So this was the aquarium room. There were tanks on all four walls, lined up side by side on floor-to-ceiling shelves. There were at least fifty of them. They were the room’s sole illumination, a Caribbean blue filtered through gels. Some of the tanks were lit with black lights, creating a dizzying array of incandescent fish and coral. Pink. Blue. Purple. Susan’s hair had been all those shades.

Heil’s voice was smooth and firm, each word carefully enunciated. The black light made his eyes and teeth a dazzling unnatural white. “Now stand up, very, very slowly.”

“What. The. Fuck?” Susan said.

She followed his gaze to a wall of aquariums. All four of the room’s walls were lined with shelves of aquariums. But the aquariums on this wall were empty.

“There are seven of those tanks,” Heil said. “Each one had a blue-ring in it.”

It took her a second to understand.

They were in the water. She was sitting in it up to her chest.

She made a strangled cat sound and started to get up.

“Stop,” Heil said quickly.

His urgency froze her in her tracks.

“Listen to me,” he said. “They’re not aggressive. They’ll only bite if you brush up against them. You just need to stand up slowly. Don’t slosh.”

Susan’s mouth felt dry. How did you stand up from a seated position without sloshing? She was on her butt. Her hands were on the floor behind her. Her legs were out in front, bent at the knee. If she stood up, she’d have to move through the water. She’d touch one of those things and it would bite her and she’d suffocate and her heart would stop. She was just going to stay where she was. She would sit there in the water and wait for someone to come get them out of there.

“Stand up, Susan,” Heil said.

She didn’t move. “Why can’t I stay like this?”

“Because they’re swimming around in here, and your odds of getting in one’s way are directly related to the surface area you have in the water.”

An excellent observation.

“I thought they couldn’t survive in this kind of water,” Susan said.

“They can live briefly in it,” Heil said. He rubbed his forehead. “I don’t know.”

“Okay,” Susan said.

But she still couldn’t move.

“Are you going to stand up?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

She wondered if her teeth looked like that.

“Give me a minute,” she said.

She looked down toward her right hand and began to incrementally lift it to the surface of the water. Every cell in her arm hummed with electrical current, ready to react at the slightest contact with solid matter. When her hand broke the surface and eased out of the water, it was like Susan had never seen her hand before. It looked incredible and marvelous. A hand!