“Can you walk?”

Could he walk? He felt like an old man leveled by a blow from an invisible fist. He had fallen into a deep, dark, narrow fissure and now had to crawl up out of it.

“Yes, I can walk.”

Grace handing him his father’s carving, him taking it.

“Let’s go back up to the landing.”

There was a huge hole in the side of the first-floor wall. The night peered in from it. But the lighthouse had held.

“Yes, the landing.”

He would be safe there.

He wouldn’t be safe there.

Control lay there, back on the landing, sprawled across a blanket, looking up at the paint-peeled ceiling mottled by candlelight. Everything seemed so far away. Such an overwhelming psychic sense of their distance from Earth, that there might not now be astronomers, might never be astronomers who, all-knowing, could even make out the speck that was the star around which they must revolve. He found it hard to breathe, kept calling forth another passage from the pages of Whitby where the man almost waxed poetic: “Area X has been created by an organism left behind by a civilization so advanced and so ancient and so alien to us and our own intent and our own thought processes that it has long since left us behind, left everything behind.”

Wondering, too, because of all that the biologist’s intrusion had knocked loose in his head … if there was any evidence he’d ever sat in the backseat of his grandfather’s muscle car—if somewhere at Central you would find black-and-white photos shot from farther down the street, through the windshield of a car or a van. An investment. A divestment. The start of it all. He’d had dreams of cliffs and leviathans and falling into the sea. But what if the leviathans were back at Central? The shadowy forms mere outlines of memories he could not quite recall, overlaid with those that he should not remember because they had never occurred. Jump, a voice had said, and he had jumped. Two days lost at Central before he came to the Southern Reach, and only his mother’s word for it that he was being paranoid … But it was such a weight, so exhausting to analyze, as if the Southern Reach and Area X both interrogated him.

Hello, John, said some version of Lowry in his head. Surprise.

Fuck you.

Seriously, John? And here I thought you knew all along, the game we were playing. The game we’ve always been playing.

His lungs felt heavy, thick, as Grace checked him out, bandaged his elbow, told him, “You’ve bruised some ribs and your hip is bruised, too, but you seem able to move everything.”

“The biologist … she’s really gone?” This leviathan that has taken the terroir of a place and made it its own. Every moment that passed, the gospel of Whitby made more and less sense to him. Such an inconsistent heartbeat. Such simplicity to concentrate on those three pages, to focus on the parts so smudged he had to interpret the words or to smooth out a curled corner, than on the fact that the sun should not be shining above, that the sky could peel back to reveal a celestial landscape perhaps never dreamed of by humankind, the weight of that oppressive, a beast bearing down on the very center, which must be protected from that which did not bear contemplating.