She shook her head. “Not happily, but we need to try it. Here’s what we’ll do: I’ll take one of my knives and cut his head loose from the net, then one of you boys can put the helmet on him and make sure it’s all secure. Watch out for them teeth, though. Some of ’em are as big as my thumb.”

The sasquatch was propped in a halfhearted slouch against the dirty wall.

He flinched and growled when Angeline came toward him with a small blade, so he understood more than you might expect—Rector gave him credit there. But since she didn’t hurt him, he didn’t lash out. Instead, he held very, very still while she trimmed away the lines necessary to fully expose his head, as if he had popped through the neck hole of a sweater.

She held his gaze for a moment, but it was inscrutable. His eyes were deep-set in a flattened face that was a mass of leathery brown-black wrinkles. Those eyes—which, yes, as Zeke had noted, were turning gold—told them nothing.

“Inexplicable,” Rector breathed.

And Houjin said, “Sasquatch.”

“Here he is, boys. Only a handful of folks have ever seen him, or ever will, I expect.” She took the big glass helmet in her hands, and passed it toward Zeke. “You do it,” she told him.

Zeke took the helmet and held it up, checking for cracks and testing its filters. The sasquatch’s eyes followed the globe. He tracked the thing up into the last slivers of light, watching it catch those rays and reflect them, bowed and broken, in the curve of the glass.

Zeke lowered the helmet, putting it in front of the creature’s face and letting him get a good look. “See? It’s just a mask, like the ones we wear—but a little different.” As he showed the sasquatch, he appeared to be genuinely curious and paying close attention. “I’m going to put this on you. It’ll feel funny at first, but then you’ll breathe better. You’ll feel better, I think. I’m going to try it now. Let me do it, please? I don’t want to fight you for it.”

To Rector’s frank astonishment, the brute held still, like he was kept in place with a madman’s jacket and not an oversized net made of fisherman’s yarn. He closed his eyes when Zeke lowered the helmet-mask, cringing when the seals settled around his neck. He stretched and leaned inside the device, gazing out at them with questions he couldn’t ask and they couldn’t answer.