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I returned Morgan’s key the next morning and found his mood a little hard to peg. He was pleased I’d been so quick to deliver his circulation system but frustrated that I hadn’t also riddled out how to sneak in bulk quantities of coal under Oscar’s runny nose to test it. He decided I should start on cosmetic repairs in the curiosity museum, which was how I wound up standing next to the yeti while Morgan paced around like the room had committed some personal offense.

“Christ.” Morgan lifted a decrepit wing off the dragon and a flurry of red paint flakes drifted to the floor. “For a place where first impressions are made, the tone in here is ‘mausoleum meets sculpture garden for the criminally insane.’”

It’s fine for white guys of a certain means to insult what’s theirs, but que Dios te perdone if you tell them they’re right. I kept my mouth shut.

“These ancient relics from Jack Morgan’s old traveling show all need new bones, so I expect you’ll have to sculpt from scratch. Ah, but what am I saying,” Morgan said with a patronizing smile. “A craftsman like you will figure it out. Should you need me,” he sighed scornfully, “I’ll be domesticating our new tenant.”

Claro. That explained his finicky temperament. As he strode toward the theater, I mustered my courage and stopped him at the threshold. “Mr. Morgan?”

“Hm?”

“I was just wondering how the merman was taking to the food.” To justify my inquiry, I quickly added, “I made some cod for the company yesterday.”

“In the meal rotation already,” he mused. “The exhibits have taken a shining to you, eh?”

The way he called the company “exhibits” wasn’t exactly endearing. With his expression falling just shy of pleased, I tried to make myself look as benign as my given name suggested I was and shoved my hands in my pockets. “They don’t hate me, I guess.”

“Well. As long as you’re asking, I thought the creature would be hungry enough by now to eat its own tail, but it remains insufferably”—his nose twitched—“ resistant .”

Aquí voy. “I’m no expert, but I grew up on salt cod. If you don’t mind my saying, it might be easier for the merman to swallow it if you soak it overnight.”

Morgan blinked. I didn’t know if he was the sort of yanqui who put insults and consultation from brown day laborers in the same box. When his grin came back, it reached no further than his mouth.

Same box, then.

“I will take that into consideration,” he said. “After all, I grew up on red meat.”

Then he left me to fix his gallery of atrocidades . Good thing the pantry wasn’t out of sardines yet.

I decided to start on the dragon with a mind to salvage whatever didn’t outright disintegrate into my palms. My spackle knife was positioned to lift off some of the chipped paint when a sudden, shrill noise made my hand flinch, sending dragon scales scattering.

It was a whistle. Not the kind my lungs made, but a high-pitched, tooth-grinding FWEEEEET .

Was Morgan trying to train Río? I stilled and waited for the gong of Río’s tail defiantly colliding with the tank side—but there wasn’t so much as a splash.

The whistle introduced a pattern of activity in the theater while I worked, beginning with Morgan stomping around the stage, barking commands like “Look here , I say!” and “Swim, dammit!” and “Get off your blasted tail!” which he’d keep up for about twenty minutes before storming off to his tent because Río wouldn’t react to any of it.

During one of those silent gaps, I found termites in the baseboards under the dragon display. On my way to give Morgan the news, I looked in on the tank as discreetly as I could and found Río facing away, tucked in his shadowy corner except for the shaft of light shining across his brilliant tail. Though the blue was so vibrant it dulled every other color in the room, something else had caught my attention.

Río’s hands were covering his ears.

“Everywhere I look, another blasted expense,” Morgan groaned at the ceiling when he heard his museum was infested. “Just find Lulu and tell her we need to borrow the Albemarle’s exterminator. You two may as well work out upholstery estimates while you’re there—and tell the rest of those lazy nincompoops I expect them to help dismantle the museum tomorrow so they can kill the little bastards!”

“Will do, boss.” I touched the rim of my cap and turned to leave.

“Before you go, Benny...”

I paused at the tent flap. “Yeah?”

He plucked the pipe from his teeth. “Fetch a bowl from the storage room. Fill it with water. And,” he growled through his nose, “soak the damn fish.”

That night, before heading out on a “walk” as I put it to my housemates, Sonia let it slip that Morgan always left early on Fridays to “unwind with his Victrola after a long week.” It gave me an idea.

“Is that a lyre?” Río asked as I scaled the tank ladder.

“It’s my cuatro .”

“I see ten strings, not four. The name is misleading.”

“Noted. I’ll inform the mayor.”

I toed my way to the middle of the bars and sat, balancing the sardines on the grill and trying not to crack wise at Río’s face when I positioned the instrument on my lap. I was beginning to learn his expressions, and this particular one was his default—narrow eyes, furrowed brows, and pinched lips that all seemed to ask what earthly continent was responsible for breeding a human as confusing as me.

“You are a musician, then?” he asked.

I strummed the open strings and grimaced; it sounded just like my eviction from Red Hook had felt. “My tití thought so. Boleros were her favorite.”

“Boleros,” he murmured, exploring the word with his mouth as he drifted closer. “The ocean has not carried such a word to my ears.”

“It’d have to go a long distance.” I gently twisted the peg until the sound rang true and I could move on to the next string. “So you know what music is. What sort of music do you get in the ocean, anyway?”

When he didn’t answer, my fingers paused over the strings. I peered over my lap.

“The ocean is my native song,” he said. His voice was usually so melodic, I hadn’t thought him capable of sounding so toneless.

“‘Native song.’ ?Qué significa eso? ”

“It means the ocean’s music is my language. The way yours is Spanish. The way the Shark’s is British.” Rolling his eyes, he added, “Though he tries very hard to seem otherwise.”

A guffaw fell out of my mouth. “Mr. Morgan, British ? Are you kidding?”

“I always hear that word, ‘kidding.’ There is not a juvenile goat for miles. What does that even mean?”

“Nothing, forget it. So, you’re saying your language is music ?”

“All language is music, all music is language. But the song of the sea is a dialect unlike any other.” His eyes took in my cuatro and dimmed. “I was a voice in a once vast choir.”

I wanted to ask why he spoke of his kind in the past tense, but the dark turn of his expression told me that would be a mistake. I’d come to cheer him up, not depress him.

“I keep meaning to ask how you know Spanish,” I said, moving on to the next pair of strings. “Or English, for that matter. I didn’t think merfolk would bother with human words.”

Río splashed some water over his head to rewet his hair. “We excel at absorbing the utterings of land dwellers. Especially those who navigate the water,” he said simply. “When you live as long as we do, there is time enough to swim in as many seas and learn as many human tongues as you desire.”

“ Ave María. And here I thought I was pretty good at picking up voices.”

Just then, a circuit connected in my brain.

“Río, how old are you?”

He lifted an arm idly out of the water, watching the beads roll over his tinted skin. “Quite young by our standards. Quite old by yours,” he said thoughtfully. “How old do you think I am?”

“Qué sé yo.” I scratched my neck. “You look my age.”

“And how old is that?”

I didn’t have an immediate answer. After the hurricane, when finding any documentation of my birth had proved impossible, Tití Luz declared my birthday the first of January, and decided I was probably about as old as the other muchachito who hung around the revolutionary sect, Ramón. He would turn twenty-two in July.

“I’m twenty-two.”

After brief consideration, he gave a satisfied nod. “Then I am twenty-two as well. Now did you plan to play something, or will your cuatro play itself?”

“Sure,” I said, testing a chord. “I’ll play something soft.”

“Is that customary?”

“Well, I can’t imagine wanting to hear anything loud after Morgan practically busted the windows blowing that maldito whistle.”

There was a pause. “You heard it?”

“How could I not? They probably heard it in Queens—”

“Yet you did not stop him.”

His voice put an end to my tuning. I looked down to find Río staring, his blue eyes relit in anger like a pair of kerosene flames. “Were you amused? Entertained?” he demanded.

“ Claro que no. It was awful to hear—”

“But not enough to intervene in my torture?”

Torture. The word bore down on my heart like a brick. “I couldn’t,” I insisted. “He got peeved when all I did was suggest he soak the cod!”

I didn’t realize how pathetic my excuse was until it came out of my mouth. Obviously, Río thought so too, because the next moment, he was gone in a rippling swirl of marine blue and burnished hair.

“I just gotta be careful,” I half shouted at the water. “I can’t free you if he tosses me out. Río? Río!”

Carajo , I was earning a reputation here as Brooklyn’s worst bystander. Calling down again got me nothing but a dose of the defiance Río had been showing Morgan all day, and if the whistle had taught me anything about the merman, it was that his will was made of stronger metal than mine. I looked around helplessly for a way to coax him back to the surface—but a couple of measly sardine cans were a weak offering in exchange for his forgiveness.

So I started to play. “Palomita blanca del piquito azul, llévame en tus alas a ver a Jesús...”

My fingers were a little stiff from taking apart monsters all morning. But I never wheezed when I sang, and the notes I strummed were as sturdy as the iron I cast, taught to me by tabaqueros who knew just how to make a song speak truth where words failed. It felt like I was praying for the third time in a week.

Ola, ola, ola,

Ola de la mar

Qué bonita ola para navegar...

It wasn’t hard to steep every chord in remorse for letting him suffer. I played until I ran out of refrains. Until it seemed like God had finally reached His threshold for doling me second chances. The theater was quiet again, leaving me alone to figure out another way to repair what I’d broken, but then Río’s form began growing larger in the water.

When he finally broke the surface, he didn’t emerge past his chin. “You sing,” he whispered.

Gracias a Dios. I nodded.

“You would truly free me?” he asked, an edge of disbelief in his voice. “If you could?”

“Sure I would.”

He closed his eyes and rose further until the water was level with his shoulders once more. It felt like he might be weighing my integrity again; I didn’t want to speak in case it tipped his opinion back in the wrong direction.

When he opened his eyes, he said, “Your voice is... surprising.”

“In a bad way?”

A subdued smile pulled at his lips. “No.”

Relief unclenched my muscles. I laid my instrument aside to lower my face to the lattice.

“Forgive me,” I whispered in Spanish, to make doubly sure I meant what I said. “You are right. I should have done something. If I were braver—if I had known better—I might have found a way to stop him. It won’t happen again.”

He studied my face—for honesty or contrition or both—while sweat dampened the rim of my cap. After a long moment, he spoke Spanish back to me. “I think you are right to be afraid of the Shark. I have seen enough to believe him capable of doing great harm. But not to me.”

“?Cómo?”

Río’s tail crested and flicked, propelling him to the cage side where he reached over the rim of the glass to touch the bars with a webbed finger. “It appears I am valuable to him. He would make my ears bleed a thousand times before my resistance would persuade him to kill me.” Turning his serious face back to me, he added, “Your life, I think, he would not spare.”

Diablo , I’d been worried about getting fired, not killed. Río didn’t know that, compared to him and his mother, I was safe by virtue of my species, or so I figured. Even so, his assumption had a cold logic to it that made my neck prickle.

He wrapped his palm around the iron. “I do not understand humans, but I think I am beginning to understand you.”

“You are?”

“You heard the whistle, and so you came to soothe my ears with music.”

I cleared my throat and pulled my cap lower over my eyes. “So?”

He tilted his head thoughtfully and, in English, said, “So, your name suits you too, Boy Named Kind.”

And like a crank on a phonograph, something in his words whirred my heart into motion the way it hadn’t since I last sat under a warm Caribbean sun next to Ramón. I didn’t think I’d earned it.

“I forgive you,” he announced, reclining on the water. “Sing another bolsillo , if you know one.”

“Bolero.”

“Yes. That.”

I stayed for another song. And another after that. And as I sang, Río floated in a lazy circle, his eyes fastened on the little window near the ceiling where moonlight lined the glass. I refused to play him a third until he polished off both the sardine cans I’d brought him, then promised him fresh fish next time. When two more hours had passed without another offense on my part, I collected my cuatro , dropped down the ladder, and touched my hand against the glass in farewell.

I didn’t head for the promenade. Instead, I took the path to Morgan’s empty tent where I hunted around until, tucked in a nest of paintbrushes, I found his whistle.

Tin. Malleable.

Good.

I set it against the edge of the table and took off my necklace. With the medallion, I pushed a dent into the reed, so small you’d miss it altogether if you weren’t looking closely.

Satisfied with the pettiness of my crime, the whistle went back into the brushes, San Cristóbal went back around my neck, and I walked home like an innocent man.