“No, what?”

“Everything.” So much everything that Grace is still wading through all of it.

When Severance comes calling, there’s a sense she’s checking up on her investment, her shared risk.

“Does it ever get to you?” Severance asks you more than once, and you’re fairly sure she’s just making conversation.

“No,” you lie, shoot back your own cliché: “We all have our jobs to do.”

Back when she worked for the Southern Reach, you’d liked her—sharp, charming, and she’d done a good job of fine-tuning logistics, of diving in and getting work done. But since she’s chained to Lowry, you can’t risk that her presence isn’t his presence. Sharing a swig of brandy with Grace: “A living bug—can’t exactly just pull her out of the ceiling tiles.” And the glamour has begun to fade: At times, Severance looks to you like a tired, faded clerk at a makeup counter in a department store.

Severance sits with you, observing the returnees through closed-circuit cameras for long minutes, coffee in hand, checking her phone every few minutes, often drawn off into some side conversation about some other project altogether, then coming back into focus to ask questions.

“You’re sure they’re not contaminated with something?”

“When do you send in the next expedition?”

“What do you think of Lowry’s metrics?”

“If you had a bigger budget, what would you spend it on?”

“Do you know what you’re looking for?”

No, you don’t know. She knows you don’t know. You don’t even know what you’re looking at, these people who became ever more gaunt until they were living skeletons, and then not even that. The psychologist perhaps even blanker than the rest, like a kind of warning to you, as if it were a side effect of his profession, encountering Area X. But a closer look at his history reveals Lowry probably leaned on him the most, thought, maybe, that his profession made him stronger than the rest. The bindings, the reconditioning sessions, the psychological tricks—surely a psychologist could absorb them, armed with foreknowledge. Except the man hadn’t, and as far as they knew this “coiled sting” inside his brain had made no difference at all to Area X.

“There must be things you would have done differently,” Severance says.

You make some noncommittal sound and pretend you’re scribbling something on your notepad. A grocery list, maybe. A blank circle that’s either a representation of the border or of Central. A plant rising out of a cell phone. Or maybe you should just write Fuck you and be done with it. Gnaw your way out of Lowry’s trap.

At some point after the last of the last eleventh passes away, you get black paint from maintenance, along with thick black markers, and you open the useless door that gives you access to the blank wall—casualty of a clumsy corridor redesign. You write out the words collected from the topographical anomaly, the words that you know must have been written by the lighthouse keeper (this flash of intuition, unveiled at a status meeting, allowing you to order a deeper investigation into Saul’s background than ever before).