“I can’t be sure without an X-ray.”

Another impossible thing. Yet another moment in his decline. A wall changing to the touch of his hand, the touch of the biologist in his head. Enough of this. Enough.

He took up Whitby’s pages, began to read by candlelight even as he began to tear the corners off. Slowly.

We must trust our thoughts while we sleep. We must trust our hunches. We must begin to examine all of those things that we think of as irrational simply because we do not understand them. In other words, we must distrust the rational, the logical, the sane, in an attempt to reach for something higher, for something more worthy. Brilliance and bullshit both. A binary trapped in its single-minded focus on solutions.

“What?” he asked. He could feel the other two staring at him.

Ghost Bird said, “You need to rest.”

“What I’d suggest isn’t going to be popular anyway,” he said. Tearing one full page into shreds. Letting the pieces fall to the floor. It felt good to tear something apart.

“Say it.” Challenging him.

A pause, preparing himself. Aware of the conflicting voices in his head.

“What you call the Crawler—we have to try. We have to go back down into the tower and find some way to neutralize it.”

Ghost Bird: “Have you been paying attention? Have you been listening?”

“Or we stay here.”

“Staying here isn’t going to work,” Grace admitted. “Either the biologist will get us, or Area X will.”

“There’s a lot of open, vulnerable space for us between here and the tower,” Ghost Bird said.

“There’s a lot of everything between here and there.”

“Control,” Ghost Bird said, and he didn’t want to look at her, didn’t want to see those eyes that now reminded him of the creature the biologist had become. “Control, there’s no reset. There’s never going to be a reset. That’s a suicide mission.” Unspoken, that she thought it was a suicide mission for them. Who knew what it might be for her?

“But the director thought you could change its direction,” he said. “That you could change it, if you tried hard enough.” A halting kind of hope. A childish thrashing against the dictates of the real. If you wished upon a star. He was thinking of the light at the bottom of the tower, this new thing he hadn’t known about before entering Area X. He was thinking about being sick, and now sicker, and what that meant. At least they were all out in the open now, clear to him. The brightness, Lowry, all of it. Everything in the mix, including the core he still thought of as John Rodriguez. The Rodriguez who didn’t belong to anyone. Who clasped his father’s carving tight in his pocket. Who remembered something beyond the wreck and ruin of all this.

“It’s true we have one thing no one else had,” Grace said.

“What?” Ghost Bird asked in a skeptical, doubting tone.

“You,” Grace said. “The only photocopy of the director’s last plan.”