You’re certain you’ll have to give up something to Lowry to keep him away from the biologist, but whatever the price you’ll pay it, you decide as you order a whiskey for a change at the bar at Chipper’s—order a whiskey for everyone at the bar, for a change, all four of them. Because it’s late, because it’s a weekday, because Chipper’s is getting long in the tooth and the clientele is getting older and older. Like you. The doctor’s told you cancer has blossomed in your ovaries and it’s going to spread to your liver before you can even blink, even get used to the idea. Another thing no one needs to know.

“And before we could even think about selling that house,” the Realtor’s telling you, “we had to pull ten layers of wallpaper off. All this woman had done for a decade was keep re-wallpapering her house. It was a hell of a lot of wallpaper, and garish, like she was putting up warning signals. Wrapping her house from the inside out. I tell you, I’ve never seen that before.”

You nod, smiling, with nothing to add, nothing to say, but happy to listen. Terminally interested.

It’s plain old normal cancer, nothing like the accelerated all-out assault experienced by the last eleventh. It’s just plain old life catching up with you, trying to kill you, and you can either take the aggressive chemo and leave the Southern Reach and die anyway, or you can hang on long enough to join the twelfth expedition and, with the biologist by your side, go across the border one last time. You’ve kept secrets before. What’s one final one?

Besides, other, more interesting, secrets are opening up, because Grace has finally found something on Jackie Severance. There’s been plenty of dirt, including the scandal involving her son—a blown assignment that resulted in a woman’s death—but nothing until now that made any real difference. On a top-secret list, not of Jackie’s open case files but Jack’s closed ones, which makes sense because Jack is a little easier: He’s retired, in his early seventies, and some of what he worked on exists only in paper form.

“Look at the fifth line item,” Grace says, up on the rooftop, after a quick sweep for bugs. You’ve never found any there, but it’s worth being cautious.

The line reads:

Payment request—SB, Project Serum Bliss

“Is there more?” It’s not quite what you expected, but you think you know what it is.

“No, that’s the only one. There might be more, but the rest of the files from the period are missing. This page wasn’t even supposed to be there.”

“What do you think ‘Serum Bliss’ means?”

“Protocol back then would’ve meant it wasn’t supposed to mean anything. Probably generated at random.”

“It’s flimsy,” you say. “That’s not even ‘S&SB.’”

“It’s fucking rice paper,” Grace says. “It might mean nothing, but …”

But if, somehow, the S&SB was on Central’s payroll—even just a little bit, a side project—and Jack ran the operation, and Jackie knew about it, and the S&SB had anything at all to do with the creation of Area X …