iles sees civilization reassert itself from nature’s wilds. Vehicles with histrionic lights and infant bawls. Men in uniforms and rain gear, sprinting for the docks, hands steadying the jounce of equipment belts. They skid to a halt before the beasts massed at the foot of the jetty, not as many as before, but enough to impress. Civilians have also begun to gather, people who wouldn’t brave a storm like this except to seek out the incredible colors they saw radiating from the docks, some madman, maybe, launching fireworks in the downpour.

He coughs water from his lungs. He ought to be dead. He recalls striking the river bottom and paddling furiously to resurface, only to be clenched by a riptide and tugged toward the bay. A hand had grasped his wrist, though, pulling him back to the jetty. Their palms should have slipped from each other’s, but this hand had a good texture for gripping, calloused by scouring pads and perpetual pushes of brooms and mops, a hand rather like Elisa’s.

It had been the black woman Giles had glimpsed at the Occam loading dock, their clandestine colluder. How she was here he couldn’t begin to guess, but then again, nothing about the woman added up: round, middle-aged, given to appearing at momentous junctures, driven by some unlimited cache of courage. The second he had a hold on the jetty, she’d unsheathed the paintbrush from his pocket and attacked the man with the gun. Now that man is dead, his throat pumping so much blood even the whipping waves can’t disperse all of it.

Giles struggles to an elbow. The woman pulls his shivering body close to hers. Their heaving breaths equalize as they squint through the spray to watch the creature stand, flick the man’s blood from his claw, and walk on webbed feet to Elisa’s collapsed body, his glorious lights dimming with every step.

“Is she…?” Giles croaks.

“I don’t know,” the woman says.

“Put your hands up!” men shout. The creature takes no heed. He lifts Elisa from the jetty. The shouts change to “Put the woman down!” but these have no better effect. The creature stands in place for a moment, black against the river foam and sterling rain, a tall, strong shape at the edge of America. Giles is too exhausted, too heavied by grief to cry out, but he mouths the word good-bye, both to the creature whose healing touch gave him the strength to resist drowning tonight, and to his best friend, who gave him the strength to resist drowning for the past twenty years.

Without a sound, without a splash, the creature, holding Elisa, dives into water.

Men come at last, their shoes splashing up the jetty. The ones with firearms go all the way to the end, pinning their hats to their heads in the gusty winds while trying to follow the flashlight beams being shone at the waves. The ones with medical kits drop down first beside the dead man, and second beside Giles and the woman. A medic runs his hands over Giles’s head and neck, along his torso.

“Are you hurt?”

“Of course he’s hurt,” snaps the woman holding Giles. “We’re all hurt.”

Giles surprises himself by chuckling. He will miss Elisa. Oh, how he’ll miss her, every night as if it’s morning, every morning as if it’s afternoon, every time his stomach rumbles because he has forgotten to eat. He loved her. No, that isn’t right. He loves her. Somehow he knows that she isn’t gone, nor will she ever be. And this woman? His savior? He might already love her, too.

“You must be Giles,” she says as the medic examines her.

“And you,” he says, “must be Zelda.”

The absurdity of formal introduction under such apocalyptic settings makes both of them smile. Giles thinks of Elaine Strickland, who disappeared before he could tell her everything she had meant to him. He will not make that mistake again. He reaches out, takes Zelda’s hand. Salt water slides between their palms and seals them together. She leans her head against his shoulder as the rain drums against them, melting them, or so it feels, into one being.

“Do you think…” Zelda begins.

Giles tries to help. “That they’re…”

“Down there, I mean,” she offers. “That they might…?”

Neither can finish. That is all right; they both know the question as well as they know that, for them, there will be no definitive answer. Giles squeezes Zelda’s hand and sighs, watching his plume of breath—still strong, he observes—dissipate beneath a shower that he believes might, at long last, be waning. He waits until after they are swaddled in hospital blankets, after they are in the back of the ambulance they insisted upon sharing, after he suspects Zelda has forgotten the question, before he offers his best guess at the answer.