Area X Three Book Bundle

by Jeff VanderMeer

  She appeared so close, from concealment on his left, that he almost jumped back, caught himself in time by bending and putting out a hand.

  In that moment, he was helpless and in steadying himself he found that she had a gun trained on him. It looked like a Glock, like his own, standard-issue. He hadn’t expected that. Somehow, somewhere, she had found a gun. She was thinner, her cheekbones as cutting as the rocks. Her hair had begun to grow out, a dark fuzz. She wore thick jeans and a sweater too big for her but heavy, and high-quality brown hiking boots. There was a defiance on her face that warred with curiosity and some other emotion. Her lips were chapped. In this, her natural environment, she seemed so sure of herself that he felt awkward, ungainly. Something had clicked into place. Something had sharpened her, and he thought it might be memory.

  “Throw your gun into the sea,” she said, motioning to his holster. She had to raise her voice for him to hear her, even this close—close enough that with a few steps he could have reached out and touched her shoulder.

  “We might need it later,” he said.

  “We?”

  “Yes,” he said. “More are coming. I’ve seen the lights.” He did not want to share what had happened to the Southern Reach. Not yet.

  “Toss it, now, unless you want to get shot.” He believed her. He’d seen the reports from her training. She said she wasn’t good with guns, but the targets hadn’t agreed.

  So there went Grandpa version 4.9 or 5.1. He hadn’t kept track of the expeditions. The sea made it disappear with a smack that sounded like one last comment from Jack.

  John looked over at her, standing across from him while the waves blasted the rocks and despite the gray and despite the wet and the cold, despite the fact he might die sometime in the next few minutes, he started to laugh. It surprised him, thought at first someone else was laughing.

  Her grip tightened on the gun. “Is the idea of me shooting you funny?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s very, very funny.” He was laughing hard enough now that he had to bend to his knees to keep his balance on the rocks. A fierce joy or hysteria had risen inside of him, and he wondered in an idle, distant way if perhaps he should have sought out this feeling more often. The look of her, against the backdrop of the swell and the fall of the sea, was almost too much for him. But for the first time he knew he had done the right thing in coming here.

  “It’s funny because there have been many other times … so many other times when I would’ve understood why someone wanted to shoot me.” That was only part of it, the other part being that he had felt almost as if Area X was about to shoot him, and that Area X had been trying to shoot him for a very long time.

  “You followed me,” she said, “even though I clearly don’t want to be followed. You’ve come to what most people consider the butt end of the world and you’ve cornered me here. You probably want to ask more questions, although it should be clear that I’m done with questions. What did you think would happen?”

  The truth was, he didn’t know what he had thought would happen, had perhaps unconsciously fallen back on an idea of their relationship at the Southern Reach. But that didn’t apply here. He sobered up, hands held high now as if surrendering.

  “What if I said I had answers,” he said. But all he had to show her that was tangible was Whitby’s manuscript.

  “I’d say you’re lying and I’d be right.”

  “What if I said you still hold some of the answers, too.” He was as serious as he had been giddy just moments before. He tried to hold her with his gaze, even through the murk, but he couldn’t. God, but the coast here was painfully beautiful, the dark lush greens of the fir trees piercing his brain, the half-raging sky and sea, the surge of salt water against the rocks twinned to the urgent wash of blood through his arteries as he waited for her to kill him or hear him out. Seditious thought: There would be nothing too terrible about dying out here, about becoming part of all of this.

  “I’m not the biologist,” she said. “I don’t care about my past as the biologist, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I know,” he said. He’d figured it out on the boat, even if he hadn’t articulated it yet. “I know you’re not. You’re some version, though. You have her memories, to some extent, and somewhere back in Area X, the biologist may still be alive. You’re a replica, but you’re your own person.”

  Not an answer she had expected. She lowered the gun. A little. “You believe me.”

  “Yes.” It had been right there. In front of him, in the video, in the very mimicry of cells, the difference in personality. Except she’d broken the mold. Something had been different in her creation.

  “I’ve been trying to remember this place,” she said, almost plaintively. “I love it here, but the entire time I’ve felt like it was the one remembering me.”

  A silence that John didn’t know if he wanted to break, so he just stood there.

  “Are you here to take me back?” she said. “Because I’m not going back.”

  “No, I’m not,” he said, and realized it was true. Whatever impulse in that regard that might have lived within him had been snuffed out. “The Southern Reach doesn’t exist anymore,” he admitted. “There may not be anything we’d recognize out there very soon.”

  There in the twilight, no birds now overhead, the smoke fading into the dusk, the raucous surf the only thing that seemed alive besides the two of them.

  “How did you know I’d be here?” she asked, deep in thought. “I was so careful.”

  “I didn’t. I guessed.” Somehow his face must have given something of his thoughts away, because she looked a little startled, a little wrong-footed.

  “Why would you do that if you don’t want to take me back?”

  “I don’t know.” To try to save the world? To save her? To save himself? But he did know. Nothing had changed since the interrogation room. Not really.

  When he looked up again, she was saying, “I thought I could just stay here. Build the life she didn’t build, that she messed up. But I can’t. It’s clear I can’t. Someone will be after me no matter what I do.”

  Now that the sun had truly set there was a glimmer of a light dimly familiar to him coming from deep in the lagoon below.

  “What’s down there?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” Said too quickly.

  “Nothing? It’s too late to lie—there’s no point.” It was never too late to lie, to obscure, to delay. Control knew this too well.

  But she didn’t. She hesitated, then said, “I was sick when I got here. One night I came out here and I had a dizzy spell and I was unconscious for a while. I woke up with the tide rising and I wasn’t sick anymore. The brightness was done with me. But there was something at the bottom of that hole.”

  “What?” Although he thought he already knew. The swirling light was too familiar, despite being broken by ripples and the thickness of the water.

  “It’s a way into Area X, I think,” she said, and now she looked scared. “I think I brought it with me.” He didn’t know how she knew this. He thought it might be true, remembered what Cheney had said about how difficult and enervating that travel could be. Whitby’s horrible description of the border.

  Now that the darkness was complete and she was just a shadow standing in front of him, they could both see the lights farther down the coast. Bobbing. Floating. Trudging. Dozens of them. And so far down below, that glimmer, that hint of an impossible light.

  “I don’t think we have much longer,” he said. “I don’t even know if we have the night. We’ll have to find a place to hide.” Not wanting to think about the other possibility. Not wanting even a hint of it in his thoughts to invade her thoughts.

  “It will be high tide soon,” she said. “You have to get off the rocks.” But not her? Even though he could not see her face, he knew the expression that must be etched there.

  “We both have to get off the rocks.” He wasn’t sure he meant it. He could hear the helicopter n
ow, could hear boats again, too. But if she was unhinged, if she was lying, if she didn’t actually know anything at all …

  “I want to know who I am,” she said. “I can’t do that here. I can’t do that locked up in a cell.”

  “I know who you are—it’s all in my head, your file. I can give you that.”

  “I’m not going back,” she said. “I’m never going back.”

  “It’s dangerous,” he told her, pleading, as if she didn’t know. “It’s unproven. We don’t know where you’ll come out.” The hole was so deep and so jagged, and the water beginning to churn from the waves. He had seen wonders and he had seen terrible things. He had to believe that this was one more and that it was true and that it was knowable.

  Her stare took the measure of him. She was done talking. She threw her gun away. She dove into the water, down deep.

  He took one last look back at the world he knew. He took one huge gulp of it, every bit of it he could see, every bit of it he could remember.

  “Jump,” said a voice in his head.

  Control jumped.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to my editor, Sean McDonald, and everyone at FSG for their expertise, passion, sense of humor, and, above all, patience. Thanks as well to everyone at the Fourth Estate, HarperCollins Canada, Blackstone Audiobooks, and my foreign-language publishers. Thanks to my agent, Sally Harding, and my wife, Ann, for helping me find the mental space to write these novels. Thanks to Black Dog Café, All Saints Café, the Fermentation Lounge, San Luis Mission Park, and Shared Worlds for giving me physical spaces to work in. Thanks to Eric Schaller, Geoffrey A. Landis, and Ashley Davis for science discussions. Finally, thanks to my first readers for their help, including Brian Evenson, Tessa Kum, Greg Bossert, Jeremy Zerfoss, Karin Tidbeck, Craig Gitney, Berit Ellingsen, and Adam Mills.

  Credits

  COVER DESIGN BASED ON AN ORIGINAL

  BY CHARLOTTE STRICK

  COVER ILLUSTRATI ON AND

  AUTHOR PORTRAIT BY ERIC NYQUIST

  HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS LTD

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  Copyright

  Authority

  Copyright © 2014 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPUB Edition April 2014 ISBN 9781443428422

  Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  First Canadian edition

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

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  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information is available upon request

  ISBN 978-1-44342-841-5

  WC 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Acceptance

  Jeff Vandermeer

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  000X: The Director, Twelfth Expedition

  Part I: Range Light

  0001: The Lighthouse Keeper

  0002: Ghost Bird

  0003: The Director

  0004: The Lighthouse Keeper

  0005: Control

  0006: The Director

  0007: The Lighthouse Keeper

  0008: Ghost Bird

  0009: The Director

  0010: Control

  Part II: Fixed Light

  01: The Brightness

  02: The Moaning Creature

  03: The Island

  04: The Owl

  05: The Seeker & Surveillance Bandits

  06: The Passage of Time, and Pain

  Part III: Occulting Light

  0011: Ghost Bird

  0012: The Lighthouse Keeper

  0013: Control

  0014: The Director

  0015: The Lighthouse Keeper

  0016: Ghost Bird

  0017: The Director

  0018: The Lighthouse Keeper

  0019: Control

  0020: The Director

  0021: The Lighthouse Keeper

  0022: Ghost Bird

  0023: The Director

  0024: The Lighthouse Keeper

  0025: Control

  0026: The Director

  0027: The Lighthouse Keeper

  0028: Ghost Bird

  000X: The Director

  Acknowledgments

  Credits

  Copyright

  Dedication

  For Ann

  000X: The Director, Twelfth Expedition

  Just out of reach, just beyond you: the rush and froth of the surf, the sharp smell of the sea, the crisscrossing shape of the gulls, their sudden, jarring cries. An ordinary day in Area X, an extraordinary day—the day of your death—and there you are, propped up against a mound of sand, half sheltered by a crumbling wall. The warm sun against your face, and the dizzying view above of the lighthouse looming down through its own shadow. The sky has an intensity that admits to nothing beyond its blue prison. There’s sticky sand glittering across a gash in your forehead; there’s a tangy glottal something in your mouth, dripping out.

  You feel numb and you feel broken, but there’s a strange relief mixed in with the regret: to come such a long way, to come to a halt here, without knowing how it will turn out, and yet … to rest. To come to rest. Finally. All of your plans back at the Southern Reach, the agonizing and constant fear of failure or worse, the price of that … all of it leaking out into the sand beside you in gritty red pearls.

  The landscape surges toward you, curling over from behind to peer at you; it flares in places, or swirls or reduces itself to a pinprick, before coming back into focus. Your hearing isn’t what it once was, either—has weakened along with your balance. And yet there comes this impossible thing: a magician’s trick of a voice rising out of the landscape and the suggestion of eyes upon you. The whisper is familiar: Is your house in order? But you think whoever is asking might be a stranger, and you ignore it, don’t like what might be knocking at the door.

  The throbbing of your shoulder from the encounter in the tower is much worse. The wound betrayed you, made you leap out into that blazing blue expanse even though you hadn’t wanted to. Some communication, some trigger between the wound and the flame that came dancing across the reeds betrayed your sovereignty. Your house has rarely been in such disarray, and yet you know that no matter what leaves you in a few minutes something else will remain behind. Disappearing into the sky, the earth, the water, is no guarantee of death here.

  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.