There were questions she did not want to ask, because if she did they would take on detail and weight and substance, flesh and skin reclothing the arch of ribs. Wonders and horrors alike she could compartmentalize, but Control, at least, might never be ready, and on some level it was wearying to push, to have that kind of purpose. It seemed to push against the reality of Area X, to say that even she had learned nothing from being her. Should she even try, knowing that it wasn’t fair, that they had all traveled too far, too fast, even Grace with her three-year head start?

It was dusk now, almost nightfall, and into the silence and gathering shadows, Grace took the lead, said: “We’re astronauts. All of the expedition members have been astronauts.”

That should have been comforting in its way, a kind of anchor, but Control’s face had become a resolute mask that said he didn’t want to deal with this, that, defiantly, he wanted only to bury his nose in what was comfortable. He clutched the yellowing pages of the biologist’s letter tight in his left hand, while the biologist’s journal, which Grace had rescued from the lighthouse, lay on his lap. It had interested Ghost Bird to read it, to fill in the final gaps, and yet what gaps remained despite it. The white light at the bottom of the tower. The manifestation of the lighthouse keeper within the Crawler. These were things she distrusted without seeing them for herself. But to Control she knew it would just register as new evidence, new hope—information that might provide a solution, a sudden fix. As if Grace’s scrutiny and thoughts about them were not enough.

“We’re not on Earth,” Ghost Bird said. We cannot be on Earth. “Not with that much distortion of time. Not with the things the biologist saw.” Not if they wanted to pretend that there were rules in place, even if the rules had been obscured, made unclear, withheld. But was that true? Or had time just become irrational, inconsistent?

Still that reluctance, and the distance it created between her and them, until Grace finally said, “That was my conclusion, one of the theories put forward by the science division.”

“A kind of wormhole,” Control said. The limit of how far he could go; anything more would be pulled out of him by the brightness.

A disbelieving stare from Grace. “Do you think Area X builds spaceships, too? Do you think Area X traverses interstellar space? Wormholes? Think of something more subtle, something peering through what we think of as reality.”

Flat, clipped words, stripped of the awe that should have animated them. Because she’d had those extra three years? Because she was thinking of loved ones back home?

Control, so slowly, almost as if in a hypnotized state: “Everything in Area X that we thought was degrading too rapidly … most of it was just getting old.”

Some things were very old indeed—the remnants of the village and the various sedimentary layers of those journals under the trapdoor in the lighthouse. So much more time had passed in Area X after the border came down, before the first expedition had gone in. People could have lived in Area X for much, much longer after the border came down than anyone had thought.