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when a woodpecker swooped across that scene it was as
     violent as the sonic boom of an F-16.
    To the left of the U and the lake—just visible from where he stood—a road threaded
     its way through the trees, toward the invisible border, beyond which lay Area X. Just
     thirty-five miles of paved road and then another fifteen unpaved beyond that, with
     ten checkpoints in all, and shoot-to-kill orders if you weren’t meant to be there,
     and fences and barbed wire and trenches and pits and more swamp, possibly even government-trained
     colonies of apex predators and genetically modified poison berries and hammers to
     hit yourself on the head with … but in some ways, ever since Control had been briefed,
     he had wondered: To what point? Because that’s what you did in such situations? Keep
     people out? He’d studied the reports. If you reached the border in an “unauthorized
     way” and crossed over anywhere but the door, you would never be seen again. How many
     people had done just that, without being spotted? How would the Southern Reach ever
     know? Once or twice, an investigative journalist had gotten close enough to photograph
     the outside of the Southern Reach’s border facilities, but even then it had just confirmed
     in the public imagination the official story of environmental catastrophe, one that
     wouldn’t be cleaned up for a century.
    There came a tread around the stone tables in the concrete courtyard across which
     little white tiles competed with squares of clotted earth into which unlikely tulips
     had been shoved at irregular intervals … he knew that tread, with its special extra
     little dragging sound. The assistant director had been a field officer once; something
     had happened on assignment, and she’d hurt her leg. Inside the building, she could
     disguise it, but not on the treacherous grouted tiles. It wasn’t an advantage for
     him to know this, because it made him want to empathize with her. “Whenever you say
     ‘in the field,’ I have this image of all of you spooks running through the wheat,”
     his father had said to his mother, once.
    Grace was joining him at his request, to assist him in staring out at the swamp while
     they talked about Area X. Because he’d thought a change of setting—leaving the confines
     of the concrete coffin—might help soften her animosity. Before he’d realized just
     how truly hellish and prehistoric the landscape was, and thus now pre-hysterical as
     well. Look out upon this mosquito orgy, and warm to me, Grace.
    “You interviewed just the biologist. I still do not know why.” She said this before
     he could extend even a tendril of an opening gambit … and all of his resolve to play
     the diplomat, to somehow become her colleague, not her enemy—even if by misdirection
     or a metaphorical jab in the kidneys—dissolved into the humid air.
    He explained his thought processes. She seemed impressed, although he couldn’t really
     read her yet.
    “Did she ever seem, during training, like she was hiding something?” he asked.
    “Deflection. You think she is hiding something.”
    “I don’t know yet, actually. I could be wrong.”
    “We have more expert interrogators than you.”
    “Probably true.”
    “We should send her to Central.”
    The thought made him shudder.
    “No,” he said, a little too emphatically, then worried in the next split second that
     the assistant director might guess that he cared about the biologist’s fate.
    “I have already sent the anthropologist and the surveyor away.”
    Now he could smell the decay of all that plant matter slowly rotting beneath the surface
     of the swamp, could sense the awkward turtles and stunted fish pushing their way through
     matted layers. He didn’t trust himself to turn to face her. Didn’t trust himself to
     say anything, stood there suspended by his surprise.
    Cheerfully, she continued: “You said they weren’t of any use, so I sent them to Central.”
    “By