Absolution

Book 4: The Southern Reach Series

by Jeff VanderMeer

Genres: Horror; Science Fiction

Synopsis

Ten years after the publication of Annihilation, the surprise fourth volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s blockbuster Southern Reach Trilogy.

When the Southern Reach Trilogy was first published a decade ago, it was an instant sensation, celebrated in a front-page New York Times story before publication, hailed by Stephen King and many others. Each volume climbed the bestsellers list; awards were won; the books made the rare transition from paperback original to hardcover; the movie adaptation became a cult classic. All told, the trilogy has sold more than a million copies and has secured its place in the pantheon of twenty-first-century literature.

And yet for all this, for Jeff VanderMeer there was never full closure to the story of Area X. There were a few mysteries that had gone unsolved, some key points of view never aired. There were stories left to tell. There remained questions about who had been complicit in creating the conditions for Area X to take hold; the story of the first mission into the Forgotten Coast—before Area X was called Area X—had never been fully told; and what if someone had foreseen the world after Acceptance? How crazy would they seem?

Structured in three parts, each recounting a new expedition, there are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.

Release date: October 22, 2024

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Print pages: 528

Sample

001: THE BIOLOGISTS

Once, the story went, there had been biologists on the Forgotten Coast, in numbers so great that the ground shook in the aftermath of their passage. Eager men and women who without warning bestrode the terrain like conquerors, sent by the government and funded by money that came in the form of buried gold bars that could not decay or devalue like the money kept in banks. Which is why, the conspiracy theorists at the Village Bar claimed, the biologists had been so stooped and weighted down when they arrived. Their packs had been full not of supplies and food but of gold.

That the force or forces that had sent the biologists to the Forgotten Coast wanted the biologists to be ungoverned by barter, isolated, free of the sense of neighborly responsibility that had held the Forgotten Coast together for so long.

That the biologists had been complicit, aware of their role, which was important, Old Jim believed. They had to be complicit if the folks in the Village Bar were to keep telling the story. Because if they weren’t complicit, telling the story meant the story would at some point peer back and condemn the teller.

In their initial explorations, the biologists, clad in their yellow gloves, carried out a series of ever more arcane rituals. They plucked clumps of native grasses from the mud flats with a finicky precision, tweezered scraps into vials. They shoved bits of bark mottled with lichen into tiny metal boxes. Jars small and large allowed them to sample strange aquatic species like crayfish and mudpuppies.

At night, they slept in space-age sleeping bags that looked at times like the vanguard of an alien invasion: shimmering silver cocoons against the dark green of tree islands and the golden wash of reeds and the drab gray-brown river mud pocked with the holes of fiddler crabs.

The decision to conduct an initial survey and then, later, bivouac inland had been made by someone higher up. Someone remote who thought a permanent location on the beach “would seem to flaunt,” according to one biologist in their diary.

(The diary, retrieved, had been gone at by beetles and rot, and in the searing shades of green, the watermarks that seemed more like records of tidal patterns, it had the look of an object in a museum exhibit. Old Jim had run his hand over the roughness of that faux coastline more than once as he read the faded pencil marks, before he’d thought, almost quaintly, of contamination and put the journal back.)

None of the locals ever did get a straight answer about why the biologists had been sent, this much Old Jim knew from the files, because it had been ordered that no straight answer ever be given to “those people.” But perhaps that didn’t matter, either, for most of the locals had always seen the government as an invading hydra. The “slid-off” answer, as one local called it, only reaffirmed the long-held suspicion, the desire forever gestating in them: to be left alone, left to whatever state of dissolution and decay or, yes, peace they aspired to in that wild and beautiful place.

In the transcripts, Man Boy Slim—a rickety thin twenty-year-old local, with, at a cursory glance, a distinguished career at that time of stealing hubcaps and hunting deer out of season—made many claims about the biologists. For example, he claimed to have seen a biologist “leap into the air and catch a dragonfly with his teeth,” so delicate this maneuver that the lithe biologist spit the insect unharmed into

 a jar, where it vibrated a confused blurred emerald, unsure of what had happened.

Already, almost from the start, the biologists were changing from something human in the eyes of the locals into something uncanny. One day, a local would be walking down a weed-strewn trail on the Forgotten Coast, glimpse a biologist from the corner of their eye, and not be sure of what they had seen.

Nothing that happened next changed people’s opinions in its particulars, as far as Old Jim could tell.

002: THE CAVALRY

In addition to equipment and supplies, the biologists had brought a kind of burden with them to the Forgotten Coast, and it was with a sense of relief that they prepared to release that burden into the marshes before setting up a base camp.

That this burden had been imposed on them could be sensed in how they spoke about the process of transporting their unwieldy subjects to the release site. That they, in this one particular, shared an affinity with the locals, in not knowing how the burden had been imposed, despite the attached documents, the apparent bona fides of the burden’s university sponsors.

“We could not wait to be free to conduct our general explorations,” Team Leader 1 said, while Team Leader 2 observed that “Megafauna always catch the eye of journals, but I would rather observe the bubble fortresses of the crayfish on the mud flats, because we know so little about their ways.”

For, within a week of arriving at the Forgotten Coast, the biologists would release the alligators they had brought from one hundred miles south into the local ecosystems. This plan would not be common knowledge to the locals for some weeks, for reasons unclear to Old Jim. When it did, the county sheriff spared the expedition a visit, only dissuaded from issuing some kind of ticket, or even warning, by the presentation of so many federal government permits. Or as Man Boy Slim put it, “Quills out, folks. The biologists went quills out over those alligators.”

But the locals had a wider, more practical objection to the experiment than just how it had been withheld from them.

“There must be ten thousand alligators up here already,” Man Boy Slim’s friend Drunk Boat said in disbelief, when word did finally get out. “There must be a hundred million alligators up here. Already.”

“Drunk Boat” was Man Boy Slim’s nickname for the Village Bar’s alcoholic poet in residence—a man of letters who had not been above a bit of

night poaching with a flashlight and, of all things, a handgun. (Old Jim had read up on Man Boy Slim’s file by then, and his nod to an obscure French poet didn’t surprise him. Despite initial impressions, Man Boy Slim had a fine academic record, with a college emphasis on English before he had dropped out from lack of funds.)

As far as the biologists knew, the four large, fifteen-year-old alligators had been captured in the wild. But in the margin of the files, that place where a separate truth often flourished, Old Jim read a shorthand on the alligators that gave them a different origin. Three had been plucked fortuitous from roadside zoos and the fourth—the largest female, “code name Smaug”—came from some prior Central experiment. The university sponsor did not exist.

While under anesthetic at the release location, the alligators were fitted with an adjustable soft harness that the experiment notes promised “had the necessary give and pull to not be slipped nor pose a hazard to the reptile.” The harnesses had been attached to a thin but strong rubber-coated wire that led to a radio receiver embedded in a spinner and that attached to a bobber. When the battery ran out, the spinner would power the tracker in the bobber by the reptile’s movements through the water and, erratically, by the wind when the beast hauled itself onto land.

One stated goal was to field-test cutting-edge equipment, while the primary purpose consisted solely of seeing if the alligators would, via wetlands and interconnected waterways, return to their prior locations. How, then, did bodies understand the landscape? How did minds flourish or wither, still tuned to a distant frequency?

“In other words, could these reptiles be reintroduced to areas of scarcity and be expected to remain there?” Team Leader 1 posed the question, paraphrasing from the brief imposed upon them, itself a kind of “cover.” “What kind of site loyalty has such a beast? What stressors in a new environment might evoke site loyalty? Would what might be called ‘cultural mutations’ need to occur in addition to what we might call ‘normal’ adaptations?”

This suggested a life of the mind to Old Jim that he found disturbing, but Central’s only scribble in the margin of the transcript noted that Team Leaders 1 and 2 had formed a “close bond” during training.

Surely this information was irrelevant?

Some in the Village would later call the four alligators the Cavalry, despite what happened next. In the fierce and abiding imagination of the Forgotten Coast, the Cavalry remained forever and eternal, still roamed the swamps and marshes. Still lived on in more than

memory—cherished yet feared, such that many an unexplained “incident” in later years would be attributed, perhaps comfortingly, to “the Cavalry.”

---

—

The day of the release, the biologists gathered on a raised berm at the edge of a lake that fed into swamp landward and marsh seaward, a liminal place that held a brackish kind of fresh water, neither one thing nor the other.

It was bright and breezy, with tree swallows darting through the blazing blue sky. The drugged reptiles had been outfitted with their gear and constrained by containers that resembled huge, long coolers with removable wire-mesh tops and collapsible doors in the front. Nothing in the expedition’s official journals hinted at errors or false steps in the release, but Team Leader 2 would later write in her journal that “The moment felt fraught, tense, of greater importance than the actual purpose of the release.”

Team Leaders 1 and 2 must not have thought the release important enough to record via video footage, in the context of their other work. The team’s medic alluded to “some still shots,” which did not exist in Central’s archives. But, no matter, someone had secretly hidden a grainy surveillance camera on-site, and, even more valuable, the biologists’ journals allowed a seemingly accurate reconstruction.

The process only went smoothly for the one once named Smaug but renamed the Tyrant at Team Leader 2’s insistence, the harness no impediment. The Tyrant ran-slithered in all her ten-foot glory down to the water’s edge and disappeared almost in that same instant, as if the water were as much a portal as blessed release.

Firestorm followed with some complications of timing between final fitting of the harness and releasing the door mechanism via a “deconstructed wire coat hanger”—these “1 followed by 2” operations happening, as far as Old Jim could tell, at the exact same moment, so that there had been a possibility of disaster, despite success—and the disappearance of the reptile into the water so immediate that he did not begrudge the biologists their relief.

Who could blame the biologists for ignoring the alternate universe in which Firestorm had struggled loose and ravaged bodies until the blood sprayed and sprawled across the mudbanks in waves? Yet, there had been blood, “some minor cuts, dealt with on-site.” The Medic, quoted

 in the official report.

Old Jim also noted a margin scrawl in the Medic’s record books that “all possible measures were taken but nothing could be done.” The ink color differed from the rest of the page, so perhaps the scrawled note had occurred much later, and in his panic during the disaster of that future time…the Medic had accidentally written it on the wrong page.

Battlebee and Sergeant Rocker fared less well. The former refused to leave his glorified cooler, appearing disoriented, and the latter became harness-entangled, despite the assurances, and had to be tranq’d and prepped again later that afternoon, by which time most of the expedition had been “drinking.”

But what did that mean? Drinking what? Had there been some other impairment also in play?

A glitch in the surveillance tape slowed down their steps, so the biologists appeared to have choreographed a slow retreat, a slow surrender, and then reassembled running, only to part ways again in waves, branching off in opposite directions across the berm. The grainy stick figures appeared tiny against the immensity of wetlands and sky. If not for the glitch, Old Jim would have thought they had been running from something.

Finally, Battlebee made an exit by making an entrance. Sergeant Rocker, though, snapped and skittered sideways toward his well-wishers with such ferocious intent that the biologists fled again, even as one amongst them, Old Jim couldn’t tell which, circled the beast while calling out what sounded like an absurd “Here, kitty, kitty!” That couldn’t be right, could it? (The video ended there.)

“Hilarious,” some prior analyst at Central had written as a note. But it wasn’t hilarious. Both this moment and the drinking registered as disquieting, out of place with the discipline one would expect at the start of a scientific expedition. He also distrusted the amount of redaction surrounding the alligator experiment in the archives. It signified a growing level of circumspection, like peering through mist come up over black swamp water, even as he continued to glide forward, unable to see what lay to both sides.

But then, too, there was the assurance, the confidence, in the accounts of the biologists as remedy to allay suspicion. Because Sergeant Rocker, too, had then taken to the waters and disappeared, the biologists using their tracking equipment to make sure they could follow the alligators in their new lives.

The Tyrant kept to herself, while the others remained in close proximity, for a while.

None, at least overnight, seemed inclined to leave the area, and by the fourth day, Team Leader 1 put the most junior member of their party on the task of monitoring moments that might include a full day of basking in the same stretch of mud.

On day six they found Firestorm’s front leg, bobber wire wrapped around it, the whole prominently displayed on a mudbank with deep boot prints suggesting poachers. There was, one biologist wrote, “a bathetic or pathetic quality to the paleness of the leg, enraptured in the evidence of our experiment, lost so far from her home. I wept for an hour, but do not know if this was an appropriate response.”

(No, Old Jim did not believe it was an appropriate response, even as he himself wept at odd hours, for his own reasons, down in Central’s archives.)

Battlebee turned up dead and bloated and white, with a chunk ripped out of him postmortem by some creature, possibly Sergeant Rocker, speculation being that stress and the anesthetic had been too hard on him. Postmortem examination revealed stomach contents that included fish, a turtle, mud, and, inexplicably, a broken teacup.

She had also been pregnant, “a fact that surprised us,” Team Leader 2 wrote, “given her credentials identified her as a male,” amid some general confusion: “To be honest, I cannot now remember when we first took this project on, when we first encountered these subjects. The heat here is abysmal.”

Sergeant Rocker opted out of the project by shedding his harness in the water near the tent of Team Leader 1, indicating, as she absurdly put it, “A politeness on the part of Sergeant Rocker in keeping with his personality when I knew him best. I felt this loss much more deeply than expected.”

This sentimentality toward an alligator seen as an obligation just days before weighed on Old Jim, although he could not put a finger on why. Nor did he understand why the alligator experiment registered with the biologists in their reports as a great success, and they would even reference it with a kind of beautiful, all-consuming nostalgia when the mission began to sour. The myth of competence, perhaps. The myth of persistence. The myth of objectivity.

Perhaps, both he and the biologists would have been wiser to focus on how Sergeant Rocker had turned into an escape artist, for the harness was intact and still latched, with no tears anywhere. So how had the alligator possibly gotten free? Old Jim kept seeing the biologists by a trick of faulty video running away from the release site, only to re-form in their drinking circle.

He replayed the video so often that it became a disconcerting mess of light and shadow, of pixelated disembodied heads and legs and shapes that leapt out and sharpened, only to become subsumed into the past.

“All possible measures were taken but nothing could be done.”

Or had the outcome been exactly as intended?

003: DEADS TOWN

In the late spring, a week after releasing the Tyrant, the biologists established permanent headquarters in the ruins of a ghost town that had once pretended to be a county seat. Even in those parts, rife with poachers, anarchists, and pot growers, it was remote.

An aerial view would have barely registered the ruins of the buildings under the tree cover, but to the west lay the end of the estuary, to the east an improbable wildflower meadow petering out into mud flats, to the south more marsh, leading to the sea, and to the north an impenetrable bramble of palmettos and blackberry bushes.

The estuary held Dead Town like an open hand that could close into a fist at any time.

The biologists arrived at this remote location via kayaks, a flat-bottomed boat with more robust supplies gliding dutiful behind. A row of old rusting automobiles like huge burly beetles stacked three high would have been their welcoming committee, there by the muddy riverbank, beyond which a double row of unruly swamp oaks led to the town.

Even after the biologists had planted an ironic flag at City Hall and taken their machetes to the worst of the vines choking Main Street, the expedition did not feel comfortable there. “The sounds of birds in these ruins are muffled and we cannot tell the origin except with difficulty, given the odd acoustics.”

Old Jim wondered whether the biologists had second thoughts, there on Main Street. About their mission. About their choice of careers. To end up in such a derelict place, in the process of sinking into the ground at a rate of an inch per year. To live amongst the intense nocturnal shrieking of insects and the vagaries of crumbling walls.

Nor was everything as promised in Dead Town. A year earlier, the biologists had been told, a filmmaker had used Main Street to shoot scenes for an indie film, “a fever dream shot in the sticks,” and this meant some limited access to electricity. But, in fact, nothing worked, the outlets corroded, and they discovered that the emergency generator was just a shell, with one biologist noting that “the gutted interior contained nothing but half-deflated party balloons.”

A replacement generator arrived, a week later, along with fuel—from a Central drop

site, Old Jim noted, with a raised eyebrow. By then, the biologists had removed the balloons from the old generator and disposed of them. The sight had caused anxiety, not laughter, and a sense of what one biologist called in her diary “some kind of joke that wasn’t funny.” Old Jim felt the balloons stank of provocation.

But by who? Fate? A sadistic swamp god?

---

—

As soon as the biologists occupied the ghost town, the locals started calling it Dead Town or “the deads town,” as in “you’re dead to me,” after some phantasmagoria adored by Drunk Boat. The biologists never questioned the name Dead Town but almost immediately referred to the place they lived in as Dead Town as well.

Perhaps they thought it an ironic joke of some kind, perhaps they, in their private moments around a campfire too hot for the season, understood how absurd it was to call dead a place so alive with insects and plants and fungi. Perhaps signs and symbols held no power over them.

The biologists established a perimeter, put up white canvas yurts at the tree line that bordered the wildflower meadow, made bonfires at night, found clean drinking water…and then they began to roam. Widely. An “invasive species” across a new migratory range, as observed, again, by Man Boy Slim. The yurts, as he described them, were like some vanilla variety of the flourless cakes at a local bakery, which had the novelty of a dusty model-train track running up high, near the ceiling.

Putting up the yurts signaled a kind of initial caving, Old Jim thought. A sign that they knew Dead Town wasn’t ideal as base camp, despite their orders. Every last one of them erected where the sea breeze breathed its last before dropping off into a stillness that incubated humidity and palmetto bugs and mosquitoes.

A silent rebellion that stretched the limits of authority, under the guise of processing their finds as quickly as possible—to have these “field stations,” as the official report called them, which were actually a form of physical relief from the environment for the biologists.

To process these “finds,” to be well and truly named, which were just parts of the Forgotten Coast that the locals had known about for years and that had not needed the formality of the kinds of names that the biologists wanted to give them.

It irked the locals 

who liked birding to be in pursuit of a rare vermillion flycatcher, only to gaze through binoculars…at what turned out to be a biologist wearing a red bandana, staring back through her own binoculars.

“They get in the way,” Man Boy Slim claimed, to little disagreement in the bar. Telescopes. Microscopes. More advanced and profane sensors that defied Old Jim’s understanding. Metal boxes with blinking lights, into which the biologists funneled swamp water.

By then, “peculiar instruments” had become a stand-in for “peculiar people” in the bar transcripts—Man Boy Slim and his allies at odds with others as to the intentionality of it all. A good-natured brawl, forgiven through beer, between the faction who thought the biologists fools and those who labeled them capable of harm, and thus the more formal “Rogues.”

By then, the biologists had become embedded in Dead Town, their fate and the fate of Dead Town interwoven, as if they were not an expedition at all, but an outpost, preparing for an assault from some unknown force.

004: THE ROGUE

Amid all the debris in the files, the term “Rogue” made Old Jim take notice, because the idea of a Rogue on the Forgotten Coast wasn’t “a scoundrel or dishonest person” but the more neutral idea of an outcast or stranger. A Rogue, in the parlance of the Village Bar, required keen attention not because a Rogue always intended harm, but because a Rogue might not understand the harm it could cause. This ambiguity bothered Old Jim, even has he understood that the Forgotten Coast had always been a reliquary for Rogues of some kind.

Perhaps worse, though, in Old Jim’s estimation, how the Village Bar idea of a “Rogue” had only permutated into a term of art for Central after the biologists’ expedition, as if the Forgotten Coast had colonized the corridors of power over time without Central realizing it. Where the danger in that lay, Old Jim didn’t know, just that it felt dangerous, like a counter-op or potential double agent.

The stranger who became the Rogue, and would not give the locals a name, appeared in early summer, after the biologists had become established at Dead Town. To those tanned and sun-blessed people, the stranger appeared whiter than the rabbits. As the translucent quality of the skin of some geckos reveals the beauty of a beating heart, so the face and arms of the stranger suggested a kind of vulnerability. He looked to the Village Bar regulars so pale as to have come “posthaste from some extreme northern country,” although his accent read local. Otherwise, he was physically

nondescript.

The man wore a rumpled blue blazer over a once-crisp light blue dress shirt, the top two buttons missing, with slim tan pants ending unexpectedly in sturdy military-issue boots. As startling, given his overall affect, was the camo-colored pack he had with him, which also read army. The blazer had a rip in one elbow and a tired, defeated quality in how it fell across his shoulders.

At first glance, Drunk Boat dubbed the stranger Sad Sack, but Man Boy Slim amended that to Bad Slack, B.S. for short, before some communal subtext settled on “Rogue” with a capital “R” instead.

He said nothing, framed in silhouette by the door as wiry and thin, surpassed in this regard only by a local arborist who resembled an angry jockey and shimmied up trees like an indignant squirrel. Except the Rogue wasn’t angry and he favored his left leg. Everyone recognized his walking stick as the one left at the start of the lighthouse trail loop as a courtesy.

“He made a sound,” Drunk Boat observed later. “A sound like…like a whimper…but a whimper of, well, relief…and astonishment.”

Man Boy Slim demurred that he’d heard no such sound, but Drunk Boat persisted. “Like a man on a long mission who has come home? Except no one knows him here. It was strange.”

Yes, Old Jim thought, everyone could see that the stranger was strange. Sometimes, when perplexed, Drunk Boat didn’t sound that poetic, like it was a fancy hat he wore most of the time and shared with Man Boy Slim on occasion.

When the pale stranger said nothing but ordered a beer and sat in the back, it took a while for the rest of the bar to regain a certain equilibrium.

“He brought in a smell with him,” Sally the bartender noted before closing that night. “Not like the sea or the marsh. More…electric. Like…a singe of lightning? I don’t know now to describe it. Like, if you touched him you might get a shock.”

No one touched him. He seemed untouchable, created an aura of space around him that discouraged conversation. But not gossip.

“He stole a stick,” Charlie said. “He stole the lighthouse loop stick.” Young Charlie often walked the loop, on his days off from his fishing vessel.

“To him it was just a stick and he needed a stick, and we can find another stick, can’t we?” Drunk Boat said, in reluctant defense, and then ever more inebriated and illogical camaraderie.

This line of defense seemed to be met with skepticism, or even the mutterings of

open rebellion about how easy it actually was to find the perfect walking stick. With an agitated undertone, however, as if talking about the stick was easier than grappling with other questions about the stranger.

Then Man Boy Slim waded in and described the stranger as “an out-of-work magician, looking to create a new act out of you-all.” A wide gesture, repeated at lunch the next day, that encompassed the Village, including Charlie.

“A thief,” Drunk Boat said. “A thief of our time, talking about nothing when we could be conversing about something.”

What something did he mean?

But that was the moment the tension went out of the bar about the stranger—just an out-of-work magician—and, for a couple of days, none of the locals paid the stranger any mind when he came to the bar for a quiet sit-down and a glass of water.

That’s what the Forgotten Coast was for, wasn’t it, Drunk Boat and Man Boy Slim and Charlie said, a bit sentimental. “To lose yourself. To love to live to be whatever you can be.”

So, for a time, the Rogue did nothing but become the kind of semi-regular who sat quietly in the dark part of the bar, said little, had a beer or two, and left. Offering up nothing of himself, so that no one knew where he had come from when he walked in, or where he went home to when he left.

Harmless.

But Old Jim knew. He knew the stranger was a Rogue, and he was inclined to consider this Rogue an agent of sorts—a person who, in Central parlance, would come to mean the familiar unfamiliar, “one who knows us but is not us.”

A kind of slant rhyme connecting who he was to what espionage was.

Such a person moved against the pattern of tides, of stars, of seasons and, in that sense, was not bound by the idea of Time as experienced on the Forgotten Coast.

Such a person was dangerous.

005: THE VISITATION

For dead people, or “the Deads,” as they began to be called in the Village Bar, the biologists stopped often in their labors that summer to curse about the heat and humidity, which, when overheard, surprised the locals, because it was such a human thing to do. That Drunk Boat at night, in the distance (while up to unspecified activities), could sometimes see the bobbing headlamps 

of the biologists “well out to sea, so to speak,” mystified him as much as “if faery lights had swept down low above the marshes.”

Perhaps to create a distraction from the conditions, the biologists had accelerated their tagging of so many living things—and the hours across which they spread such endeavors. “A vast human migration across the face of the Earth,” Drunk Boat said, downing a shot, for the moment the bar’s sole authority, Man Boy Slim having gone into Bleakersville to fix his car. “Unnatural—and without relief.”

No one disagreed, for the scope had expanded almost without a will in place to drive it. The biologists cast nets for tiny fish in shallows. They set net traps for small woodland creatures. They took fine nylon nets and created capture zones for songbirds, often running aghast to the rescue of what they themselves had endangered, for a songbird was a terrible curse: unpredictable and angry and easy to harm.

How fragile those wings, those beaks, heads to the side, small bright eyes staring up at the aliens that held their bodies in half-closed fists. The birds came from far north, guided by a complex knowledge of magnetic fields and the stars. Their brains had a coiled density twice that of humans. They only lived six or seven years, on average.

At the zenith of their powers that July, the biologists’ boot prints outnumbered the tracks of deer and raccoons on the mud flats. The blue caps from tranq darts became a common sight alongside empty beer cans and shotgun shells. The sun shone at their backs and the sea wind was in their faces and their bodies glistened with sweat, with the nights full of laughter and good cheer at the end of a hard day’s work—or with the work just beginning. Their labor was a rhythm and their labor was a pact and their labor continued, unbroken.

The biologists’ sleep was long and deep in their mosquito-proof yurts, and the sounds out of the night did not frighten them, and they did not dream, for they lived within a kind of dream already, doing what they had trained for their entire lives.

It would have been mid-July when the first anomaly occurred, a week after the Rogue appeared, and almost a month before the luck of the biologists could be said to have worsened exponentially. A biologist taking samples on the mud flats in front of the wildflower meadow encountered the rabbit first. She had been chosen for the mud work because her slight frame protected her from being mired up to her knees. But, also, she had a rare knack for navigating 

 that landscape, far greater than anyone else on the expedition.

Watching her spindly form from afar, Team Leader 2 would marvel at “how she manages to seem like an insect using the tensile pressure of the water’s surface to glide across, well, in this case, the mud.” Old Jim flagged her as “the Mudder” in the files, a shorthand he employed now from habit. When he had an interest in a person. Besides, they should’ve called her that.

Intent on begging mud into one last vial and placing it in her backpack, the Mudder started at an unexpected crunching sound to her left, just out of her peripheral vision, pivoted on her haunches, and fell on her ass when she saw the source.

A large white rabbit with bloodshot red eyes calmly ate a fiddler crab, crunching on the carapace, gulping it down, and starting on another. The rabbit had a starved look about it, a gauntness under the tangled fur splashed brown.

The matter-of-fact way the rabbit ate the crab unnerved her, the Mudder wrote in her journal, as much as the presence of the rabbit itself. Ragged pink ears edged with matted white fur twitched in multidirectional ways as if receiving data from radio waves.

“The eyes focused on me with what I can only call indifference or even contempt,” the Mudder wrote, but then changed her mind: “The rabbit stared through me, as if its eyes could not focus or it was intent on some sight behind me. No, that’s not right, either. I just know it was not natural.”

This page was water damaged along the left-hand side so another sentence read either “both so still and in constant motion” or “but so still in its consistent motion,” the rest of her reaction lost.

Trying to right herself, the Mudder instead wound up on all fours facing the rabbit, while the rabbit continued to eat crabs alive. The rabbit might first crush the crab’s carapace with one solid paw before feasting, the soft insides pushing out from the shell, or just crack the carapace with its teeth.

While the crabs let the rabbit devour them as if mesmerized, as if the rabbit registered as an inanimate object. That just happened to be killing them.

The pink workings of the rabbit’s mouth as it crunched crabs to death, the inner hint of rows of sharper teeth than she would have expected, ...