Page 40

“J esus Christ on a cracker, lemme get this straight...”

Emmett had the floor. Matthias’s breakfast offering sat undisturbed in front of nearly everyone but Timmy, whose grits had migrated into his curls. Sonia was the only person at the dining table who didn’t look like someone had spit in their café .

“You mean to tell me Caldera not only got the sea monster to do tricks, but he’s gonna be in the show now too? Like, on stage? In a costume? With his own goddamned poster ?” Emmett demanded in a voice that rose in pitch with every question mark.

“Is not terrible idea,” rumbled Igor. “If Mr. Benny has trust of sea creature, why should he not also be on stage?”

“Better than Sam trying to tame it,” muttered Eli, who stared at his bowl to avoid Emmett’s glare. “I’m just sayin’. The way he bumped off that mermaid, if I was a merman, I probably wouldn’t do a damn thing Sam said.” He shivered and shoved his hands in his armpits. “I get nightmares just thinking about it.”

“ You get nightmares from the Galveston Flood show,” Vera commented, plucking a crumb off her cornbread and licking it off her fingers with disdain.

Not to be sidetracked, Igor raised his fork. “In Russia, merman is ‘ vodyanoy .’” His chuckle made the bowls rattle. “Is much more older and more ugly creature than merman we capture, but anyway—vodyanoy is master of water, eh?”

He gestured at me.

“Mr. Benny is master of fire. Is make sense for blacksmith and merman to be paired. Is complement. Like Navya and me.”

In a rare moment of outward affection, Navya grinned at the giant. Despite a stomach full of knots, so did I.

“He’s green ,” Emmett fired back. “I don’t see why Benny doesn’t just share what he knows and let the professionals handle it.”

“By professionals, surely you don’t mean you and Eli,” Navya scoffed. “The two of you have been a comedy act for longer than Timmy has been alive and have yet to be funny.”

Eli sat up. “Hey!”

“You’re all missing the point here,” Sonia snapped. “The fact is, Thompson and Dundy are barely holding Luna Park together, Morgan’s in debt to gangsters , and if they go down, guess who goes down with ’em?”

The Fraülein’s hand clapped over her mouth too late, and an excruciating pause fell over the table. I buried my face in my hands.

“I knew it . That son of a bitch,” Matthias hissed. “I swear, no one knows how to dig a hole straight to hell like Samuel Morgan!”

“But we’re saved!” Sonia declared, as if it could rescue the conversation from its doomed trajectory. “Thanks to Benny, folks are gonna choose us over whatever copycat act Dreamland cooks up. And we needed someone to replace Saul, didn’t we?”

“ No one can replace Saul,” said Lulu quietly, prompting nods of agreement around the table. “No offense, Benny.”

I grunted into my palms. “None taken.”

“I personally don’t give two figs what any o’ you boneheads think,” said Matthias. He jerked his square chin in my direction. “I want to know what he has to say about it.”

The company swiveled to look at me.

“It don’t matter what I have to say,” I murmured. “I ain’t got a choice.”

Another long silence threatened to harden the cornbread when I thought maybe telling them about Río would solve this whole stupid thing. If the idea of sharing the stage with me was so awful, maybe they wouldn’t mind helping me get Río back home and out of the competition. Bring back some of the normalcy they’d had before Morgan decided to upturn their lives by courting mobsters and kidnapping mermen.

But where would that leave me?

“Aye, glad that’s resolved, then,” said Vera, butting in on my ruminations. “We got work to do if Benny’s gonna get up on that stage for previews without makin’ a right bags of it.”

I stared at her. “‘We’?”

Vera pulled out a long cigarillo and tucked it behind her ear. “You don’t think we’d feed one of our own to the matinee dogs, do you?”

One of our own.

Eight faces eyeballed me like I was dumber than I looked if it had taken me this long to figure out that “with it, for it, never against it” included me too. Even Emmett shoveled a forkful of cold eggs into his mouth in a gesture of forbearance.

“All righty then,” said Lulu, picking up her fork. “Finish your breakfast, Benny, then meet me in the parlor.”

“What for?”

“To fit you for a costume.”

For a half hour, Lulu tried and gave up squeezing me into a shiny thing that once belonged to Saul the Skeleton. “No worries, kiddo,” she said. “I’ll just let out a few seams and it’ll fit you like a glove.”

By “a few seams,” I had to assume she meant all of them.

After that, it was off to Sonia’s room to hear her ideas for dramatizing everything Río and I had improvised that morning. She had real intuition when it came to coordinating gags and tricks by the reaction they’d get from the crowd. If I were capable of paying any attention, I might’ve mentioned how little difference my input would make if I died of stage fright before the curtain even went up.

Moreover, that botched kiss still hung over our heads like the smoke from Morgan’s pipe. I got the feeling Sonia’s efforts to make me a sideshow headliner had something to do with it, a misguided olive branch that only made me desperate to finish what I’d started telling her in the ballroom. But when she asked my opinion about foregoing high wires and hoops in favor of staging her acrobatics around the tank’s metalwork, my head emptied.

“Wait, so we’d be making like the merman kidnapped you ?” I asked, catching up.

“It’s so simple. A little backbend behind the tank, and voilà! I’ve been whisked away to the bottom of the ocean,” she said brightly. “Oh! Then you can say, ‘He made her his Queen of Atlantis!’”

“Like Persephone?”

She squinted at me. “That some kind of gramophone?”

“No, the goddess of spring. There’s Hades, who rules the underworld, and he steals Persephone to be his wife. There’s a frieze of them in the theater. You never noticed?”

“When in my illustrious career of standing on my head would I have noticed the friezes?”

“Never mind,” I said. “I just don’t think kidnapping’s very romantic.”

“I don’t usually hear you talk about romance.” I looked up to find Sonia pink-faced and staring intensely at her stage diagram.

Now. Now was the time.

“Sonia, I should tell you. What you saw this morning with the merman,” I ventured, “wasn’t real. I’m—I’m not his tamer.”

She leveled a skeptical grin at me. “Huh. What was all that razzmatazz about then?”

“He did it for me,” I said. “I begged him to.”

Her grin faded. In its place a bewildered frown took shape. “What, is he an actual prince of the ocean that you’d be begging him for favors?”

“Of course not,” I said quickly. “He’s something else altogether. Especially to me.”

Comprehension flickered behind her squinted eyes like a crank engine struggling to start. I couldn’t rely on her to say it. Maybe the idea of two men together was no big deal to the surrogate sister of a pair like Eli and Emmett, but the idea of a man and a merman romantically attached had to be too great a stretch, even for a Coney Island contortionist.

I took her hands.

“Sonia, I’m his...”

My big confession fizzled halfway out of my mouth as I suddenly got it . Why Morgan had balanced the success of his criminal scheming on her shoulders—and why I wasn’t just some guy she was sweet on.

I’ll be the next Morgan, and with a young guy like you in the company now, we could even manage it together!

While Morgan sold her off as a side dish to thugs and the faceless bureaucrats of Luna Park, she was safeguarding the Menagerie’s future from a Galveston Flood–sized disaster alone . Enter me: Someone who could pick up her hankie and inherit the whole rapidly aging establishment with her.

“His... what?” she asked, her voice just above a whisper.

A shriek outside the door grew louder until Timmy burst into the room. He jumped onto my lap with a tiny blue statue in his pudgy fist.

“Demon child! Give that back!” Navya shouted from her bedroom.

“I just wooking at it! Benny, help,” he whined against my chest, huddling over the statue like a little curly-haired camarón . “I not gonna bweak it!”

Bueno , that was a lie. Nearly everything Timmy touched shattered or came apart almost instantly, as if by some sinister brujería de chiquitín . “You gotta stop nabbing things without permission, nene .” I cast a glance in Sonia’s direction; she had shifted in her seat away from me, busily gathering up notes.

Navya stomped into the room, a flush across her brown cheeks. “Mr. Benny, please escort this thieving pest back to my room to return Krishna to his proper place,” she commanded.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Timmy grumbled unhappy noises into my shirt all the way to Navya’s room—by far the most lavishly decorated room in the house, with a small shrine and expensive furniture perfectly sized to her stature except for a ceiling-high bookshelf that was crammed to bowing with books, framed portraits of bearded holy men, and statuettes of many-limbed deities I didn’t know. When I first saw it, I wondered how on earth she scaled it before I noticed the ladder and felt like a nincompoop.

My eyes lingered over Matsya’s picture as the kid placed the statue back on the shelf with less-than-gentle hands.

When I returned to Sonia and Vera’s room, it was empty.

That night, I found the fish I’d brought Río earlier still uneaten in the center of the tank floor. Río himself was lying with his head against the driftwood, facing the wall.

Huh. In the dark, I couldn’t be sure, but the water looked a little cloudy. Maybe two months was enough time for even a merman’s powers of purification to prove no match against Brooklyn tap, steam-powered circulation pump be damned.

“ Amor ,” I whispered from the lattice. “Are you awake?”

Río’s shadow slowly grew in the water. When his face broke the surface, his eyes were pink-rimmed and set in dark circles, as if all our late nights had finally caught up to him. I immediately set about pulling off my suspenders so I could join him before his low voice derailed me.

“You should not come in tonight.”

My hand stalled over my shirt buttons. “Why not?”

He looked dimly into the water. “I am unwell.”

“I had a feeling. You left the fish.” Worried, I laid down on the grill. “Last night, you didn’t feel right either. When we... Was it too much?”

“No, querido . I do not regret anything we did last night,” he reassured me with a half smile like his lips were torn between happiness and sorrow. “Your love has been a shield and sustenance to me. You revived me.”

I blushed at him through the bars. “Me too.”

“Would that you were mer,” he said in a voice I strained to hear. “You would like the ocean, I think. Can you imagine it? A liquid universe, infinite in its mysteries, and still it holds you as though you are its most precious star. A place where, no matter which sea realm surrounds you, you are always home.”

My neck prickled. “Río, what’s got you talking like this?”

He looked up at me, his lip quivering. I reached my hand toward him. He backed away from it.

“Let me in,” I said in Spanish. “You can rest on me and—”

“If you come in, you will not be able to get back out.”

There was a three-foot distance between the grill and the water. Río would lift me up so I could leave each night. It could only mean...

“You’re too weak.”

Río drifted to the wall and touched his forehead to the glass. “I resisted. I swore my captivity would never conquer my dignity. But my body can go no further, Benigno. I feel it.”

“Your dignity?” The anxiety that had been filtering into my chest like poison gas all day was thickening with every word Río wasn’t saying. “If this is about this morning, I’m so sorry. I didn’t plan it; I just thought it’d get Morgan off our backs so he wouldn’t send me away from you. You and me, we’re just trying to survive.”

“At what cost?” he asked, a new hoarseness in his musical voice. “Perhaps you are in the habit of pretending to be what you are not, denying yourself happiness, working to exhaustion for the good of everyone but yourself—of making yourself agreeable to a murderer —and for what? To exist without freedom! To wake each day with only half your humanity intact! Merciful Neptune, how can you bear it?”

I hadn’t seen him so indignant since the day he’d grabbed me by the throat. “I don’t have a choice,” I tried to explain. “In this town, choices are for white men with money, and the rest of us do what we can to get by. When the options are getting sick or shot or thrown in jail, what choices do any of us really have?”

“Do not speak to me of choices when you have not been locked in an iron box,” he said icily. “You have choices, but you are too frightened to make them!”

Too frightened to free him was what he meant. He was right. But I couldn’t bring myself to say it—that falling in love with Río had changed everything for me, and I’d assumed it had changed everything for him too. At some point, I’d convinced myself he wouldn’t be in such a hurry to leave if he felt like I did. If he knew that staying in the Menagerie meant we could stay together.

Maybe he knew no such thing.

“I’m choosing us . I’m just trying to be smart about this,” I said. “If we play our cards right, you won’t have to—”

“By the time you finish being smart, I will be dead.”

The words dealt un golpetazo to my chest before I fully understood their meaning. “What?”

“Benigno, look at me .”

I did. And, for the first time, I saw . It had happened so gradually I’d completely failed to notice it. His skin, lustrous as a pearl the first time I spied it in the light, was now as dim as the curtains I’d spent days scrubbing. His tail, once vibrant with shimmering blues and greens, now matched nearly everything else in New York City—coated in a thin gray sheen. Even the webbing between his fingers looked brittle and thin.

I rifled through memories of our nights together: Río hanging off to the side during our nighttime swims. How he’d taken to letting me carry him around.

In an instant, all the air in the room seemed to escape. “No.”

“Until today, I remained uncertain,” he murmured. “No one mer has ever been taken away from the Currents, so how could I have known? I had convinced myself it would pass. That somehow, I could will myself to overcome it, but my fins burn without ceasing.”

“No. No. You’re so young ,” I protested, “and strong! I felt it last night!”

He smiled grimly. “The condition of my spirit does not match the body that houses it any more than yours does.”

“ My body wasn’t made to last for hundreds of years!”

“Benigno, would I lie to you?”

He wouldn’t. I knew that.

But he was also wrong . Because if he wasn’t, then that’d be it for me. I’d finally fold. Neither starvation, illness, violence, nor occupation had done me in yet, and as much as I’d abandoned notions of God, I wanted to believe that whatever omnipotent being lorded mercilessly over my life would look at everything I’d done, at how hard I’d tried, and not find cause to punish me by taking away the people I loved over and over and over again. Losing Tití Luz was bad enough, but losing Río...

I was clinging to tree roots in the middle of a hurricane again.

“You can’t be dying,” I said. “You’ve lost some luster, but that’s my fault, keeping you awake so late. I’ll take better care of you. Hell, I’ll dig you a lake just like Sonia said—”

“A prison the size of a lake is still a prison,” he snapped in frustration. “I need the ocean .”

My voice felt suddenly fragile under the weight of my growing panic. “You don’t know what you’re asking of me.”

“I do know. Do you think I want to part myself from you?” He paused. “But something else prevents you from setting me free. Something the woman Sonia said to you. What makes you hesitate?”

Of course he’d heard everything. “I— I dunno what you want me to say,” I stammered. “It’s not about just me anymore. The whole company relies on this place to survive.”

Río’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Since when has the fate of this hellish place been your concern?”

“They’re decent people,” I said, sweat forming at my temples. “Their lives are staked into this show.”

“Then I should die to earn them a living?” he demanded.

“Of course not! Because you’re not going to die!”

He scrubbed a hand over his face and gripped the glass. “You needed allies, you said. You told me you would not give up on freeing me. You promised .”

“I haven’t given up!” I insisted. “Just give us the summer. Morgan could pay off Frankie and after that, who knows? There might be enough money to pay for a way to keep us together.”

Río punched the water with his tail. “Or you could release me now and damn Morgan and his Menagerie to the depths!”

“ Escúchame .” Desperation was already crowding out the remnant air in my chest while tears gathered along my eyelids. “Anyone who believes the flyers knows merfolk exist now. If you stayed, I could protect you, keep you safe from all the Morgans and Reynolds and Frankies, otherwise it’s off to the Atlantic with you until the next human drags you back out.”

“Protect me. Keep me.” Bitterness curled his pewter lips. “You sound like the Shark.”

His words could have leveled me all by themselves. “How can you say that?”

Río didn’t answer. Just stared at the water with the same hopeless disappointment that had squatted in my heart before Río’s affection had chased it out.

“My whole life, I’ve never loved anyone like I love you,” I whispered. “How can you expect me to cast you back to the water when I’ve only just found you?”

He sighed and looked despairingly up at me through the bars. “So says every man who has ever hooked a fish.”

“Río—”

“I tire of talking, Benny,” he said, and I flinched at the sound of my American name. “I wish to rest.”

And without looking back, he dove away from me.

I called after him. When he didn’t come, I climbed back down and placed my hand against the glass—a gesture, once intimate, that I’d put on display before his captor just this morning. I curled my fingers around San Cristóbal and stared into the shadows, where Río stayed until I got the message he’d rather be alone.

That night, the heat in Saul’s room stuck to my lungs like coal tar. Crying only made it worse; once the hacking started, I sat up, lit my lamp, and gave up trying to breathe the way Río showed me because nothing about the air felt remotely breathable.

What makes you hesitate? he had demanded. Three months ago, I would’ve told him nothing. Surviving was easiest when you had no one else to save but yourself.

I didn’t plan to get pulled into the center of Morgan’s criminal tempest, but maybe a tempest is where the Currents needed me to be. I could help my friends and Río, and if it meant shipwrecking whatever was left of my heart on the Menagerie stage, then so be it.