ever, in all of Zelda’s years at Occam, has she passed through its halls in civilian clothing. Her work garb, it turns out, has been a magical cape; without it, she is noticed. Yawning scientists and arriving service staff see her in a way that gives her an unanticipated rush of warmth before it is punctured by an icicle of dread. Her flower-print dress, tasteful elsewhere, is indecent in this domain of white coats and gray uniforms. She covers as much of it as possible with her purse and charges forth. The shift-change chaos will last for a few minutes more, enough time to find Elisa and give her a forceful shaking.

She hustles around a corner to find Richard Strickland stepping from his security-camera office. He teeters as if stepping off of a boat. Zelda knows this kind of unstable weaving. She saw it in Brewster before he stopped drinking. In her father, during dementia’s grip. In her uncle as his house burned down behind him. Strickland rights himself and rubs eyes that look crusted shut. Did he sleep here? He completes his lurch from the office, and Zelda recoils at the clang of metal upon the floor. It is the orange cattle prod. Strickland is dragging it behind him like a caveman’s club.

He doesn’t see her. She doubts he sees much of anything. He lumbers off in the other direction, a blessing except that Zelda knows where he’s headed, and it’s where she’s headed, too. She rotates her mental map of Occam. The underground level is a square, so there is an opposite path to F-1. But it’s twice as long; she’ll never make it before him. Strickland wobbles, puts a hand to the wall to steady himself, and hisses at a pain in his fingers. He’s slow. Maybe she can make it. If only she can cough up the fear clotting her lungs and get her feet to—

She’s moving, arms swinging. She passes a cafeteria astir with smells, not reheated Automat eatables but actual cooked breakfasts. She clips a white woman putting on a hairnet and receives a hard tsk scolding. Secretaries, alerted by the clop of her shoes, poke their heads from the photocopy room. Then, trouble: a bottleneck at Occam’s amphitheater, a room so rarely open at night she’d neglected to figure it into her calculations. Scientists file inside, maybe to view some sort of dissection, though Zelda feels it’s just as likely they’re screening a horror flick, maybe the one she’s currently living, a coven of white-coated monsters leering at her large body and sheen of sweat.

They make things difficult for her. Haven’t they always? She is forced to assert her shoulders against their suddenly inert bodies, pleading I’m sorry and Excuse me until she squeezes out the other side and barrels onward, trying to ignore the laughs aimed at her backside. She is sorry, she thinks, and there is no excuse. Her heart is pounding. She can’t catch her breath. It is thanks only to momentum that she spills around the second corner and sees, at the far end, trudging her way, Strickland.

Zelda is spotted. To turn away now would be to admit wrongdoing. What else can she do? She walks straight toward him. It is the boldest thing she has ever done. Her heart lobs against her rib cage like a handball. Her breathing is a mystery, hijacked by mysterious muscles. He’s eyeing her like an apparition and lifting the cattle prod, a bad sign, though at least it’s no longer chortling along the tile.

Both stop directly in front of F-1. Between gasps, Zelda forces a greeting.

“Oh, hello, Mr. Strickland.”

He’s inspecting her with glazed eyes. No light of recognition, even though he’s met her twice. His face is haggard and wan. A residue of a granulated powder coats his lower lip. He abandons his study of her face with a disdainful grunt.

“Where’s your uniform?”

He’s a man who knows how to cut: do it first, do it deep. With the inspiration of the desperate, Zelda holds up the only item she carries.

“I forgot my purse.”

Strickland squints. “Mrs. Brewster.”

“Yes, sir. Except it’s Mrs. Fuller.”

He nods but looks unconvinced. He looks, in fact, rather lost. Zelda has observed this before in white people new to being alone with black people; he doesn’t know where to look at her, as if he finds her very existence embarrassing. It makes him mumble, a sound too low to be heard from inside F-1. If Zelda wants to warn Elisa, she needs to exploit Strickland’s discomfiture and keep him occupied for as long, and as loudly, as possible.

“Say, Mr. Strickland.” Zelda brightens her voice to hide its tremor. “How are those fingers of yours?”

He frowns, then considers the bandage on his left hand. “I don’t know.”

“Do they have you on any pain relievers? My Brewster broke his wrist once at Bethlehem Steel, and the doctor fixed him up pretty good.”

Strickland grimaces, and for good reason: She’s shouting. Zelda doesn’t care about his reply, though the thirsty pass of his tongue over his lip’s white powder tells her everything about his painkillers. He dry-swallows, and whether by prescription or placebo, his stoop straightens and his glazed, glassy eyes snap into frightening focus.

“Zelda D. Fuller,” he rasps. “D for Delilah.”

Zelda shudders. “How is your…” Suddenly, she can’t think. “Your wife, Mr. Strickland.” She’s got no idea what she’s saying. “How is your wife enjoying—”

“You’re graveyard shift,” he growls, as if this is the worst thing she could be, worse than the other things about her that are so self-evident. “You got your purse. Go home.”

He slides a key card from his back pocket like a stiletto and stabs it into the lock. Zelda goads herself to finish her question, some happy babble about his wife, a courtesy even Richard Strickland will be forced to return, but he’s retreated into his natural state of looking through her, a woman who barely exists, and he’s through F-1’s door, the cattle prod clanking off the knob, a final warning, or at least Zelda hopes, for Elisa, wherever she is.