As they headed inland, the larger things fell away, revealing the indelible: the dark line of a marsh hawk flying low over the water, the delicate fractures in the water where a water moccasin swam, the strangely satisfying long grass that cascaded like hair from the ground.

She was content with silence, but Grace and Control were less so.

“I miss hot showers,” Control said. “I miss not itching all over.”

“Boil water,” Grace said, as if it provided the solution to both problems. As if Control’s misses were wishes, and he should think bigger.

“Not the same thing.”

“I miss standing on the roof of the Southern Reach and looking out over the forest,” Grace said.

“You used to do that? How did you get up there?”

“The janitor let us go up. The director and me. We would stand up there and make our plans.”

That catch in Grace’s throat, that invisible connection, Ghost Bird contemplated it. What did she miss? There had been so little time to miss anything. Their conversation existed so apart from her that she wondered again what she might do when she met the Crawler. What if she was a sleeper cell for a cause much older than either the Southern Reach or Area X? Did her allegiance lie with the former director, or the director as a child, playing on those black rocks near the lighthouse? And what master did the lighthouse keeper serve? It would have been better if she could have thought of each person in the equation as just one thing, but none of them were that simple.

Perhaps the biologist’s final response was the only response that mattered, and her entire letter a sop to expectations, to the reaction human beings were hardwired to have. A kind of final delay before she had come to embody that correct answer? Perhaps so many journals had piled up in the lighthouse because on some level most came, in time, to recognize the futility of language. Not just in Area X but against the rightness of the lived-in moment, the instant of touch, of connection, for which words were such a sorrowful disappointment, so inadequate an expression of both the finite and the infinite. Even as the Crawler wrote out its terrible message.

Back on the island, there had been one last, unanswerable question, and the weight of it had settled over each of them in different ways. If they now traversed a landscape transplanted from somewhere far remote, then what existed within the coordinates of the real Area X, back on Earth?

Grace had put forward the idea, had clearly been thinking about it, possibly for years now, haunted and frustrated by it.

“We are,” Control had replied—distant, coming to her from afar with an unfocused stare. “We are. That’s where we are.” Although he wasn’t stupid, must know Grace was right.

“If you go through the door, you come to Area X,” Grace said. “If you walk across the border, you go to the other place. Whatever it is.”