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*
Ghost Bird and Grace had been seeking the border since Control fell into that unbearable light. At night, one slept while the other kept watch for whatever might come ambling out of the murky night. Six days, give or take. Six days throwing stones.
Grace always slept with one eye stubbornly open, but Ghost Bird couldn’t hold her at fault.
When Grace finally began to mumble in her sleep—a sure sign of dreaming—Ghost Bird felt obliged to creep away, the thick musk of night-blooming cereus and the shrill chorus of crickets masking her retreat.
While she took some comfort in this—knowing she was trusted, perhaps almost as Grace might have trusted the former director—the somnolent whispers were intimate, desolate. Grace missed her wife. Missed Cynthia. Missed her life before Area X had encroached on the crumbling arms of the Southern Reach.
Memories of stepping around a particular creaking floorboard while a husband slept in the next room threatened to overwhelm her for a moment, before the thrashing of something in the scrub shattered her reverie. A fox—a strange, lithe thing with eyes that blazed uncomfortable recognition—darted across her path. It was not Grace. Area X was too lush, too rife with soothing noises for Ghost Bird’s exit to register with her sleeping companion.
Area X seemed to rejoice in providing her with such cover, throwing fireflies in her path, offering her the briefest glimpse of unfamiliar stars in the sky. It was a gift—a kindness—she was not sure she wanted, but it was nevertheless presented to her.
There seemed to be an unspoken agreement between her and Grace to not acknowledge the obvious: they were walking in circles. Where days ago the Southern Reach was behind them, intuitively, Ghost Bird knew that it somehow once again lay ahead of their path. There was a discomfort in the knowing; she was unable to distinguish what she knew in her bones as a legacy of Area X from what an ecologist might know after careful study of a landscape.
A short walk away from the hollow where they had camped for the night put Ghost Bird back at the coast, taller vegetation giving way to swaying grasses, turtleweeds and the winking sea, dark and ferocious before her. The island lighthouse loomed in the distance.
Somewhere, in the depths, the biologist waited. Ghost Bird felt like a sea captain once again, but this time the vessel was sunk, lost, leaving her with a desperate longing to plunge into the depths after the shipwreck. Down some invisible wire, the biologist called to her, pulling at a frightening desire in Ghost Bird to reach out, pass her hands once again over silky flesh embedded with her own eyes.
She allowed herself a few minutes to sit on the sand and drown in the sensation, then turned back to the darkness of Area X to keep an eye on Grace.
The calling did not quiet.
*
“We’ve been here already.”
Ghost Bird nodded. This site had been demarcated with hot pink plastic flagging tape, the remnant of some expedition past. They stood out like highway memorials: flowers tied to trees or streetlights in an attempt to absolve the grief of a tragedy.
Grace let out a frustrated huff, then sat down next to Ghost Bird. A bird—a jay, Ghost Bird thought, unsure—screeched from somewhere above, the sound bubbling through the canopy to laugh at them.
Grace did little more than blink at the sudden noise. She was no longer moved to alarm by the inhabitants of Area X, although each instance of strangeness lent a brief uncertainty to her step, a sharpness to her gaze.
It was a commensal relationship. Area X fed her and gave her shelter, but a disturbance could easily tear her down from her perch.
She kept a rifle at her back.
“When we find it—” Grace continued, steadfast in refusing to use the word 'if' to talk about the elusive border, “—she can't follow us.”
She meant the biologist. Something in Ghost Bird lurched.
Ghost bird wasn't sure if that ‘she’ included her, too. The lines separating herself and the biologist were increasingly tangled; more like splashes of color and light than clear delineations. While Grace saw a hulking figure looming through the trees or heard the splash of something heavy scattering the once-still surface of a deep pool, Ghost Bird felt a yearning, like a moan ringing across a chamber, echoing back and forth. She wanted to press her face to the earth, push her nails into her skin, hard; anything to stem her answering call, threatening to tear through her.
“I know,” she said, simply, her eyes fixed on the mess of laurel oak and climbing aster, dense and crawling around them.
It didn't matter whether Grace meant she wouldn't allow it, or that the biologist was somehow bound to Area X by ecology; the outcome was static. The biologist could not cross the border into Grace’s world.
Ghost Bird's entire existence had hinged on the fact, allowing her to return in the biologist’s stead.
“Do you think she'll try?”
Ghost Bird didn't know. The pull she felt—the dizzying urge to lean in whatever direction the biologist might be—offered no insight to predict the biologist's actions.
Not to mention, the further she leaned, the less she felt able to predict her own.
*
Once more they stood before the Southern Reach.
The desire to burrow down into the swampy landscape, or to head back to the coast and feel the soft, succulent leaves of sea lavender press at her skin was overwhelming. Sickening want coursed through Ghost Bird, so severe she felt dizzy with it. She wanted to be consumed by Area X, wanted to feel each component of the ecosystem cradle her.
When she stopped walking, Grace followed suit, turning slowly, lightly touching the tips of her fingers to the weapon dangling behind her hip.
“She’s inside.”
The biologist—before her transformation—might have given little to no parts of herself over to others, but Grace could read Ghost Bird like a book. The truth of her burst outward like beams of light pushing through a cloud.
Ghost Bird nodded.
Ghost Bird could feel the biologist—nested perfectly within the ruins of the Southern Reach—beckoning to her, whispering, ‘stay’, ‘give in’. The decision felt like a conical pendulum, moving in a symbiotic circle; at no point did the responsibility of it fall solely on herself, the biologist, or Area X. They were three expressions of the same idea, or one expression of three ideas, waiting to converge like streams of lava pooling across the landscape. It felt like an era passed; each time she hesitated toward a decision—escape or acclimatize, restrain or reach out, feel—the ability to make it progressed beyond her reach.
Ghost Bird wondered if Grace could feel what she felt, the vastness of the moment, the heaviness of connection. The rabbits Control described, streaking like lightning as they darted across the sky in his vision suddenly felt analogous to her, although where she had seen a sickness in Control, she felt a health—a strength—in heeding the call of the biologist.
“I need to go inside,” she said, the simple words sprawling across the eternity around her, and with their utterance, a kind of relief coursing through her, setting her alight.
Grace touched a hand to the place where Ghost Bird’s shoulder met her neck. Ghost Bird started, surprised at the coolness of the touch, when all around her the landscape burst with heat—from the insulation of the padded crust of the soil, to the brightness of the blooming red salvias and the heady spit and hiss of animals in the distance.
Once again, they smiled at each other, a symphony of kindness and understanding, a demonstration of the never-ending succession of need for connection.
“Then go.”
Ghost Bird went.
*