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O nce Río had filled my head with the Currents, I couldn’t drain them back out. Morgan stayed gone for another few days, leaving me free to ruminate on Río’s strange convictions without getting any closer to understanding why he held them. His mother was slaughtered, himself imprisoned, yet he still believed something greater than himself had a plan or at least a reason if only he could make it back to the water to hear it.

What the hell did I believe?

I was about four years removed from the day my fate became chiefly dependent on whoever handed me a paycheck. But whenever I looked at the tank and remembered all the weird synchronicities that followed its creation, I wondered if the Currents ever bothered to work their strange magic on land.

While I wrestled with the matter in private, I decided to ask Río if there was anything he thought might cure his boredom whenever my workload kept me away.

“Seashells,” he said. He lifted the end of one of his braids where a few small cowrie shells were threaded into his hair like beads. “My mother enjoyed carving them. Perhaps I would as well.”

“Seashells, it is.”

Being ahead of schedule with my renovations, I took myself on a treasure hunt for Río down Stratton’s Walk toward the sand. As my shoes sank into powder, the commercial amusements world gave way to the shoreline like vellum peeling off a painting. Now that the March breeze had lost its bite, it was easier to imagine this place in summer, warm, noisy, and packed so tight with bathers you couldn’t move without stepping on one.

I sifted a few nice unchipped shells out of the pebbles and cigar butts, then looked eastward where the craggy silhouettes of fishing boats lined the horizon.

It’d be fun to rent un barquito out here. To sail so far out that Dreamland’s tower, the Ferris wheels, and the Iron Pier would fit comodito in my palm.

Then a shock of blond hair at the corner of my eye interrupted my fantasizing.

“I can resist anything but temptation!”

A dozen yards away, Emmett and Eli were watching the waves roll in, propped up on elbows with their three-and-a-half legs outstretched. Emmett’s yell drew a dramatic gasp out of Eli who retaliated by shoving his brother sideways into the sand. Surely Emmett was the sort to hit back, but to my surprise, he started laughing —a cheerful, mischievous cackle. He grabbed one of Eli’s suspenders and yanked him down with him, the pair of them a sandy heap of giggling malcriados .

Was this what they meant by “chasing seagulls”?

As if he could sense they weren’t alone anymore, Eli looked past Emmett’s shoulder and saw me. His boyish smile converted to a curious stare.

I nabbed a last scallop shell and shuffled out of the sand. Emmett was still laughing, and I didn’t think I ought to ruin a moment that produced such a rare and pleasant sound.

“What in Neptune’s name is that noisy contraption doing?”

The circulation system was, after a bit of elbow grease—and more Ave Marías than I could count—finally up and running. I was clearing away extra parts while Río watched the effervescent bubbles fluttering up from the hose with barely controlled outrage.

A finger at a time, I wiped my grease-blackened hands off on a rag. “It’s aerating the water.”

“I can see that. I just do not understand why .”

At this point, I didn’t entirely understand myself. The water looked clearer than a spring, even after I’d convinced Río to end his hunger strike.

“You know. To keep the water... clean,” I said uncomfortably.

“Why do you need to keep the water clean if I am already cleaning it?”

I snapped the rag over my shoulder. “Whaddaya mean you’re cleaning it?”

Río’s eyes rolled to the ceiling and back. “Merfolk are purifying to water. It is the defining trait of my kind.” I gawked at him for several moments before Río folded his arms across his chest and said, “Is that so hard to believe?”

“Of course it is! You eat fish!”

“So?”

As far as Río and I had come as polite conversationalists, grilling a merman about his bodily functions felt like a Brooklyn Bridge too far. “So, do you never... I mean, you don’t need to...”

He was eyeing me like I’d gone bobo . “Defecate?” he supplied helpfully.

“Aw, jeez , Río—”

“Sky and sea, must every function of your human bodies humili-ate you?” he huffed, somehow more offended at my prudishness than that mierda had become our latest discussion topic. “The water gives me life. As a Keeper of the Sea, I give it back. A forest does the same for the air. What could be easier to understand?”

“But that ain’t easy, that’s—” Milagroso , I thought, but rather than call him a miracle to his face, I said, “Magic.”

He cocked an indignant eyebrow. “Merfolk do not lie.”

“Oh yeah? How about all that stuff you said about tearing me apart with your teeth?”

“That was not a falsehood. I simply altered my intentions.”

“Ave María—”

“If you cannot believe me, then pass that cloth through the bars.”

I glanced down at the grease-smeared rag hanging over my shoulder and, grimacing, picked up a fold of it between two fingers. “What, this?”

“Yes. Bring it to me.”

That seemed like a terrible idea. I knew what happened to fish that wandered into the Gowanus by accident, and as tough as Río seemed, I wasn’t keen to poison his water by casually dropping industrial lubricant into it.

But Río was resolute, and I was curious. I hauled myself up the rungs and dangled the greasy rag through the grill.

He glared at it so judgmentally, I thought the grease might melt off it from shame. But he snatched it away, and to my disbelief, smoothed it all over his agile hands as if it were a washcloth. When he flung it back at the bars, I caught it on the hook of my fingers—then almost dropped it again once I saw what had become of it.

“?Cómo...?”

It was perfectly clean. A bright linen white. I turned it over and over for even a hint of the grime I’d left on it, but apart from being soaked through with salt water, it looked the same as it had the day I’d bought it.

I stared at him with bulging eyes. “Can you do this... to anything? Could you, say, clear up the Gowanus Canal?”

“There are limits to our capacity to heal water,” he said soberly. “The canals are beyond anyone’s salvation unless human cretins can stop polluting them.”

“Still, that’s... increíble .”

“Not incredible,” he contested. “I am mer.”

He gave no further explanations. But after what I’d just seen, I decided I didn’t need them.

“All right,” I said, recovering. “And now I’ll tell you why we should keep the pump running anyway.”

Visibly disappointed that his demonstration hadn’t earned him a silent tank, he asked, “Why?”

I answered in Spanish. “Because it will keep your gifts a secret. If the Shark ever finds out what you just showed me, he will find a way to exploit it.”

Río’s face darkened in understanding. “I see.”

“Almost forgot...” I dug out a handful of seashells from my pocket and lowered them through the grill, balancing them in my open palm. “I tried to find good ones, but you know how lousy that beach gets with litter.”

His expression pivoted from surprise to anticipation. With a slow, graceful roll of his tail, Río rose high enough out of the water to examine the collection, somehow avoiding touching me as he plucked out the shells one at a time.

“You’ll need this too,” I said, handing down my small carbon steel graver. “It’s for engraving metal, but with a soft hand, I bet it’d do the trick on shells too.”

He lifted his face to smile at me. It made me sit up a little straighter. “Thank you, Benigno.”

“No problem.”

Río had started examining his gifts more closely, but before I could descend the rungs, he stopped me. “The noise shall keep us a secret as well, I expect?”

“‘Us’?”

He held up a pearly-white coquina shell. “Our friendship.”

My cheeks warmed. For a guy who usually made enemies just walking into a room, making a friend like Río felt like a big deal. “Yeah. If you can tolerate it—the noise, I mean, not the friend. Ship.”

“You should know, Benigno,” he said with sudden seriousness, “that violence is not in our nature. I regret the threats I made.”

I stared dumbly at Río’s contrition, not daring to mention how small his regret should be compared to mine.

“Thanks. But save it for the day I get you out.”

On the second to last Friday in March, Morgan and Sonia returned from Manhattan. The showman congratulated me on getting his circulation system running but was otherwise wound up tighter than a wristwatch for reasons he wouldn’t share with anyone. Lulu waited past Timmy’s bedtime to tell me she was sure Morgan had resumed “embalming his liver,” which I guess explained the acetic tang in the pipe smoke aroma coming off his green suit.

As for Sonia, she withdrew to her bedroom for the day, claiming that traveling in corsets had left her spine “stiffer than a lousy plank” and she needed to unwind.

Once Morgan had returned to the theater, there was no way to keep him away from Río’s tank whenever he felt the inclination to “train” him. But in the showman’s absence, I had prepared an arsenal of distractions to pull out whenever Río’s refusal to so much as look at the guy made him ready to combust, from weathered upholstery to rusted electrical fixtures to rats in the walls.

It was a goddamned miracle I got anything done when the Avocado Man was around.

Gracias a Dios , I’d had extra hands in the museum earlier that week. Vera had helped me rip up the old carpeting on the nutty condition that I let her try on my old guayabera . It cheered her up so much, she forgot to snipe back when Sonia yelled about finding crushed cigarillos in her silk hatbox. Once the carpets were gone, Matthias had volunteered to be my right hand at restoring the wire skeletons of the museum’s monstruos —me using a pair of needle-nose pliers, Matthias just using his fingers. (We’d decided it might be time to retire the Chimera after we found its crumbling head hidden under Timmy’s bed behind his shoes.)

Even Igor had lent his massive height toward fixing some faulty bulbs, albeit he’d seemed far more interested in playing rummy with Madam Navya while she complained about the Trolley Dodgers’ disappointing starting lineup. I had my suspicions about why he let her go on like that when Igor himself was a Yankees fan.

Then there was Emmett. Despite Sonia’s mostly accurate prediction that things would go back to normal after the dinner table incident, he still gave me a wide berth and barely said a word to me if he didn’t have to. Meanwhile, Eli campaigned for a seat as Emmett’s only human credential.

So it happened that, on the rainy day Morgan left work early, Eli came to visit me in the theater while I was repairing the friezes. “Need an extra set of hands?”

I glanced nervously back at the stage where Río slept behind the curtain.

“Sure,” I said. “Just, you know... keep it down.”

He cut his eyes to the stage. “Sounds like you’ve got a motorcar running back there, I should still keep it down?”

My eyebrows went up. “How bad do you want a merman listening in on your conversations?”

Eli shuddered. “I’ll keep it down. Jesus, I dunno how you get anything done with Moby Dick over there. Gives me the heebie-jeebies.” He rolled up his sleeves as he walked toward the spot where I was sanding down sculpted walls to prime them.

I tore another sheet of sandpaper from my pile and made room for him to stand next to me. “Don’t rub too hard.”

He chuckled and started scrubbing the paper gently over the peeling surface of a trident protruding from the frieze. “I gotta tell Emmett he’s missing out.”

“On what? A chance to polish Poseidon’s prick?”

“Ha! You got a funny bone, you know that?” he remarked as flecks of faded gold cascaded to the floor. “He woulda come, ya know, but he wasn’t up to walking today.”

“If you came to make excuses for Emmett,” I said tightly, “I ain’t the right audience.”

Eli dropped his head and sighed. “He’s just... protective.”

“Right. ’Cause I’m such a threat.”

This wasn’t like me. When folks made a stink about where I came from, I never fussed. But despite everything, I wanted that pasty-faced gringo to like me, and I hated how helpless I felt that he didn’t.

“It ain’t about you,” Eli said. “Not really, anyway. He’s just got a hard time trusting people thanks to some no-good louses we grew up with.”

“But you don’t have that problem,” I remarked, “and you’re his brother.”

The look on Eli’s face, like he’d bitten into salt expecting something sweet, paused my hand.

“What?” I asked.

He glanced over my shoulder at the theater doors to make sure they were closed. “Benny,” he said in quiet disbelief. “He ain’t my brother.”

My eyes squinted over my O-shaped mouth. “What do you mean he ain’t—”

And then, as if Poseidon’s trident had fallen out of the wall to thump me over the head, I understood him perfectly.

Their constant closeness. The playful way they touched each other. Emmett’s ferocious protectiveness of Eli, and Eli’s infinite patience.

Chasing seagulls.

“He’s...”

The sandpaper fell out of my grasp. Fumbling to catch it, I backed into the ladder, and it tipped. I had to leap to catch it before it crashed to the ground. Eli folded his arms over his chest. “You oughta be in the ballet.”

“Sorry—”

“Does it bother you?”

“No!” I said quickly. “It don’t bother me at all. I just... I ain’t never met a man who— Who—”

“Loves another man?”

I nodded.

Eli pulled a bench away from the wall where Morgan had stacked them and sat, leaning forward on his elbows. “Let’s be honest, most people would be bothered.”

My cap felt too hot, so I took it off and sat down next to him, sticking the mask of casual interest back on my face.

“I ain’t the judging type,” I said.

He snorted. “Everyone thinks they ain’t the judging type, but they can’t all be telling the truth, right?”

“What’s there to judge? I ain’t never been in love.”

“What?” He balked dramatically. “Handsome guy like you? Somebody chain you to that Red Hook furnace so’s you’d never meet a girl?”

I shrugged. “There was no one to meet.”

It wasn’t a lie, exactly. Hardly anyone ever tempted me; I’d left the one person who did behind in Caguas when I was thirteen. Since then, I’d been too distracted with surviving to ask myself if I still knew how to want someone that way, and in the meantime, my heart became like iron left too long in the flames: charred and brittle beyond salvaging.

“Matthias mentioned you and Emmett ran away,” I said.

Eli cast me a bittersweet grin. “We was acolytes together at Saint Joe’s Episcopal outside Jersey City when we figured out our enthusiasm for Sunday service had nothing to do with sneaking the communion wine. You wouldn’t have recognized us back then—not just ’cause I was Rudy, he was Lenny, and neither of us was blond, but because that kid I grew up with was so different. Lenny was a handsome, freckle-faced dope who ate too many taffies and loved his horses—almost as much as he loved me.” Eli bumped his shoulder into mine and added, “Well. I guess he’s still a handsome dope.”

I looped my finger around San Cristóbal . “What changed him?”

“Some nosy rat in the neighborhood told the priest she saw us foolin’ around. When my pops heard I was kissin’ the altar boy behind the hay bales, he laid into me like buckshot with that leather belt of his. I thought nothing could ever feel as bad as I did gettin’ whipped by my pops. But then, when he was done with me, he shouted, ‘I’m gonna give that fairy a leveler he’ll never forget.’ And that felt even worse.”

There was a word in there I’d never heard before. I wasn’t sure I wanted it defined for me, but I asked anyway. “What’s a leveler?”

Eli looked down into his lap and scraped his thumbnail across the sandpaper. “He beat him, Benny. Left both his eyes in mourning, busted some ribs, and snapped his leg so bad it nearly killed him.”

“Then that’s why his leg is...” My fingers went numb. “Cristo.”

I could see it on Eli’s face, the ghost of a devastated kid named Rudy, his lips pulled into a line only Emmett ever got to cross. “Yeah, well. Once the leg was gone, he healed up so fast I thought he’d done it on purpose to spite my pops. ’Cause as soon as he could walk again, Em got me out of that house and away from my father,” he murmured. “He saved my life, kid. And I’ve been his extra leg ever since.”

For a full minute, my jaw hung open. I’d never known a love like that—the kind that paved a road through Hell and motored you to freedom. How many chumps had come to see the Conjoined Twins on stage, and never seen what they were looking at?

“And the company?”

“Oh, they know,” he said, relaxing into an easier topic. “They only call us the Twins ’cause that’s our gaff.”

“Ave María.” I scrubbed my cap over my sweaty neck. “You two ever think you’d find yourselves attached at the hip in a sideshow?”

Eli chuckled. “Nah, but I ain’t got no regrets. The show keeps us together and safe from folks who don’t understand. And that’s a damn sight better than bein’ alone and dead.”

“Yeah...”

Eli swiveled on his seat to look me in the eye. “Emmett’s not a bad guy, Benny. He’s just been broken in more places than his leg, and sometimes it’s hard for him to understand that the whole world ain’t tryin’ to take what’s his. Especially if he thinks you’re... hiding something.”

I swallowed, but nothing went down. Eli’s gaze had nailed me to the bench.

“See, he’s got this crazy idea,” he said carefully, “that maybe we three got something in common.”

I tried to laugh, but it came out thin. “What gave him that idea?”

“Could be the way you look at Miss Kutzler. Or don’t look, I should say.”

My lungs wasted no time with their tontería , squeezing around the air in my chest while the rest of me sat stiff as a beam. I’d been here before, my bare palm sizzling against a glowing bar. “Emmett’s the one who said she’s sweet on me. I’m just trying to be careful around her.”

“Then you gotta be the most careful guy I’ve ever seen.” Eli’s face softened. “Listen. I’m the last person on earth who’s gonna judge you. I just know what it’s like to live in a skin that ain’t mine. Onstage, that’s the act, but offstage, I get to have Emmett and a family who loves us like there ain’t nothing wrong with us. Because there ain’t .”

He placed a hand on my shoulder, and everything around it tensed.

“Ain’t nothing wrong with you either, Benny—”

“I’m no invert .”

My voice came out blunted. Like a bat. It was a reflex, the way a cornered perrito bites in fear without meaning to. Eli let go of my shoulder like he’d touched a hot stove, and my regret filled in the outline of his missing hand.

“I’m sorry,” I breathed. “I wasn’t trying to—”

“It’s all right,” Eli said through a weak smile. “My fault for prying.”

Without another word, he went back to work on Poseidon’s trident until the sky went dark behind the curtains. Before he left, we moved the ladder and drop cloths to continue my work the next day.

But I already knew, when the next day came, he wouldn’t be back to help.