lisa’s dreams have begun to unmuddy. She’s reclined at the bottom of a river. Everything is emerald. She springs her toes from mossy stones, glides through caressing grasses, pushes off from the velveted branches of sunken trees. Objects she recognizes appear gradually. Her egg timer in slow somersault. The eggs themselves, little moons in rotation. Shoes tumble past like a school of clumsy fish, and album covers descend like stingrays. Two human fingers float into view, and Elisa wakes up.

A lot about Richard Strickland distresses Elisa, but his fingers are what haunt her. It takes several of these dreams before, one night, she bolts awake in understanding. She uses her own fingers to interact with the world. It’s not ridiculous, she thinks, to be frightened by a man at risk of losing his own fingers. She imagines the equivalent in a speaking person and it’s horrific: Strickland’s teeth tumbling across riven lips, a man no longer capable, or inclined, to discuss what he does before he does it.

She, too, has things she won’t discuss. It’s the latter half of the night, when she and Zelda work separately. Elisa presses her ear to the ice-cold door of F-1. She holds her breath and listens. Voices tend to carry through lab walls, but tonight none do. She glances back at her cart, which she has parked in front of a different lab halfway down the hall, hopefully enough to hoodwink Zelda should she rejoin Elisa earlier than expected. Elisa feels exposed while carrying so little—just a brown-paper lunch bag and her key card. She slots the card and wishes the lock’s bite was softer.

Occam’s constant is its uncompromising brightness. Lights do not turn off. Elisa has never been privy to so much as a single switch. F-1’s dimness, then, is as outrageous as a fire. Once inside, Elisa presses her back to the closed door and panics that something has gone wrong. But this is clearly by plan: A perimeter of lights, installed along the walls for this purpose, radiate a honey glow off the ceiling.

Plenty enough light to see by, but there are noises, too, keeping Elisa sealed to the door. Reek-reek, chuk-a-kuk, zuh-zuh-zuh, thoonk, hee-hee-hee-hee-hee, thrub-thrub, curu-curu, zeee-eee-eee, hik-rik-hik-rik, lug-a-lug-a-lug, fyeeeeeew. Elisa has spent every day of her life in the city, yet recognizes these as natural sounds, none of which have any place in this concrete bunker. They overwhelm F-1’s after-hours inertia, impregnating every table, chair, and cabinet with predator menace. There are monsters loose in the lab.

Elisa’s reason wrests control from the fear. The bird arias and frog dirges come from a single source, off to the right. They are recordings, and this isn’t so different than a movie at the Arcade—the lowered lights, the speaker sound track. Some Occam scientist has designed what Giles might call a mise-en-scène, an atmosphere inside which unfolds the currently screening fantasy. Her guess is Bob Hoffstetler. If anyone at this facility has the empathy required for this artistic endeavor, it’s him.

She crosses over the spot where she plucked Strickland’s fingers from the floor. Her footsteps are loud, and she curses her forgetfulness. She’d meant to wear rubber-soled sneakers. Or had she kept on her purple heels as subconscious inspiration? There’s a hissing to her right. An anaconda attracted by the jungle’s incantations? No—it’s the roll of a reel-to-reel player. The stainless steel surface shimmers like a moonlit river; Elisa approaches until she is close enough to see the jumping VU meters. Canisters are piled about. MARAÑON FIELD #5. TOCANTINS FIELD #3. XINGU/UNKNOWN FIELD #1. Gathered also is a hill of other audio gear, none of which she can identify except for a standard record player.

Elisa steps away, circles the tank. One more foreboding sign: The top hatch is open. She expects the hair on her neck and arms to razor in dread, but it doesn’t. She continues toward the pool. It is the pool, after all, that has monopolized her mind. Every bath she takes, she takes in this pool, or so she pretends. This make-believe persists throughout her whole routine: Eggs bobbing into water, the creak of the timer, the hope of shoes, the disappointment of LPs, Giles pausing his paintbrush to bid her good night, having no idea of the strange thoughts in her head.

A red line is painted on the floor a foot from the pool. It is unsafe to go any farther. So why is she considering it? Because she can’t get it out of her head, this thing that Mr. Strickland has dragged here, that Empties guard with guns, that Dr. Hoffstetler endeavors to study. She knows that she’s been the thing in the water before. She’s been the voiceless one from whom men have taken without ever asking what she wanted. She can be kinder than that. She can balance the scales of life. She can do what no man ever tries to do with her: communicate.

She proceeds until the two-foot ledge pinches her thighs. The surface of the water is still. But not perfectly still. You only need to look, really look, to see the water breathe. Elisa inhales, exhales, and sets her lunch bag on the ledge. It crunches, as loud as driving a shovel into dirt. She watches the water’s surface for reaction. Nothing. She reaches into the bag and winces at the rustling. Nothing. She finds what she wants, withdraws it; it glows in the soft light. A single boiled egg.

For days, she’s dared herself to add this egg to the three she makes each night for Giles. Now she peels it. Her fingers are shaking. It’s the ugliest egg peeling of her life. White fragments drop to the ledge. The egg, at last, is revealed, and what is more coherent and elemental than an egg? Elisa holds it in the palm of her hand like the magical object it is. And the water responds.