Absolution: A Southern Reach Novel

Feeling a renewed sense of purpose, Old Jim insists on returning to the investigation. He and Cass drive to Beacham’s Point, the coastal location where the psychics found the alligator harness after claiming “a mind had revealed itself” to them (231). Old Jim suspects that the Rogue is manipulating what the psychics perceive. At the beach, they observe numerous animal tracks and a wide track suggesting a massive alligator crawled along the shore. Old Jim theorizes that the Rogue didn’t burn Old Decomp, as he would have taken the surviving rabbit camera.

Cass then reveals an important discovery: The blood that she sent in to be assessed from the bridge was from an alligator, not a human. When submitting it, she had made up a cover story about wildlife studies relevant to “foreign entities.” Despite the evidence, Cass is certain she shot a man, not an alligator, and believes the Rogue is severely injured. After Cass returns his gun, Old Jim insists they go to Dead Town, the location where his alligator tracker had previously indicated a signal.

Old Jim and Cass drive to the remote and abandoned Dead Town. They proceed on foot through an overgrown meadow that was once the biologists’ worksite. Old Jim nearly falls under a spell gazing at its beauty until Cass grips his arm to guide him away. They enter the decaying main street and go to City Hall, which Cass confirms is empty. On the second floor, a ruined tourist center, Old Jim spots a clear path through the debris leading to a large leather chair in an alcove and posits that the Rogue sat there regularly.

Getting low to the ground, Cass identifies a trail leading to the chair, marked by mud and moss, like an animal’s passage. Near the chair, an impression on a rug suggests a large alligator has rested there. They find a dried piece of meat and notice the chair is coated in a golden dust and a rotting, husk-like fabric. Old Jim photographs the scene, deciding against taking samples. On the wall behind the chair, he sees graffiti that includes a variant of the Winter Journey lyrics and, to his shock, his real name. The discovery triggers a traumatic memory of a roadside bomb attack.

The sight of his name sends Old Jim into a hallucinatory state. He hears a non-human song and is drawn toward water, where he glimpses the Tyrant, a massive alligator, before it vanishes. He comes to his senses in the meadow outside City Hall, overwhelmed with emotion and reliving the trauma of the biologists’ deaths. He collapses in a muddy patch, wracked with despair.

Cass finds him and, instead of recoiling, holds him while he cries. She then shares a deeply personal story about her own past to comfort him. Afterward, she tells him she believes someone has been intentionally manipulating him over a long period, using methods like the Winter Journey songs. She admits she was wrong to bring him to Dead Town after the bridge attack, but Jim insists he does not need rest. Cass expresses concern that his current resolve might be temporary and that he may need hospitalization. They remain together in the meadow as he recovers.

On the drive back, Cass reveals that when she was first given this mission, Central ordered her to write a letter to Old Jim, posing as his daughter, but she refused. At his house, Jim finds a new fax from Central’s R&D requesting to re-interview the exiled Dead Town team leaders about the rabbit camera. He realizes R&D is unaware of the disastrous nature of the expedition and is being kept in the dark by Jack. He then discovers a pile of burnt faxes under his desk, all containing lyrics from Winter Journey.

This triggers another vision, from which he emerges to hear a man’s voice. He finds himself sitting in a strange, blue-lit room, holding a sack of money. He sees a huge man, who he recognizes as Commander Thistle from the Monkey’s Elbow, stuffing bodies into barrels. Some of the other barrels contain money. Thistle tells him that he will be going in a barrel. Old Jim rises from his chair and steps back; Thistle reads words from a folded piece of paper, and Old Jim realizes that they are meant to trigger responses from him, like hypnosis. Old Jim feels only a fizzle and resists. 

They fight, and Old Jim repeatedly stabs Thistle, who flees. Old Jim pursues him through the marsh until Thistle collapses and dies, revealing Jack sent him. Old Jim looks around and realizes that that he was being held in the biowaste facility near his house. 

Back at his house, Jim finds Jackie waiting. She reports being recalled to Central; separately, psychics on two submersibles set them on fire from inside, and three S&SB personnel on Failure Island fell into comas while the Failure Island building also caught fire. Before leaving, she stuns Jim by revealing she has taken Cass off the mission and sent her back to Central.

The following morning, a sore and shaken Old Jim returns to the biowaste facility to conceal the previous night’s events. He hides the money and finds a briefcase containing documents that expose the extent of Jack’s shadow operation. Jack has been using the Forgotten Coast as a personal bank and disposal site; he is a “Brute of Brutes,” building a parasitic organization within Central. Jim buries Commander Thistle, whose wallet identifies him as Gus Waldron, and finds the list of control words used on him. Realizing that when the Rogue spoke to him and he responded, he was inadvertently freed from Jack’s long-term manipulation. He decides not to flee but to continue his mission for Cass’s sake.

When Old Jim returns to the Village Bar, he learns from Sally that his “daughter” called, asking him to feed her frogs—a clear message from Cass. He drives to Cass’s apartment, breaks in, and finds it cleaned out, likely by Jackie. In the empty frog tank, he discovers a key and a numbered code. Deciphering the reversed numbers, he locates Cass’s secret second apartment. Inside, he finds her real command center. One wall is covered with her research on the Brigade, Henry, and the Rogue.

On the desk, she has left him two files and a photograph. The first file exposes Central’s mind-control program, revealing that the Winter Journey music was used to condition him and that reviewing the Dead Town files was part of his manipulation. It also details Central’s earlier experiments on the Tyrant and how Jack derived his conditioning methods from what Central learned during the biologists’ expedition. The second file contains infrared images of Old Decomp, showing that the parking lot potholes form a distinct pattern and contain neo-biological residue matching traces found on the exiled biologists. The final item, a photo of the wall in Dead Town, has a note from Cass on the back about how she didn’t “like the potholes” (274). Studying the image, Jim sees the faint outline of a hidden door. In Cass’s refrigerator, he finds a single pomelo.

Determined to find the secret room, Old Jim prepares to return to Dead Town, believing he may now be aligned with Cass, who he realizes must be a “Phantom,” another faction within Central. On his back deck, he is ambushed by Henry, who beats him and accuses him of sabotaging Henry’s research by withholding money and resources. To save himself, Jim falsely claims the money is buried at the Old Decomp site.

The Medic arrives; he tells Jim that Jack said he should have gotten in the barrel, signaling that Jack knows Jim remains a problem and has dispatched the Medic. The Medic binds Jim, and he and Henry drive him to Old Decomp. There, Jim directs them to the strange potholes in the parking lot. The Medic forces a reluctant Henry to start digging. When Henry reaches into a pothole, his hand becomes trapped. The potholes begin to glow, and Henry’s body horribly liquefies. As the Medic stares in shock, Jim shoves him into the dissolving Henry, and both men are consumed. Jim escapes in his truck.

Jim drives back to Dead Town and returns to the second floor of City Hall. He finds the hidden door behind the alcove chair. Inside the secret room, the floor is marked with the same pattern as the Old Decomp potholes, with burnt rabbit cameras in the indentations. The walls are covered with diagrams suggesting a symbiotic link between the Rogue and the Tyrant, along with lists of names—including Saul Evans, Henry, Gloria, his own, and Cass’s—with Gloria at the center of the diagram and Cass on the periphery, lines connecting Old Jim to both and Saul Evans to Gloria only, and cryptic notes throughout.

He hears a dripping sound and turns to see that a watermark on the wall has become an impossibly deep pool of water. The Tyrant erupts from the pool and seizes him. The grip is gentle, and Jim does not resist. The Tyrant pulls him into the water, and they disappear into its depths.

The Tyrant carries Old Jim through a field of golden sunflowers to a remote lagoon. There, the Rogue floats in the water, mortally wounded from Cass’s gunshots but in a state between life and death. The Tyrant embraces him, and the Rogue’s eye opens, sending a wave of understanding through Jim. 

The Tyrant breathes a cloud of golden particles onto Jim, inducing a vision of the distant future: armies marching across a dried seabed toward a lighthouse. He now understands that the Rogue is an agent from this future who traveled to the past to avert a catastrophe but was wounded and forced into hiding. The future is colonizing the past, and the land is being transformed by Area X, an event emanating from the lighthouse. The Rogue and the Tyrant then submerge into the water to rest.

The Tyrant tows Old Jim in a rowboat through the marsh. As night falls, she sings a new version of Winter Journey, and he understands he must follow her commands. When he reaches land, he walks back toward the Village Bar. He passes Henry and Suzanne driving toward the lighthouse; they do not see him.

At the bar, Jim sits at the piano. His mind is now clear, filled with a purpose given to him by the Rogue. There is the Tyrant’s signal—a distress beacon to the future buried in what he plays—and separately the sound, which is love for his real and false daughters. As he plays, he finally understands the full truth of his past: The mission where he was broken, his daughter’s fate, and how Central remade him. The bar darkens and fills with screams as his fingers come apart at the piano, but he continues playing, feeling that in some essential way, he has survived.