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“D ónde está mi milagrito?”

Tití Luz was wearing her nicest nightdress. A relic of the life she lived before el Grito de Lares and San Ciriaco and tuberculosis. Her once tanned skin hung gray across the bones of her face, her hair whittled to straw. She rested on an embroidered pillow I’d given her with my first earnings at the Sobrinos de Portilla foundry—a fancy thing that had only ever decorated a parlor chair before, but which she wanted to use before she died.

With her, nothing ever went to waste, not even me.

I moved from the chair where I was keeping watch to her bed and wrapped my fingers gently around the fragile knobs of her hands. “ Aquí estoy, Tití. ”

“ Mijo ,” she said in a breath that rattled out of her.

Her hand slipped out from under mine and gestured toward the night table drawer where an envelope sat at the top of her stationery pile. I made to hand it to her, but her fingers came gently down on my wrist to stop me.

“You have been strong against life’s many storms,” she whispered in Spanish, “but I worry for the part of you that has hardened under all that strength. That accepts pain and injustice as your birthright.”

Though it was pointless to say it, I told her in our shared language, “You don’t have to worry about me.”

She pretended not to hear me.

“The things I’ve seen have hardened my heart as well,” she went on. “I lost my family. My country. The future I’d fought for. When you are as lonely and angry as I was, all you can do is pray that the light of God still shines upon you. Little did I know when I found you clinging to that riverbank that the Lord had delivered the answer to my prayers.”

Her eyes flitted to the envelope. “And now, He answers another. A new beginning, Benigno. For you.”

I said nothing. Any strength she saw in me was just the mask I wore to hide my fear—of her illness, of the ways I wasn’t like the other boys and men around me, of forces of nature like rivers and oceans and storms and love. And as I sat there, beside her dying body, I could feel the terror of who I’d become without her weave another knot into the net that held me. Why did new beginnings feel like the end of everything?

“Like the lagartijos that shed their skin many times before they die, every change strengthens us. But staying soft in here”—she pointed weakly to my chest—“is up to you. When next you shed your skin, you must hold on to the love that lives in you and wants to be free, even if that love is... different.”

Even then, she knew.

My tití reached for my other hand and took it, clutching them both with the dregs of her strength. “You are the blacksmith of your fate,” she whispered. “I will not have your spirit wither on an island of tragedies when you can go to New York and forge a life. Promise me.”

What else could I say? “I promise.”

Tití’s face relaxed, and she smiled. “Now. Open it.”

Next to a wad of American dollars and an address to someplace I would never find was a string of pewter links. I pulled out the medallion by the chain and held it in the air.

“ San Cristóbal protects... all who journey... my little Odiseo ,” she murmured, her breath turning labored. “Make freedom your destination... and you will know what metal you are made of soon enough.”

“Goddamn you, Sam, what have you done ?”

My face was in the sand. Grit was everywhere, in my hair, on my tongue. The bullet had entered my side with the disturbance of a wayward pebble before the burning spread from a root somewhere under my ribs, incinerating me like paper over a flame. I looked dimly in the direction of Sonia’s weeping to find Morgan purple-faced and dragging her by the arm as he stalked toward me, his derringer still fixed on its target.

“ Where . Is . My . MERMAN? ”

My mouth opened to answer, but only a hiss came out.

He’s gone.

“Get your meat hooks off me,” Sonia shrieked, yanking against Morgan’s grip before he pulled her face up to his and spat into it.

“Shut your traitorous mouth, you little— Argh! ”

Sonia’s free hand whipped up and dug its fingernails into Morgan’s eyes. Howling, he dropped the gun and her arm. As he staggered in a blind circle, Sonia raced over and flung herself down beside me.

“Oh, please, God, help me...” She reached trembling fingers around my waist, pulled her hand away, and found it slick with dark red. “Benny, get up! Please , kiddo, you gotta get up!”

Morgan reappeared over her, blood beading along diagonal gouges that fractured his face. He made a fist in her bright red hair and heaved her out of my field of vision, where I heard a muffled thwack that stopped Sonia’s whimpering.

He was back a moment later to yank me to my knees by my shirt. “Tell me where the beast is or I’ll tear you apart!”

My voice was thinner than a cuatro string, but I found it nonetheless. “ No .”

He backhanded me across the face into wet sand. “You ungrateful shit !” he bellowed. “I opened my doors to you! Handed you a living! A goddamned poster in the hall! And this is how you thank me? By demolishing everything I’ve built?”

When his hand went for my collar, I grabbed it. “You d-did that yourself. When you sold us to Frankie and stole the m-merman.”

“That’s it , isn’t it,” he sneered with disgust. “Your perverse attachment to that watery fiend . You think ingratiating yourself to a scaly incubus makes you something special? That you’re anything more than a worthless blight on the populace best left in a gutter to lick rats?” He barked a rabid laugh, and the tang of booze went up my nose. “Who in hell do you think you are?”

It was the same question McCoy had asked me the day I’d burned my hand. The day I’d turned over a tank with the bits of my Puerto Rican identity I hadn’t already lost to assimilation baked right into the iron. I’d kept quiet back then because even after years locked in the pit of my own mind trying to puzzle it out, I was still too afraid to look myself in the eye in case I saw someone I wasn’t allowed to be.

But I had an answer now. And I’d be damned if this murdering crook was going to decide anything for me ever again.

I grabbed a fistful of sand and whipped it into Morgan’s face, sending him lurching backward, snarling like a wounded animal. I used the rest of my strength to pull myself back onto my feet, a stone’s throw from where Sonia was sprawled on her back, unconscious.

“ S-soy boricua, pa’ que lo sepas. I’m with it, for it, n-never against it,” I croaked. “The company’s my f-family—”

Morgan swung at me and missed.

“—and if you weren’t a selfish, shit-eating bastard, they could’ve been yours too!”

He swung again, and this time, his punch launched me into the surf. I couldn’t get off my back before Morgan was on top of me, pinning me to the sand with a heavy arm across my neck. Salt water ran into my mouth.

“Think I can’t replace that tank? That I can’t find another siren to fill it? That I can’t get rid of you just like I got rid of old Jack ?” Morgan spat. “No one will even bother riddling out how you died as long as there’s one less immigrant mongrel in New York City!”

Samuel Morgan had killed his own mentor. Of course he had. That brazen declaration rang truer than anything that ever came out of his mouth, especially his petty insults.

There will always be yanquis calling you a mutt instead of a man.

I spat out salt water and blood so I could smile. “M-must eat you alive,” I choked, “knowing I’ve heard the merman s-sing.”

With a roar to shake the scales off his museum monsters, he slammed his knuckles into my open wound, the pain exploding across my body just like Dreamland Tower’s electric bulbs. I’d barely gasped in any air before his thumb and fingers clamped around my jaw and pushed my face sideways into the water.

Tití Luz was wrong about me. I wasn’t strong, not anymore. And even blacksmiths get burned—a weeping red stripe across my palm for daring to be free in a world where freedom was the exclusive province of people nothing like me.

But I held my breath anyway. Because if I was going to die on Manhattan Beach, then I would choose when. Despite everything, I wanted to live, even if I had only seconds left to do it. Time stretched long as I gazed beyond Morgan’s blood-smeared, hate-filled face to a sky about to welcome the sunrise. To the vast tract of blue that touched every shore, ones I’d visited and ones I’d never get to see.

I was still here , and as I closed my eyes and let the pain and disappointment turn to sea foam, the only thing I couldn’t understand was, how was I still here?

I put the question aside to make my last petitions to God. May the Menagerie live on. May Río find his harmony. May Sonia be freed. And if the Currents are real...

I sure hope they find me.

CRACK.

Morgan’s hand lurched, then let go.

My eyes blinked open to find something dark dribbling into the water above my stomach from a small hole in the middle of Morgan’s limey waistcoat. Dazed, he touched it, watched it run over his fingers, then looked up.

“S-Sonia...”

She limped into view, the sandy derringer in her hand, her bruised face dark with cold resolve. Through trembling lips, she whispered, “My name is Mary.”

Then she lifted her skirt and, with the toe of her shoe, pushed him off me into the shallows.

Sonia—or rather, Mary—splashed down next to me. The water was ribboned with blood—mine and Morgan’s. And though she knew I wasn’t going anywhere, she tried to get a hand behind my shoulders. Pleaded through sobs for me to get up and go back to the skin I’d just finished shedding.

But Tití Luz said to never look back. Even if you left your keys...

“Dammit, Benny, please . You have to come with me—”

“He cannot!”

My heart quavered in my chest when I heard that musical voice. I peered at the water beyond my feet and wondered if I’d already died.

Río had never looked so glorious. The iridescence of his body was restored; the lush blue-greens and silvers gleamed in the growing sunlight. He sailed in on a breaker that seemed to obey his command, steering him toward us and seating him neatly at my side—like he’d actually been a prince of the deep this entire time and we just never knew.

He gathered me easily into his arms, San Cristóbal still hanging from his neck. “ V-volviste ,” I whispered through tears, trembling like a leaf in a storm.

“ Mi luna. ” He kissed my forehead and covered my wound with a soft hand. “ Nunca te abandonaría. ”

My eyes combed his features hungrily for evidence I wasn’t dreaming. Even the scar across his brow was gone. “H-how...?”

“Salt water’s healing properties,” he reminded me, wiping my eyes with a gentle fingertip. “It is why our tears are made of it.”

A soft groan turned our heads. Morgan’s breaths now gurgled wetly through the hole in his chest. Río held me closer and gazed upon his old captor with pitiless eyes as Morgan gaped back with an expression more like yearning than resentment. A moment before the gurgling ceased, his glassy eyes dropped back to look at me.

Not look. See .

Then a wave climbed up the shore, wrapped itself around Morgan’s body, and dragged it into the Atlantic.

“Río, please,” whispered Mary, “Benny needs a doctor—”

“No. Out of the ocean, his body will succumb.” Río reached around me with both hands and widened the rip in my union suit where the bullet hit me. “Indeed, seawater is all that is sustaining him right now.”

Mary spoke for us both: “What are you talking about?”

“You have liberated us all from the Shark’s treachery. I live in gratitude for your courage, my friend,” he said in lieu of an answer to her question, then turned back to me. “There is no time left to lose. One more breath of air, Benigno.”

“C-can’t...”

“You must ,” he insisted. “I beg you to try!”

I gulped in a dram of sea breeze, and as if I were no heavier than an empty conch shell, he lifted me to his chest.

“Wait!” Mary’s hand flew out to grab Río’s wrist. “Where are you taking him?”

Frothy waves rushed in around us. “Home.”

The ocean’s din gave way to silence as we dove into the surf. Río seemed to swim at the speed of a locomotive, leaving me blind in the wake of bubbles we left behind. Though my body was dead weight, a flimsy arrangement of busted human parts, only seconds passed before the shelf disappeared and open water stretched out around us as far as I could see. Río’s swimming slowed, then stopped, delivering us to an undulating calm.

I was about to rattle right out of my skin, my heart hammering like a cogging machine against my rib cage, everything inside me overtaxed and starved for air. I thought Río might bring me back up for another breath.

He didn’t.

Instead, he brought his face level with mine, and as the light above grew around him like the first rays of sun after a storm, I realized I’d been here before. In my dreams. The same liquid universe around us and nowhere to focus except deep into a piercing set of azure eyes.

Gracias a Dios. I could go peacefully if this was the last thing I saw before my lungs finally gave up.

Llévame, Río, hasta el mar.

As if he’d figured out how badly I wanted his kiss to escort me from this world to the next, he wrapped himself around me and brought his lips to mine. Lost in a swirl of copper hair, I felt him take hold of my chin and open my mouth while it was still pressed to his, his tail tightening around my legs.

And he inhaled.

My body was too wrecked to resist. Río drew all the air I had into himself, and when he couldn’t take anymore, I watched with wide eyes as he turned his face away to cough dark clots of my blood into the water like he’d just drawn poison from a bite. With his hand firm on the skin of my neck, he made me look into his eyes again.

Now, he whispered to my mind, breathe deep and live.

The last of my breath was gone. We were sinking. I shook my head. It’s over, Río. I’ll drown —

You cannot drown, mi amado . You never could.

As soon as he’d said it, a strange sensation filtered into my skin and bones. Like my body had become sediment. It took quick command of my thoughts until one word repeated in my mind.

RESPIRA .

A finger at a time, I surrendered my frantic grip on his shoulders. Then, squeezing my eyes shut, I breathed in, the pain sharp and instant as water entered my lungs like a river of knives. I tried to make myself spacious, unlocking the corners of my chest to make room the way Río had taught me. Once I’d taken in all I could, Río’s mouth fastened to mine again and forced the exhale from my lungs, the last of it escaping in a stream of warmth.

He turned and spat another bloody cloud into the sea.

In the pause before I inhaled again, I found myself desperate for the water, suffocating without it. Again, I drew ocean into my lungs, only this time, it was painless. Easy. Waves of relief rolled through my limbs and un-seized my muscles.

That’s when I noticed the burning in my side had dulled. My headache was quieting too, soothed by rare strains of music that seemed to hum in my ears from every direction. Río pulled another exhale from my lips as every inch of me thrummed like ripples from a drop in still water, sealing my wound and stirring my cells as if from a long slumber.

Glimpses of my half-lived life began to zoetrope behind my eyes. The face in the Río Humacao . Coughing blood at the forge. A mermaid’s dying wish and my flooded fantasies. Learning to love like learning to swim, until each night in the tank with Río felt like being consecrated by forty tons of holy water. I relived in rapid succession every night I’d ever stared across the Gowanus at Lady Liberty making silent prayers I didn’t think anyone could hear until a head-smelter fell into my hands and ruined my life.

Only it hadn’t. Though I’d had Río right as the person fate had bonded me to, I’d had everything else wrong.

All this time. I’d thought I was bringing him home.

The Currents are real. I feel them now, thundering through me like a silver rapid as the cords around my chest dissolve into the sea. Anyone might look at my body and think nothing has changed, but inside it, I am unbound.

Breathing more freely than I ever have in my life, I take Río’s face between my sandpaper palms as he gazes back with all the wonder of having just witnessed his first miracle.

Are you my captor or my savior? I ask.

Río

With Benigno’s voice in my mind and his kiss on my lips, I impart the truth my soul has known since he first sang to me from across the iron bars.

Son of Neptune , I answer. I am your harmony.