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I wound up obeying orders just like Río. Manual labor was all I had to distract me from feeling I could punch a hole in the tank with my bare hands, like Matthias probably should have done the first day we met. Every crate I moved wrought a burning hatred that coalesced in my stomach like liquid metal.

I hated Morgan. I hated Sonia. The whole Empire State could go to hell.

But I hated myself most of all. I was about to lose a genuine article in a sea of impersonators, the only person left who truly knew me, and I understood with bone-crushing certainty that part of my soul would go with him, never to revive. I thought of what Igor said about Río and me, water and fire. Whether or not humanity deserved it, Río was the sort to pour himself out in compassion for humans.

Me? I wanted to burn down the world.

The rattle of the handle jolted me out of my violent thoughts. Suddenly, the door swung wide to reveal a sweaty, self-satisfied Sam Morgan, who did a quick examination of the room while I stood in the back corner balancing an overfull crate of costumes in my arms.

“I’m retiring for the evening,” he said. “Clear out of here.”

He waited for me to join him at the door, then walked me past Río’s tank—no doubt to make sure I didn’t linger there. I kept my head down, so it wouldn’t be too obvious when I peered hungrily through the iron bars. Río lay in his corner, his arms wrapped tightly around himself.

Is he sleeping? Injured?

“The Menagerie was once a traveling exhibition, you know.”

Morgan’s gravelly voice wrenched my attention away from the tank. “You mentioned,” I mumbled.

“A small caravan of curiosities,” he said with a strange lilt, as if he rarely shared this information with anyone, much less his troublesome hired hand. “The creatures that stand in the museum today were once on display in towns from Burlington to New Orleans, drawing hordes from their sleepy villages like a pied piper on the promise of seeing a stuffed being or beast lured from the edges of the earth.”

Morgan sucked his teeth breezily. “Of course, mummified relics could never compete with a living curiosity. Whenever the everyman confronts the abnormal, the deformed, and the deviant, he apprehends the oddity within himself. From there, he grows an appreciation for the perfect, the divine, and the noble. And then”—he pointed toward the sky—“he aspires to it.”

A shadow had settled over Sam Morgan since the night he tangled with Frankie Agostinelli’s goons. Even in stagnant heat, it sent a chill down my backbone.

“Nowadays, the freak is no longer evidence of God’s judgment, but an object of... scientific contemplation ,” he grumbled sourly. “Scholars explain away the riddles of the natural world with their lengthy papers and Latin names, and the public imagination shrivels. It then falls to other men to restore their sense of wonder.”

“Men like you, you mean?”

He glanced sideways at me and grinned, baring his bright teeth. “ Especially men like me. Old Jack Morgan didn’t have the requisite language, business sense, or ambition to draw in larger, more sophisticated crowds. Luckily, I did. And unlike my predecessor, I don’t tend to tolerate obstacles. Had he not bequeathed his establishment to me, Luna Park might never have become the Heart of Coney Island.”

“Must’ve been hard to do all that by yourself.”

Morgan’s eyes darkened over his smile.

“I can see why the exhibits like you. How nice you’ve all taken to each other so quickly,” he said, though he didn’t sound like he thought it was particularly nice at all. “They disagree with my approach, I know. They have their silly little motto that they never stop saying.”

“‘With it, for it, never against it’?” I offered.

Morgan snorted to the affirmative. “A quaint philosophy for those whose aspirations don’t exceed eating tinned food thrice a day and escaping the asylums. That attitude does little more than fool them into believing they can protect each other from the derision of the outside world,” he said, biting each consonant on its way out of his mouth. “But not even a person’s flesh and blood can protect them from that.”

A sneer twisted his lips. “A mermaid I saw in my youth damn near ruined my life,” he murmured. “No one believed me. My family rejected me. But I knew that, were I to capture one, I’d do better than unshackle myself from the assumptions everyone had made about me. I would awaken in the masses a new understanding of the natural world and our place in it.”

Jesucristo , nothing makes a lowlife feel high like stomping on folks more spurned by society than they are. I bit back the urge to ask him what his lime-green suit purchase did to advance his “aspirations.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked instead.

“So you can understand my intentions. That creature will send a message—one which will resonate throughout the populace—that gods still dwell among us, and my Menagerie is the sole establishment on earth fit to keep one. For this reason, it is imperative that you trust me enough to stay out of my way,” he said coldly. “Do you?”

We’d finally reached the front gate of Luna Park. The sun no longer blazed overhead, but there wasn’t so much as a draft to cut the malevolent haze rising off the pavement. I was burning too—with a desire to grab his silver chain by the whistle and strangle him with it.

“Yes, sir.”

“Capital,” he said with a smile. “I knew I could rely on you.”

The Albemarle and the Culver Depot were in the same direction, but he guarded the gate until I was far enough in the distance that there was no chance I could turn around and sneak back in without him catching me. He knew I was lying when I said I trusted him, just as I knew he was lying when he said he could rely on me.

He hadn’t asked me to call him Sam.

I never made it to the Albemarle. Once Morgan’s watchful eye was on its way back to Queens, I took the path between Feltman’s and Dreamland toward the beach.

It gave me a closer look at the park that had made so much trouble for my friends, with its gold-leaf-encrusted carousel, towers, and roller coasters, the maintenance workers hanging off them like paint-spattered Christmas ornaments. Dreamland would open the day after Luna Park’s previews.

For the evening, the moderate crowds had dwindled, and there was only the scuffle of my shoes against pavement and the rolling drone of ocean waves growing louder as I approached the beach.

Concrete gave way to boardwalk, powder gave way to wet sand. I didn’t bother taking off my shoes. Just staggered right into the water.

The unceasing breakers surged and crashed, spread, and retreated. Though I dug my heels in to steady myself, the tide still pulled the silt right out from under them, leaving me wavering on my feet. In a battle for supremacy, I was no match for the Currents.

“Why?”

My whisper disappeared in the din of waves.

“ Tell me why, ?carajo! ”

I plunged both my hands into the water, scooped up dripping wads of sand, and flung them as hard as I could at the sea.

“You left him,” I hollered, “ ?Y pa’ qué? So he could die alone in a cage after that yanqui diablo maims him with a five-penny whistle? What kind of shitty deity are you?!” I grabbed another fistful of wet sand. “How could you just strand him here ?”

I flung the wad of sand as hard as I could and took it as an accusation when it slapped lamely into a slow wave near my feet.

You were the one the mermaid had begged to save his life, it seemed to say.

“Yeah well, I got news for you,” I spat. “Río’s mother picked the wrong guy. I can’t save anyone. Not Tití Luz , not my parents, not the Menagerie.” I kicked the water as hard as I could. “Not even my own”— kick —“sorry”— kick —“ass!”

I lost my footing in the undertow and fell onto my knees. The water ran frigid over my thighs and forearms, ice against the fire on my skin, and I just stayed there, shivering on the warmest spring day New York had seen in decades, waiting for a reason to stop believing I was completely, infuriatingly alone.

“Which god do I gotta pray to?” I gasped through tears. “ No me importa. I don’t care who’s out there, just don’t let him die. Please, I’ll do anything. Anything. Just tell me what to do...”

A flock of noisy seagulls soared over my head. As the waves retreated, they landed around me, dozens of them, to peck at horseshoe crabs that had climbed up in pairs along the shore.

“The hell—”

Without warning, a stealthy wave slammed into my side and knocked me flat on my back, soaking me through. It chased the seagulls away.

Suddenly, I knew exactly who I needed to talk to.

“If you’re knocking to see Eli, he’s— ergh —in the kitchen so I don’t gotta— goddammit —poison nobody!”

I’d never given much thought to the limitations Emmett’s missing leg placed on him because it frankly never seemed to slow him down, but as I stood outside his and Eli’s bedroom, I suddenly wondered if he’d had an accident.

“Do you need help?” I called through the door.

“Not in the mood, kid,” he grunted, and I heard a loud thud as something large thumped against the floor.

“What was that?”

“A warning shot! Go away!”

I tried the knob. It was unlocked. “I’m coming in,” I said and pushed my way into the room.

Garments were scattered around Emmett like rainbow-colored seaweed, and he, the hapless seagull perched in the middle of it. From the waist down, he wore something too wide for his hips but too small for his leg, red and satiny with a tear in the inseam where his gray union suit poked out.

His peg leg lay across the room where he’d apparently thrown it.

“Nice... pants?”

“Aw, shut up,” he grumbled. “The costumes are always a little tight before the season starts. Lulu will fix ’em.” Sitting at the vanity, he rummaged on the ground for something else shiny and bright. “You here to stink up my evening?”

“I need your help.”

“Go milk a bull. I got a whole other person to fit in these pants, so if you don’t mind—”

“ Please. ”

Emmett lifted his head to shoot me his most hostile glare, but as soon as his eyes landed on my face they popped in surprise.

“Jesus, Benny. You look like shit.”

I glanced down at myself. I might as well have been run over by a streetcar in a rainstorm. I didn’t care.

“Let’s get something straight,” I began in a low voice. “I know you don’t like me. You make that plain enough every time I gotta suffer through your grousing at the dinner table. I also know you only hate me ’cause you’re spooked by a certain kind of foreigner, just like every pale-faced pendejo in New York who thinks I don’t deserve to be here.”

Emmett made an indignant noise, but I plowed on. “You’re just another back-seat bully who can’t stand bein’ so goddamn scared all the time, so you made up a version of me you could blame for all the bullshit you can’t fix. That’s why, when it comes to me, you’re wrong about everything—except one thing.”

I turned and slammed the door closed behind me. “And I know you know what it is.”

For the first time ever, Emmett looked at me like I was a real person instead of the villain in his paranoid delusions. He shrank in his seat.

“It’s true then. That you’re...?”

“Yeah. I am.”

He glanced down at the crumpled mound in his hands and rubbed uncomfortably at the red silk stretched over his thigh. “All right. So, what’s that got to do with me?”

“Tell me how you did it.” My voice came out ragged, a sound like mortar scraped across bricks. “Eli told me what you did for your freedom. When everyone and everything was trying to end Rudy and Lenny—when you had to be scared outta your mind and it’d be easier to just go back to whatever life was like before the neighbors caught you—how’d you get him out? How’d you find a way when there wasn’t a way?”

He let out a sardonic pfft . “Why? You fixin’ to lose a leg?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

Emmett stilled, frowning at me. But before I could make a second attempt at convincing him, he made a fist in the shiny red fabric and, with a loud rriiiippp, yanked it off, letting the shredded pants fall to the floor.

He leaned his forearms on his thighs and sighed.

“The way you tell it, you make it sound like I had some kind of secret. I didn’t have no trick for getting Eli and me outta there. Hell. I don’t even remember that night.”

My face fell. Everything fell. “Oh. I see.”

“But what I do remember,” he continued quietly, “was thinking I was gonna die getting Eli out, or I was gonna die without him, you get what I’m saying?”

I swallowed back the hard knot in my throat and nodded.

“I ain’t a smart guy like you, Benny.” A bittersweet grin crossed his lips. “But if there’s anything I’ve learned just being human in this lousy, jacked-up world, it’s that love and hate—they got something in common. They put blinders on you, so’s you can’t see nothing but whatever it tells you to see. When our folks saw we was a couple of inverts, they did what hate makes people do. But me...”

Emmett’s rugged features melted into an almost unrecognizable softness. He spoke just above a whisper.

“All I could see was the boy I loved.”

I stepped closer to him. “You ever regret it?”

He chuckled and shook his head. “Nah. I got everything I need and better—’cept maybe a goddamned costume that fits. What I want to know is why you and your sweetheart are stuck. This is Coney Island, not Connecticut. The Brooklyn waterfront’s got more fairies than Neverland.”

He could’ve knocked me over with a feather. “ What? ”

“And anyway, it ain’t like the company cares about that kind of thing. Do I even know the guy?”

Suddenly, everything from my hair to my toenails seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.

“Sort of.”

Emmett sat up. “Who?”

Ignoring the unhappy fact that confessing my affair with Río to the guy who’d pegged me as a threat would basically confirm everything Emmett had ever suspected about me, I let the whole history out, from the mermaid’s dying wish to the intimacy that bloomed between Río and me—all while Río’s health wilted right under my nose. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to spill my guts when Emmett and I had nothing in common without the shared experience of loving someone we weren’t allowed to love.

It seemed to be enough.

“Now Morgan’s back to torturing him,” I concluded, starting to shake. “He won’t even let me near the tank anymore. I gotta get Río out of there. And I know the show will be done for and I’ll lose him forever, but Emmett, I just can’t l-let him—”

A sob smothered the word I couldn’t bear to say. Without Río to keep me afloat, I backed toward the wall, sank to the floor, and wept into my grainy sleeve. Somehow, even weeping in Emmett’s humiliating presence felt better than preserving myself like one of Morgan’s museum pieces behind a wall of numb indifference.

A succession of thumps halted just ahead of where I’d crumpled. I looked up, and Emmett was standing over me with his hand out.

I took it. Balanced solidly on his one leg, he helped me to my feet.

“I’m real sorry, kid,” he whispered, gripping my hand harder than I could grip back. It wasn’t the lengthy amends you expected from somebody who looked as contrite as he did, but even I knew how much those words cost a guy like Emmett.

“How much do you love him?” he asked.

My voice still sounded like steel wool. “I can’t breathe without him.”

He nodded. “Then there’s only one thing left to do.”

“Rob a bank?” I sniffled.

“What? No!” And he slapped me upside the head like I was Eli. “Abduct the merman, ya knucklehead!”

My eyes bulged at the suggestion—and at the man who’d been so protective of the Menagerie but was now offering to demolish it. “What about the company?” I asked. “The show will probably close, not to mention Morgan’ll go batty on everyone the second he finds out his star performer is gone.”

“Oh, I know.” Emmett hopped to my side and put his arm around my shoulder. “ That’s why we’re gonna frame Dreamland for it.”