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“Good heavens...” Mr. Morgan ran a finger along a seashell I’d improvised into the design. “Are you an artist as well as a blacksmith? This... is astounding!”

“Well, I certainly do my best to exceed expectations, sir! Very glad you’re pleased with my design,” McCoy said.

Though my chest hadn’t stopped hardening to concrete, the rest of me unraveled with relief—

Wait.

“If exceeding expectations was your goal, then it’s no wonder the tallest building in New York City is in the care of such a discerning craftsman,” Mr. Morgan gushed.

Had I heard wrong? The chief’s eyes shifted in my direction, then snapped away like an elastic. “That’s mighty kind of you to say, sir.”

Two feet away from where McCoy was taking credit for my work , I thought maybe that thumper had slipped out by accident—only my stomach knew better, slowly souring like I’d swallowed something rotten. Before I could pretend the feeling away, I felt my breath tangle somewhere below my throat and blanched.

Not. Now.

A cough scorched a painful path out of my chest. I threw an arm across my face and backed toward the nearest shadow, but on the way I bumped into Innis and his pipe, breath whistling out of me like I’d soldered a boiling kettle to my neck. Innis adjusted his cap so his wide eyes could telegraph a discreet warning at me, but every muscle was already taut with the pointless effort of holding in what had already decided to escape. My next cough was a loud hack .

That’s when I felt the familiar prickle of someone watching. I looked up, and there was the Mighty Matthias. Frowning at me.

He tipped his head toward the dandy’s ear, whispered something into it, and then Mr. Morgan’s gaze met mine too, before he quickly looked away.

I flapped out my handkerchief and stuffed it over my mouth.

“My good man,” Mr. Morgan said amiably to McCoy, “seeing as this marvelous structure is the product of your own ingenuity, I’m very interested to know your opinion on a particular matter of concern. What would happen if someone were to attempt to break this enclosure from the outside? Say”—he knocked his gloved knuckles on the glass where iron bars didn’t protect it—“with the force of a heavy blow?”

“Well now,” McCoy laughed uncomfortably, “I’d say those are the very four-inch-thick tempered panels you ordered, sir. Reckon it’d take a cannon to break that glass sure.”

“Fascinating. Matthias”—he turned to the strongman—“would you do us the honor of a quality test?”

Mr. Martin shrugged. “If you say so.”

He strolled over to the glass wall, pulled his fist out of his pocket, and shook it out. He drew back his arm to strike—

“ Don’t! ”

I hardly knew where the air for that shout came from, but somehow it came out of me.

“The glass is as good as he says,” I wheezed as embarrassment chased the blood from my fingertips. “But the seals... need more time to set. If you strike it... it’ll loosen the glass from the brackets.”

Next to McCoy’s warning expression, Mr. Morgan’s gaze was inscrutable. I grimaced. Tití Luz had often warned me “el pez muere por la boca,” and here I was about to become the fish snared by its own mouth. “And when will the seals be set?”

“Tomorrow.” It was the date on the calendar I’d prepared for—the full moon.

Morgan’s mustache twitched, then widened over a genteel smile as he stepped toward me with his hand held out. I took it and matched the man’s hard grip with my own because, when you’re an extranjero , people will size you up with whatever measuring stick you give them, and Tití Luz always said I should give them no less than a yard.

“Have you a name, son?”

“Benny, sir. Benny Caldera.”

He leaned back on a leg and scratched his chin. “Caldera. That Italian?”

My accent almost climbed into my mouth before I gulped it back and answered the way I knew would make the most sense to him. “Porto Rican, sir.”

“ Porto Rican ,” said Mr. Morgan conspiratorially in Mr. Martin’s direction, as if that guy should’ve recognized me from somewhere because he’s Black and I’m brown. “Mr. Caldera, say you were in my shoes. That you absolutely had to make use of this asset tonight or else its entire function would be rendered completely and irrevocably obsolete. What would you do?”

I tried to ignore how far down McCoy’s frown had dragged his jowls while this green-suited gringo waited for me to make spontaneous liquid volume calculations.

“A fast coat of pitch could help,” I croaked. “It’d be a day before it’s cured. But just... don’t fill the tank all the way at first. If there’s less pressure on the joints”—I coughed—“the seal should hold.”

I’d be damned before I saw a month of late nights and missed lunches crumble in the Brooklyn winter because this fuzzy aguacate couldn’t wait for tar to set.

“’Course it’ll be fine to fill all the way eventually,” McCoy chimed in, as if he’d known these vulnerabilities all along.

“Capital!” Mr. Morgan turned and whispered something at the pelirroja , who nodded once at whatever he’d said. Then he pulled an envelope out of his coat containing the banknote that would pay for the job. McCoy and I both sagged with relief as Mr. Morgan flipped his top hat back on his head, bid us an extravagant farewell, and spun back toward the carriage. “Let’s get on with it, Matthias.”

Every smithy’s jaw slackened as the Mighty Matthias looped an arm under each side of the yoke and heaved the massive iron tongue over his shoulders like it was no heavier than a couple of potato sacks. Then he hauled the entire thing over to the wagon by himself and hitched it. The sight had stunned me so stupid, I hadn’t noticed the Flexible Fraülein had quietly slid into my periphery.

“Dropped my hankie,” she said in a breathy Bushwick voice. We both looked down. It was hanging off my shoe.

“I’ll get it!” cried Elmer, nearly upending Dan in his rush to aid the senorita .

Her Gibson Girl mouth curled in a coy sonrisa . “That’s all right. Mr. Caldera will get it for me.”

Elmer squeaked as I picked it up and shook it out. It was already smeared with grime. “Sorry about the dirt. Here ya go.”

“On second thought”—she gently pushed my hand back toward me—“you keep it. ’Til we meet again, mein Freund .” With a wink and a brush of red skirt against my shoes, she turned back toward the stagecoach.

To the crack of the reins, the caravan creaked its way out of the delivery bay. And in the same slippery way strange dreams vanish with the night when you wake, the Mighty Matthias, the Flexible Fraülein, and the Avocado Man were gone.

At first, I didn’t understand why the other smithies were giving me a wide berth as we shuffled back through the barn doors toward our workstations. But when McCoy strode over to me, jowls quivering like an angry vieja , I started to figure it out.

“Mr. Caldera! What in Jesus’s name did you think you was doin’, speaking to the gentleman like that?”

It was involuntary, the wave of shame that rose up my throat and rinsed all the thoughts from my head. “I-I answered his question—”

“Made a fool of me in front of customer, is what you did,” he snapped. “How do you think it looks when the foreman don’t know his own design well enough to defend it?”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“The next time you talk over me”—he stuck a calloused finger in my face—”I’ll make sure you’re tending stoves ’til Judgment Day, and that’s if I don’t boot your arse out the door first!”

“I thought that... cómo se dice ... that...” English words were disappearing faster than I could hold on to them, leaking through the hundreds of cracks all those late nights had left behind.

McCoy started to walk away, and a withering vision of the clean, bright drafting room next door snapped me back into focus.

“Wait!”

I rushed over and, against all my practice and better judgment, let the desperation show on my face. “That was my design,” I reminded him—quietly, so he wouldn’t think I was out to embarrass him further. “And Mr. Morgan called it ‘astounding.’ Ain’t that worth something?”

He squinted at me like I’d gone batty. “That design came outta my department. Which makes it my design. Who the hell do you think you are, Caldera?”

I fell back on my heels. He got me with that question.

Because I really didn’t know.

“Back to your rivets. Now .”

Watching my foreman stride off into the smoke with my ground-up dignity under his soles, I choked back the bile in my throat. That balding chayote . I didn’t know if I was madder at him or myself for buying his sweet talk when it was always just a setup to put his name on work he didn’t have the chops to do himself.

Caramba , I couldn’t even let myself stay mad. The workday schedule made no allowances for anger or grief or any kind of hurt, really; and anyway, letting myself seethe over losing the chance to work in Ornamental meant accepting that McCoy had never meant to give me the chance to begin with.

“Get a load o’ that Friday face, now.”

My head turned slowly to find Farty slouched against a pillar biting off a greasy fingernail. His other hand was tucked behind his back, like maybe he could have been a gentleman if only he’d had the proper motivation.

“Lay off, Marty,” I muttered, striding away from him toward the rivet rounds.

He jogged cheerfully along behind me. “You could always catch up with that Morgan chap, Wheezy. The way they took a shining to you, I thought they was gonna do the charitable thing and take you with ’em. Put you on a stage for the Coney crowds.”

I bit back a cough and looked around for my leather gloves. Where the hell had I put them?

“Then again, they probably didn’t want a cur like you slobberin’ all over that pretty little ginger...”

Tití Luz’s voice was in my head again. No digas nada. Dogs tame easier than people. It is why there will always be yanquis trying to convince you you’re a mutt instead of a man. Don’t you believe them, Benigno.

Suddenly, Farty’s breath was next to my ear.

“Or was it the strongman you liked best?”

I stuck my forearm under his collar and shoved him off. “I’ll weld your goddamn mouth shut!”

“What in hell’s goin’ on?” shouted McCoy from his office window.

“Nothin’, chief,” I called back in a barbed voice. Beside me, Farty sucked innocently on his teeth, then held up a sooty brown bundle.

“Lookin’ for these?”

My leather gloves. I rolled my shoulders and yanked them out of his grip, loaded the dolly with rivet stock, and carted it away from his lemon-peel smile.

Back at the furnace, the stock felt heavier than usual. I drove it into the flames and watched it turn red through scratchy eyes before pulling it out and onto the anvil. By the factory clock, it would be four relentless hours before I could leave behind the rivets and the ache in my chest, fill my acid belly with something flavorless, and fall into my cot. Didn’t much feel like walking to the pier tonight anyway.

“Look at this peaky bugger,” I heard Farty say to Dan. “You oughta be more careful with that temper, Wheezy. You’re apt to get burnt .”

I was about to tell him to “get burnt” himself when I realized: something was burning.

I looked down. I’d wrapped my palm around the glowing round—without noticing the freshly sliced hole in my glove.

“ ?Cono! ” The round clanged to the floor.

Three more Spanish obscenities flew out of my mouth in the time it took to shake off my gloves and run to the spigot, smithies dodging as I rushed past. I stuck my crackling skin under the water, grateful to stand where my shock and mortification could face the wall.

Quick feet scuffled in my direction.

“Lad, let me see it.”

“It’s nothing—”

Innis snatched my hand out of the water by the wrist and pocketed his pipe at the sight of the sizzling stripe across my palm. “There’s a pure mess. Come on, you need patchin’.”

The first-aid tin sat coated in black ash at the end of a long row of tongs. Inside it was a half-empty jar of camphorated Vaseline, an empty aspirin bottle, and a pilled roll of gauze, a humiliating testament to how infrequently beam rollers ever needed first-aid. I reached for the Vaseline.

“Don’t be daft.” He snatched the jar away and pointed at my burn. “Give it here.”

He dabbed on the goop while I hissed through my teeth. “You can’t let ’em get the better of you, you know,” he said. “Marty’s a vulture lookin’ for carrion, and you just gave ’im a feast.”

I stared at the floor with my uninjured hand in my pocket squeezing the pewter out of San Cristóbal . “Just finish so’s I can throw on a new set of gloves.”

He shook his head. “You’re no good with a burnt flapper.”

“Think I can’t handle the pain?”

“Pain ain’t the problem,” he muttered and reached for the gauze. “You’ll need time.”

I felt myself pale. Beam rollers didn’t get time off work for burned hands. They got fired.

As Innis wrapped my palm, I noticed the brass ring on his hand and remembered this guy had a family of his own: five chiquitines with his coal-black hair and translucent skin. I wondered how many of their scrapes he’d patched up just like this.

“Why are you helpin’ me?” I mumbled.

“Welp, you’re a lad in your twenties with no family,” he said flatly. “Your lungs is broke. And like it or not, you’re out of a job. With no hand, you’ll be a dead man walking—though if you ask me, you look halfway there.”

“You give great sermons.”

He wound the gauze around my palm and shrugged. “Might not be so bad gettin’ outta here. Give you a chance to sort out how to stop survivin’ and live for a change. Hankie?”

I reached around my waist with my good hand and tried not to flinch as he looped it around the dressing for extra cushioning.

Given the choice, I’d let Farty change my name from Wheezy to Worthless over losing the only job I’d ever had in New York, but as I’d run out of choices, I dragged myself to McCoy’s office. I was great at impressions, but Paddy McCoy had me beat with his impersonation of a beneficent boss who regretted firing his best smithy.

It wouldn’t be the last time I regretted building that maldito tank.