A shadow joins the shadow of the lighthouse.

Soon after, there comes the crunch of boots, and, disoriented, you shout, “Annihilation! Annihilation!” and flail about until you realize the apparition kneeling before you is the one person impervious to the suggestion.

“It’s just me, the biologist.”

Just you. Just the biologist. Just your defiant weapon, hurled against the walls of Area X.

She props you up, presses water to your mouth, clearing some of the blood as you cough.

“Where is the surveyor?” you ask.

“Back at the base camp,” she tells you.

“Wouldn’t come with you?” Afraid of the biologist, afraid of the burgeoning flame, just like you. “A slow-burning flame, a will-o’-the-wisp, floating across the marsh and the dunes, floating and floating, like nothing human but something free and floating.” A hypnotic suggestion meant to calm her, even if it will have no more effect than a comforting nursery rhyme.

As the conversation unspools, you keep faltering and losing track of it. You say things you don’t mean, trying to stay in character—the person the biologist knows you as, the construct you created for her. Maybe you shouldn’t care about roles now, but there’s still a role to play.

She’s blaming you, but you can’t blame her. “If it was a disaster, you helped create it. You just panicked, and you gave up.” Not true—you never gave up—but you nod anyway, thinking of so many mistakes. “I did. I did. I should have recognized earlier that you had changed.” True. “I should have sent you back to the border.” Not true. “I shouldn’t have gone down there with the anthropologist.” Not true, not really. You had no choice, once she slipped away from base camp, intent on proving herself.

You’re coughing up more blood, but it hardly matters now.

“What does the border look like?” A child’s question. A question whose answer means nothing. There is nothing but border. There is no border.

I’ll tell you when I get there.

“What really happens when we cross over?”

Not what you might expect.

“What did you hide from us about Area X?”

Nothing that would have helped you. Not really.

The sun is a weak halo with no center and the biologist’s voice threads in and out, the sand both cold and hot in your clenched right hand. The pain that keeps returning in bursts is attacking every couple of microseconds, so present that it isn’t even there anymore.

Eventually, you recognize that you have lost the ability to speak. But you are still there, muffled and distant, as if you’re a kid lying on a blanket on this very beach, with a hat over your eyes. Lulled into drowsiness by the constant surging sound of the water and the sea breezes, balancing the heat that ripples over you, spreads through your limbs. The wind against your hair is a sensation as remote as the ruffling of weeds sprouting from a head-shaped rock.

“I’m sorry, but I have to do this,” the biologist tells you, almost as if she knows you can still hear her. “I have no choice.”