is gills open wide, revealing dizzying layers of red lace, and hold there, the filaments fluttering like centipede legs in search of solid ground. His gasps are short, growing further apart. His arm rises from the wet laundry, draped in it like a child playing ghost, and his hand curls and continues upward, like the first part of him going to heaven.

Elisa grabs his wrist, brings it back to earth. It struggles back outward, and suddenly she sees it: the sign for water. She’s been packing him in towels, deaf to bottles clanging all over the floor. They bank and spin with Giles’s turns, but she snatches one, screws off the lid, and douses the creature’s face, eyes, gills. He arches his back, leans into it. It seeps into his body through grooves that have gone a miserable brown, the liquid vanishing seconds after it hits, and still he’s dry, still he’s gasping.

“Is it all right? Is it alive?” Giles hollers.

Elisa kicks the wall with both feet, the closest she can get to signing “faster.”

“It’s morning! It’s traffic! I’m doing my best!”

She kicks again. Hoffstetler had said thirty minutes was all the creature could take and fifteen must have passed by now, maybe twenty; time is lost. Her attention knifes back to the creature. He’s making a choking noise, and Elisa, who knows only human consoling techniques—a pathetic limitation, she now realizes—slides an arm beneath him and hitches him up to a sitting position, while her other hand corrals another bottle and starts pouring it over his body.

He absorbs, he gulps; his freshly watered eyes, now at window level, go from gold to dandelion yellow; even nearly suffocated, he appears amazed at the world unfolding outside the van. Elisa looks, too, wondering if the city possesses a shred of a jungle’s magic. Gray scaffolding of unlit neon lights daubed with orange sunlight. The surging yellow whale of a trolley. A Coca-Cola billboard of a man and woman, nestled as closely as Elisa and the creature, the woman holding a soda bottle as Elisa holds the next bottle of water. She thinks, just for a moment, that Baltimore isn’t the futile anthill she’s forced herself to accept, but its own tangle of tales, morass of myths, forest of fairies.

The Pug, swooping behind the Arcade, loses control, and though Giles brakes, the left front of the van, no longer protected by a bumper, smashes into the trash bins. No one has time to care. When Giles throws open the back doors, Elisa is ready, the creature draped in a wet lab coat and hooded in a wet sheet. The climb up the fire escape is a blundering, gawky, graceless slapstick, the sickening opposite of Shirley Temple and Bojangles.

Somehow they make it to the top, and also down the hall, and also through Elisa’s door, and Giles lets go at the bathroom threshold because of the narrow clearance, and it’s Elisa alone who has to guide the creature down, but they’re both weak now and it’s more like a fall, his useless legs buckling against the tub and dropping back-first into the waiting water. The splash hits Elisa’s face like the van’s bottled water had hit the creature’s face: ablution, baptism. He dwarfs the apartment’s tub, but so would most men, Elisa tells herself, and she cranks the hot-water knob because a full night has cooled what’s there. The pipes squeal and shudder, then water unloads right next to the creature’s head. The surface rises fast, covers his face. Elisa waits for bubbles of breath. There is nothing. She stirs the water with her hand to match the heat of F-1’s pool.

“Who was that woman helping you?” Giles pants from behind. “Do you employ a whole nest of saboteurs?”

Yes, the pool: She thinks of how she slipped beneath the water, how her mouth flooded with salt. She reaches into her pocket, withdraws Hoffstetler’s bottle of saline pills. Another object comes out, clatters to the floor.

“Good Lord,” Giles says. “Is that a syringe?”

One pill every three days, is that what Hoffstetler had said? Or three pills every one? The creature is a sunken rock; there is no time to ponder. She shakes three pills directly into the water. They fizz, and she stirs again with her hand, slopping the salt toward the creature’s face and neck. Then, terribly, there is nothing more to do. She takes the creature’s hand. That massive, webbed thing, resplendent with rainbowed scales, striated with delicate spirals. She adds her other hand, folding his clawed fingers until she can squeeze their joint fist as a surgeon might squeeze a heart.

Giles’s shadow falls over them.

“You were right,” he breathes. “He’s beautiful.”

The creature’s hand tightens around hers, swallowing it whole as a snake does a rodent. A death spasm, Elisa thinks with a jagging sob, until the bathwater begins to glow, a flicker of cobalt at first, a trick of the eye, then blossoming, then burning sapphire blue, transforming the cramped, dank, windowless chamber into an endless aquarium inside which they swim, too, effervescent, ethereal, and alive.