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  These last two utterances, jostling elbows, Cheney had offered up a bit plaintively because, in fact, he had staked his reputation to Area X—in the general sense that the Southern Reach had become his career. The initial glory of it, of being chosen, and then the constriction of it, like a great snake named Area X was suffocating him, and then also what he had to know in his innermost thoughts, or even coursing across the inner rind of his brain. That the Southern Reach had indeed destroyed his career, perhaps even been the reason for his divorce.

  “How do you feel about all of the misinformation given to the expedition?” Control asked Cheney, if only to push back against the flood of Cheneyisms. He knew Cheney had had some influence in shaping that misinformation.

  Cheney’s frown made it seem as if Control’s question were akin to criticizing the paint job on a car that had been involved in a terrible accident. Was Control a killjoy to want to snuff out Cheney’s can-do, his can’t-help-it brand of the jowly jovial? But jovial grated on Control most of the time. “Jovial” had always been a pretext, from the high school football team’s locker room on—the kind of hearty banter that covered up greater and lesser crimes.

  “It wasn’t—isn’t—really misinformation,” Cheney said, and then went dark for a moment, searching for words. Possibly he thought it was a test. Of loyalty or attitude or moral rigor. But he found words soon enough: “It’s more like creating a story or a narrative to guide them through the narrows. An anchor.”

  Like a lighthouse that distracted them from topographical anomalies, a lighthouse that seemed by its very function to provide safety. Maybe Cheney told himself that particular story about the tale, or tale about the story, but Control doubted the director had seen it that way, or even a biologist with only partial memory.

  “Jesus, this is a long drive,” Cheney said into the silence.

  009: Evidence

  Finally they had addressed the mouse in the room, and the plant, during their meeting about the wall beyond his door.

  “What about this mouse, this plant?” Control had demanded, to see what that shook loose. “Is this a memorial, too?”

  Plant and mouse still resided inside the pot, had not yet leapt out and gone for their throats even though Hsyu had kept a keen eye on the pot during the entire meeting. Whitby, though, wouldn’t even acknowledge it with a glance, looked like a cat ready to leap off in the opposite direction at the slightest sign of impending pot-activated danger.

  “No, not really,” Grace conceded after a pause. “She was trying to kill it.”

  “What?”

  “It wouldn’t die.” She said it with contempt, as if breaking the natural order of things wasn’t a miracle but an affront.

  The assistant director made Whitby embark upon a summary of hair-raising attempts at destruction that included stabbings, careful burnings, deprivation of soil and water, introduction of parasites, general neglect, the emanation of hateful vibes, verbal and physical abuse, and much more. Whitby reenacted some of these events with overly manic energy.

  Clippings had been rushed to Central, and perhaps even now scientists labored to unlock the plant’s secrets. But Central had sent no information back, and nothing the director had done could kill it, not even sticking it in a locked drawer. Except, someone had taken pity on the plant and watered it, perhaps even stuck in a dead mouse for nutritional value. Control looked with suspicion upon both Whitby and Grace. The idea that one of them had been merciful only made him like them both a little more.

  Hsyu had then piped up: “She took it from the samples rooms, I believe. It was from Area X originally. A very common plant, although I’m not a botanist.”

  Then, by all means, lead the way to the samples rooms.

  Except that Hsyu, as a linguist, didn’t have security clearance.

  _______

  A few miles from the border the landscape changed, and Whitby had to slow down to about ten miles an hour as the road narrowed and became more treacherous. The dark pines and the patches of swamp gave way to a kind of subtropical rain forest. Control could see the curling question marks of fiddlehead ferns and a surprising density of delicate black-winged mayflies as the jeep passed over several wooden bridges that crossed a welter of creeks. The smell of the land had changed from humid and cloying to something as questing as the ferns: a hint of freshness caused by a thicker canopy of leaves. They were, he realized, making their way along the periphery of a huge sinkhole, the kind of “topographical anomaly” that created an entirely different habitat. Sinkhole parks in the area were, for whatever reason, favorite teen hangouts, and sometimes after leaving Hedley with their ill-gotten six-packs they had headed for rendezvous with girls there. The sinkholes he remembered had been litter grounds of crushed beer cans and a scattering of condom wrappers. The kinds of places the local police kept an eye on because it was a rare weekend someone didn’t get into a fight there.

  More surprising still, white rabbits could be seen, nimbly negotiating the edges of pools of standing water and brown-leaf-littered moist spaces where the rotting of the earth proceeded apace and red-tipped mushrooms rose primordial.

  Which caused Control to interrupt one of Cheney’s stutter-step monologues: “Are those what I think they are?”

  Cheney, clearly relieved that Control had said something: “Yes, those are the true descendants of the experiment. The ones that got away. They breed … well, just like rabbits. There was an eradication effort, but it was taking up too many resources, so we just let it happen now.”

  Control followed the progress of one white brute, larger than his fellows—or larger than her fellows—who sought the higher ground in limitless leaps and bounds. There was something defiant in its stride. Or Control was projecting that onto the animal, just as he was projecting onto most of the other rabbits a peculiar stillness and watchfulness.

  Whitby chimed in unexpectedly: “Rabbits have three eyelids and can’t vomit.” For a moment Control, startled that Whitby had spoken, assigned more significance to the statement than it deserved.

  “You know, it’s a good reminder to be humble,” Cheney said, like a rumbling steamroller intent on paving over Whitby, “to be humbled. A humbling experience. Something like that.”

  “What if some of them are returnees?” Control asked.

  “What?”

  Control thought Cheney had heard, but he repeated the question.

  “You mean from across the border—they got across and came back? Well, that would be bad. That would be sloppy. Because we know that they’ve spread fairly far. The ones savvy enough to survive. And as happens, some of them have gotten out of the containment zone and been trapped by enterprising souls and sold to pet stores.”

  “So you’re saying that it’s possible that some of the progeny of your fifteen-year-old experiment are now residing in people’s homes? As pets?” Control was astonished.

  “I wouldn’t put it quite that way, but that’s the gist, I guess,” Cheney conceded.

  “Remarkable” was Control’s only comment, aghast.

  “Not really,” Cheney replied, pushing back gently but firmly. “Way of the world. Or at least of invasive species everywhere. I can sell you a python from the dread peninsula that’s got the same motivations.”

  Whitby, a few moments later, the most he said in one gulp during the whole trip: “The few white-and-brown ones are the offspring of white rabbits mating with the native marsh rabbits. We call them Border Specials, and the soldiers shoot and eat them. But not the pure white ones, which I don’t think makes sense. Why shoot any of them?”

  Why not shoot all of them? Why eat any of them?

  Fifty thousand samples languished in the long rooms that formed the second floor of the left-hand side of the U, assuming an approach from the parking lot. They’d gone before lunch, left Hsyu behind. They had to don white bio-hazard suits with black gloves, so that Control was actually wearing a version of the gloves that had so unsettled him down in the science divi
sion. This was his revenge, to plunge his hands into them and make them his puppets, even if he didn’t like their rubbery feel.

  The atmosphere was like that inside a cathedral, and as if the science division had been some kind of rehearsal for this event, the sequence of air locks was the same. An ethereal, heavenly music should have been playing, and the way the light struck the air meant that in certain pools of illumination Control could see floating dust motes, and certain archways and supporting walls imbued the rooms with a numinous feeling, intensified by the high ceilings. “This is my favorite place in the Southern Reach,” Whitby told him, face alight through his transparent helmet. “There’s a sense of calm and safety here.”

  Did he feel unsafe in the other sections of the building? Control almost asked Whitby this question, but felt that doing so would break the mood. He wished he had his neoclassical music on headphones for the full experience, but the notes played on in his mind regardless, like a strange yearning.

  He, Whitby, and Grace walked through in their terrestrial space suits like remote gods striding through a divinely chosen terrain. Even though the suits were bulky, the lightweight fabric didn’t seem to touch his skin, and he felt buoyant, as if gravity operated differently here. The suit smelled vaguely of sweat and peppermint, but he tried to ignore that.

  The rows of samples proliferated and extended, the effect enhanced by the mirrors that lined the dividing wall between each hall. Every kind of plant, pieces of bark, dragonflies, the freeze-dried carcasses of fox and muskrat, the dung of coyotes, a section from an old barrel. Moss, lichen, and fungi. Wheel spokes and the glazed eyes of tree frogs staring blindly up at him. He had expected, somehow, a Frankenstein laboratory of two-headed calves in formaldehyde and some hideous manservant with a hunchback lurching ahead of them and explaining it all in an incomprehensible bouillabaisse of good intentions and slurred syntax. But it was just Whitby, and it was just Grace, and in that cathedral neither felt inclined to explain anything.

  Analysis by Southern Reach scientists of the most recent samples, taken six years ago and brought back by expedition X.11.D, showed no trace of human-created toxicity remained in Area X. Not a single trace. No heavy metals. No industrial runoff or agricultural runoff. No plastics. Which was impossible.

  Control peeked inside the door the assistant director had just opened for him. “There you are,” she said, inanely he thought. But there he was, in the main room, with an even higher ceiling and more columns, looking at endless rows and rows of shelves housed inside of a long, wide room.

  “The air is pure here,” Whitby said. “You can get high just from the oxygen levels.”

  Not a single sample had ever shown any irregularities: normal cell structures, bacteria, radiation levels, whatever applied. But he had also seen a few strange comments in the reports from the handful of guest scientists who had passed the security check and come here to examine the samples, even as they had been kept in the dark about the context. The gist of these comments was that when they looked away from the microscope, the samples changed; and when they stared again, what they looked at had reconstituted itself to appear normal. “There you are.” To Control, in that brief glance, staring across the vast litter of objects spread out before him, it mostly looked like a cabinet of curiosities: desiccated beetle husks, brittle starfish, and other things in jars, bottles, beakers, and boxes of assorted sizes.

  “Has anyone ever tried to eat any of the samples?” he asked Grace. If they’d just devoured the undying plant, Control was fairly sure it wouldn’t have come back.

  “Shhhh,” she said, exactly as if they were in church and he had spoken too loudly or received a cell-phone call. But he noticed Whitby looking at him quizzically, head cocked to one side within his helmet. Had Whitby sampled the samples? Despite his terror?

  Parallel to this thought, the knowledge that Hsyu and other non-biologists had never seen the samples cathedral. He wondered what they might have read in the striations of the fur of a dead swamp rat or in the vacant glass eyes of a marsh hawk, its curved beak. What susurrations or utterances might verbalize all unexpected from a cross section of tree moss or cypress bark. The patterns to be found in twigs and leaves.

  It was too absurd a thought to give words to, not when he was so new. Or, perhaps, even when he was old in this job, should he be that lucky or unlucky.

  So there he was.

  When the assistant director closed the door and they moved on to the next section of the cathedral, Control had to bite his thumb to stop a giggle from escaping. He’d had a vision of the samples starting to dance behind that door, freed of the terrible limitations of the human gaze. “Our banal, murderous imagination,” as the biologist had put it in a rare unguarded moment with the director before the twelfth expedition.

  _______

  In the corridor afterward, with Whitby, a little drained by the experience: “Was that the room you wanted me to see?”

  “No,” Whitby said, but did not elaborate.

  Had he insulted the man with his prior refusal? Even if not, Whitby had clearly withdrawn his offer.

  Glimpses of towns now under kudzu and other vines, moldering in the moss: a long-abandoned miniature golf course with a pirate theme. The golf greens had been buried in leaves and mud. The half decks of corsairs’ ships rose at crazy angles as if from choppy seas of vegetation, masts cracked at right angles and disappearing into the gloom as it began to rain. A crumbling gas station lay next door, the roof caved in by fallen trees, the pavement so cracked by gnarled roots that it had crumbled into water-ripe pieces with the seeming texture and consistency of dark, moist brownies. The fuzzy, irregular shapes of houses and two-story buildings through the trees proved that people had lived here before the evacuation. This close to the border as little as possible was disturbed, and so these abandoned places could only be broken down by the natural process of decades of rain and decay.

  The final stretch to the border had Whitby circling ever lower until Control was certain they were below sea level, before they came up again slightly to a low ridge upon which sat a drab green barracks, a more official-looking brick building for army command and control, and the local Southern Reach outpost.

  According to a labyrinthine hierarchical chart that resembled several thick snakes fucking one another, the Southern Reach was under the army’s jurisdiction here, which might be why the Southern Reach facility, closed down between expeditions, looked a bit like a row of large tents that had been made of lemon meringue. Which is to say, it looked like any number of the churches Control had become familiar with in his teenage years, usually because of whatever girl he was dating. The calcification of revivalists and born-agains often took this form: as of something temporary that had hardened and become permanent. And thus it was either a series of white permafrost tents that greeted them or the white swell of huge waves, frozen forever. The sight was as out of place and startling as if the facility had resembled a fossilized herd of huge MoonPies, a delicacy of those youthful years.

  Army HQ was in a dome-shaped section of the barracks after the final checkpoint, but no one seemed to be around except a few privates standing in the churned mud bath that was the unofficial parking lot. Loitering with no regard for the light rain falling on them, talking in a bored but intense way while smoking cherry-scented filtered cigarettes. “Whatever you want.” “Fuck off.” They had the look of men who had no idea what they guarded, or knew but had been trying to forget.

  Border commander Samantha Higgins—who occupied a room hardly larger than a storage closet and just as depressing—was AWOL when they called on her. Higgins’s aide-de-camp—“add the camp” as his punning father would’ve put it—relayed an apology that she’d had to “step out” and couldn’t “receive you personally.” Almost as if he were a special-delivery signature-required package.

  Which was just as well. There had been awkwardness between the two entities after the final eleventh expedition had turned up back home—p
rocedures changed, the security tapes scrutinized again and again. They had rechecked the border for other exit points, looking for heat signals, fluctuations in air flow, anything. Found nothing.

  So Control thought of “border commander” as a useless or misleading title and didn’t really care that Higgins wasn’t there, no matter how Cheney seemed to take it as a personal affront: “I told her this was important. She knew this was important.”

  While Whitby took the opportunity to fondle a fern, revealing a hitherto unobserved sensitivity to texture.

  Control had felt foolish asking Whitby what he meant by saying “the terror,” but he also couldn’t leave it alone. Especially after reading over the theories document Whitby had handed him that morning, which he also wanted to talk about. Control thought of the theories as “slow death by,” given the context: Slow death by aliens. Slow death by parallel universe. Slow death by malign unknown time-traveling force. Slow death by invasion from an alternate earth. Slow death by wildly divergent technology or the shadow biosphere or symbiosis or iconography or etymology. Death by this and by that. Death by indifference and inference. His favorite: “Surface-dwelling terrestrial organism, previously unknown.” Hiding where all of these years? In a lake? On a farm? At slots in a casino?

  But he recognized his bottled-up laughter for the onset of hysteria, and his cynicism for what it was: a defense mechanism so he wouldn’t have to think about any of it.

  Death, too, by arched eyebrow: a fair amount of implied or outright “your theory is ridiculous, unwarranted, useless.” Some of the ghosts of old interdepartmental rivalries resurrected, and coming through in odd ways across sentences. He wondered how much fraternization had taken place over the years—if an archaeologist’s written wince at an environmental scientist’s seemingly reasonable assertion represented a fair opinion or meant he was seeing an endgame playing out, the final consequence of an affair that had occurred twenty years earlier.