He did not look in his rearview mirror, did not want to see anything that might spill out into the night. The stars were so distant and yet so close in the dark sky above.

0022: GHOST BIRD

During much of the descent, the strong feeling of a return to what was already known came to Ghost Bird, even if experienced by another—a memory of drowning, of endless drowning and, at the remove of those unreliable words from the biologist’s journal, the end of what she had encountered, what she had suffered, what she had recovered. And Ghost Bird wanted none of it—didn’t want Control, either, following behind. He wasn’t suited for this, had not been meant to experience this. You couldn’t martyr yourself to Area X; you could only disappear trying, and not even be sure of that.

If the biologist had not leaned in to stare at those words so long ago, the doppelgänger might not exist in this way: full of memories and sneaking down into the depths. She might have returned with a mind wiped clean, her difference not expressed through her role as the mirror of the biologist but instead as a function of the right time or the wrong place, the right place or the wrong time.

Such strange comfort: that the words on the wall were the same, the method of their expression the same, if now she might interpret it as a nostalgic hint of an alien ecosystem, an approach or stance that the Crawler and the tower, in concert, had failed to inflict upon Earth. Because it wasn’t viable? Because that was not its purpose—and thus giving them instead these slim signs of where it came from, what it stood for, what it thought?

She had rejected a mask filter, and with it the idea that somehow Area X was only concentrated here, in this cramped space, on these stairs, in the phosphorescent words with which she had become too familiar. Area X was all around them; Area X was contained in no one place or figure. It was the dysfunction in the sky, it was the plant Control had spoken of. It was the heavens and earth. It could interrogate you from any position or no position at all, and you might not even recognize its actions as a form of questioning.

Ghost Bird did not feel powerful as they descended through the luminescent light, hugging the right-hand wall, but she was unafraid.

There came the overlay, in memory and in the moment, of the harsh revolution of a mighty engine or heartbeat, and she knew even Control could hear it, could guess at its identity. From there, they moved swiftly to that point from which there was no real return: the moment when they would see the monster and take its measure. It lay, all too soon, right around the corner.

“I want you to stay here,” she said to Control, to John.

“No,” he said, as she’d know he would. “No, I won’t.” An unexpected sweetness in his expression. A kind of weary resolve in the words.