project lead enjoys access to every room at Occam but one, and it is here Hoffstetler finds himself: the ladies’ locker room. There are, Slava Bogu, no cameras here; he has come to consider cameras to be gargoyles flapping their wings in the high reaches to report his every move. Hovering at the locker-room door would get him branded as a pervert—acceptable in these final days except for how it would spur further interrogation—so he’d slunk inside, nosed out a bygone shower room filled with supplies, and hidden behind a keep of industrial cleaner.

A harsh bell marks the close of the overnight shift. He hears the drudging entry of the graveyard shift’s quartet of women. He feels dizzy. It must be the stench of ammonia. Unless it’s panic. The rest of the week, he repeats to himself, is all he needs to last. His first and, he hopes, last lie to Mihalkov was that the syringe had worked and the Devonian was dead, and Mihalkov had rewarded him with details: On Friday, Hoffstetler’s phone will ring twice, and he is to proceed to the usual spot, where the Bison will take him to a ship, and the ship will sail him home, to Minsk, to his waiting parents. Mihalkov had even lavished praise on Hoffstetler for his dauntless years of service. He’d called him Dmitri.

Hoffstetler tears off his glasses, rubs eyeballs aflame from chemical vapors. Is he going to faint? He focuses on locker-room sounds. He is a cataloger by nature and trade but has done little study in the classification of feminine noises. Silken rustles. Pert snaps. Delicate jingles. Evidence of life that he has never known, but still might, if he can just survive until Friday.

“Hey, Esposito.” The woman’s voice is of Latin accent and is as harsh as the shift siren. “Did you tell that man we were out there smoking?” A pause for Elisa’s signed or gestured reply. “You know what man. The one that gives you the looks.” Pause. “Well, someone told him that we move the camera. And the only one of us that doesn’t smoke is you.” Pause. “You act all innocent. But you’re not. You watch your back, Esposito. Or I’ll watch it for you, entiendes?”

Footsteps march away, followed by sympathetic murmurs—Hoffstetler believes they come from the one named Zelda. He holds his breath against fumes, waits for sounds of Zelda leaving Elisa’s side. Instead he hears a rumble from upstairs, the lobby, the day shift beginning to arrive. There is no time. Hoffstetler makes his move, scrambling on all fours across the dank tiles. He peers around a corner. Elisa is sitting on the bench. Zelda stands beside her, combing her hair in a locker mirror. He has to take the chance. He waves a hand to get Elisa’s attention.

Her head whips in his direction. She is clothed but covers herself reflexively, a leg cocking back, ready to kick. She’s wearing shoes of startling flair—bright sequined green—and the heels crack loud against the tile and Zelda whirls and sees Hoffstetler and her chest expands to scream, but Elisa snatches Zelda’s blouse and springs from the bench, dragging Zelda behind her into the dim aqua glow of the shower, her free hand signing as wildly, no doubt a litany of questions. Hoffstetler lifts his own hands, begging for a moment.

“Where is it?” he whispers.

“They’ve got us,” Zelda gasps. “Elisa, they’ve got—”

Elisa signs curtly to Zelda, something that shuts her up, and then signs to Hoffstetler, gesturing for Zelda to translate.

Zelda eyes Hoffstetler with misgiving before stating, simply, “Home.”

“You’ve got to get rid of it. Right away.”

Elisa signs. Zelda translates: “Why?”

“It’s Strickland. He’s close. I can’t promise what I’ll tell him if he uses—he’s got that baton—”

He doesn’t need to know sign language to understand Elisa’s panic.

“Listen to me,” he hisses. “Do you have means to get it to the river?”

Elisa’s face drains of emotion. Her head drops down until she stares at her bejeweled shoes, or perhaps the mold of the tiles showing between them. After a moment, her hands rise, torpidly as if attached to weights, and she signs with a mournful reluctance. Zelda translates each fragment as it comes.

“The dock. Opens to the sea. At thirty feet.”

Zelda looks at Hoffstetler pleadingly; she doesn’t know the significance of these words but Hoffstetler does. This fragile-looking janitor of incalculable ingenuity must live near enough to the river to get the Devonian to some kind of pier. But that’s not good enough. If the spring drought persists, the creature will be beached there, a flopping fish no better off than being chained to one of Strickland’s posts.

“Is there anything, anything at all?” he pleads. “That van—you took it away in a van—could you make it to the ocean—”

She’s shaking her head in childish refusal, eyelashes thick with tears, cheeks and neck splotched red except for two keloid scars that hold a smooth, gentle pink. Hoffstetler wants to grab her by the dress and shake her, rattle that brain inside her skull until the selfishness is knocked clean out of her. But he has no chance: A phone is ringing, it is answered, and the angry woman with the Latin accent is shouting, her voice reverberating from the locker room’s surfaces.

“Phone call for Elisa? If that isn’t the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. How the hell’s she supposed to take a phone call?”

“Who is it, Yolanda?”

The boom is loud enough to pull Hoffstetler from his tarn of consternation. It comes from Zelda, discounted by Hoffstetler as dumbstruck by fear of losing her job or worse. With the situation for the three of them as dire as it has ever been, this woman’s leaping, lioness defense of Elisa hands to Hoffstetler a tiny, precious gift, thinner than cellular membrane, smaller than a subatomic particle: hope.

Zelda’s brown eyes boil with a warning for Hoffstetler, and then it is she, this time, who takes Elisa by the arm and drags her away. Hoffstetler has no choice but to recede, though not far, knowing he’ll need to escape the locker room before the dayshifters begin filing inside, knowing he’s got three more days of this pressure, knowing he won’t sleep tonight with Elisa uncommitted to the only sensible course of action. It is entirely possible that he’ll never sleep again. He ducks behind the bottles of cleaning fluid while Yolanda’s last few grouses echo.

“I’m a custodian, Zelda, not AT&T. Jerry? Jeremy? Giles? How am I supposed to remember?”