The glass crunch, the crunch glass, and its source beyond the wall, exploring inward, held his full attention. Boot? Shoe? Foot? No. Claws? Hooves? Cilia? Fins? Suppressed a shudder. Could he reach his knife? No. If he could have reached his knife in time, if his knife had been any help, it wouldn’t have happened like this, except, yes, it was always going to be like this. Border breach, but there was no border here. It had all been moving so slow, like a journey that meant something, and now so fast. Too fast. Like breath that had become light, gone from mist to a ray, slashing out toward the horizon but not taking him with it. On the other side of the half-demolished wall, a new thing? An old thing? But not a mistake. Was there anything in it now of what he’d once known through its surrogate? Because he recognized its eyes.

Some part of it enveloped him, held him there, against the floor, while he screamed. Something like an eclipse in his head, a thick, tactile eclipse, pushing out his own intent. Questing through his mind for something else entirely, making him turn inward to see the things Lowry had put there, the terrible, irrevocable things, and how his mother must have helped Lowry. “Check the seats for loose change,” Grandpa Jack had said, or had he? The heavy shape of the gun in his hands, Grandpa Jack’s greedy gaze, and yet even that childhood memory seemed as hazy as smoke curling up from the cigarette of someone who stood in shadow at the far end of a long, darkened room.

Those thousands of eyes regarding him, reading him from across a vast expanse of space, as if the biologist existed simultaneously halfway across the universe. The sensation of being seen and then relief and a stabbing disappointment as it withdrew, spit him out. Rejected him.

There came a sound like a weight leaving the sky, a plunging toward the waves, and the awful weight of a pushing against the air lessened, and the restless agony in his bones receded, and he was just a dirty, spent figure weeping on the floor of a ruined lighthouse. With words like collateral damage and containment and counterattacks blossoming like old spells, incantations that worked in other, far distant, lands but not here. He was back in control, but control was meaningless. His father’s sculptures in his old backyard were tipping over, one after the other. The chess moves between them in those last days before his father had died. The pressure of the piece between his fingers as he moved it, and the empty air as he let go.

Silence then. An absence into which the brightness again took up sentinel duty, swung around with ever-greater confidence to peer at him like the leviathans from his dreams. Perhaps unaware of what it protected, what it lived within.

Except he would never forget now.

Later, much later, familiar steps, and a familiar voice—Grace, extending a hand.