For the Southern Reach? For humanity?

But Whitby’s close-lipped about that, changes the subject. Abruptly.

You’re less obsessed with the cell phone, which has been living with the techs down in the hardware department, the ones who have the right security clearance. But the techs can’t make it work, are confused by it, perhaps even unnnerved. Nothing about it indicates a malfunction. It should work. It just doesn’t. It should reveal who owned it. It just doesn’t.

“As if it’s not really made of the parts it should be made of. But it looks exactly that way—like a normal phone. Really old, though.”

A bulky veteran of a phone, scarred and scraped and worn. It looks like you feel sometimes.

You offer it to Lowry during one of your calls, as a kind of sacrifice of a pawn. Give Lowry an exclusive, let him worry at it like a dog with a new bone, so the old bone can get some rest. But he doesn’t want it—insists you keep it.

Something an expedition member had snuck in with them or inadvertently brought along? Something perhaps from a recent expedition that someone had thought was old enough not to disturb Area X’s slumber? During the cycles that predated Lowry’s intervention, your stewardship, techniques primitive and untested.

Recalling the very earliest photographs and video—of Lowry and the others in what amounted to deep-sea diving outfits to traverse the border, before they realized it was unnecessary. Lowry, returned, disoriented, babbling on videotape, words he would later recant, about how nothing would ever come out of the passage in the border, nothing, because they were waiting for ghosts, for something long dead, Area X a memorial, a gravestone.

“What made Area X spit it back up?” you ask Grace, safe on the roof in Beyond Reach.

“What made Whitby the one to find it?”

“A good question.” A gift from Dead Whitby.

“Why did it allow itself to be found?”

That sounds like the right question, and some days you want to tell Grace … everything. But most days you want to shield her from information that will make no difference to her job, her life. Somehow Dead Whitby and the Saul apparition fall on the same side as telling her that your name is not your name. That all of the unimportant things about you are a lie.

Eventually, into the middle of all this comes the call you’ve been dreading: Lowry, with a purpose. While you’re staring at the incriminating photograph on the wall: you on the rocks, shouting either before or after the shot was taken, “I’m a monster! I’m a monster!”

“Another eleventh expedition is a go.”

“Already.”

“Three months. We’re almost there.”

You want to say, but don’t say, “It’s time to stop tampering, not time to intensify the tampering.” The fiddling. All the ways Lowry tries to control what cannot really be controlled.

“That’s too soon,” you say. Too soon by far. Nothing has changed, except that you interfered and went over the border and brought back two objects you can’t explain.