ven when his tears drop to the paper, Giles makes it work, smearing them with the side of his hand, imbuing harsh lines with a fluidic softness resembling that of the creature’s scales. He smiles at this revelation, even as he expects that it is only the first of many to come. Tears, a drop of blood, the touch of saliva from a kiss: The creature would use his magic to turn these substances, too, into art, into grace.

Giles lifts a hand, spins a finger. The creature shifts to offer Giles yet another angle, stretching his resplendent neck, almost preening. Giles laughs, tastes salt, licks it away, and draws, draws, draws, a starving man at a banquet that he worries the waiters might whisk away. When he begins to speak, he doesn’t notice it; his murmur is the rustle of charcoal over paper.

“Elisa says you’re all alone. The last of your kind. Something like that.” He chuckles. “Try as I might, I don’t catch everything she says. Naturally I didn’t believe her at all at first. Who would? Then I saw you and, if I may say so, you’re very convincing in person. I hope you can forgive my early reticence. Perhaps even sympathize. What did you think when you first saw the inside of a naval ship or the tank they put you in? I can’t imagine your thoughts were especially flattering to the human race. Things change.”

The ridge over the creature’s eyes: He draws it mist-gray, defenseless.

“But then Elisa finds you. And there again, yes? A change. In her, for sure. But also, I suspect, in you? Perhaps we humans are not all so bad? If such a thought has crossed your mind, I thank you, though I’d warn you that it’s a charitable assessment.”

The cascading plates of his chest, sleek as petals, each one drawn a darker silver.

“Now that I’ve properly met you, though—oh, I’m Giles, by the way. Giles Gunderson. The custom is to shake hands, but seeing how we’re to the point of bathroom nudity, I think we can forgo that. You see, now that I’ve met you, I find myself circling back to where I began. I’m not certain that I agree with our Elisa. Are you all alone? Are you really? For if you are an anomaly, then so am I.”

The diaphanous fins drawn ash-cloud gray, the bones black slashes.

“It’s silly. But I feel as if I, too, were plucked from where I belonged. Or when—perhaps I was born too early. The things I felt as a boy … I was too young to understand them, too out of place or time to do anything about it. Now that I understand? Well, I’m old. Look at this thing. This body I’m stuck inside. My time is ending, even though it feels like I never had a time, not really.”

The shape of the scalp, the smoothest, feathered strokes.

“But I can’t be alone, can I? Of course not; I’m not that special. Anomalies like me exist all around the world. So when does an anomaly quit being an anomaly and start being just the way things happen to be? What if you and I are not the last of our kinds, but one of the first? The first of better creatures in a better world? We can hope, can’t we? That we’re not of the past, but the future?”

Giles holds the drawing at arm’s length. For a character sketch, it’s not bad. And what are character sketches for? Practice for a grander work. Giles chuckles again. Is that what he’s planning? My, he hasn’t felt this precocious in decades.

He takes a breath and turns the paper toward the tub. The creature cocks his head until his second eye crests from the water. He stares at the sketch, then tilts his head to compare it to his own submerged body. Occam types might insist self-awareness in the creature was impossible, but Giles would tell them different. The creature knows he’s being depicted, and that it’s different from a reflection in a river. This is, in short, the magic of art. To concede the possibility of being captured in this way is to actively collaborate with the artist. By God, Giles thinks, it’s true: They are not so different from each other. Giles might still, under the right light, bathed in the right water, be beautiful, too.