trickland smells Deus Brânquia. The memory floods back from the Amazon. The Gill-god’s scent of brine and fruit and silt. In Occam’s labs, antiseptic cleaners had blotted it out, and that had been a mistake. How stupid are humans to rob themselves of their most critical defensive sense? He knows who’s to blame. The janitors. Their soap, bleach, and ammonia weren’t wiping away the crud of this world. It was hiding a second world, an ascendant one, unless Strickland moves fast and puts an end to it.

Two apartment doors. He picks the first one. Doesn’t bother with hands or feet. He points the Beretta, fires at the knob. The door is of lousier quality than Delilah Brewster’s. The middle third of it disintegrates into sawdust. Strickland boots away the sharp-edged clingers and shoulders inside, gun raised, as prepared as he was at the bottom of the pile in Yeongdong to murder anything that breathes.

Deus Brânquia, colossal, beatific, resplendent, lords from the center of the cramped, dusty apartment. Strickland was wrong that he was ready. He isn’t. He screams, and falls to his knees, and fires, and screams, and fires, and screams. Bullets pass right through Deus Brânquia. The Gill-god doesn’t react. The gun goes hot in Strickland’s hands. His arms tremble from the discharges. He throws himself back against the wall and covers his face. Deus Brânquia gazes down at him, patient and unchanged.

Strickland wipes rain from his eyes, begins to understand. This Deus Brânquia isn’t real. Not in the sense of a thing that he can kill. It’s a painting. Bigger than life, disorienting in detail. It is Deus Brânquia, somehow, as if painted with Deus Brânquia’s blood and scales upon a rock dredged from Deus Brânquia’s grotto. Strickland angles his head and the picture of the Gill-god seems to lift its arms, offering embrace. Some kind of visual trick. Strickland rejects the memory. It barges in anyway. His chasing of Deus Brânquia to the fateful bayou. His cornering of it in a cave. How it had reached out to Strickland, accepting his violence, anger, and confusion, understanding the obligation Strickland felt to the god he called General Hoyt. Strickland, in reply, had harpooned Deus Brânquia. Until now, he’d never noticed that he’d impaled himself on the harpoon’s other end, binding the two of them forever, wound to wound.