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O nce, ten years ago, as Tití Luz and I rode our solitary wagon away from her bankrupted tobacco hacienda in Caguas , she’d given me a stern order to never look back, not even if you’d forgotten your keys. Dios tiene su plan , she’d said. If God had wanted you to have your keys, He would’ve made sure you remembered them when you left.

When the only things behind you are the sneering faces of a couple of malicious pendejos like Farty and Dan, that advice feels especially practical.

I’d never been idle a day in my life, and as I stood outside the ironworks without so much as a flea in my ear for what to do with myself, I knew I hated it. Another cough was brewing; not finding my handkerchief where I usually kept it, I reached into the other pocket and pulled it out.

’Pérate. If my handkerchief was wrapped around the gauze, then what was it doing in my pocket?

I inspected my bandage more closely. I’d been too distracted by my cooked meat to notice a monogram embroidered on the knot, two letters tucked into the folds on either side of a black M . The hankie I’d given Innis wasn’t mine, but that redheaded Kutzler lady’s.

My burn was weeping through the fabric; it seemed a shame to ruin Miss Kutzler’s fancy thing with the effects of my mistakes, whether or not her German was an act (as I strongly suspected it was). I shoved my handkerchief—my real one—between my teeth and bit down as I undid the knot in the other one. Slowly, it came free and fell open into my good hand.

“Pero, ?qué?”

There was charcoal on the linen, smudged. What I’d mistaken for soot earlier was handwriting:

Fulton St. Ferry Term. 5 p.m.

I looked around, expecting to find the Fraülein’s poofy sleeves tucked behind a lamppost, but there was only the usual noisy exhibition of longshoremen and merchants swarming the docks like foulmouthed ants.

This couldn’t be an invitation, could it? I wasn’t the guy pretty German senoritas wanted to meet under the Brooklyn Bridge—I was the guy they pretended not to notice, then crossed the street to escape from. I pried more information from my memory of our brief encounter: Miss Kutzler only dropped her handkerchief on my foot after the Avocado Man had whispered into her ear. And that made me think.

Maybe the invitation wasn’t from her.

The Fulton Ferry station sat in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, on the edge of brick tenements, boardwalk, and cobblestones. Right across from it stood the Menagerie’s plumed team and caravan, bright and colorful against the faded relic of steamship transit. I pulled my cap down and hid under the awning of the windbeaten hotel across the street to look for Mr. Morgan when the Avocado Man himself emerged from the Water Street market swinging a bucket of pitch.

“You’re early.”

“?Cristo!” I jumped back and nearly landed my ass in a pickle barrel before the Mighty Matthias reached out a thick hand to steady me, his friendly smile tipped in amusement.

Suddenly next to Mr. Martin—though under him might be more accurate—I had an up-close view of the Strongest Man in the World and was a little thrown to see him in a delicate pair of wire-framed glasses. His earlier complaints about the cold made a lot more sense now that I saw how thin the layers were that insulated him from the March chill. Maybe clothiers didn’t make garments for physiques like his if he had to rely on an overcoat that barely buttoned and ended well above his knees.

“Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t spyin’ or nothin’, I was just—”

“Hey, Sam!” he yelled over my head. “The smithy made it!”

Mr. Morgan paused in his steps. Miss Kutzler poked her face out of the carriage window, beaming with the satisfaction of knowing her little hankie trick had worked.

“Come on.” The strongman thumped me on the shoulder and steered me into the street. “You don’t want a room at a flophouse like this, trust me.”

I fought to keep upright under the weight of Mr. Martin’s grip as Miss Kutzler stepped onto the street with a different skirt under her wool coat—a modest charcoal gray one that, against her bright red hair, gave her the look of an iron right out of the fire.

Mr. Morgan put down the bucket to greet me. “Delighted and, if I may say, surprised to see you here so soon, Mr. Caldera,” he said. “I do hope you didn’t skive off work for our sake.”

“No, uh, I tangled with a hot round and, well...”

Four sets of eyes looked down at my bandaged hand, and the pelirroja clasped her hands over her heart in dramatic sympathy. “That looks abso-tively awful! You ain’t gonna lose that hand, are ya?”

“It’s a burn, Sonia,” Mr. Martin said dully, “not the plague.”

“Still,” said Mr. Morgan with a knitted brow, “a burn may impede his usefulness for tonight’s engagements.”

I paled. A vision of my muddy, lifeless body stuffed into a burlap sack at the bottom of the Hudson invaded my thoughts with the meticulous detail of a blueprint. “‘E-engagements,’ sir?”

“No formalities, please. It’s Sam,” he said, to which Mr. Martin added, “Matthias for me,” and Miss Kutzler finished, “Sonia on the offseason!”

“Thanks, um, Sam. Mr. Morgan—sir. It’s just I’m not really an engagements kind of guy. I’m more the dis engagement type.”

The straight line of his brows tilted. “And yet, here you are.”

He walked backward and lifted a corner of the tarp, revealing one of the ornamentation panels I’d wrought. “It didn’t take a scholar to figure out your foreman wasn’t the craftsman behind our commission—”

“Excuse me, no, not a scholar,” interrupted Matthias, glaring sourly over his folded arms at Mr. Morgan. He bent his head in my direction. “I told him if McSaggy-Face really designed this tank, I’d eat my hat.”

“Yeah, yeah, everyone’s a genius,” Sonia grumbled. “I’m the one who got him to come—”

“And that is why,” Mr. Morgan plowed on, “we can use your hand. Burned or not.” He dug into the folds of his cape and produced a folded bit of paper which he held out to me.

I took it and read aloud, “‘Sober men wanted for perilous aquatic excursion. Generous wages, swimmers preferred. Risk of injury and possible death. Inquiries to Samuel T. Morgan, 1200 Surf Avenue, Brooklyn.’”

He plucked the paper out of my grip and restored it to his cape. “The papers refused to run it. For the best, I suppose. Goodness knows thrill-seekers at Coney Island are a dime a dozen. We’d have a line around the park,” he declared, as if drowning for your wages was so tempting. “But that’s where you come in.”

My brain was still stuck on aquatic . “Me? But I can’t swim.”

All three of them stepped back.

“Can’t swim?” Mr. Morgan repeated, aghast. “Are you not from an island?”

“I was a smithy on the coast, but I grew up in the mountains. Couldn’t really swim in those rivers.” Not after the hurricane, anyway. Whether I’d known how to swim before the storm trapped me in tree roots and turned off the lights in my memory was anyone’s guess.

“So, he can’t swim.” Sonia waved a dainty hand by way of dismissing this skill’s relevance to my valuable qualities. “‘Swimmers preferred’ don’t mean ‘swimmers required,’ does it?”

“Of course, not,” Mr. Morgan agreed, sounding slightly less enthusiastic. “More important to the cause is the tank’s integrity, and as Mr. Caldera is the most knowledgeable person here on that count, his presence would safeguard against any unplanned setbacks while we procure its”—he cleared his throat—“inhabitant.”

My gaze drifted nervously back to the house-sized cargo as the words “risk of injury and possible death” came back to mind. “What kind of inhabitant?”

Mr. Morgan looped an arm around my shoulder and a mix of pipe smoke, brandy, and tangy cologne wafted up my nose, coaxing a cough from my throat.

“Secrecy is key, but it may be safe enough to tell you this,” he murmured. “Not even P. T. Barnum, that colossal goldbrick, could gaff so rare and astounding an exhibit. No one alive—no one but I —has ever seen the like of it. But you”—he gave my shoulder a squeeze—“would be among the very first in human history to do so without having to pay a dime for the honor. All I’d need is your promise not to tell a soul what we are catching.”

Ave María. I wondered how many suckers this Morgan guy had hooked with that slick voice of his, peddling excitement and intrigue for a jitney per ticket.

I glanced down at his bucket. “And?”

“And a second coat of pitch.”

Always a catch.

“In exchange for...” Mr. Morgan produced a small clip of banknotes. He tugged one out and handed it to me.

I nearly choked at the number on it. “Twenty dollars?!”

His face fell. “Is that not sufficient?”

“Gosh, no, jeez, it’s plenty,” I sputtered through numb lips. “It’s—it’s too much!”

Morgan shook his head decisively. “I should say not. Something you need for something I want is how agreements are made. Now then.” He adjusted his top hat. “Do we have one?”

This guy’s mouth was obviously well-practiced in manipulating the average Juan Bobo. On a day when my hopes got stuffed in the blast furnace, I wasn’t keen to make the same mistake I’d made the day McCoy hooked me with that head-smelter. I was about to return his banknote when a strong wind off the East River turned my head toward the water.

The Fulton Ferry was set to depart. As the last Manhattan-bound workmen stepped aboard, the operator shouted to the street, “Final call for New York Schemers and Dreamers! Last chance to wave at Lady Liberty! Alll aboooard!”

I got a funny feeling hearing him say that. A niggle that made me pocket the banknote.

Keeping secrets was easy. Lo que no se dice, no se sabe, Tití Luz often said, and no one was better at keeping their mouth shut than me. Anyway, earning some extra cash sure beat all the nothing I’d originally planned for the evening.

“Sure,” I said. “So long as I don’t get wet.”

Before I had traded my Caribbean island for one coated in soot, the only excitement I’d ever had was with my boyhood pal Ramón. That kid was a professional at roping me into dicey schemes, which always ended in me getting my ears boxed while Ramón got off like the sneaky sinvergüenza he was. Something about this little side job had the familiar whiff of a momentary thrill that would end up blunting my hearing.

Mr. Morgan said we were riding out to someplace in Queens called Lawrence Point. With time to burn until we reached our destination, Matthias and I made like a couple of fish and climbed into the tank through the bottom hatch with two paintbrushes, the bucket of pitch, and a greasy paper bag of Gage stuff like whether steel was stronger than heavy iron and if I’d ever met a Skywalker. I was impressed Matthias even knew what the Native Mohawk ironworkers called themselves, but as Skywalkers usually worked off-site (and hundreds of feet in the air), I’d only ever talked to one once. We had breaked for lunch at the same outside table, and when I’d asked where he was from—“Uptown, midtown, downtown, out-of-town?”—he’d laughed, pointed at the clouds, and said, “Look up.”

Less than halfway through the bucket of pitch, right about when Matthias switched to talking about the weather, I started thinking the strongman’s name should have been ’Metido instead.

“Sure beats a Porto Rican winter, doesn’t it?”

I cut a look at him mid-brushstroke. “That a joke?”

“It’s a fact. jitneys says you never saw a snowflake in your whole life before you came here, and now you can’t get enough of ’em.”

The first time I saw snow, I lost an entire night’s sleep watching it fall in thick cottony clumps from the sky.

“Lucky guess,” I said.

Matthias laughed so heartily, the metal under us vibrated. “Brother, if it were me, I’d’ve stayed in Porto Rico just so’s I didn’t have to freeze my ass off five months out of the year.”

That wasn’t likely. Staying in Puerto Rico for the temperature was like choosing purgatory over heaven because you had an aversion to white robes and trumpets. Not that Nueva York was such an improvement.

“What?” Matthias asked when he noticed me scowling at my paintbrush.

“Nah, nothing. I just...” I rolled my eyes at myself. “I built a tank bigger than my room in the tenement, and I don’t even get to live in it.”

“Ha! The poetry of the peasant class,” he remarked, reloading his brush. “Mind if I use that little anecdote?”

“For what?”

“My autobiography,” he said proudly. “ The Heaviest Weight: A Mighty Memoir . Catchy title, right?”

“I guess. Does that mean I’ll be in it?”

“Depends on whether you gonna be a main character,” he said in the manner of issuing a challenge. “So, tell me. How does a Porto Rican join up with a bunch of Ulstermen in Red Hook, instead of the rest of his compadres in East Harlem?”

The question stunned the words right out of my head.

Matthias pushed up his glasses to sharpen his already sharp focus on me. “You do know you ain’t the only Porto Rican in New York City, don’t you?”

I looked away. “I know.”

weeks before I’d sailed into the Atlantic Basin, Tití Luz gave me her San Cristóbal necklace with an address to a rooming house on Second Avenue. She had connections with an unobtrusive society of revolutionary exiles in East Harlem who rolled tobacco to the beat of the latest socialist essay just like the tabaqueros back home—except they made plans and propaganda for Puerto Rican liberation from the seclusion of cigar factories sixteen hundred miles away. Tití Luz was a revolutionary herself; she’d had no reason to doubt I’d fit in with a community so like the one that had helped raise me. “They will greet you like family,” she’d said.

But after what happened between Ramón and me, I wasn’t much inclined to believe in Tití Luz ’s idea of family with New York borinquenos . I disembarked in Red Hook, and though the address said to go west, I stayed put.

Until today, I supposed. “How do you know so much about my people, anyway? You’re a strongman.”

“I am a writer ,” he clarified. “I know everything about this city. Hell, I know everything about every other place I’ve been, and I’ve been places. If it’s where I make my bed and earn my bread, I make it my business to know where my feet stand. Don’t you?”

“I stopped feeling my feet back on Flatbush Avenue.”

With one hand, he unwound his red woolen scarf and tossed it to me. The residual ache of workplace disappointments eased in my chest as I wrapped it around my neck. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Matthias said, resuming his brushstrokes. “So, what you gonna do with that bum hand now you ain’t got a job?”

“You always ask this many questions when you first meet someone?”

“Just passing the time,” he said innocently. “All right, how ’bout you ask me something?”

You’d think I would have been prepared for this opportunity, brimming as I was with questions like “What sort of guy was Samuel Morgan who’d run a sideshow but speak like a gentle-man?” and “Is it true that Coney Island pleasure-seekers ditch the rules of civilized society on the southbound Brooklyn Rapid Transit train?” and, more intriguingly, “What exactly will this tank hold that required me to make it so indestructible?”

What I asked instead: “Can you really lift two thousand pounds?”

Matthias barked another laugh. “Do I look like John Henry to you?”

“Who’s John Henry?”

“Jesus, Benny, never mind. The point is, do you believe I can lift two thousand pounds?”

That one was easy. I’d watched this guy lift a solid metal tongue with his bare hands and drag an apartment-sized iron tank without breaking a sweat, much less his bones. Had I not stopped him, I was willing to bet the San Cristóbal in my pocket there would be a Mighty fist-sized hole in the glass where he would have punched it.

I nodded.

“Then brother”—he flicked his cap—“that’s all you need to know.”

Daylight changed shifts with the night, and we spilled out the hatch at a bare stretch of road that dead-ended at a patch of rocky riverbank beside the East River. For the first time, I could see the pancake-flat outline of Rikers Island, a distant stretch of fuzz beside two dark lumps that Matthias informed me were the Brother Islands. He said the larger lump played host to a hospital for contagious diseases and a small lighthouse that guided ships through the dicey waters of Hell Gate.

“Speaking of Hell Gate”—Matthias nudged my shoulder—“looks like a couple o’ devils escaped.”

I followed the strongman’s gaze to a dusty Hudson motorcar by the shore where two men were hitching a rowboat to the back fender in matching light-brown duffle coats, though neither of them could pass for Navy men. One wore a peg leg from the right knee down and didn’t seem to notice us; the other lumbered over, teetering a bit on the shifting pebbles like his shoes had never stood on unstable ground before.

“Hey, Emmett, bring your walnut limb over here and get a load o’ this cargo,” the approaching man said, prompting the guy with the peg leg to abandon the rope for a look. “We bringin’ Moby Dick home in this thing, or what!”

Sonia was at my side in an instant and hooked her arm through mine. “Stick with me, kiddo. I’ll introduce you to the gang,” she murmured, then gently pulled me along.

Stood together, the two men were taller than me by a few inches, not quite middle-aged, and similarly dressed, their matching blond hair glinting gold under their flat caps. In the dim lamplight, they looked like two of the same person, peg leg notwithstanding.

“Meet Benny Caldera,” Sonia announced, “the craftsman behind this bee-yoo-tiful tank. Benny, meet Eli and Emmett Rhodes and Madam Navya.”

That was three names. Where was the third person?

A light tug on my coat made me look down. At my feet, in women’s winter furs over what looked like brightly colored, loose-fitting trousers, stood a woman of proportions so impossible, I rubbed my eyes in case they were fooling me. This lady they called madam couldn’t have been taller than two feet.

“Navya Attwal. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Benny,” she said in a cadence that tickled my eardrums. I took her hand with three fingers and promptly forgot how not to gawp.

“You... You’re a—”

“A madam .” Her air of authority seemed even more pronounced in a voice like a slightly sped-up gramophone record. “‘Midget’ is a hateful word. I find nothing more accurately expresses my sovereignty—and intolerance for ignoramuses—than does my actual title.”

“Madam it is,” I said quickly. “Nice to meet you.”

“I’m Eli,” announced one of the rubios , “and this one-legged lunkhead to my right is Emmett.”

Eli saw my bandaged meat hook and clapped me on the shoulder in lieu of a handshake while Emmett made the sort of face I was used to seeing from guys who wondered what shade of trouble I was. He leaned toward Mr. Morgan, who was hassling a wad of fish netting by the motorcar. “What’s with the outsider, Sam? I thought we all agreed we was keepin’ this a secret!”

With a soft grunt, Morgan heaved the heavy net over his shoulder and wheeled around. “I am buying his discretion and expertise,” he whispered impatiently, “and if you all don’t quiet down and give me a hand with this confounded netting, I’ll pay him out of your earnings!”

Matthias strolled over, plucked the netting off Mr. Morgan’s shoulder, and laid it quietly in the small boat with an eye roll that well conveyed his disdain for being the only capable person here. Eli clapped my shoulder again before turning back to the motorcar, prompting a small glare in my direction from the less friendly Rhodes before he walked off too.

“Don’t mind Emmett,” Sonia said. “He’s just overprotective of his twin nincompoop.”

Twins, then. That didn’t seem so odd for a sideshow, but then again, neither did Sonia. And anyway, I was hardly an expert on the topic of seaside entertainment if it didn’t involve perching on a pier to stare at Lady Liberty.

“Pardon me, Mr. Benny.” My eyes dipped to find Madam Navya shivering at my feet. “If you could please assist me into the carriage. God did not make me for standing outside in this relentless cold—on Holi of all days! We should be celebrating around a bonfire instead of freezing to death in this late-night inanity!”

“Oh! Yes, ma’am—uh, madam.”

What etiquette had Tití Luz given me for assisting women no taller than my knee? I haltingly reached toward her waist to pick her up before she slapped my fingers away and gasped, “ Ghanta! What are you doing?!”

“I-I don’t know!”

Behind me, Sonia was cackling into her gloves. “Aw, Navya, go easy on him!”

“Presumptuous boy,” the madam snapped. “I simply need the stepstool, which is inside the carriage and should be placed on the ground so I may ascend it! Dur fitteh muh! ”

Spluttering apologies, I rushed to the coach, reached through the window for the stool, and froze when my hand grazed against cold metal instead. I peeked in. Lying in the footwell of the carriage was a small pistol.

I snatched up the stepstool like it might set off the trigger and placed it before Madam Navya’s feet. “Uh, there’s something. On the floor. Maybe just... be careful.”

Madam Navya eyed me like I was dimmer than a candlestick when she slipped into the coach and emerged a moment later with the pistol. In her hands, it looked like a full-sized rifle.

“Your derringer, Mr. Morgan,” she called out. Morgan felt his pockets, then strode over and plucked the gun from her fingers.

His gaze caught my alarm as he tucked it into his waistcoat. “Not to worry,” he said, smiling. “For emergencies only.”

The alarm bells going off between my ears were finally too loud to ignore. He headed to the motorcar. I jogged after him.

“Sir, would it be all right to ask what we’re catching now?”

“Please, stop with the ‘sirs.’ I’m not a hundred-year-old man.” Morgan threw his cape into the back of the car, dipped into the footwell, and came back out with a stack of buckets. “All right. What do you know about sirens? And I don’t mean fire engines.”

To say his question had broadsided me was an understatement. In the split second he waited for me to answer, I worried I’d forgotten all my English words. All my Spanish ones too. Because there wasn’t a translation for his question that made any sense—not if he really intended to say “ sirenas .”

“You mean the half bird–half ladies that lure sailors to their deaths with a song,” I half answered, half asked. “‘Fields of bones,’ and all that?”

His eyebrows rose to his hairline. “You know The Odyssey ?”

Tití Luz was a seasoned lectora who had taught me to read so I could take over reciting texts to entertain the tabaqueros on days when she felt too hoarse, though I suspected it was actually so I’d have a leg up on the other morenos looking for work during the job famine. I wasn’t much a fan of delivering socialist essays, but as far as books went, I’d devour anything that wasn’t la Sagrada Biblia . “I’m familiar.”

Recovered from the shock of discovering I wasn’t as simple as I looked, Morgan leaned in. “Then, what if I told you the succubus of the sea exists—right here in our own waters—and that the beast is not half bird, but half fish ?”

I stared at his armful of buckets. “You mean...”

“Yes,” he said, his eyes glittering. “After tonight, Morgan’s Menagerie will finally have its very own mermaid!” He pushed the buckets into my arms. “Now, fill ’er up!”

And he marched off.

Bueno. I didn’t know anything else about Sam Morgan, but I was the only other person in Lawrence Point who knew exactly how much he’d paid McCoy today. As disappointing as my day had been, I knew his would be a hundred times worse when he rode back to Coney Island in the morning with an empty tank.

With the dory now bobbing amidst a broken crust of ice along the riverbank, Eli, Emmett, and I filled the tank, the extra handkerchief back around my bandage in case I needed my right hand for anything beyond this maldito Jack-and-Jill business. I couldn’t be the only skeptic hanging out in the cold with the Avocado Man, but as no one said anything, I just kept quiet and hoped for a ride home later.

Once the tank was full enough to submerge a man up to his waist, we rejoined the rest of the crew to hear Mr. Morgan whisper through his plan. Everyone had a job—even Madam Navya, whose size apparently made her “singularly well-suited for a lookout”—but Sonia’s cheerful air evaporated in the icy breeze as soon as she heard her part in this locura.

She was the bait.

“Nope. Uh-uh,” Sonia said in a trembling whisper. “What if it starts workin’ us over with its voice or somethin’?”

“Relax, Sonia,” drawled Emmett with a wry smile. “It don’t even know the lyrics to ‘Shine On, Harvest Moon.’”

Sonia’s frigid glare made the ice-encrusted river look like a tepid bath.

“Ah, thank you for reminding me.” Morgan reached into his trouser pockets and produced a small mound of dark, fluffy wads. “Earplugs. Courtesy of Lulu for blocking sounds of sinister intent. Everyone, take two.”

“I know what I’ll be wearing when Emmett starts snoring— Ow!” Eli yelped as Emmett elbowed him in the ribs.

“Be quiet, you pair of congenital numbskulls,” Morgan hissed. “Their hearing is exceptional! Do you want to run them off?” Eli hid his eye roll and gave Emmett a stealthy shove while Morgan put his telescope to his eye and pointed it at the sky. “The moon is in position,” he said breathlessly. “Now. You must go now .”

“Jesus Christmas, this is where the General Slocum sank,” Sonia whispered, staring woefully at the dory. “If the boat goes under—”

“Matthias will keep you perfectly safe.” Morgan tacked on a cavalier smile. “Would I ever endanger Coney Island’s favorite Fr?ulein for a mermaid?”

“Nobody answer that,” grumbled Matthias. “Let’s go, Sonia.”

Muttering about “the toes ’bout to break clean off” inside his rubber boots, Matthias looped one arm around Sonia’s waist, another behind her leg, and lifted her off the ground as if she weighed no more than the combined mass of her clothes, her lips trembling as he placed her gently in the boat. Then, in wide strokes that hewed through the ice, the strongman rowed away from us until both he and Sonia were just another shadow on the water.

We moved to a set of logs by the bank, me sandwiched under a wool blanket between Morgan and Eli, Emmett huddled against Eli’s other side trying to rub warmth into his brother’s shoulder.

And we waited.

An hour later, and moments from becoming the world’s first human piragua , Mr. Morgan seized my arm so roughly I almost fell off the log. Wordlessly, he pointed at a glittery spot on the water we all squinted at.

Sonia was in the boat, upright, untouched, and alone. Per Morgan’s earlier instructions, Matthias had hidden himself.

But just ahead of the dory—against all logic and reason—a shadow dipped in and out of the water.

Madre de Dios.

Something was pulling the boat to shore.