There came shouting and screaming and gunfire—all too near, all from the island of trees, or, perhaps, something Lowry had placed in his head. Something that had happened here long ago only now coming to the surface. Control kept his eyes on the reflection, where men and women in military uniforms attacked one another while some impossible thing watched from the watery sky. At such a remove, distorted, it did not seem so harsh, so visceral.

“They are already somewhere else,” Control said, although he knew Grace and Ghost Bird wouldn’t understand. They were already in the reflection, through which an alligator now swam. Where swooped through the trees, oblivious, a flicker.

So they continued on, him with his sickness that he no longer wanted diagnosed, Grace with her limp, and Ghost Bird keeping her own counsel.

There was nothing to be done, and no reason to: their path would skirt the fire.

In Control’s imagination, the entrance to the topographical anomaly was enormous, mixed with the biologist’s vast bulk in his thoughts so that he had expected a kind of immense ziggurat upside down in the earth. But no, it was what it had always been: a little over sixty feet in diameter, circular, located in the middle of a small clearing. The entrance lay there open for them, as it had for so many others. No soldiers here, nothing more unusual than the thing itself.

On the threshold, he told them what would happen next. There was in his voice only the shadow of the authority of a director of the Southern Reach, but within that shadow a kind of resistance.

“Grace, you will stay here at the top, standing guard with the rifles. There are any number of dangers, and we do not want to be trapped down there. Ghost Bird, you will come with me, and you will lead the way. I’ll follow at a little distance behind you. Grace, if we are down there longer than three hours”—the maximum time recorded by prior expeditions—“you are released of any responsibility for us.” Because if there were a world to return to, the person to survive should be someone with something to return to.

They stared at him. They stared, and he thought they would object, would override him, and then he would be lost. Would be left out here, at the top.

But that moment never came and an almost debilitating relief settled over him as Grace nodded and said to be careful, rattled off advice he barely heard.

Ghost Bird stood off to the side, a curious expression on her face. Down there, she would experience the ultimate doubling of experience with the biologist, and he couldn’t protect her from that.

“Whatever you have in your head now, hold on to it,” Grace said. “Because there may be nothing left of it when you go down below.”

What was coiled within his head, and how would it affect the outcome? Because his goal was not to reach the Crawler. Because he wondered what else might lie within the brightness that had come with him.