He sat on the beach, watching the sun come up.

The distant lighthouse rose a pale spiral in the blue haze of the morning sky, stark against the dark sand and beach-grass and the crystalline trees.

Brad took a deep, shuddering exhale, breath steaming clouds into the chilly air.

How long had it been?

His memories seemed blurred and so little made sense now as he sat there amongst the clumps of dune grass along the shoreline, watching the sun bleed the sky gold and orange, a kaleidoscope of colours.

His chest ached with the burn of his last cigarette, knee jerking up and down as he sat there; a lifetime and a single second all at once as he watched the still ocean, surface only interrupted by the occasional little wave that lapped at the sand half-heartedly.

Fuck, it was cold.

Brad took a drag off the cigarette and tried not to cry.

He couldn't remember the last time he cried, not for himself, not anymore.

Nothing made sense.

Not here.

Not anymore.

He rubbed his stiff fingers together like it'd really do anything, half-heartedly trying to get some circulation back in the digits. The smoke and his own breath fogged in front of him as he stood up, listened to his bones creak and groan in protest.

The cigarette had burned almost down to the quick, singeing his fingers before he dropped it into the damp sand where it sputtered and died.

He ground the remains of it into the earth before he slowly made his way down the shoreline towards the half-caved in tower; past the rifle planted firmly into the sand, too-many sets of dog tags and too many bones.

He didn't have enough left of himself to mourn, but there was a sadness in his chest he couldn't place, one that didn't belong to Brad.

Poke had died first. Was it the fifth day? The seventh? He wasn't sure, the days had all smeared into a blur, like running your hand across a painting that hasn't quite dried yet.

There'd been something, it came in the night, came in the night and dragged him into the swamp kicking and screaming and struggling. Brad could still hear it, from different perspectives, the fear, the pain, the empty silence in the end, feel the water in his mouth and lungs, how it soaked into his bones.

By the time they'd hauled the corpse out of the water, it'd been too late.

If he closed his eyes, he was sure he could still see the image in the beam of his flashlight— Poke's face, half gnawed down to the bone, riddled with holes, the little worms that had squirmed from his flesh and back into the filthy water, enough the make them all stumble back out and onto the shore frantically, afraid of them and whatever else might be beneath the mirror-smooth surface, whatever had dragged Poke into the darkness.

Brad had put it in his notes. Stafford had drawn it, and Doc had made neat medical notes in his clean, organised cursive. That much he knew. He was assured of this. He remembered it.

More days passed, though he didn't know how many. None of them had been able to agree on how long it had become since they passed through the barrier. The Edenic landscape had been green and lush and beautiful around them as they made their way towards the lighthouse, like an eternal summer.

They had still been uneasy with the weight of Espera's death on their shoulders, when they'd still been themselves enough to understand it, to grieve privately.

It hadn't lasted long.

The coyotes had come when they made it to Fort Amaya, the old headquarters of the Southern Reach, barking and snarling and howling, circling the building like sharks around a shipwreck. They'd prowled through open windows on too many legs, too many eyes and too many teeth and too many bullets to put them down.

Christeson had been nothing but a mangled arm, shredded scraps of uniform, a boot, and the torn open remains of his ruck after they'd killed or driven them all off, but by then it didn't really matter, did it? They didn't understand it yet, but he was already part of them by then, in some way.

They'd moved into the watchtower after that, out of their reach, though they could still hear the baying of the creatures, like a symphony of agony-soaked screams, the hiccuping sobs of someone desperate to live, a child's wailing.

He hadn't slept well since then.

Brad, Not-Brad, Maybe-Brad's notebook was filled with cursive and drawings he didn't remember making and memories he didn't see through his own eyes.

When he closed his eyes, he dreamed of green, a soft mouth and even teeth and wondered if they were something he'd seen, or if this place had truly and irreparably changed him, them , everyone , filled his head with memories from other eyes.

He wondered if he was more himself or the others now. He had moments, brief glimpses into the Brad he remembered being. If he managed to get out of this place, what would it be like?

What would he be like?

He wasn't sure if he would be Brad anymore, or if he'd be BradandEvan, BradandEvanandMikeandTimandJohn, everyone and no one at all, so many people and yet not a single one, just an amalgamation of cells, reflecting, refracting, carbon and ions and nothingness swarming inside him like a hive of bees, buzzing in his bones.

(Who he was, who he is, who he will be. Does it matter?)

Nate would know, he always knew, the science made sense to him in a way it didn't to whoever Brad was now, Brad or Not-Brad or Brad-and-Everyone-Else. Even as he remembered Nate and his green eyes and gentle smile he was already forgetting, forgetting and remembering a billion other things that weren't his, were his, because he wasn't Brad and yet he was.

Maybe he was losing it.

Doc had lost it too, lost it when the coyote bite on his arm had swollen up filthy and angry, too fast to be an infection; when his guts had squirmed and writhed under his skin like eels and spilled out into Brad's (or maybe Evan's, he didn't know anymore, couldn't remember) hands, twisting like pine needles in a fire, black and rotten like carrion sat too-long on the side of the road.

Like maggots.

Brad dug through his backpack, pulling out the five notebooks in a frantic rush, desperate.

He was pretty sure Mike might've had one, but if he did, it had been lost to the woods in the night. Same as the rest of him was.

Maybe Poke had been lucky, dying before he'd mutated like the rest of them had, become part of whatever Brad or Not-Brad was now, a twisted amalgam of the men who had stepped across the border and into the Shimmer an unknowable, innumerable number of days ago.

Maybe he'd been lucky, and Brad hadn't because he'd had to listen to it for days now— the thing that had followed him and Evan after the bear, that sickly, twisted creature, had dragged Mike off, too fast and too big to go down even after they poured two magazines of lead into it.

It spoke with Wynn's voice and it screamed at night, when Brad and Evan climbed into trees and prayed to anything that would listen that it couldn't follow them.

Maybe that's why Evan had blown his brains out one, two, however many days ago, the morning after the thing stood up on its hind legs, searching, reaching, close enough that they could look it in the eyes— and it begged them to help him in Mike's voice.

After long enough, after Evan had started crying and trying to ask the Not-Bear, Not-Mike questions, a shot had rang out in the half-dawn blueness and everything had been quiet again.

Brad was no longer sure if he'd pulled the trigger or if Evan had. Maybe it didn't matter anymore anyways.

He needed to know, know who was who and what had happened. He needed to know how long it had been since he was just Brad and not Maybe-Brad or Not-Brad.

The journals made his head ache.

(His head? Was it really his anymore? It felt wrong to say that.)

(Their head. That felt wrong too.)

He could recognise where they began and ended, meshing together in their journals, when they became Not-Brad, where Evan's looping scrawl bled into Christeson's chicken-scratch and Brad's neat printing and back again, when he became Not-Tim and Not-Mike, but at the same time circled back all the way around into Evan's handwriting again.

The wind picked up and he could see waves blooming white foam as they crashed against the shoreline through the hole in the lighthouse wall; and Maybe-Brad remembered another ocean a million lifetimes ago, green eyes, soft hands, and softer lips, cold water surrounding them like a second skin, a loving embrace.

He (whoever he was) was pretty sure the memory was Brad's, Brad and Nate, but not BradandNate , because he was Brad (and everyone else. Or maybe it was the other way around now, Everyone-Else-and-Brad) and Nate was somewhere, somewhere beyond the Shimmer, beyond everything and out of Maybe-Brad's reach. Somewhere along a different shore, a different sea.

The thought confused him, set an aching alight in his skull.

The pages of the notebooks, soft from the humid sea air, crumpled under his hands as he tore them out, and with the roll of duct tape he'd salvaged from someone's pack, he began reconstructing everything along the walls of the lighthouse, from the beginning when they'd been Brad Colbert and Evan Stafford and Tim Bryan and Mike Wynn and John Christeson, before— before everything, everything and nothing and they'd all blurred together.

It was hard, when their journals all stopped looking different, all a mess of crumbled pages and smeared ink and half finished drawings, shaky hands and sentences that had the same style and different penmanship or the same penmanship but phrased in a way Christeson would never have written, but exactly what Doc used to write like; until none of it made sense, until all of it made sense.

This was busywork, and he knew that, knew that it didn't matter because he wasn't walking out of this place alive. Maybe something was, something not quite Brad and not quite Not-Brad either.

The papers rustled as he spread them across the walls, tracing a line through the narrative even as the line between them blurred until it was just Brad and Evan, BradandEvan , though sometimes it was Mike and sometimes it was MikeandJohn , or BradandJohnandEvanandMikeandTim , even after they'd all died.

By the time he finished, maybe everything would make sense and he'd be just Brad again, and he could figure out how to go home; remember how to be Brad and Nate just like before and forget how to be Everything-but-Just-Brad.

The other him— who'd sat and watched quietly as he created the sprawling web of words and minds and thoughts across the walls of the lighthouse, who'd come from the lights under the earth, pulsing like a heartbeat and a drum and silence at the same time, reaching and pushing and pulling, everything at once— had agreed.

Brad and other Brad, but not BradandBrad , because they were already both Brad and not quite Brad but everyone else at the same time and not at all, just the two of them, whoever they were, standing in the lighthouse, perfect mirrors of each other.

Two halves of the same whole or were they two separate wholes, two unique beings?

One, two, five, seven, what did it matter anymore— there was just the two of them left anyways now.

Everything and nothing at once.

He was fine with that, fine with the other version of himself being here. It made sense, even if nothing else did, even if he wasn't sure who he was anymore.

His sidearm was heavy in his hand when he finally pulled it out of the holster on his thigh, and sat it on the concrete between him and not-him (or maybe they were both him).

There was one bullet left.

The only question that remained was who was going to pull the trigger.