imbs pretzeled into a hard metal box, hair snagged in a hinge, knee abraded and bleeding, and yet Elisa feels no pain. Only fear, that mighty dust storm swirling up from her insides, and anger, thundering her skull into a new shape of thick, broad forehead and long, curling horns. She’ll ram her way out of this box and on her new animal hooves charge this horrible man, even if he kills her in the process—anything to save her beloved creature.

Elisa hadn’t been able to identify the voices at first, but inside F-1, all human timbres mean trouble, and she’d tensed like a varmint and looked for a hole inside which to burrow. It wasn’t Strickland she first saw through the opening door, but Zelda, her casual dress as gobsmacking as a bright red wedding gown. Zelda had been trying to warn Elisa, and Elisa had to honor that risk. She dove into a medical cabinet, cracking her knees hard enough to draw tears to her eyes. Like everything in F-1, the cabinet was wheeled and began to roll. She stuck out a hand and pressed her palm to the floor as a brake.

Now there’s Strickland, pacing ten feet away, too close for her to close the creaky cabinet door. She constricts herself, hidden only by shadow, and self-strangles her panting. Her chest and left ear are flattened to the cabinet floor and she can feel through the flimsy tin the thump of her heart. Don’t move, she tells herself. Run, attack, she tells herself.

Strickland swings the prod with a ballplayer’s ease. It makes a sidearm swoop and sticks the creature’s armpit. Two gold lights flash and the creature’s body clenches, scales rippling over seizing muscles, torso twisting as far from Strickland as he can get—mere inches. It’s only because Elisa can’t cry out that she doesn’t. She covers her mouth anyway, fingertips digging into her cheeks. Everybody has felt electric shocks of some sort, but she can’t imagine the creature ever has. He’d believe it black magic, a bolt shot from a vengeful god.

Strickland looks damaged and desperate. He lumbers behind the post. There, out of the creature’s sight, he removes his blazer, folds it like a man who’s never had to fold his own laundry, sets it beside the candy bag. It is a snakelike shedding of a skin that chokes Elisa with dread. The white shirt beneath is stained with what looks like old food. It doesn’t look to have been ironed in some time.

“I got some shit to say to you,” he mutters.

He slides the prod across his injured left hand like a pool player so that it aims at the nape of the creature’s neck. Elisa can feel her hands signing into the darkness: “Stop, stop.” Strickland takes his shot; sparks fly and the creature’s head rockets into the concrete post. His head lolls back, his forehead scales crushed and shining with blood. To Elisa, they are still beautiful, silver coins dipped in red ink. His gills sinuate, confused from the shock, and he lets loose a dolphin whimper. Strickland shakes his head in disgust.

“Why’d you have to be so much trouble? Leading us to hell and back. You knew we were there. You could smell us, sure as we could smell you. Seventeen months. Hoffstetler says you’re real old. Maybe to you, seventeen months is a drop in the bucket. Well, I’ll tell you what. Those seventeen months—they ruined me. My own wife looks me in my face like she doesn’t know me. I come home, my little girl runs the other way. I’m trying, I’m fucking trying but—”

He kicks a cabinet just like the one in which Elisa hides, denting the door right where her face would be. He flips the table to its side. Medical instruments catapult across the lab. Elisa draws more tightly into a ball. Strickland rubs his free hand over his face and the bandage unfurls, and in the underlayers Elisa sees concentric brown rings of blood as well as a splotch of yellow. There’s a dark ring, too. The wedding band she returned to him. He’s forced it back on, right over his reattached finger. Elisa, already sick, feels sicker.

“I dug you out of the jungle like I’d dig a stinger out of my arm. Now you get hot tubs and pools. And what do I get? A house no better than a jungle? A family no friendlier than all those native fucks in all their fucking villages? It’s your fault. It’s all your fucking fault.”

Strickland thrusts the prod like a fencing blade, triggering fire against the creature’s sutures, then back-swinging to strike them again. Elisa sees one of the sutures tear, scaled flesh peeling away from raw muscle. A stench of smoke and singed blood fills the lab, and Elisa buries her mouth into her elbow while her stomach convulses. She doesn’t, then, see the second cabinet being kicked over, only hears its clatter like a full drum kit being tossed down a staircase. Her own cabinet, she realizes, is the next in Strickland’s destructive path.

She peeks from the cabinet and finds, close enough to smell the insomniac stink, the back of Strickland’s legs, the trousers wrinkled from being slept in and spattered with old coffee and fresh blood. If she had a knife, she thinks wildly, she could slice his Achilles tendon or go stabbing for a calf artery, terrifically vicious acts she’s never before considered. What has happened to her? She thinks she knows, despite the dark irony: What has happened to her is love.

“You’re going to pay for it,” Strickland snarls. “All of it.”

There is the hum of the Howdy-do and the malodor of hot metal, and he bucks away, the prod striking Elisa’s cabinet with an incidental but deafening crash. She grinds her teeth, rigid with horror, and watches Strickland lift the prod like a jouster’s lance and gallop straight for the creature’s eyes, those former beacons of flashing gold turned flat, milky plashets. Though the cabinet vibrates, she envisions it clearly: The prod will pierce an eye, pump the creature’s brain full of electricity, and end the miracle of his life while she, every bit as slow as the Matron accused, does nothing.

Strickland’s foot glances against a small object. It twirls away in a mocking arc. He stutter-steps, nearly trips, and then halts to watch the object putter to a stop. He mutters, bends down, and picks it up. It is the boiled egg Elisa dropped upon seeing the chained creature, a fragile little thing of atomic potential.