Standing there in front of the skeleton of the moaning creature, Control said: “Then I might end up like this? Some version of me?”

“We all end up like this, Control. Eventually.”

But not quite like this, because from those eye sockets, from the moldering bones, came a sense of a brightness still, a kind of life—a questing toward her that she rebuffed and that Control could not sense. Area X was looking at her through dead eyes. Area X was analyzing her from all sides. It made her feel like an outline created by the regard bearing down on her, one that moved only because the regard moved with her, held her constituent atoms together in a coherent shape. And yet, the eyes upon her felt familiar.

“The director might have been wrong about the biologist, but perhaps you’re the answer.” Said only half sarcastically, as if he almost knew what she was receiving.

“I’m not an answer,” she said. “I’m a question.” She might also be a message incarnate, a signal in the flesh, even if she hadn’t yet figured out what story she was supposed to tell.

She was thinking, too, about what she had seen on the journey into Area X, how it had seemed as if to both sides there lay nothing around them but the terrible blackened ruins of vast cities and enormous beached ships, lit by the roaring red and orange of fires that did nothing but cast shadow and obscure the distant view of mewling things that crawled and hopped through the ash. How she had tried to block out Control’s rambling confessions, the shocking things he said without knowing, so that she did not think he had a secret she did not now know. Pick up the gun … Tell me a joke … I killed her, it was my fault … Had whispered hypnotic incantations in his ear to shut out not only his words but also the horror show around them.

The skeleton before them had been picked clean. The discolored bones were rotting, the tips of the ribs already turned soft with moisture, most of them broken off, lost in the mud.

Above, the storks still banked and wheeled this way and that in an intricate, synchronized aerial dance more beautiful than anything ever created by human minds.

0003: THE DIRECTOR

On the weekends, your refuge is Chipper’s Star Lanes, where you’re not the director of the Southern Reach but just another customer at the bar. Chipper’s lies off the highway well out of Bleakersville, one step up from being at the end of a dirt road. Jim Lowry’s people back at Central might know the place, might be watching and listening, but you’ve never met anyone from the Southern Reach there. Even Grace Stevenson, your second-in-command, doesn’t know about it. For a disguise, you wear a T-shirt for a local construction company or a charity event like a chili cook-off and an old pair of jeans from the last time you were fat, sometimes topped off with a baseball cap advertising your favorite barbecue joint.