lisa glances at her friend as he fusses his paintbrush within the hand-cut stencil taped against the sliding door of the Pug. After dislodging plates of caked dirt, the two of them loosened decades of exhaust grit with citrus-based dish soap before scrubbing the van with clay—a janitor’s trick. Giles has done all this wearing the same houndstooth vest he wears when vultured over his drafting table, and he’s making the same squint. Seeing him released, however, into the sweet fresh air of spring is like seeing him released from dungeon shackles. The late Sunday sun warms the top of his bald scalp, and when was the last time he went outside without his toupee? It makes Elisa happy. Giles has been different this weekend; all hesitance has been cored from him. If this, Elisa thinks, is their final day together, before they enact her plan, before arrest, before sentencing, maybe before being shot dead, it has been a good day indeed.

She can’t observe him for long. Her arms quake beneath another load of unreturned milk bottles, each cleaned and filled with water. She climbs inside the van. Everything behind the front seats has been cleared to make room for a hodgepodge of boxes and baskets arranged atop a piece of carpet. Elisa lets the bottles roll from her arms and places them, one by one, into a box padded with a blanket. They clank and slosh; her stomach behaves in kind. She sits back against the inner wall, panting.

“Yes, do take a moment’s rest.” Giles flicks his smiling eyes from his stenciling. “You’re working too hard. Worrying too hard as well. In a few hours, my dear, all of it will be over and done with, one way or the other. Focus on that. The only thing I’m certain of is that uncertainty is the hardest thing in life to endure.”

Elisa smiles; she is surprised, but she does. She signs: “Did you finish your ID?”

Giles dabs paint, blows it dry, then sets his brush crosswise atop a tin of paint. He removes his wallet, withdraws a card with flourish, and presents it across his opposite wrist as he might a sword. Elisa takes it, examines it, and then digs her authentic Occam ID out for comparison. The texture and weight are wrong, though if anyone is handling the card that closely, it’s likely the game will already be lost. Otherwise it is as convincing a piece of work as anything Giles has done. That it was a new medium for him, and completed over a single day, makes the effort all the more impressive.

She signs the name on the ID: “Michael Parker?”

“I thought it was a good, hearty, trustworthy name.” Giles shrugs. “Naturally, my friends can call me Mike.”

Elisa scans the details harder, and with a smile, signs: “Fifty-one years old?”

Giles looks crestfallen. “No? Not even with the hair? What about fifty-four? A single dab of paint, and I can add three years, just like that.”

Elisa grimaces. Giles sighs and snaps his fingers for the card. He picks up the paintbrush, twists the bristles so that they taper into a point, and touches it softly to the ID.

“There. Fifty-seven. The absolute best I can do. Now stop being rude to poor old Mike Parker.”

He gets back to work, scowling for show. Elisa is sick with sustained tension, so dizzy she feels as if swimming, and yet bundled in a peculiar warmness, the interior of the van somehow the most comfortable spot in the world. So much of her life she’s felt alone, but at this second there is plentiful proof to the contrary. If they are caught in a few hours, her second-biggest regret is that she won’t be able to thank Zelda for wanting, nearly begging to help. Elisa couldn’t do it to her; if Elisa and Giles get caught, Zelda can’t be involved. It’s a terrible feeling, pushing Zelda away. Still, Elisa thinks, she must have done something right in her life to earn that kind of loyalty.

The sounds of Giles stowing his gear drag her back to harsh reality. A wind too dry to hold a drop of water buffets the inside of the Pug, and she feels from inside the theater the rumble of a sinister music cue. Elisa climbs out of the van, slits her eyes at the dusking sun.

“I’m proud of you.”

Elisa looks down at Giles. He’s on his haunches, rinsing his brush. The sinking sun backlights him, but she can make out the serene lines of fond contemplation.

“Whatever happens,” he says, “I’m old. Even my alter ego, Mike Parker, is old. What does this kind of risk matter to us at the end of the day? But you’re young. Your life sprawls out ahead of you like the Atlantic Ocean. And yet look at you. You’re not afraid.”

Elisa lets herself absorb the compliment, because she needs it, and then, to clear the air, simpers and signs with overblown motions. Giles frowns.

“Oh. You are afraid? Very afraid? Well, don’t tell me that, dear. I’m terrified!”

His exaggeration of fright makes the real thing somehow governable. Elisa smiles, grateful for the buoy, and steps back to gaze at Giles’s stenciled handiwork in the melodrama of an orange-purple sunset. She catches her breath. A doctored ID card slid into a pocket is one thing. A fraudulent sign painted onto a registered motor vehicle is another level of audacity:

MILICENT LAUNDRY

Behind the lettering, the Pug’s cleaned door, luminous in the sun, becomes a pool into which Elisa slips and inside which she drowns until, in a great turnabout, she is graced with the creature’s abilities and begins to swim, even to breathe, not merely bubbled to the top like boiling eggs, but darting through the currents of this impossible scheme. Awareness of the cramped, dirty alley, suffused in the stink of tossed popcorn, doesn’t go away, and yet she believes she can feel an entire ocean’s worth of creatures converging on one spot, looking to her for guidance. The time has come.