offstetler slides across the ledge, crashes into the water, grabs Elisa by the shoulder. The creature hisses, a sound like shaving ice, but, for once, death doesn’t scare Hoffstetler.

“Who are you working with?” He asks because he still can’t believe that music and dancing, those vanguard tactics that kept the Devonian alive, could have been the brainchild of this nondescript janitor. But it takes one second of staring into her despairing eyes to affirm that she is that rarest of all things, a truly independent operative beholden to no principle beyond her sense of what is right.

“You moved the dock camera, didn’t you?” he says. “You’re taking it out of here, aren’t you?”

She nods, and his mind whirls. There are no Russians. He just blew Occam’s electrical grid with Mihalkov’s popper, and the only person here to help him is a frail-boned woman who can’t speak. It’s a situation doomed enough to laugh at, but he thinks of what he used to tell his students. Imagine being a planet. Don’t laugh, he’d tell them. Try to imagine it. Eons of loneliness, and then one day your ellipsis peaks toward that of another planet and there is a gasp of nearness. Wouldn’t you try to make the most of it? Wouldn’t you, too, combust and flare and explode if you had to? That is Elisa Esposito and Bob Hoffstetler: two lonely, unlikely bodies grasping at each other for just this precious instant.

“Tell it not to hurt me,” Hoffstetler says. “I’m going to unlock it.”