“Yes,” he said.
No, she would go north, she would go to the wilderness above the town of Rock Bay, even if she didn’t believe she was the biologist. She would go somewhere personal to her. Because she felt the urge, not because Area X wanted her to. If she had been right, if she’d been their true soldier, she would have been as mind-wiped as the others.
At least, that’s what he chose to believe. To have a reason for his packing, and a place to think of as a sanctuary. Or a hiding place.
* * *
They announced boarding for his flight. He was headed west, yes, but he’d step out at the first connecting flight, rent a car from there, take that rental to another, then perhaps steal a car, always the arc going south, south, suggesting a slow descent. But then he’d go dark completely and head north.
He’d actually pulled at Grace to get her away, had taken her hand and pulled her off-balance, would have dragged her if he’d been able. Shouted at her. Given her all the reasons, the primal, visceral reasons. But Grace couldn’t see any of it, wrenched away from him with a stare that made him give up. Because it was self-aware. Because she was going to see it through to the end, and he couldn’t do that. Because he really wasn’t the director. So he let Grace fade away into the rain as the director came up toward the door and he retreated in mindless panic to the cafeteria and then out to his car. And he didn’t feel guilty about any of it.
A beep from his phone told him that, coming in over some unimaginable distance, he had received the last, useless videos from the Southern Reach, from the chicken and the goat.
The footage told him nothing, gave him no closure, no sense of what might have happened to Grace. The quality was grainy, indistinct. Each clip was about six seconds in duration and each cut off at the same time. In the first, his chair sat empty until the very end, when something blurred appeared to sit down. It might have been the director but the outline was ill-defined. The other video showed a slumped Whitby in the chair opposite, doing something peculiar with his hands that made his fingers look like soft coral swaying in a sea current. A wordless droning in the background. Was Whitby now in the world of the first expedition? And if so, did he know it?
Control watched both video clips twice, thrice, and then deleted them. This act did not delete the subjects, but it made him more distant from them, and that would have to be good enough.
* * *
The usual influx of heat and then frigid cold on the airplane. The grappling with frayed seat belts. As they rose, Control kept waiting for something to swat the plane out of the sky, wondered if Central would be there to greet him when he touched down, or something odder still. He wondered why the stewardesses were looking at him funny by mid-flight, and realized he’d been responding to their rote kindness with the intensity of someone who has never experienced courtesy, or never expects to experience it again.
The couple in the seats next to him were of the annoying yet ordinary type who said almost everything for their audience, or to affirm their own couple-hood. Yet even them he wanted to warn, in a sudden, unexpected outpouring of raw and almost uncontainable emotion. To somehow articulate what was happening, what was going to happen, without sounding crazy, without scaring them or him. But, ultimately, he popped another calm pill and leaned back in his seat and tried to banish the world.
“How do I know that going after the biologist isn’t an idea you’ve put in my head?”
“The biologist was the director’s weapon, I believe. You said in your reports she doesn’t act like the others. Whatever she knows, she represents a kind of chance. Some kind of chance.” Control hadn’t shared with his mother the full experience of his last moments at the Southern Reach. Not everything he had seen, or that whatever the director was now or wherever she’d grown up, she was less herself than at any point in the past. That whatever plan she’d had was probably irrelevant.
“And you are my weapon, John. You’re the one I chose to know everything.”
The comfort of the scratched metal armrests with the fat, torn padding on top. The compartmentalized scoops of sky captured by the oval windows. The captain’s unnecessary progress reports, interspersed with the stupid but comforting jokes over the intercom. He wondered where the Voice was, if Lowry was having flashbacks or freaking out in a more general way. Lowry, his buddy. Lowry, the pathetic megalodon. This is your last chance, Control. But it wasn’t. It was, instead, an immolation. If he was remembered at all, it would be as the harbinger of disaster.
He ordered a whiskey with ice, to see it gleam, to keep the ice in his mouth and experience the smooth cold with the hint of bite. It helped him fall into a lull, a trough of self-induced tiredness, trying to slow the wheels of his mind. Trying to wreck those wheels.