elda has gone for help. Elisa can hear her nurse flats firecracking down the hallway. She’s left staring at Strickland’s fingers. The pinky, the ring finger. Snaggy fingernails, poignant tufts of knuckle hair. The skin of the ring finger is pale on one end, blocked from sun for years by the wedding ring. Elisa’s mind returns to the sight of Strickland bursting from the lab door. He’d been clutching his left hand. These are two of the fingers that had fished into the crinkling cellophane bag of green hard candy.

She can’t just leave them there. Fingers can be reattached. She’s read about it. Maybe Dr. Hoffstetler has the know-how to do it himself. She grimaces and looks around. F-1 is a lab. It must have containers, beakers. Occam labs, however, mock people like her; they’re impossible to decode, provisioned with instruments of arcane utility. Her eyes fall in despair and she sees, next to a trash can, something more endemic to her field: a wadded brown paper bag. She goes for it, shakes it open, and sticks her hand inside the greasy paper to operate it like a puppet. Those nubs on the floor aren’t human fingers. They’re just pieces of trash needing to be picked up.

Elisa kneels and tries to collect them. They are like two chunks of chicken, too soft and small for her to get a grip. They fall once, twice, scattering blood like Giles’s dropped brushes scatter paint. She holds her breath, locks her jaw, and picks up the fingers with her bare hand. They are as lukewarm as a limp handshake. She inserts them into the bag and crimps the top. She’s wiping her hand on her uniform when she spies the wedding band. She can’t leave that, either, but no way is she opening the bag again. She swipes the ring and drops it into her apron pocket. She stands, tries to restore normal breathing. The bag feels empty, as if the two fingers have wiggled away like worms.

Elisa is alone, in silence. But is it silence? She is aware of a soft wheeze, air being discharged through a vent. She looks across the lab, once again, at the tank. A second, more disturbing question poses itself. Is she, after all, alone? Fleming warned her and Zelda not to approach the tank. Sound advice. Do not approach the tank, Elisa reinforces to herself. She glances down. Her bright shoes are moving over mopped floor. She is approaching the tank.

Though she is encircled by advanced technology, Elisa feels like a cartoon caveman advancing upon a thicket despite the growls vibrating from within. What was foolhardy two million years ago is foolhardy now. Yet her pulse doesn’t quicken as it did from Strickland’s harmless fingers. It could be because Fleming promised her that she was safe. Or it could be because every night she dreams of the darkest water, and there it is, beyond the portholes of the cylindrical tank: darkness, water.

F-1 is too bright for her to adjust her eyes to the tank’s interior blackness, so she sets down the paper bag and tunnels her hands against the porthole. Refracted light makes her feel as if she’s spiraling until she realizes that the window is underwater. She squashes her nose to the glass to see upward. Here, at last, her pulse gallops, right along with the old iron-lung nightmares.

The dark water eddies with weak light. Elisa catches her breath: It’s like distant fireflies. She presses her hands flat against the window, wanting closer, feeling a physical need. The substance turns, twists, dances like an arabesque veil. Between the points of light, a shape coalesces. Floating debris, Elisa tries to tell herself, that’s all it is, and then a shaft of light hits a pair of photoreceptive eyes. They flash bright as gold through black water.

The glass explodes. At least, that is how it sounds. The crash is the lab door banging open, the shatter is the several sets of feet charging inside, and the scrunch is the paper bag being swiped up by her own hands. She’s proving herself a caveman indeed, shrinking back from a bestial threat and rushing at civilization’s centrum—Fleming, the Empties, Dr. Hoffstetler—hoisting the bag of fingers like a trophy, her trophy for having looked into the eyes of ravishing annihilation and lived to tell. She’s giddy with survival, breathless, almost crying, almost laughing.