She proceeds until the two-foot ledge pinches her thighs. The surface of the water is still. But not perfectly still. You only need to look, really look, to see the water breathe. Elisa inhales, exhales, and sets her lunch bag on the ledge. It crunches, as loud as driving a shovel into dirt. She watches the water’s surface for reaction. Nothing. She reaches into the bag and winces at the rustling. Nothing. She finds what she wants, withdraws it; it glows in the soft light. A single boiled egg.
For days, she’s dared herself to add this egg to the three she makes each night for Giles. Now she peels it. Her fingers are shaking. It’s the ugliest egg peeling of her life. White fragments drop to the ledge. The egg, at last, is revealed, and what is more coherent and elemental than an egg? Elisa holds it in the palm of her hand like the magical object it is.
And the water responds.
24
THERE IS A dark, underwater twitch, like the leg-jerk of a dozing dog, and a plip of water leaps a foot from the center of the pool. It lands and echoes outward in delicate concentric circles—and then the lab’s soft babbles are overwhelmed by a ripsaw of ratcheting metal. The water is torn into an X-shape as four fifteen-foot chains, each bolted to a corner of the pool, pull tight and shark-fin to the surface, sizzling foam and slobbering water, all of them attached to a single rising shape.
The knifing water, the rainbow refractions, the bat-wing shadows: Elisa can’t understand what she’s seeing. There: the gold-coin eye reflections she first saw in the tank, sun and moon. The angle alters and the eyeshine winks out. She sees its real eyes. They are blue. No—green, brown. No—gray, red, yellow, so many implausible shades. It is moving closer. The water does the thing’s bidding, barely rippling. Its nose is slight, reptilian. Its lower jaw is multijointed but rests in a noble straight line. It is moving closer. Upright, as if no longer swimming, but walking. It is the God-image Strickland referenced: It moves like a man. Why, then, does Elisa feel that it is every animal that ever existed? It is moving closer. Gills on either side of the neck tremble like butterflies. Its neck is brutalized by a metal collar that binds the four chains. It is moving closer. It has a swimmer’s physique, with shoulders like clenched fists, but the torso of a ballerino. Tiny scales cover it, scintillating like diamonds, lucent as silk. Grooves run over its whole body in elaborate, swirling, symmetrical patterns. It is no longer moving. It is five feet away. Even the water streaming from its body makes no sound.
It looks from the egg to her. Its eyes flash.
Elisa crashes back to earth, her heart thwacking. She sets the peeled egg on the ledge, grabs the lunch bag, and hops behind the red line. Her stance is defensive and the creature responds, lowering itself until only the smooth crown of its head is visible. Its eyes bore into hers for an unsettling moment before shifting back to the egg; the eyes, at this angle, go blue. It skims leftward as if expecting the egg to match the move.
He trusts nothing, Elisa thinks, and then verifies to herself, with surprise, that the creature is male. She’s somehow certain. It’s in the bluntness of his bearing, the forthrightness of his stare. Elisa has a queasy thought: If she knows he’s male, he must know she’s female. She orders herself to hold steady. This creature might be the first man-thing she’s known who is more powerless than herself. She nods for him to go ahead, take the egg.
He advances as far as the chains allow, two feet from the ledge. Elisa is postulating that the red line was painted at too cautious of a distance when the creature’s lower jaw drops and a secondary mandible punches out like a bone fist. A fraction of a second later, the egg is vanished, the pharyngeal jaw is retracted, and the water is as still as if none of it had happened. Elisa hasn’t the time to even gasp; she pictures Strickland’s fingers toppling to the floor.
The surface of the pool shivers, a billion pinpricks Elisa interprets as pleasure. The creature looks at her with eyes so bright they’re white. She takes a stabilizing breath through her puny, single-jawed mouth and directs herself to keep going, keep going, keep going. She reaches her shaking hand into the bag again. Chain links clang as he lifts a shoulder to shield himself from what might be a weapon. This, she sees, is what he has come to expect from Occam.
But it is simply another egg, the last one. She holds it up so that he can see, then cracks it against her opposite knuckle and peels off a bit of the shell. Carefully, now, carefully—she extends her arm, the egg upright in her palm, her proffering posture like that of a mythical goddess. The creature doesn’t trust it. He dolphins his upper body from the water and hisses. His gills fluff, flashing a blood-red warning. Elisa lowers her face to show meekness; it is no mere show. She waits. His jaws gnash but his gills subside. Elisa seals her lips and resumes extending her arm. She shifts the egg so that she holds it atop her fingers, a ball on a tee.
Elisa is out of range of his jaw and, she hopes, his arm. She lifts her other hand until it mirrors the egg. She can’t sign “egg” without letting the egg drop from sight so instead she uses the letters: E-G-G. He does not react. She signs again, the dog paw of the E, the finger-point of the G, and wonders what the signs might remind him off. Wolf? Arrow? Cattle prod? She asserts the egg, then the signs. She is desperate that he understand. Unless he does, this creature who seems to have materialized straight from her dreams can’t fully exist inside her reality. The egg, the signs. Egg, signs, egg, signs.
Her hand is beginning to cramp when the creature at last reacts. Once resolved upon action, he shows no hesitation, gliding as near to the ledge as the chains allow and raising his arm from water without splash or sound. Spines sprout from the arm like dorsal fins, and his fingers are bound by translucent webbing and tipped with curled claws. This makes the hand look huge, and when the fingers flex, it’s difficult to imagine them doing so for any reason other than crushing prey.
His fingers bend at the second knuckles. His thumb curls across pale palm scales. The webbing folds like diaphanous leather. It’s an E, a clumsy one, but Elisa believes this creature is accustomed to much larger gestures: full-body tumbles within seething seas; darting attacks; unfolding to full height beneath a tropical sun. Elisa feels as if she’s the one underwater. The creature dips its gills into the pool as if to remind her to breathe.
His palm releases the E and his fingers open into a hesitant fan. Elisa nods support and signs G, pointing off to her left. This is considered good signing, but the creature is a novice. His three smallest fingers pinwheel to touch the heel of his hand and he points his index finger directly at Elisa. Her vision spins. Her chest throbs joyfully, almost painfully. He sees her. He doesn’t look through her like Occam’s men or past her like Baltimore’s women. This beautiful being, however he might have hurt those who hurt him first, is pointing at her and only her.
She drops her signing hand and moves forward, her purple heels fearlessly disobeying the red line. The creature paddles in wait, his eyes, blue now, watching her body so closely that she feels naked. She holds the egg over the ledge, into the zone of hazard, no longer afraid of what happened to Strickland. The creature rises, all portents of caution gone, gills ruffling, chest expanding, water slipping from the splendor of his gemlike scales. He is what the jungle field recordings only hinted at: a pure thing.