With as much gentleness as he could muster: “Do you mind if I wake up Ghost Bird now?”

“I gave her a sedative with her water last night.”

“You what?” Echoes of a dozen domestic terrorism interrogations, all the symbols and signs.

“Are you her new best friend now? Do you trust her? And do you even know what I mean?”

Trusted her not to be the enemy. Trusted her to be human. Wanted to say, I trust her as much as I trust myself, but that wouldn’t satisfy Grace. Not this version of Grace.

“What has happened here?” He felt betrayed, sad. To have come so far, but that old dynamic—sharing a smoke in the courtyard of the Southern Reach—had turned to ash.

A shudder passed through Grace, some hidden stressor coming to the surface, moving through and past, as if waking only now from a nightmare.

“It takes getting used to,” she said, staring down at the patterns she’d made in the dust. “It takes getting used to, knowing that everything we did meant nothing. That Central abandoned us. That our new director abandoned us.”

“I tried to—” I tried to stay; you told me to go. But that clearly wasn’t how she saw it. And now they were at the very edge of the world, and she was taking it out on him.

“I tried to blame you, at first, when I was getting things straight in my head. I did blame you. But what could you have done? Nothing. Central probably programmed you to do what they wanted.”

Going over those horrific moments again, jammed together in his memory, wedged in there at odd angles. The look on Grace’s face in that moment of extremes, as the border advanced on the Southern Reach, weighing the possibility that he’d said nothing to her at all. Hadn’t been as close to her and hadn’t put his hand on her arm. Just thought he had.

“Your face, Control. If you could have seen the expression on your face,” she said, as if they were talking about his reaction to a surprise party. The wall of the building becoming flesh. The director returned in a wave of green light. The weight of that. The fingers of his left hand had curled around the carving of Chorry in his jacket pocket. He released his grip, pulled his hand out, let his fingers open up. Examined the white curved indentations, fringed with pink.

“What happened to the people in the science division?”

“They decided to barricade the basement. But that place was changing very fast. I didn’t stay long.” Said so casually, too casually, talking about the disappearance of the world they had both known. I didn’t stay long. One sentence disguising a multitude of horrors. Control doubted the staff had had a choice about what happened to them, sealed off by that sudden wall.

And Whitby? But, remembering the last transmission from his spy cameras, he didn’t want to know about the W-word yet, or perhaps ever.