Page 10

T he first face to greet me the next morning belonged to Matthias, who strolled out of the kitchen with a plate of tosineta in a too-small apron, his sleeves rolled up to expose a tangle of tattoos. “Hope Porto Ricans like bacon.”

I shot him a look and decided it was safe to drop the American act where my island’s name was concerned. “ Puerto Ricans invented bacon.”

“Jesus,” he said, shaking his head. “Been here, what, two minutes, and you already picking fights?”

But a fight was already happening above us.

“Vera Campbell, you loon! They looked perfect on you!” echoed Sonia’s voice from above as Vera stomped down the stairs, her hair spilling out of a messy braid.

“Keep your manky ribbons!” snapped the fire-breather. “I amn’t a bleedin’ birthday parcel! Ah. Morning, Benny.”

“Morning, Vera.”

Harassments continued over breakfast, more to Lulu’s dismay than anyone else’s. She seemed to take it upon herself to parent everyone in the house, not just her son, breaking up an argument between the Rhodes brothers over Emmett’s need for a new prosthetic (“You ain’t spendin’ a leg just to get me a new one!”), scolding Timmy for nicking sugar cubes from the pantry, and calming Navya’s temper when Igor purposely tried to step on her foot. The madam had accidentally stepped on his first, at which point, I learned that Igor and other superstitious Russians believe trading one stomped foot for another avoids future conflicts. And bueno ... there went that theory.

By the meal’s end, I was weighed down with enough bacon and eggs to send me back to bed, but I was too eager to put Saul’s key to use. I ventured briskly back to the Menagerie, saluting Oscar as I let myself into the playground that had, by some trick of fate, become my new workplace. The stuffed monstruos in the museum didn’t faze me this time, but a shout from inside the theater did.

“Hellfire and damnation!”

I poked my head in. The curtains were open, the tank so big in my field of vision I almost missed Sam Morgan in his green vestido , perched on the ladder beside it like a cranky iguaca . His hand clung to a rig suspended from the ceiling, the other knotted in a long cloth banner that spilled to the floor.

“Sir?”

“Benny, be a gentleman”—he jutted his chin toward the ground—“and lift up the other end, would you?”

I scooped the cloth off the floor. Through the creases, “THE PRINCE OF ATLANTIS” read in sea-blue letters against a lemony background.

“Painted it yesterday,” he grunted, maneuvering the cloth for a better grip. “How do you like it?”

“It’s nice. Very...” I needed a kinder version of “chillón.” “Bright!”

“The better to see from the ground!”

I peeked involuntarily toward the tank. El tritón was right where we’d left him, curled against the glass in the same corner where the sunlight didn’t touch, sleeping.

“There another ladder?”

“A single ladder is all this blasted production is fit to own at present,” he grumbled, looping a swath of fabric around his forearm. “Get on top of the cage. I’m sure you can reach from there.”

I carried the other end of the banner to the rungs I’d built into the tank and hauled it up. Halfway to the top, I noticed something downstage: A double-boiler engine sat attached to a long rubber hose that ran up the tank side through the grill to dangle in the water. A second hose lay idle on the ground next to it.

“What’s that?” I asked.

Morgan shook out his arm and rested it against the ladder’s top cap. “A retired steam pump from the fire brigade. I was hoping that prodigious brain of yours might help me come up with a way to convert it into a circulation system for the water—sooner rather than later if you don’t mind. We wouldn’t want a swampy tank on our hands!”

I was about to say I didn’t mind, but then my foot came down on the tank’s roof, making the metal—and my knees—vibrate. The last time I’d stood here, we had just hauled the merman’s bleeding body up those rungs.

I willed my focus back to the topic at hand; there were logistics to work out if the pump was going to filter the water without clogging.

Except there was nothing in the water. It was completely clear.

“Does the merman...?” Bendito , how could I put this? “Does he leave any... mess?”

“One assumes it metabolizes food like any other sea animal,” Morgan said, delicately. “Not that I’ve seen it eat. So far, all it does is seethe and sleep in that corner like a defanged viper. I keep finding the salt cod I’ve been feeding it tossed back out of the tank, the slippery ingrate.”

“Do mermen like salt cod?” Without proper soaking, that stuff could break teeth and make your eyes water.

Morgan huffed. “I hardly think that matters. I’m running a sideshow, not a Bavarian beer garden.” He pointed above my head. “The hook’s up there.”

While the showman repositioned himself to hang his end of the banner, my jellied legs inched toward the edge of the roof. With some direction from me, Morgan managed to hang the eyelet from the metal hook on his side of the tank, after which I slipped my own into place.

“Splendid! Stay where you are; it might need adjusting.”

He gingerly made his way back down the ladder. “Rather nice having someone with a work ethic around here. The exhibits are positively useless in the offseason,” he said dryly. “Though I might have saved myself a mountain of effort had I just bought the silly patents from Harry, that Hungarian bastard.”

I blinked. “As in Houdini ?”

“You’re right, he wouldn’t have given them up,” he grumbled. “Fame makes a man cagey, if you’ll forgive the pun.”

Morgan examined our handiwork from the audience, his pointer finger tapping an impatient rhythm on his bottom lip. “Lighting’s a travesty,” he concluded after a pause, “but an overhead spotlight might fix it. Add a bit of drama. I’m sure there’s a spare in the ballroom they’d never miss.” He turned on his heel to march back toward the curiosity museum. “I’ll just pop over and get it.”

“Should I—”

“No, stay there! I’ll be back before the coffee’s gone cold,” he called back, then left me stranded on the tank roof like underwear hung out to dry. The height was making me dizzy. I backed away from the edge wondering if the air was thinner up here or if I’d just never known the unique displeasure of standing two dozen feet above the ground with a slumbering merman under my boots.

I could just as easily wait for Morgan on the stage floor, so I turned back to the ladder.

I made it only a step.

A splash like a cannonball blasting into a lake sent spray flying up at me from below.

Before I could react, something hard struck my ankle and I buckled, falling cheek-first onto metal.

A sea-stained hand—wet, webbed, and rougher than sand-paper—caught my wrist through the grill. I couldn’t get to my knees before another closed around my neck and yanked me down, banging my face into the iron. Through watering eyes, I saw two limpid blue irises glittering with lethal intent.

My lungs shuttered.

“Have you no voice to scream, fiendish parasite?”

?Manos a Dios! He speaks English!

“I will tear out your throat,” he continued in a quiet voice as deep and fearsome as distant thunder. “I will dine on your flesh, you flea-bitten sack of terrene entrails.”

I gagged and gasped against the bars. “L-let... go...”

“ No ,” he snarled. “You will release me from this cage or, so help me Neptune, I will gouge out your eyes with my fingernails. I will take you apart with my teeth and season the water with your blood until my fins are stained red.”

Saul’s key ring was in my pocket. I wrenched my free hand behind my back and fumbled for it, praying for even an ounce of Sonia’s flexibility.

“Can’t... breathe...”

“ Die , then! You shall have the same mercy you showed my mother!”

A hairsbreadth from blacking out, my finger hooked around the key ring. As hard as I could, I swung out and stabbed the Menagerie key into the merman’s hand. The blow only glanced off his wet skin but loosened his fingers enough for me to rip myself from his grip and roll onto my back, sending him falling tail-first into the tank. Water sprayed up, drenching my newly liberated ass up to my shoulders.

I clawed my way to the edge of the roof and half fell down the rungs. At the bottom, I collapsed onto my knees and stayed there. My vision was swimming, my breathing all wrong; if I made myself walk, I’d faint the second I stood upright.

But el tritón wasn’t finished with me. I looked up in time to see him launch himself at the glass. The impact rang like a gong, but to his visible fury, the glass held. He flew into a fit, careening in a circle along the walls, hammering his tail against them as if he intended to burst them from the inside. How was his speed even possible underwater?

He was terrifying. A tornado in a tank.

His strikes at the glass eventually slowed until he stopped and clung to it, his hunched shoulders outlined in cold, filtered sunlight. When I hazarded to meet his eyes again, the fire had gone out of them. His despair hadn’t.

Morgan was carrying a large round lamp in his arms when I staggered blindly into the daylight outside the theater.

“Benny?”

I sidestepped around him to hide my drenched backside, rationing my inhales to keep from coughing. “Air’s a little... thin... over the tank,” I croaked.

At first, he squinted suspiciously at me, but then his eyes widened.

He could hear it. The whistling.

“So it would seem.” An uneasy frown inverted his mustache. “That doesn’t bode very well for our aquatic circulation system—”

“I’ll... come back,” I panted. “Tonight. I’ll be... better by then.”

“I don’t favor the idea of leaving you alone in the theater at night—”

“It’s just this once.”

I held Morgan’s gaze until he relented and dug a key out of his pocket that wasn’t on Saul’s key ring.

“For the new padlock to the theater. I’ll be in town tomorrow conducting business. Lock up after yourself, then return the key to me on Friday.” He leaned in to add, “Guard it with your life.”

With an enthusiastic nod, I took it. And before the coughs could explode out of me, I tore out of the park straight for the beach.

The chilly wind blew inland. I tried frantically to inhale it, gripping San Cristóbal until his haloed face was practically stamped permanently into my palm. Once I felt aerated enough not to swoon, I headed back to the Albemarle where I snuck in like a shadow. I sat on the corner of my new bed, cold, damp, and breathing easier by a margin too small to find relief in.

When I’d taken this room, I had accepted the risk I’d be haunted.

But not like this.

I didn’t tell anyone about my confrontation with el tritón . I wrapped Matthias’s wool scarf around my collar, earning me a few side glances from my housemates at dinner. I told them I thought I might have a cold.

“Probably caught it getting dunked the other night,” Eli observed through a mouthful of biscuit, “’cause I ain’t felt right since neither.”

“You got your arse dragged by a sea lady. That ain’t a cold, that’s humiliation,” Vera chided.

“Eli coulda died,” Emmett murmured, instantly quashing Vera’s wisecracking.

“Hey.” Smiling, Eli put a hand on Emmett’s arm and squeezed. “I’m still here, Em.”

“’Tis natural to fall ill when one’s life path has shifted,” Navya said sagely. “The former self must be purged that the new self may emerge.”

“ Or Benny just has the sniffles,” Lulu said.

“Well, we’ll fix you right up, won’t we?” Sonia said, shifting in her seat to reach for my scarf.

“No!” I yelped. Her hand froze in midair. “I mean, no thanks. I just gotta lie down or something.”

“Do what you gotta do,” Matthias said, then stuffed half the steak into his mouth.

“Right. Uh, buen provecho .”

I abandoned my dinner and avoided their puzzled gazes as I left for my room. When I reached the mouth of the stairs, a hushed voice from the dining table stopped me in my paces.

“Are we sure about this Benny guy?”

It was Emmett.

“Here we go,” groaned Matthias. “You afraid he’s gonna murder us in our beds with his shrimpy guitar?”

“Something’s off about him, and it ain’t a cold.”

“Oh, give it a rest, Em,” said Sonia.

“Didn’t you see how he flinched just now? He’s a flincher, and flinchers always got something on their conscience! You don’t really believe that thumper he told us last night, do you? All that tripe about stowin’ away on a—”

“Emmett, do the damn world a favor and shut the hell up,” Matthias whisper-shouted. “You act like you and Eli got the monopoly on running away. Like nobody else done had it rough as you. Of course I believe him, ’cause I know a survivor when I see one. And if I was you, I’d take a long look at my pale-ass face in the mirror and think about how that Caribbean kid crossed an ocean for a slice of freedom America ain’t never gonna give him.”

I waited. Then I padded up the stairs.

Seemed no one had anything to say after that.