Absolution: A Southern Reach Novel

Lowry grows agitated with the inactivity at base camp, convinced that remaining stationary is a deadly trap orchestrated by Area X. He argues with Sky’s second-in-command, Winters, insisting the expedition must keep moving. Sky dispatches a five-person team led by Easterling to secure Dead Town. Shortly after, their routine is shattered when another expedition member, psychic Sherri Binder, is killed by an alligator. Lowry is disturbed by the mundane nature of her death. The incident triggers an fixation on their food rations, and he rants about eating processed bars when they are surrounded by edible wildlife. After Binder’s death, 21 members remain at the base camp.

Around a campfire, the team drinks vodka that one of them smuggled in. Lowry thinks about his secret mission to find Old Jim and recovering any money or documents related to Serum Bliss and the Séance and Science Brigade. Jack also gave Lowry files on the “False Daughter Project,” a psychological operation involving Old Jim and another agent posing as his daughter Cass, and warned him about a dangerous man named Henry Kage, to be treated with extreme prejudice. 

Lowry’s reflections are interrupted by the realization that another expedition member, Hinojosa, has disappeared; they had already fallen to 16 at camp, with five of them at Dead Town, and are now down to 15.

The next morning, the expedition’s walkie-talkies begin to emit screams and disjointed fragments of past conversations, including their own recent discussions. Sky reveals to Lowry that the devices are not turned on. The team attempts to dispose of the walkie-talkies by throwing a box of them in a nearby river, but the box reappears at their campsite the following day. After shooting the box full of holes, they throw it back into the water. Lowry, who had secretly kept his own walkie-talkie, eventually destroys it as well, but retains his small satellite phone, which has behaved normally.

That night, as they sat around the fire and discussed how to proceed on their mission, a darkness settled around them. It slowly encased them and even entered them, but Lowry decided he wasn’t going to submit. He began attacking the wall, which felt like flesh, biting it. Everyone joined in, and after they finally went to bed, Lowry went to Sky’s tent. She tells him to leave, and the next morning they discover that one of the team members died by suicide the night before, although none of them heard the gunshot.

Sky shows Lowry video footage from the previous night in which he appears to be embracing the wall of flesh, contradicting his memory of fighting it. The expedition moves out and is ambushed by amorphous, liquid-like creatures that take the form of their dead comrades. Lowry opens fire, but the entities re-form. Suddenly, the team members’ assault rifles transform into monstrous, gar-like fish that fuse to their hands and pull them down into the marsh, devouring them. Lowry, Sky, and Winters escape; Landry and several others are trapped on the far side of the ambush line.

Lowry, Sky, Winters, and a psychic named Scaramutti reach the coastline to find the beach littered with thousands of human bones. In the distance, the wrecked destroyer is visible. Sky has become fixated on a video she recorded that seems to show her interacting with a doppelgänger amid a crowd swelling toward 100 figures, suggesting a bifurcation or civil war of selves. 

Believing the destroyer may hold answers or survivors, she and Winters ignore Lowry’s frantic pleas and set out for the ship in a green rowboat that has mysteriously appeared on the shore. The next day, the boat drifts back empty. Lowry realizes he has not seen Scaramutti for two days.

Now alone, Lowry continues his secret mission for Jack. He travels to the locations mentioned in his briefing—the apartment of Old Jim’s “false daughter” Cass, Old Jim’s home, and an abandoned facility—but finds no money or documents. At the institute, he discovers storage barrels filled with jellied human remains and toxic substances. Feeling lost and sensing he is being followed, Lowry decides his last option is to head for Dead Town.

In the City Hall of Dead Town, Lowry finds a secret room containing occult diagrams and a list of his expedition’s members written on the wall; his own name is circled. In a corner lies a desiccated human husk next to a note reading “DO NOT EAT.” Despite the warning, the husk emits an overwhelmingly delicious aroma. Driven by an intense, unnatural hunger, Lowry begins to eat the remains.

As Lowry consumes the husk, he recognizes its face as that of Whitby, the analyst from the Southern Reach. Rationalizing that it must be an illusion, since the real Whitby is not in Area X, he finishes the entire body. 

Afterward, he feels full but mentally vacant. He goes to the roof, where a figure claiming to be Winters appears, telling Lowry that he has scales turning into eyes all over his body and that he has been there a long time. Convinced this Winters is another Area X imitation, Lowry shoves him over the edge of the roof, killing him.

Consuming the Whitby-husk floods Lowry’s mind with alien knowledge. He understands that the entity he ate was a being from the distant future, sent back to ensure history unfolds in a precise way to prevent a more catastrophic version of Area X from emerging. He learns that the world he knew is already doomed and that the current state of Area X is the “best possible outcome” (419). As the entity’s consciousness leaves his body in a stream of golden dust, taking the memories with it, Lowry runs in a panic toward the lighthouse.

Lowry arrives at the lighthouse to find it dark and choked with hundreds of identical corpses of Henry Kage. He proceeds to the nearby village, a ruin covered in the graffiti tag “TOT.” He enters the Village Bar, a former haunt of Old Jim, and finds it destroyed. 

Inside a broken piano, he discovers a large pile of letters written by Old Jim to his daughter, Cass. While he is sifting through them, Karen Hargraves appears. She reveals she is Cass, Old Jim’s “false daughter,” and that Lowry was a decoy for Jack’s real mission. Claiming to have found a note on Old Jim’s remains that read “Kill Lowry,” she shoots him.

Badly wounded after being shot by Hargraves, Lowry stumbles away from the Village Bar. He encounters a delirious Landry by the shore next to a green boat. They get into the vessel, but Lowry soon realizes it is a living creature, and they are inside its mouth. When a transformed Landry lunges at him, Lowry shoots him in the face and plunges over the side into the water.

Mortally wounded and hallucinating, Lowry drags himself to the Border extraction point. A single environmental suit is waiting for him, but it appears to be a sentient mass of microscopic organisms. The suit speaks to him, confirming that Hargraves has made it through. Too weak to continue, Lowry sits with the creature-suit, and they watch the sunset together.