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just sat there staring at her. He found
     her fatalism a hindrance, especially suffused, as he misdiagnosed it at first, with
     such a grim satisfaction. A claustrophobic combination that no one needed, that helped
     no one. It was also inaccurate in its progressions.
    The first expedition alone had, according to the files, experienced such horrors,
     almost beyond imagining, that it was a wonder that they had sent anyone after that.
     But they’d had no choice, understood they were in it for “the long haul” as, he knew
     from transcripts, the former director had liked to say. They hadn’t even let the later
     expeditions know the true fate of the first expedition, had created a fiction of encountering
     an undisturbed wilderness and then built other lies on top of that one. This had probably
     been done as much to ease the Southern Reach’s own trauma as to protect the morale
     of the subsequent expeditions.
    “In thirty minutes, you have an appointment to tour the science division,” she said,
     getting up and looming over him, leaning with her hands on his desk. “I think I will
     let you find the place yourself.” That would give him just enough time to check his
     office for surveillance devices beforehand.
    “Thanks,” he said. “You can leave now.”
    So she left.
    But it didn’t help. Before he’d arrived, Control had imagined himself flying free
     above the Southern Reach, swooping down from some remote perch to manage things. That
     wasn’t going to happen. Already his wings were burning up and he felt more like some
     ponderous moaning creature trapped in the mire.
    *   *   *
    As he became more familiar with it, the former director’s office revealed no new or
     special features to Control’s practiced eye. Except that his computer, finally installed
     on the desk, looked almost science-fictional next to all the rest of it.
    The door lay to the far left of the long, rectangular room, so that you wandered into
     its length toward the mahogany desk set against the far wall. No one could have snuck
     up on the director or read over her shoulder. Each wall had been covered in bookcases
     or filing cabinets, with stacks of papers and some books forming a second width in
     front of this initial layering. At the highest levels, or in some ridiculous cases,
     balanced on the stacks, those bulletin boards with ripped pieces of paper and scribbled
     diagrams pinned to them. He felt as if he had been placed inside someone’s disorganized
     mind. Near her desk, on the left, he uncovered an array of preserved natural ephemera.
     Dusty and decaying bits of pinecone trailed across the shelves. A vague hint of a
     rotting smell, but he couldn’t track down the origin.
    Opposite the entrance lay another door, situated in a gap between bookcases, but this
     had been blocked by more piles of file folders and cardboard boxes and he’d been told
     it opened onto the wall—detritus of an inelegant remodeling. Opposite the desk, on
     the far wall about twenty-five feet away, was a kind of break in the mess to make
     room for two rows of pictures, all in the kinds of frames cheaply bought at discount
     stores. From bottom left, clockwise around to the right: a square etching of the lighthouse
     from the 1880s; a black-and-white photograph of two men and a girl framed by the lighthouse;
     a long, somewhat amateurish watercolor panorama showing miles of reeds broken only
     by a few isolated islands of dark trees; and a color photograph of the lighthouse
     beacon in all its glory. No real hints of the personal, no pictures of the director
     with her Native American mother, her white father—or with anyone who might matter
     in her life.
    Of all the intel Control had to work through in the coming days, he least looked forward
     to what he might uncover in what was now his own office; he thought he might leave
     it until last. Everything in the office seemed to indicate a director who had gone
     feral. One of the