Lowry, pumping himself up, pacing in front of the glass, smacking his chest with one hand. “And what I want is this: The next expedition, they don’t go to Central. They come here. They receive their training here. You want Area X to react? You want something to change? I’ll change it. I’ll coil things so far up inside Area X’s brain, things that’ll have a sting in the tail. That’ll draw blood. That’ll fucking make the enemy know we’re the resistance. That we’re on to them.”

Some trails go cold fast; some trails take a long time to pick up and follow. Seeing Severance walking along the ridge of black rocks near the lighthouse, even a fake lighthouse, raises your hackles, makes you want to say, “That is mine, not yours.”

Lowry’s still standing over you and ranting about what will happen and how it’s going to happen. Of course he wants more control. Of course he is going to get it.

But now you know, too, what you’ve only guessed at before: Beneath Lowry’s bluster, he feels that your fates are intertwined. That he’s more bound to you than ever.

After six months, you will be able to return to the Southern Reach. No one there will know why you were gone so long, and Grace won’t tell them, promises she’ll have pushed them so hard in the interim that “they won’t have time to think about it.”

While you wait out your suspension at home, you have this image in your head of Grace as a tall, stern black woman in a white lab coat and the tricornered hat of a general, holding a saber at arm’s length, for some reason standing in the prow of a rowboat, crossing a strategically important river. When it’s time for her to drop the hat, get rid of the boat, cede control back to you, how will she feel about that?

Single dim thought most nights, after a doctor’s appointment or buying groceries for dinner: Which world am I really living in? The one in which you can hear Whitby’s screams in the lighthouse intermingling with the screams from the first expedition, or the one in which you’re putting cans of soup in the cupboard. Can you exist in both? Do you want to? When Grace calls to ask how your day is going, should you say “Same as usual” or “Awful, like conducting autopsies over and over again for no reason”?

Sitting on a stool in the bar at Chipper’s—that’s the same, isn’t it, after you come back? Perhaps even more so, given you have more time to spend there. The Realtor’s around a lot, too. She talks all the time—about a trip up north to visit her family, about a movie she saw, about local politics. Sometimes the veteran with the perpetual beer in hand dredges up a long-ago memory of his kids, trying to be part of the conversation.