The Weight of Feathers

Una golondrina no hace verano.

One swallow does not make a summer.

The feathers were Lace’s first warning. They showed up between suitcases, in the trunk of her father’s station wagon, on the handles of came-with-the-car first-aid kits so old the gauze had yellowed. They snagged on antennas, turning the local stations to static.

Lace’s mother found a feather in with the family’s costumes the day they crossed into Almendro, a town named for almond fields that once filled the air with the scent of sugary blossoms and bitter wood. But over the last few decades an adhesive plant had bought out the farms that could not survive the droughts, and the acres of almonds dwindled to a couple of orchards on the edge of town.

The wisp of that black feather caught on a cluster of sequins. Lace knew from the set to her mother’s eyes that she’d throw the whole mermaid tail in a bucket and burn it, elastane and all.

Lace grabbed the tail and held on. If her mother burned it, it would take Lace and her great-aunt at least a week to remake it. Tía Lora’s hands were growing stiff, and Lace’s were new and slow.

Her mother tried to pull the tail from her grip, but Lace balled the fabric in her hands.

“Let go,” her mother warned.

“It’s one feather.” Lace dug in her fingers. “It’s not them.” Lace knew the danger of touching a Corbeau. Her abuela said she’d be better off petting a rattlesnake. But these feathers were not the Corbeaus’ skin. They didn’t hold the same poison as a Corbeau’s body.

“It’s cursed,” her mother said. One hard tug, and she won. She threw the costume tail into a bucket and lit it. The metal pail grew hot as a stove. The fumes off the melting sequins stung Lace’s throat.

“Did you have to burn the whole thing?” she asked.

“Better safe, mija,” her mother said, wetting down the undergrowth with day-old aguas frescas so the brush wouldn’t catch.

They could have cleaned the tail, blessed it, stripped away the feather’s touch. Burning it only gave the Corbeaus more power. Those feathers already had such weight. The fire in the pail was an admission that, against them, Lace’s family had no guard.

Before Lace was born, the Palomas and the Corbeaus had just been competing acts, two of the only shows left that bothered with the Central Valley’s smallest towns. Back then it was just business, not hate. Even now Lace’s family sometimes ended up in the same town with a band of traveling singers or acrobats, and there were no fights, no blood. Only the wordless agreement that each of them were there to survive, and no grudges after. Every fall when the show season ended, Lace’s aunts swapped hot-plate recipes with a trio of trapeze artists. Her father traded homeschooling lesson plans with a troupe of Georgian folk dancers.

The Corbeaus never traded anything with anyone. They shared nothing, took nothing. They kept to themselves, only straying from the cheapest motel in town to give one of Lace’s cousins a black eye, or leave a dead fish at the riverbank. Lace and Martha found the last one, its eye shining like a wet marble.

Before Lace was born, these were bloodless threats, ways the Corbeaus tried to rattle her family before their shows. Now every Paloma knew there was nothing the Corbeaus wouldn’t do.

Lace’s mother watched the elastane threads curl inside a shell of flame. “They’re coming,” she said.

“Did you think they wouldn’t?” Lace asked.

Her mother smiled. “I can hope, can’t I?”

She could hope all she wanted. The Corbeaus wouldn’t give up the crowds that came with Almendro’s annual festival. So many tourists, all so eager to fill their scrapbooks. That meant two weeks in Almendro. Two weeks when the younger Paloma men hardened their fists, and their mothers prayed they didn’t come home with broken ribs.

Lace’s grandmother set the schedule each year, and no one spoke up against Abuela. If they ever did, she’d pack their bags for them. Lace had watched Abuela cram her cousin Licha’s things into a suitcase, clearing her perfumes and lipsticks off the motel dresser with one sweep of her arm. When Lace visited her in Visalia and they went swimming, Licha’s two-piece showed that her escamas, the birthmarks that branded her a Paloma, had disappeared.

Lace’s mother taught her that those birthmarks kept them safe from the Corbeaus’ feathers. That family was el Diablo on earth, with dark wings strapped to their bodies, French on their tongues, a sprinkling of gypsy blood. When Lace slept, they went with her, living in nightmares made of a thousand wings.

Another black feather swirled on a downdraft. Lace watched it spin and fall. It settled in her hair, its slight weight like a moth’s feet.

Her mother snatched it off Lace’s head. “¡Madre mía!” she cried, and threw it into the flames.

Lace’s cousins said the Corbeaus grew black feathers right out of their heads, like hair. She never believed it. It was another rumor that strengthened the Corbeaus’ place in their nightmares. But the truth, that wind pulled feathers off the wings they wore as costumes, wasn’t a strong enough warning to keep Paloma children from the woods.

“La magia negra,” her mother said. She always called those feathers black magic.

The fire dimmed to embers. Lace’s mother gave the pail a hard kick. It tumbled down the bank and into the river, the hot metal hissing and sinking.

“Let them drown,” her mother said, and the last of the rim vanished.

Her mother spit out the words like a bad taste, but Lace couldn’t blame her. The Corbeaus would’ve let a Paloma drown any day. Eight years ago, Lace’s older cousin Magdalena got caught in a fishing net the Corbeaus had set in the lake. She would’ve drowned if her novio had not seen her stuck in the nylon threads and pulled her out of the water, half the net still tangled around her costume tail.

The Corbeaus had been setting nets to trip them up for years, and the sirenas learned to spot them and get out of them, the same as colanders. But the one that got Magdalena was nylon, not rope. The dark water made those thin threads and tight knots invisible.

Lace’s father had filed a police report about what happened to Magdalena. The report went nowhere, but it had scared the Corbeaus off nylon nets ever since.

Lace went to break the news about the tail to her great-aunt, but Tía Lora had already seen. Lace found her watching from the motel window.

“Which one?” Tía Lora asked.

“The blue one,” Lace said. “One of the new ones.” She waited for sadness to wash over her great-aunt’s face.

Tía Lora showed little more than a wince. It crept into the muscles around her mouth, but barely reached her eyes. “It’s okay. We’ll make another.”

She accepted it with such quiet. This was her work, every stitch born from the pain in her fingers. Lace could help, but she didn’t have Tía Lora’s years and instinct. Even with her eyes going, Lora Paloma’s sewing by touch came out better than Lace’s by sight.

They were lucky Tía Lora had stayed with them. No one had been so good with the costumes since Lace’s great-grandmother died. Four years before Lace was born, Tía Lora had every reason to leave. The Corbeaus had killed her husband, the man who had given her his name and made her a Paloma.

But Tía Lora stayed, and Lace’s grandmother made sure the whole family knew they would not leave her alone and widowed by Corbeau hands. That Tía Lora had no Paloma blood meant nothing. The Paloma name she had fastened to herself on her wedding day was still hers.

“Lo siento,” Lace told her great-aunt.

“I’m used to it.” Tía Lora turned her face from the window and smiled. Light gilded her brown cheek. “Every year your abuela brings us back here and pretends we can keep the feathers away.”

Lace gave her great-aunt a smile back. A few weeks earlier, Lace’s grandmother had drawn the family’s route on an age-softened map of California, announcing they would set up in Almendro even earlier this year.

Now Abuela sat in the motel parking lot with her coffee, smug smile ready to greet the Corbeaus’ Shasta trailers when they realized the Palomas were already here.

What she was hoping for, waiting out there with her Styrofoam cup of Folgers and powdered creamer, Lace didn’t know. A good brawl, maybe, between the Corbeau men and Lace’s cousins. A shouting match, Abuela screaming in Spanish, Nicole Corbeau shrieking in French.

Either way, her grandmother was disappointed. Lace’s cousin Matías brought her the news that instead of taking a block of rooms at the River Fork, the Corbeaus had rented a run-down house, like they knew the Palomas had gotten ahead of them.

“Where?” Abuela demanded.

Matías told her it was somewhere near the campground, if he could even call it that. Five years ago the state had cut the funding to keep it up. Now it was just a cluster of fire pits, the root growth of porcelain vine and wild roses turning over the earth.

“At least they’ll be out of the way,” Lace said.

Matías folded his arms. “I don’t know what they’re doing. That house is only half as big as they need for all of them.”

“I bet they make their children sleep outside,” Abuela said. “Los gitanos and their trailers.”

Abuela drained the last of her coffee and crushed the cup in her hand. She tossed it over her shoulder, knowing Lace would throw it out.

This was her grandmother’s pride. If she wanted Lace’s father and uncles to make the aguas frescas, she would pelt them with lemons until the mesh bag was empty. Instead of asking for la Biblia from her trunk, her brown, ring-covered hand pointed until the nearest grandchild obeyed.

Lace bent toward the asphalt. If Abuela left her coffee cup on the ground, any Paloma daughter knew enough to pick it up.

Volez de ses propres ailes.

Fly with your own wings.

A knock shook the trailer door.

“Ten minutes,” Cluck said, scrambling to replace a broken wire. During the season, fixing wings was a full-time job. His mother’s qu’il pleuve ou qu’il vente policy meant they performed through every summer storm, rain damaging the feathers and wind warping the frames.

“Five,” his mother said. Her shoes crunched the ground outside.

He tied his hair back. Pépère hated when he did that. He thought ponytails were odd on both boys and girls, something strange and American. He’d fluff the back of Cluck’s hair with his hand and say, “What is this?”

But Pépère was already down at the show site, checking Cluck’s work. Without the wings, there was no show.

Chemical smells blew in through the window. Boiling water. Rusted metal. Hot adhesive in the nearby plant’s mixing tanks. Reminders that his grandfather used to check the temperature and pressure gauges, the pipe-washing logs, the vent gas scrubbers.

That was twenty years ago. Now the plant ran so hot the smell of plastic and ash blew clear to the highway. One day the whole system would overheat and shut down like a fried car engine, his grandfather said. The owners hadn’t replaced the old overflow tank, just to save a hundred thousand dollars. And the plant’s trainings didn’t even cover how workers shouldn’t wear cotton near the tanks. Last year, a pipe burst, and a spray of cyanoacrylate burned through the shin of a man’s jeans.

Cluck’s mother kept the show coming here because of the Almendro Blackberry Festival. Each year the town celebrated a variety of blackberry first cultivated by a local fifty years earlier. It was a point of pride around here, the berries growing so easily in backyards and ceramic planters that the brambles trailed on brick walkways and crabgrass lawns.

The festival brought in enough tourists for a quarter of the season’s ticket receipts. But if it were Cluck’s call, they’d go west to the coastal forests, or north and east, where wildflower fields fringed the groves of trees. They’d never stop in the town that had turned on Pépère.

A pebble bounced off the trailer’s window. “Cluck,” one of his cousins yelled through the pane.

Cluck cut a few feathers. He wished all his fingers worked. He’d gotten used to three being nothing but dead weight, but when he had to rush, he missed them.

“Did you go back to France to get the feathers or something?” Cluck’s cousin laughed at his own joke. A few of his younger cousins gave him an echo.

“We didn’t wear wings in France, crétin fini,” Cluck said under his breath. In Provence, the Corbeaus had been les fildeféristes, tightrope walkers. They’d moved from town to town, fastening their ropes to church steeples. Onlookers swore les Tsiganes had sold their souls to the devil so he would take from them their fear of heights.

Now the Corbeaus were a tentless circus, performing anywhere they found enough trees. Their fildefériste blood had thinned out enough that they now walked branches, not tightropes.

Cluck came out of the costume trailer, arms full of feathers and wire, and put the repaired wings on the last few performers.

He had to dodge to keep from bumping into anyone. The ring of travel trailers was busy as a yellow jacket’s nest. Performers cycled through the pink Airflyte to get iodine for their feet. Cluck’s mother and Yvette kept the books, receipts, and maps in a half-white, half-red 1962. Lights and cables came out of the aluminum 1954 Cardinal. Anyone with a twisted ankle or a cut palm waited for Georgette in the 1956 Willerby Vogue with the melamine-green underbelly. And a 1963 Airstream was the junk drawer of the trailers, half schoolroom for the younger Corbeaus, half workshop when Pépère and Cluck needed the extra space.

Cluck watched Clémentine and Violette skip off into the trees, carrying burlap bags of petals. Each night they refilled them with cornflowers and seven-sisters roses that grew wild in the woods, the same kinds they wove into flower crowns.

They looked like wood fairies, their wings made of forest and sky colors.

His mother snatched the spare feathers from his hands. “What were you doing, trying to grow wings yourself?” She followed after the performers, her shoes clicking on the rocky ground. Only his mother would wear high heels in the woods.

Cluck got to the show space in time to see the performers taking their places in the boughs. The wings drew the audience in, but they made the performers’ jobs harder. It took years for a Corbeau to learn to wear them without knocking the wide span into branches or snagging them on leaves.

Cluck knew. His grandfather made him climb trees wearing a set of wings when he was fourteen. Cluck had been scrambling barefoot up maples and oaks since he was old enough to walk, hiding in the higher branches Dax couldn’t get to. But his first time up with those wings took him twice as long. The weight pulled him back or pushed him forward. Hitting the outer wires on the boughs made him fight to keep his balance. “If you’ve been up there wearing them, you will be better at making them,” Pépère had called up from the ground.

Now Cluck only went up into the show’s trees twice each run, once to hang the glass chimes and once to take them down. In each town where his family stopped, he had his own trees, always far from the show space.

Pépère found him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Good work.”

“Yeah, tell that to my mom,” Cluck said.

It was Pépère and Cluck’s job to make getting up there easier. For the climb, the wire frames folded against the performers’ backs like lacewings or stoneflies. Once they reached a high branch, a few tugs on two ribbons or cords opened the feathered span.

Thanks to the width his mother and aunts insisted on, the wings, once open, acted as sails. They caught all wind. If a performer didn’t have the strength and balance to fight the pull, they fell. A generation before Cluck was born, a sudden gust knocked a great-aunt from a silver maple, and she fractured two lower vertebrae. She walked again, but never climbed.

“Don’t worry about my daughter,” Pépère said just when Cluck thought he hadn’t heard him. “She doesn’t like to see you do anything better than her precious vedette de spectacle.” He moved a few trees away to light up a cigarette, far enough that the wind wouldn’t bring the smoke to the audience.

Cluck smiled. Only his grandfather could call Dax the star of the show and make it sound like an insult.

He watched the trees. The performers let themselves be seen, looked as though they meant not to. They leapt onto lower branches. The strongest ones, like his brother, pulled up the lightest ones quick enough to make them look like they were flying. The women danced as if the thin boughs were wide as the sky. The men stood as their partners, lifting them, offering their hands, and hoisting themselves higher up so easily it looked like their wings had done it. The more graceful of his cousins ventured far onto the boughs of valley oaks, their weight bowing the wood.

He would’ve loved to see any Paloma try it.

Cluck’s mother stopped a few steps from him. Every Corbeau, from five-year-old Jacqueline to Cluck’s grandfather, knew her stare was an order, a flight call keeping a flock together.

“You’re slower this year,” she said, a warning, and then left to count ticket receipts.

Cluck put his hands in his pockets and let a long breath out. “No, I’m not,” he said when she’d gotten far enough not to hear him. “I just hate this town.”

Más vale pájaro en mano que ciento volando.

A bird in the hand is worth a hundred flying.

Lace didn’t have to ask why her family had set out for Almendro so early. Abuela wanted to make sure the Corbeaus couldn’t steal the lakeside.

The Corbeaus had held their own shows there twenty years ago, forcing the Palomas to set up along the river. But after the night the water rose up onto the shore and swallowed the Corbeaus’ favorite trees, the Palomas claimed the lake. Those trees, now on the lake floor, were the only ones near the water strong enough to hold the Corbeaus’ bodies and wings. But Abuela still worried that their magia negra could make birches and young magnolias grow big as sycamores.

“Those cuervos should never have taken the lake for themselves when we’re the ones who need the water,” Abuela said. “And now we’ll keep it. I don’t care if it means we come here in February.”

“We’re gonna freeze our asses,” Alexia whispered as the mermaids wriggled into their tails at the river’s edge.

But none of them could blame Abuela. This was the town where the Palomas and the Corbeaus always crossed paths. Sometimes, in other counties, they overlapped for a couple of days, the end of one family’s run coming up against the start of the other’s. But Almendro was their battleground, even before that night at the lake twenty years ago. And if one family didn’t show, the other won by default.

Lace and her cousins slid down the bank, the heat fading with the light. The water felt cold as the first minute of their motel showers. Their skin puckered into gooseflesh. They held their grumbling under their tongues, but their grandmother still sensed it.

“The spring in Weeki Wachee was colder than this,” Abuela said. “Seventy-two degrees.”

A shiver of excitement crossed Lace’s escamas whenever Abuela talked about Weeki Wachee. In that little spring-fed town, Abuela had performed with a dozen other women in ruched elastane. Playing to the aquarium glass built into the side of the spring, they combed their hair with carved conch shells, chased each other’s spangled tails, kissed sea turtles. They smiled underwater without making bubbles, something Lace practiced in every motel pool from Magalia to Lake Isabella.

In a little more than a year, she’d be there, sharing the spring with wild manatees, swimming in the town that made her grandmother a famous beauty.

The Paloma sirenas weren’t Weeki Wachee mermaids. They didn’t perform in front of plate glass. They were less like circus girls and more like the world’s tallest thermometer (134 feet, for the record high in Baker, California), mechanical dinosaurs made out of scrapped car parts and farm equipment (Lace and Martha snuck off to see them in Cabazon), or the world’s largest concrete lemon (ten feet long, six feet wide, five miles outside El Cajon).

But the real tourist trap was the Corbeaus’ show. Lace had never seen it herself, but from what Justin told her, all the Corbeaus did was climb trees with wings on their backs. At least the Paloma mermaids were quick, darting through the water, dancing in the drowned forest. Vanishing and reappearing.

“They want to work to see you,” Abuela reminded them. “Don’t start la danza too early. You let them find you first. They find you, they feel smart.”

“Half of them are here for a festival about a berry,” Lace said as she fixed Martha’s smudged lipstick. “How smart can they be?”

Abuela stood over Lace, her shadow great as a jacaranda tree. “You make them feel smart. You make them feel special, or you’re not doing your work. ¿Entiendes?” She looked around at Lace’s cousins. “All of you. You understand?”

“Sí, Abuela,” they murmured.

Abuela turned back to Lace. “¿Entiendes?”

Lace did not round her shoulders the way Martha or Reyna did when Abuela looked at them. She kept her back straight.

“Sí, Abuela,” Lace said, barely parting her teeth. Always Abuela, never Abuelita.

Emilia—Abuela called her la sirena aguamarina—leaned toward Lace. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “That’s a good sign. The day she starts calling you fat and saying your poses are sloppy is the day she’s decided you’re one of us.”

Emilia would know. Her hair glittered with strands of paillettes and river pearls that marked her as a lead mermaid. She swam in last, perched in the center of those sunken trees, posed for tourists. But when she first joined, it was months before Abuela even let her choose her own tail, a blue-green like Colorado turquoise.

They all wore tails bright as tissue paper flowers. Butter yellow. Aqua and teal. The orange of cherry brandy roses. The flick of their fins looked like hard candy skipping across the lake.

Lace’s own, pink as a grapefruit, branded her as the youngest, in her first season. Same with her hair, loose, no decorations. At the end of this season she’d earn a gold-painted shell or a strand of beads. Then another every season after. When the light hit Martha’s wet hair, sequins shimmered like constellations. Reyna and Leti wore clusters of shells at their hairlines. Her older cousins had so many strands clipped in that their hair looked made of paillettes.

They used those same plastic coins, sheer as beach glass, to cover their birthmarks. Their escamas were not some spectacle to be displayed in the show. Apanchanej, the river goddess who had blessed them with their love for water, had given them these marks, and they were not to flaunt them. Lace had barely gotten the high school equivalency all Paloma girls had to earn to join the show when Abuela filled her hands with paillettes and told her, “I don’t care if you have three GEDs. You cover your escamas, or you don’t swim.” So every sirena did, even though the waterproof glue made their skin itch.

Lace touched up her cousins’ cream eye color, fixed the pins in their hair, and then slipped into her own tail.

“Don’t let the water keep you, la sirena rosa,” Tía Lora whispered.

The sun turned the trees to fire and gold, and Abuela called them to their places. Lace’s uncles sold their aguas frescas to the audience at the lakeside. Mothers charged their camera flashes. Fathers held video recorders, speaking the year and month and panning across the lake. Children held up plastic binoculars, seesawing the focus bars. Couples soaked up the light off the water and the fever of looking for mermaids.

The stretch of river Lace’s grandmother had her swimming from ran through deep woods, the edge of where the Corbeaus would set up their show.

“But you are a good girl,” her grandmother said. “So you will not go into the woods.” A statement and a warning. ¿Sí, mija? ¿Verdad?

Lace clutched an algae-slick rock and listened for the hollow whistle of her uncles’ zampoñas. To start the show, three of them blew into the long pipes. The arundo reed gave back clean, full sounds. Those thin walls meant louder notes, but only a few of her uncles knew how to hold them without snapping the pipes.

“Los turistas are gullible, huh?” they said as they warmed up the zampoñas. “They think we can call mermaids with these things.”

But it added to the show’s mystery, one man, silent and sun-weathered enough to look wise, standing on a near bank, two others in the trees across the lake, where the audience could spot them. All three played those wooden pipes, fastened with strips of cane and braided bands, the notes long and steady as their breaths.

Lace kept listening for the deep call of the arundo wood. Tangled river roots gave the air the scent of cool earth. It mixed with the tart fruit of the aguas frescas.

She took the deep breaths she’d need to stay under. The tail was heavy, and if she didn’t have the air to kick against it, it pulled her down.

A few low trees shivered. A handful of night birds scattered. Lace crossed herself, like her mother told her, to keep away feathers.

The silhouettes of branches trembled in the fading light.

“Hello?” Lace called out, but the wind choked the sound.

She ducked behind a rock, ready to dive into the current. She’d never been quick on her feet, but she could swim away so fast anyone would think she was a trick of the light, the flicker of a candle in a glass jar. Half her job was disappearing.

The branches parted, and a pair of enormous wings emerged from the woods. Their shape stood black against the sky. They loomed over the bank. A few more steps, and their shadow would find Lace. If the wearer brought them down, they could crush her. The Corbeaus’ magia negra would harden them into flint.

The feathers vibrated with all the evil that family carried. These crows had left Lora Paloma nothing. There were reasons a flock of crows was called a murder.

Lace waited for the figure to click his back teeth like the rattle of a comb call. If she let him, he’d get those teeth into her, his bite sharp as a beak.

The water grew colder against Lace’s back. She peered around the rock, looking for the frame of a Corbeau man big enough to make the trees shrink away from him.

Her breasts stung from the chill. The current pulled at her hair. She’d only ever seen pictures of the Corbeaus’ wings, all those feathers fastened to arched wire. They were wide as a hawk’s span, so tall she wondered how the wind didn’t tip them.

They twitched on the back of their wearer.

Lace squinted into the dark, making out the body attached to these wings.

It wasn’t a man, but a woman, smaller than the shortest of Lace’s cousins. How did she stand up against wings that size?

She stumbled, lost or drunk. Her feet grazed where Lace had hidden her dress in the undergrowth.

The woman tripped on the underbrush, and her hand bumped her lips. A smudge of red-orange came off on her thumb and forefinger.

She pinched her fingers, making the imprint of her mouth move. She laughed at her own hand.

Then she noticed Lace.

She turned her head and took in the pink of Lace’s tail, the matching cream eye shadow, the plum-red lipstick.

The woman’s stained fingers froze in the air, a tethered balloon.

“Ah, ouais?” she asked, as though Lace had said something.

Her hair was cut to her chin, with thick bangs, like the girls in Martha’s old postcards. By the light of the candles Lace’s father left burning in glass jars, it looked orange like flowering quince. Her crown of flowers and leaves reminded Lace of fruit topping a tarta.

She was iced as a cake, her eye shadow the mauve of new lilacs. Painted wings spread from the bridge of her nose across her eyelids and temples. Rhinestones glinted at the corners of her eyes. The blue and bronze peacock feathers on her back rippled like wheat. Not the black ones Lace and her mother kept finding. Those, her cousins swore, grew from their heads like hair, another mark of el Diablo.

Lace’s fingers dug into the rock. She and this woman could tear each other’s hair out. Lace could scratch at those feathers. The woman could wade into the river and shred the soft fabric trailing from Lace’s fin.

Lace could take off her costume top and swing it at the woman. The scallop shells and fake pearls would leave her lip bloody.

She didn’t.

If the woman pulled a wire loose from her wings, she could put Lace’s eye out.

She didn’t.

Lace slid down into the water.

The woman backed toward the woods until the tree shadows swallowed her whole.

On ne marie pas les poules avec les renards.

One does not wed hens with foxes.

They didn’t want money. If they did, they would’ve gone for his wallet as soon as they’d gotten him on the ground and then just left him outside the liquor store.

In the dark, he could only tell them apart by size. The biggest one. Another a little shorter, quick enough to get him in the stomach before he could tense. The third a couple of years and a few inches behind them both.

“You don’t talk, chucho?” the biggest one asked. He hadn’t hit him for a couple minutes. He let the other two get the practice.

The smallest of the three got Cluck in the jaw. He hit the hardest. More to prove.

The salt taste thickened inside Cluck’s cheek.

“You speak English, chucho?” The quick one kicked him in the shoulder.

Pain spread down Cluck’s arm. Letting them get him on the ground was his first mistake. He knew that now. But it always worked with Dax. Once Dax got him down, Cluck wasn’t fun anymore. Better not to fight back.

This was about territory. These guys didn’t like him in their part of town after dark. He’d figured if he went slack, they’d know he’d gotten the message.

Next time, he’d just walk the extra half-mile to the grocery store.

“¿Hablas español?” the quick one asked.

It wasn’t the first time Cluck had gotten mistaken for something he wasn’t. Women often asked him for directions in Spanish. His mother said it was his Manouche blood. His whole family had it, but in him it came through like a stain spreading. It made him darker than anyone in his family except his grandfather. It streaked red the feathers that grew in with his hair, made him le petit démon to his mother.

“You don’t speak none of them, chucho?” the smallest one asked.

Cluck tongued the blood on his lip.

The oldest one grabbed his shirt. “Talk, chucho.”

The cornflower came unpinned from Cluck’s vest, and the blue-violet bloom tumbled to the dirt. He still didn’t look up.

The oldest one shook him. “Talk.”

Cluck’s shirt collar came off in his hand, and he fell back to the ground.

The oldest one’s lip curled up. He’d probably never heard of a detachable collar. Cluck wouldn’t have either if his grandfather hadn’t worn them when he was his age. The buttonholes had grown soft over the last half a century. The collars came off more easily than they once did.

“Used to be very fashionable,” Cluck said. “The mark of a gentleman.”

The oldest one hit him in the temple. The force spun through his head. He felt his brain whipping up like one of his aunts’ meringues. Beat to stiff peaks. Just add sugar.

Something about Cluck always rubbed somebody the wrong way. If it wasn’t his clothes, it was his left hand. These three hadn’t noticed it yet. Too dark. The light from the liquor store barely reached them. The ring of red-orange stopped just short of the ground where Cluck braced his hands.

A shadow broke the neon. The shape of a girl, hands on her hips. She set her shoe down a few inches from the fallen cornflower.

Cluck looked up. The red-orange caught one side of her face and body. It lit up the hem of her skirt and one sleeve of her jean jacket. It brightened her lipstick to the color of pincushion plants, and streaked her hair. Black or brown, he couldn’t tell. She had on a thin scarf tied like a headband, the tails of the bow trailing on her shoulder.

She cleared her throat.

All three of them looked up. The bigger one dropped Cluck’s collar.

The girl tilted her head toward the road. The three of them backed away, like Cluck was something they’d been caught breaking.

“You gonna say anything?” the youngest one asked as he passed her.

“Still thinking about it,” she said.

She held out her hand to Cluck. He hesitated. She wasn’t as little as Eugenie or Georgette, but he was still more likely to pull her down than she was to get him on his feet.

The muscles in his left hand twitched. He kept it still. He never could talk his body into believing it was right-handed.

She grabbed him just above his elbow and pulled him to standing. The force of her surprised him, her small hands stronger than he expected. He stumbled, stopping himself from falling forward.

“You got an arm on you,” he said. “Well, two of them.”

“I do a lot of swimming.”

“Around here?” He brushed off his hands on the front of his pants. “I don’t recommend it. Not with the colanders.”

She stared at him, her lips a little parted.

He picked up his collar, dusted it off. “The roots of the trees growing in the river tangle together, form these big strainers.”

“I know what a colander is,” she said.

“Of course you do.” Anyone who lived around here did. He buttoned his collar back on his shirt. “Do you always have that effect on men?”

“I know their mother.”

He blew the dirt off the cornflower and pinned it back onto his vest. “Same sewing circle?”

“Something like that,” she said. “You could’ve fought back, you know.”

“Oh yeah?”

“You take out the biggest one first. Do you have any brothers?”

“Just one.” He folded his collar down. “He’s the biggest alright.”

He straightened up, collar and cornflower and the rest of him all put back in place. He had about six or seven inches on this girl, her body small but not willowy. There was enough on her that she seemed soft instead of fragile like the thinnest and shortest of his cousins.

He wished he hadn’t noticed. Noticing came with the thought of touching her, and a sureness that she would not break under his hands.

“What’s your name?” Cluck asked.

“None of your business,” she said.

“How’s that look frosted on a birthday cake?”

She laughed, but didn’t want to. The corners of her eyes fought it.

“What are you doing out here?” he asked.

“You first.”

“My family needed milk.”

“You couldn’t have gotten it in the morning?”

“They get up early.”

“First shift at the plant?” she asked.

The plant. Two words, and Cluck’s tongue tasted dry and bitter as the charcoal off burnt toast. The plant, where his grandfather once worked as a safety engineer, making sure everything ran clean. He oversaw the safety measures, implemented new ones. That was before the plant let him go, all because of what the Palomas did.

Now his grandfather traveled with the rest of the family, the life he’d never wanted. He’d gone to school to get away from it. All he’d wanted was to work, use what he’d learned, live in a house that was his. He’d had these things—the position at the plant, the house with a lemon tree that blossomed every May—until the Palomas took them.

But none of that was anybody else’s business, so Cluck just told the girl, “No, they don’t work at the plant.”

The girl pointed at Cluck’s left hand. “You should get that looked at.”

That was a new one. Strangers usually assumed it was a deformity, that he came this way, his fingers balled into a fist at birth and never fully opening. His hand had been that way for years, the ring finger and pinkie stuck curled under like talons, the third finger always bent. He could only straighten his thumb and forefinger, only had full range of motion in those two. Even if he could spread out his whole hand, his fingers wouldn’t match. The third, ring, and pinkie would never get as big as the ones on his right hand, the growth plates cracked and knocked out of place years ago.

“Too late,” he told the girl.

Then came the few awkward seconds that made her hunch her shoulders as though she were tall. Her ear almost brushed her jean jacket. She looked caught, like strangers when he noticed them staring.

“Let’s get you some ice,” she said.

Her guilt made him wince.

“You don’t have to do that,” he said.

But she waved him into the liquor store, slid quarters into the ice machine, and filled a plastic sack. The light from the refrigerator case shined through the soda bottles, casting bands of color on the linoleum. Stewart’s Lime, Cheerwine, Blue Vanilla Frostie, all bright with dyes his grandfather said were no better than the chemicals the plant mixed up a hundred thousand gallons at a time.

The girl pulled the scarf off her hair. Her messy bun came undone, her hair falling down her back. She plunged her hand into the ice and wrapped a fistful in the sheer fabric. The water darkened the flower pattern, turning the white space between the roses gray.

She held it to his temple. “That’s gonna be blue by tomorrow morning.”

Cold water dripped down his cheek. “Don’t worry. They look good on me.”

She switched hands and shook out her fingers. “This happens a lot?”

“Must be my sparkling personality.”

She put his hand on the scarf. “Could be the way you’re dressed.”

“Eye-catching, isn’t it?” Cluck had the same thing on he wore most days. Collared shirt, sleeves rolled up from working on the wings. Vest and trousers. “Fetching, you might say?”

The girl filled her arms on the way to the counter. Soda bottles, caramel corn, praline cashews from a farm one county over.

The man at the counter jerked his newspaper to straighten it. “More popcorn, eh?”

The girl flicked him off. The man chuckled, an almost-friend laugh. Almendro was so small nobody bothered to renumber the town sign after the census a few years ago. The man probably knew the girl’s mother and all her sisters if she had any. She’d probably been coming in to buy sour worms and neon sodas since she was in grade school.

They probably did this every week, the man’s teasing, her middle finger, his laugh.

“You want anything?” the girl asked Cluck.

Cluck wondered how someone her size ate all that. “You don’t mess around, do you?”

Her hand paused halfway to a bag of peach rings. “Excuse me?”

He braced to talk himself out. He forgot girls didn’t need to be heavy to feel heavy. Last summer, half his cousins lived on honey and chili powder, a diet they read about in a magazine. Eugenie planned on doing it again this year before they got to Stanislaus County, where she had a park ranger who thought he was her boyfriend.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. “Here.” He tried to take the bags and bottles. “Let me buy. Least I can do.”

She dropped everything on the counter, bag of ice and all, and walked out. The bell on the door jingled and knocked the glass.

Cluck followed her out. “I can do this all night.”

She stopped and turned around, arms crossed tight. The wind fluffed up her skirt, like the bottom half of her was underwater. “Do what?”

“You say something and feel bad about it,” Cluck said. “I say something and feel bad about it. Just warning you though, I say a lot of stupid things, and I’m good at feeling bad. You’ll get tired before I do.”

She walked off, the thin film of her dress lapping at the backs of her knees.

He still had to get the milk. The man at the counter grunted to his newspaper, huffed at the mess of packages Cluck had made the girl leave on the counter.

“Sorry.” Cluck paid for a quart of milk, and put everything else back. Soda bottles in the refrigerator case, dried mango and a whole jicama with the other fruit.

The man looked over at him like he might shoplift. He should’ve combed his hair. His grandfather said wearing it as long as he did, down over the collar, wasn’t doing him any favors. But his grandfather knew why he never cut it shorter. He knew what it was hiding, why Cluck never pulled it back in public. It would’ve been as bad as turning his head over, showing strangers the red.

Cold water dripped off the sides of Cluck’s palm. He still had the girl’s scarf, full of ice.

He ran outside after her, but she was already gone.

A mal nudo, mal cuño.

Meet roughness with roughness.

Oscar and Rey saw Lace holding the bucket of motel ice and knew they were in for a show. But she hitched her thumb toward the door to order them out. They grumbled and took their soda bottles and chicharrones down the hall to Matías’ room.

Justin lay sprawled on the other bed, the motel’s patterned spread crumpled under him. He snored the low drone of june bugs, one hand shielding his eyes from the TV.

He and Matías could get away with anything. They were Abuela’s perfect little soldados. Matías was ready for a fight whenever a Corbeau looked at one of them. Justin always had some plan to sabotage the Corbeaus’ generator or spread vegetable oil on the tree branches.

They were Abuela’s good boys, sus ninõs buenos, and las sirenas were clumsy fish. Abuela always pointed out when one mermaid was looking a little soft, another too bony. One of them had put on too much cream blush, another hadn’t speckled enough paillettes over her body, so the ones covering her escamas were too obvious.

Abuela saw only their screwups, while Matías riled up the Corbeaus, and Justin beat up locals when no Corbeau showed.

But even Matías wouldn’t have pulled what Justin did tonight. The only locals Matías ever beat up were a couple of guys throwing corn nuts and M&Ms at Emilia and Martha, trying to feed the mermaids like animals. Matías might have been one made-for-TV movie away from slapping a Corbeau in the face with a glove and challenging him to a duel, but he took pride in a fair fight, even with the Corbeaus. When Justin stole the Corbeaus’ extension cords, he did it behind Matías’ back. Matías never would’ve let him do something that pulled in the Corbeau women. His caballerosidad was as firm as his fists.

Lace upended the ice bucket. The flat cubes spilled onto Justin’s chest and scattered out, hitting his chin and arms.

He startled awake and jumped up. “What the…” He shook off his body.

“What is wrong with you?” Lace asked. “Do you want your mother getting the call to bail your ass out of the county lockup?”

“You think I’m stupid?” He ripped the spread off the bed and shook it out. “We were never gonna get caught.”

“You don’t know that.” She tore the bedspread out of his hands. “What was that?”

He snatched it back, forehead creasing. He and his brothers looked so much like his father, with that hard brow bone and lips as full as any woman’s. The girls liked him as much as the women liked his father. But now his father was gone, taking his mother’s Chevy and leaving nothing but three sons who had his last name instead of Paloma.

“Why’d you do it?” Lace asked.

“What are you, my mother?”

“Worse. Your mother’s too nice to do this.” She smacked the side of his head.

He flopped down on the plain sheet and bunched both pillows under his neck. “Get out of the way, will you?” he said to Lace’s body cutting through the TV’s light.

She put her hands on her hips, blocking it worse. He was gonna listen. He was gonna know that if he broke his mother’s heart, she’d break him.

Justin stared at Lace’s rib cage, trying to see through her.

“That guy was what?” she asked. “Fun?”

“I didn’t like how he looked at me.”

“Bullshit.” She slammed her hand into the side of the TV. It went dark. She’d stayed in this room last season, and knew the right spot to turn it off.

Justin still stared at her stomach. “Oscar and Rey, if nobody teaches ’em how to fight, they won’t know.”

“That wasn’t a fight,” Lace said. “That was the three of you beating on a local. You know what happens when you beat on the locals? They don’t come. If they don’t come, we don’t get paid. Word spreads that we’re the kind of people who beat up anyone we feel like. Then guess what? We’re not welcome in this town anymore. Then we’re not welcome in the next town, or the next county. My father goes back to a job the school district cut. Your grandfather goes back to selling champurrado where, Echo Park? You want that?”

He sat up. “I had it handled.” His yelling turned her face hot.

“Oh, like you had it handled with the horse?” Lace asked.

Justin’s cheek grew sunken, back teeth biting the inside. “Low, Lace,” he said. “Low.”

The guilt hit her, small, but sharp. He was right. Her bringing it up was low. Justin was only eleven when he, Alexia, and Alexia’s older brother “borrowed” a Camargue colt from a family that ran a traveling horse show. They’d planned to bring it back before dawn, but it had spooked and gotten away from them, and in the moonless night they couldn’t spot its pale coat.

The three of them thought they could get away with it if they kept their mouths shut. But then Alexia, a new mermaid, could not get near water. She shied away from it like a foal that had never seen a river. Her brother and Justin startled as easily as fillies, jumping at the sound of every closed door or chittering squirrel. They realized the horse family knew about the Camargue, and had cursed them.

Justin, Alexia, and Alexia’s brother stayed up three days and nights, searching for that horse. The Palomas, including Lace, all stayed up too, praying, fearing that the lost colt would make the horse family hate the Palomas as much as the Palomas hated the Corbeaus. But they could not help them look, because to lift the curse the three would have to get the horse back themselves.

They finally found it grazing in a salt marsh. They returned it, their eyes never leaving the grass as they apologized. The next day, Alexia loved water again, and her brother and Justin were bold as hawks. The family who owned the Camargue figured they had learned their lesson, and lifted the curse that made them like skittish horses.

Lace sat on the edge of the bed, back to Justin. All the arguing seeped out of her. It wasn’t fair of her to bring it up. Justin had been the youngest of the three of them, and he and his cousins had made it right.

If only the feud with the Corbeaus came down to a single lost colt.

“Somebody’s gotta look out for us,” Justin said.

“We look out for each other,” she said.

“Abuela puts us in the same town with them.”

Them. The word twisted his lips. He couldn’t even speak the name Corbeau.

He was saying what nobody else would. Abuela chose wrong. Every year, she chose wrong. And every year, the Corbeaus got one of them. Last year Matías spent half the show season with a cast on his right arm, though he swore it was worth it and he’d do it again. The year before that a sirena came home with her dress strap ripped by a Corbeau. Her mother had thanked God she could run faster than any of her cousins.

Every year, they wondered what the Corbeaus might do next. Send crows to bring sickness on the Palomas. Use gitano magic to curse a Paloma child, stopping her from growing the birthmarks that showed up on all other Paloma girls. Leti was sure they’d murdered Tío Armando years ago, slaughtered him in the woods. The story about the coyote was just that, she said, a story.

Lace put nothing past the Corbeaus. Twenty years ago, they’d caused the flood at the lake, killing Tía Lora’s husband. Eight years ago, they’d almost drowned Magdalena with that net. There was nothing they would not do.

Justin punched his pillows, fluffing them up.

“I’m not gonna go looking for a fight,” he said. “All I’m saying is, they come here, they’re gonna get one. And I’m gonna make sure my brothers are ready.”

“And whose show do you think that guy’s gonna go see now?” Lace asked. “Ours or theirs?”

Justin grabbed the remote and clicked the TV on.

“If you want to look out for us, good,” she said. “Look out for us. Keep Oscar and Rey out of fights.”

He flipped the channel. “If you don’t want me beating on the locals, don’t go out so late.”

He knew why she went out late. She starved all day so when she slid into her tail, her stomach wouldn’t look soft with baby fat, Abuela poking it with the corner of her Bible and saying, “You’re still not a woman, mija.” But after the cleanup and the costume mending, hunger drove Lace to the snack aisle at the liquor store. So she stayed as she was, not soft enough for her grandmother to pull her from the show, not thin enough to be one of the finned beauties who draped their tails on wide rocks, posing for pictures.

Justin threw the remote in the air and caught it. It smacked against his palm. “Guys around here gotta know they can’t look at my cousins.”

“He wasn’t looking at me.”

“He could’ve been.”

Thank God Justin didn’t have sisters. “But he wasn’t.”

She almost felt bad for the guy. He’d either been too scared to fight her cousins or thought it was no use. He wasn’t built like Justin, but he was just as tall, and he had enough muscle on him that he could’ve tried if he’d wanted to.

Maybe Justin didn’t like his hair, how it was almost long enough to touch his shoulders. According to Lace’s uncles, no man worth anything wore his hair past his ears. She didn’t know if it was that wavy and messy on its own or if that was from her cousins kicking him around. And she couldn’t quite tell what he was, his features strong but not sharp.

Lace’s cousins didn’t like not knowing what someone was, not knowing what to do with them. Poor guy didn’t stand a chance.

“Sorry, Lace,” Justin said, as quickly as if he’d stepped on the fin of her tail.

“Don’t tell me. Tell the local guy. Tell your mother.”

“I thought you didn’t want my mother to know.”

“Then don’t do it again.” She pulled the door shut behind her.

Her feet brushed the hallway carpet, picking up static. Her fingers sparked on the knob of her room. Today had been the first day dry enough for it. The rain was coming again, her father said. They were waiting on a wet summer, one that would dull tourists’ taste for outdoor shows. The Palomas would fight the Corbeaus for an even smaller audience.

Martha had fallen asleep before Lace went out. So bony her upper arms were as thin as her forearms, Martha couldn’t keep weight on, even with her mother always pushing stone pine nuts at her, swearing they would help her grow hips.

Poor, good-hearted Martha. She’d once made the mistake of saying they shouldn’t call the Corbeaus gypsies. She’d read somewhere that the right word was Romani. The glare Abuela and Lace’s mother gave her could have singed the green off an ancho chile.

Their tails hung over the shower bar, the pink and orange fins dripping into the bathtub. Martha’s arm stuck out of the comforter, long fingers grasping the TV remote. Lace clicked off the set.

Makeup covered the pressboard dresser. Base and mascara. Cream eye shadows in a dozen shades. Red lipsticks. All waterproof. Sea-colored rhinestones to stick at the outer corner of each eye and on their false eyelashes. It was Lace’s job to put color on each of her cousins, the same as it had been before she joined the show.

If her cousins showed for call late from flirting with local men, Lace barely had time to do her own makeup. Not that it mattered. Abuela kept her in the background, a mermaid who flicked her tail and then disappeared into the shadows of sunken trees.

Lace took off her dress and twisted to look at her escamas, jeweling her lower back like coins of water. Each one was round, the size of a dime, raised a little like a mole. They shone like the cup of an abalone shell. A sprinkling of scales off a pale fish, a gift from the river goddess Apanchanej.

Las sirenas all had them. Alexia’s spotted the back of her neck. Sisters Reyna and Leti wore theirs on opposite shoulder blades.

Martha was lucky. Hers encircled her lower calf like an anklet, hidden by the costume tail. Any paillettes she wore were for decoration.

Lace sank down on her side of the bed. Her skirt fluffed, and a wisp of black wafted out. She pinched the air and caught it between her fingers. A feather, dark as obsidian, streaked with the red of wine and pomegranate seeds. She’d never seen one like it, with all that red.

The color turned her throat sour. It made her lower back prickle. If it brushed her birthmarks, it might make each one peel away like a scab.

She took the feather out to the parking lot, struck a match from one of the motel books, and lit it. The fire ate through the plume. She let it fall to the ground and then stamped it out until it crumbled to ash.

Entre l’arbre et l’écorce il ne faut pas mettre le doigt.

Don’t put your finger between the tree and the bark.

Cluck watched his grandfather lean an elbow out of the Morris Cowley’s driver’s side window. The wind from the highway made the end of his cigarette glow.

“Those things’ll kill you, you know,” Cluck said.

“So will the things they eat in this country,” Pépère said. The soda in the liquor store horrified Alain Corbeau, those colors bright as neon tubes. He thought Kraft Singles contained, within a few square inches, all American evils. His career at the adhesive plant had only strengthened his belief that chemicals belonged on the flaps of envelopes and between layers of pressboard, not in the stomach.

Cluck laid two new peacock feathers out on the dashboard, both pale as swans’ wings, thanks to a recessive allele. Leucism. It left nothing but white, and the faintest flashes of sunrise colors if the light hit the barbs the right way.

Locals swore the white peacock of Elida Park was a myth, no more real than a green flash at dusk. But today the bird had dragged his train across the grass and left behind these two perfect tail feathers.

Cluck’s grandfather lifted one off the dashboard. It let off a little blue. “What will you do with them?” he asked.

Cluck held the passenger door handle. Whenever the truck upshifted, its weight pulled on his fingers. The latch was so old that if Pépère sped, it might come unhooked, and the door might fly open. “Same thing I do with the blue ones, I guess.”

His grandfather set the feather down. “Your hard work will never be worn, then. You’ll never catch anyone in this family in white wings.”

Pépère parked the Morris Cowley behind the Craftsman house, their home for the weeks they’d be in Almendro. The plumbing squealed, the floorboards groaned back and forth, and on windy nights, the attic murmured to the second floor.

Cluck didn’t have to hear it though. He slept in the costume trailer, a blue and white 1961 Shasta Compact. It saved his cousins from arguing about who had to sleep in the same room with him, calling not-it like they were still in grade school lessons. To them, his left-handedness and the red in his feathers made him dangerous as a matagot. Worse luck than a black cat brought across a stream. When the family went to church on la veille de Noël or le Vendredi saint, they did not bring him. So Pépère stayed home with him, reading from Luke. “Let them have their Latin and their hosties,” he told Cluck.

Pépère pointed out the window. “Regarde.” He lifted his hand toward a flitter of movement. A red-winged blackbird, all dark feathers except for a brushstroke of deep coral on each shoulder, crossed the sky.

This was his way of telling Cluck not to mind the red in his own feathers.

Pépère set the parking break. “I left Eugenie’s wings for you. She tore the right one.”

“Again?” Cluck slammed the door.

“Malheureusement.”

“I’ll get to it.”

First Cluck got the tire pressure gauge from inside the costume trailer. If the Shasta would sit for the show’s run here, he had to make sure the tires weren’t sinking into the ground.

He’d just put the gauge to the front right tire when Dax grabbed him by the back of the neck.

“You just had to go start something, didn’t you?” Dax slammed him against the side of the trailer. He caught a handful of Cluck’s hair, pulling at the back of his scalp.

“What?” Cluck asked.

“Don’t ask me what.” Dax flicked Cluck’s temple. “This.”

Pépère had made Cluck forget the bruising, the soreness. He always made him forget, no matter who gave him the bruise. Locals. Dax. His mother, when he was small, catching him in the eye with her elbow and then telling him “Le petit imbécile, stay out of my way.”

“You went to start a fight,” Dax said.

The smell of Dax’s aftershave dried out Cluck’s mouth, his tongue a parched sponge.

“I didn’t start anything,” Cluck said.

“Then where’d you get this?” Dax pressed him into the aluminum siding so hard the ridges cut across his body.

“Some guys in town,” Cluck said.

“What guys?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t lie to me.” Dax pulled him off the side of the trailer enough to slam him into it again.

Cluck held himself up, but didn’t fight. “I don’t know.” A metal seam pressed into his cheek.

“If you went to settle the score, you better tell me now.”

“What?” was all Cluck could get out.

“Don’t go near them.” Dax held him harder, wringing out the muscle at the back of his neck. “Got it?”

“Who?” Cluck turned his head.

The rage in Dax’s face shifted, the edges ground down.

He loosened his grip, dropped his hand. “You don’t know.”

The back of Cluck’s neck cooled.

“They’re in town,” Dax said. “That family.”

That family.

The Palomas were already here. They came back every year, never any guilt. Because of them, Clémentine’s oldest brother had lost his first wife twenty years ago. Cluck had heard stories about her, the woman with so much grace on the highest branches none of them could believe she had no fildefériste blood.

La magie noire the Palomas carried in their birthmarks had taken her.

The Palomas meant for every performer to die, drowned with those branches when the water flooded up onto its shores. All to steal the lake they thought belonged to them. It was only by the grace of God that the rest of the Corbeaus managed to swim against the pull of their own wings, scramble onto rocks, claw at the shore.

The Palomas lost one of their own too, a man who must have been at the lake to draw the water onto the land, la magie noire ready in his hands. But the Palomas still set up their show where the trees had been, on that man’s grave and the grave of a Corbeau.

Cluck’s family moved to the other side of the woods, as far as that stretch of forest would let them get from a family that danced where one of their own had died.

Cluck’s neck prickled to hot again. This was where the Palomas had ruined their grandfather. And every year they came back to rub it in.

“Does Pépère know?” Cluck asked.

“Since when is it my job to tell him?” Dax shoved him, this time to let him go. “You swear the fish didn’t do that to you?”

The fish. Dax didn’t like saying the name Paloma any more than Cluck did.

Cluck pulled on the hem of his shirt to smooth it. “It was some guys from around here.”

“You’re sure?”

“Another local told them off.” The girl in the red lipstick knew the man at the liquor store enough to give him the finger and get a laugh. And Cluck would have known a pack of Palomas. He would have seen la tromperie in their eyes. His mother called the Paloma girls les sorcières. They must have been, she said, to draw an audience when all they did was swim.

“What are they doing here this early?” Cluck asked.

“They know our schedule,” Dax said.

“We should’ve canceled the stop.”

The words drew their mother’s shadow toward the trailer. The idea must have summoned her, called her like a spirit.

She stood with arms crossed, thin elbows resting in her palms. “This family hasn’t canceled a stop since we came to this country.” She’d starched her linen shift dress so well the breeze didn’t move it. Her eyelashes looked sharp as chestnut spines. “Not for rain. Not for the earthquakes. Not even for snow, not that either of you would remember that year.”

It was what set them apart from the Palomas, who had to cancel their shows every time it rained. The drops disturbed the water too much to let the audience see them.

“Not another word about canceling shows, understood?” his mother asked.

Dax’s “Compris” and Cluck’s one nod satisfied her. She went back inside, slamming the kitchen door.

“Don’t go near them,” Dax told Cluck.

“I never have,” Cluck said under the screen door’s rattle.

“But you’re thinking about it.”

Every Corbeau thought about it. Cluck never did anything though. Dax and his cousins were the ones who used to place nets where the Palomas swam. They’d only stopped when Dax and Cluck’s mother ordered them to. “Only cowards set traps for little girls in costumes,” she told them; true men did not go after women. Cluck had tried telling them before that someone would drown, and all he’d done was earn a few more bruises from his brother. Dax only listened to their mother.

But Dax throwing out the nets hadn’t kept the Palomas from slicking the tree branches with petroleum jelly last year. The Palomas had even been smart enough to pick branches shadowed by leaves, so the performers wouldn’t see the light shining off them. They were lucky Aunt Camille had broken her leg and not her neck.

Pain throbbed through the roots of Cluck’s hair. “I won’t do anything,” he said, though God knew he wanted to sometimes. Fighting was the only safe way to touch a Paloma. Half this family believed if they ever let a Paloma brush their arm or bump their shoulder, they’d wither and die like wildflowers in July sun. But fighting was safe. The rage made it true and good. The anger and honor of defending this family shielded them like a saint’s prayer. Hitting and kicking were safe. Anything else could bring sickness.

“You better not.” Dax followed their mother, his slam of the door as fast and loud as hers.

Cluck set a hand on the trailer door frame and pulled himself up the step.

Eugenie sat on the trailer’s built-in, her skirt rippling over the threadbare mattress.

There were only two reasons Eugenie showed up in the costume trailer. Cluck only had to check her hands to know which. Sometimes it was a torn dress, usually one of Mémère’s chiffons or silks, skirts she had danced in at Eugenie’s age. Eugenie would hold the fabric out to him, and he stitched up the tear.

This time his cousin’s palms cupped not one of their grandmother’s dresses, but a plastic bag of freezer-tray ice cubes. She said nothing, just held it out to him the same way she offered a ripped dress.

He took it, his nod as much of a thank you as he had in him.

She got up from the built-in and hopped down from the trailer door, the hem of her dress dragging after her bare feet.

The bag wet his palms. He didn’t know where she meant him to use it. His temple, the back of his neck, where his ribs hit the trailer siding.

Cluck made out the sharp, far-off call of red-winged blackbirds. Pépère always meant for the sight of them to make Cluck feel better about his own feathers. Cluck could never bring himself to remind his grandfather how easily crows killed them.

Una oveja que arrea a los lobos vale más que la lana.

A sheep that herds wolves is worth more than her wool.

Lace’s uncles stood at the picnic tables in silence, half-juiced fruit filling their hands.

They were never this quiet when they made the aguas frescas. Every afternoon, their laughing carried all the way to the motel with the scent of limes and oranges.

Had they just killed a crow? Last summer, Lace had seen a black-feathered bird peck the heart from a halved passion fruit. Her uncle loaded the Winchester 1912 her father used for scaring off bears and coyotes, and shot it. Lace could still remember its eyes, shining like mercury drops.

Lace searched for the crow or the shotgun. Instead she found Abuela, standing between wooden picnic tables, her presence hushing the men.

“Rosa,” Abuela said. The wrinkles in her face thinned to cracks.

Rosa. Pink, the color of Lace’s tail. Her name to her grandmother.

Tía Lora caught up, her eyes tight. Worry pulled at her mouth.

“After the show, you stay,” Abuela told Lace.

This was it. Tonight Abuela would tell Lace off for throwing ice on Justin. He and Matías, los soldados. Abuela blessed the work of their hands. It didn’t matter that Justin knew Lace was right. To Abuela, it would never be Lace’s business to correct him.

Lace nodded.

“After the show you make yourself pretty and show your tail,” her grandmother said. “Let them take pictures of you.”

“What?” Lace asked. Only Abuela’s favorite mermaids draped themselves on rocks after the show. “Why?”

Abuela put her hands on Lace’s shoulders and pressed down, like she did to bless her when she was sick. “Una oveja que arrea a los lobos vale más que la lana,” she said.

The sound didn’t break the squish of fruit under the men’s hands.

A sheep that herds wolves is worth more than her wool.

This was a reward. This was for Justin and the bucket of hotel ice, for telling him to keep Rey and Oscar out of fights.

Abuela understood. She knew even better than Lace did that if Justin and Rey and Oscar hit whoever they wanted, soon the Palomas would get run out of town. Abuela treated as sacred the fights with the Corbeaus, all those bruises and the broken arms. But Abuela would not bless sending a local home with a black eye.

Lace would never have Martha’s shape, thin and jeweled as a violet eel, or Emilia’s wide, pageant-queen smile. But she had thick hair that fell to her waist, mermaid’s hair, and she was una niña buena. A good girl.

Her grandmother had decided this was enough.

“Gracias, Abuela,” Lace said, accepting the blessing.

Her grandmother crossed the afternoon shadows, the crepe myrtles and salt cedars casting the shapes of their leaves.

Lace’s great-aunt squeezed her shoulders, laughing like she’d remembered a joke. Each of her uncles picked her up and spun her once, for luck, “Para que nada cambie tu rumbo.” So nothing will turn you around. It was always their blessing to las sirenas, because the river’s depth was so dark a mermaid could forget which way to the surface.

An hour before the show, Lace layered on pink eye shadow, added a last coat of red lipstick, rubbed in more cream blush. At the sound of their uncles’ zampoñas, the mermaids swam in from their different spots along the lake and river, like creatures called from faraway grottos.

They held their breath and took their places in the underwater forest, made of trees the Corbeaus had sunk twenty years ago. This was Abuela’s greatest triumph, that every time they came to Almendro they used the stage the Corbeaus had built them, the grove the Corbeaus once called their own. Now audiences who sat on the ridge just above the shore could see down to the lake shelf, where the trees locked together into tangles of branches.

The mermaids treated those branches like a coral reef, settling into the hollows, perching on the edges of submerged boughs. They swam in pairs, then clusters, then each out in a different direction. They circled, then broke away. Their bodies formed the shapes of hearts or stars. They lined up so their tails made a rainbow.

No canned music. Just the reed pipes and the soft rush of the river emptying into the one side of the lake and flowing out the other. The applause came in bursts, like the mermaids were fireworks blooming into sparks.

They draped their bodies to look as though they were sunning themselves, even though they were underwater and the light had fallen enough to turn the edges of the lake copper. A few of them dove in and out of the lake like flying fish.

It was being under that Lace loved most. The lightness of her own body, the water trying to lift her toward the surface. The silhouettes of the underwater trees, like a forest on a fall night. How everything looked blurred like she was seeing it through stained glass. How water that had felt cold when she slid into the river now felt as warm as her own body. Even the sharp sting in her lungs as she swam out of view to take a breath.

Just as the audience began to believe they were spying on unknowing mermaids, las sirenas looked at them. They swam up to the rocks, hiding and flirting like water nymphs. The tourists caught those flashes of color on camera.

At the end of la danza de las sirenas, Lace and Martha posed on the steep bank, fanning their tails out on a rock. The trees filtered the last sun, and the sequins lit up like raw quartz. Los turistas left the low cliffs where they’d been watching and took the path down the slope, to the narrow stretch of beach.

A girl in jelly sandals the color of hibiscus flowers took a few steps toward Lace. Her eyes wavered between the shimmer of Lace’s fin and her painted face.

“Do you want to touch my tail?” Lace asked, like she was told to, in the voice she’d heard her older cousins use, soft as the whispers of river sprites.

The girl opened her small hand and stroked the fin, first hesitant as touching a snake, then surer, like petting a cat. To her, the soaked elastane and sequins might feel a little like a mermaid’s scales.

Their season’s receipts were at the mercy of children and their favorite cuentos de hadas. The Corbeaus called her family’s show kitschy, as artless and plastic as souvenir snow globes. Matías and his brothers had thrown punches when Corbeau men made fun of the bright colors, the glitter, the wide-eyed looks Abuela made the sirenas wear, as though dry land was magic they’d never imagined. But Lace’s mother told her that tourists probably couldn’t even take their children to the Corbeaus’ show. “They’re French,” she said. “I bet they take their clothes off halfway through.”

When the crowd thinned, and the families left, the mermaids watched Abuela. At her nod, they slid back into the water, smooth as knives. Martha swam toward her far corner of the lake, Lace back to her spot up the river. She kicked down to where the river’s current didn’t pull.

A shriek like a car alarm echoed through the water.

Lace startled, losing her rhythm, and the current swept her.

She spread her arms to swim, but her tail jerked her back.

Her fin fabric was caught. A colander had gotten the end of her tail.

Lace doubled her body over and felt at the fin. Her hands found not just river roots, but tangles of slick threads.

The nylon of a fishing net.

The Corbeaus. They hadn’t put a net in the water since what happened to Magdalena. But tonight they’d left one in the river for Lace and her cousins.

She pulled at her tail. The fin stayed. The net had balled and wrapped around her, holding her to the colander. She twisted and swam, but the roots and the net only gave enough to let her fight.

A string of bubbles slipped from Lace’s lips, the last air she had left. The dark water turned to stripes of light. Red like the Cheerwine in the liquor store refrigerator case. Green as lime soda. Electric blue like the Frostie bottles.

She’d been taught to protect her tail like it was as much part of her body as those little girls thought. But now its weight and its trailing fabric were killing her.

She braced for ripping the fabric to hurt, and tore the fin in half. The tail split up the side. She kicked out of the river roots. The empty tail dangled from the colander, leaving her naked except for the fake pearls of her costume top. She floated toward the surface like a bubble.

Her grandmother would wring her neck for leaving her tail, but not as hard as she would if Lace washed up dead. A mermaid drowned in the North Fork. What would that do to their ticket sales? Abuela would use every yerba buena in her suitcase to bring Lace back to life just so she could kill her again.

The net came with her, caught on her fingers. The threads, aqua as a swimming pool, almost glowed in the dark water, this awful thing like the one that nearly killed Lace’s cousin.

She shook the nylon threads off, and they sank back toward the river roots.

Lace surfaced to the noise of far-off screaming, and a long call like a tornado siren. Louder than her gasping. Louder than her coughing. Louder than her sucking the air from the dark.

Her half-drowned brain fizzed at the edges, making her hear things. She got her breath back and shook her head to clear it all.

But the screaming stayed. So did the siren’s yell. She rubbed her eyes and temples, circling her bare legs to tread. She pressed behind her ears to clear the water. But the noises kept on, joined by a thrumming through the ground. A whole town running at once.

She lifted her head to the sky, a shade of blue from dark.

A cloud swirled over Almendro, so thick it seemed made of liquid. It looked deeper as it moved, solid as water. Tilting her head up made her dizzy with wondering if it too held a current and tangles of roots, a mirrored river banding the sky.

Qui vivra verra.

He who lives will see.

It took Cluck ten seconds to get up the cottonwood. He didn’t even have to paint iodine solution on the soles of his feet the way his cousins did. Climbing had turned his rough as bark.

The moon looked wedged between the hills, yellow as tansy buttons. It got free and rose, paling. He could almost make out the ringing of distant glass chimes, the show’s only music.

Then sound broke the sky open. The moon shuddered. The siren’s first scream filled the dark, turning the stars to needles. It grew, spreading out from the plant like air thinning a balloon’s skin.

Cluck put his hand to the tree’s trunk and steadied himself. His heartbeat clicked in his ears. Another drill. By now, Almendro had gotten used to them. When Cluck’s grandfather worked as a safety engineer, the plant ran drills more than regulations mandated. Now they just blared the sirens to make the plant sound compliant, while telling employees to ignore the noise and keep working.

The ground wavered like a pond’s surface. The porcelain vines flickered with life, lit up with the chatter of small creatures. Sparrows flitted to their nests. He made out the dark shapes of wild rabbits and prairie voles darting into burrows. Squirrels scratched up trees. Two stray cats slipped into a hollow trunk, a gray fox into its den. They scrambled like wasps into a nest, sensing rain coming.

Cluck lifted his eyes to the moon. Wisps of white-gray cut across its gold, like curls of smoke off his grandfather’s cigarettes.

He looked over his shoulder. A ball of cirrus clouds rose from the chemical plant, a nest of white thread. He swore he felt the cloud reach out through the night, the threads tangling in his hair, cutting through his throat toward his lungs. The closest he’d ever come to le vertige. Not from height, but from the distance across Almendro’s sky.

The moon pulled back. The cloud spread out from the plant, a blanket unfurling. The siren throbbed between his temples.

Cluck half-climbed, half-jumped down.

He ran through the woods, calling his grandfather. “Pépère,” then “Alain,” then “Pépère” again.

Cluck ran down the hill. He found his mother sitting on a costume trunk, counting ticket receipts.

He caught his breath. “We have to stop the show.”

She looked up from her ledger, pencil paused.

“We have to stop the show now,” he said.

She shook her head and went back to her numbers.

He slammed the book.

She backhanded him. He knew that kind of slap, meant to knock sense into him as much as to reprimand. Suggesting they stop a show was little distance from cursing the family name. They’d gone on through sprained wrists, jammed shoulders, nosebleeds. If one fairy twisted her ankle, the rest kept on. The first night Margaux took off with a local, they put Violette in her place, like changing out a lightbulb.

Cluck turned his face to his mother again, his cheek hot.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

He lifted his hand, toward the siren’s swell. The glass chime sounds died under its rise. But even the audience ignored it. The sirens annoyed the residents of Almendro, but they were used to them. The tourists took their cues from the locals and figured no tornado or air raid was coming.

“It’s not a drill,” Cluck said. He pointed to the sky. The ball had thinned to a veil. It spread out over the town, opening like a trumpet flower.

To his mother it must have looked like cloud cover. Nothing more. She had begun to tip her chin back down to her work when Cluck heard his grandfather’s voice.

“He’s right,” Pépère said. Cluck could see the readiness in those hands, his fingers half-bent. But what would he do with those hands? The plant had locked him out years ago, so he wasn’t there to check gauges or turn off valves.

Cluck’s mother watched the sky. The veil thickened and grew uneven, like la religieuse, the hard layer coating the bottom of a fondue caquelon.

The pen fell from her hands. “Et maintenant que faisons-nous?” she asked Cluck’s grandfather. What do we do now?

It was the first time Cluck had heard her sound like Pépère’s daughter, her voice open and fearful, instead of annoyed, put-upon, as though the old man were an aging dog. Her words so often brimmed with “Et alors?” What now? Now they were full of “Papa, take this, fix it.”

The three of them didn’t whisper. The audience couldn’t hear them. A hundred yards, the trees, and that siren took the sound.

But the audience saw the cloud. Children watching for fairies spotted it first, thinking it was the magic of winged beings. They squealed and waved at the fairy cloud.

Their parents followed those small hands. That cloud drew a shared gasp from mothers, a what-the-hell from fathers. The siren swelled from background noise to a shriek, and they registered the sound.

Pépère closed the space between him and them. “Ladies and gentlemen, my apologies,” he said, his voice level but loud. It carried, pulled their eyes from the sky, covered the faint breath of glass chimes. “We’re going to have to cut tonight’s show a bit short.”

Cluck watched him, his own muscles sparking and restless. How did Alain Corbeau keep such stillness in his voice?

“I’m going to ask you all to proceed to the road,” his grandfather said. “There’s a service station very close. Everyone go there. Stay inside or under an awning.” He spoke in his safety engineer’s voice, a pilot directing passengers. Stay calm. Breathe. Brace. “Do not try to go to your cars. Do not try to go home.”

Cluck’s cousins climbed down from the boughs, light as cicadas. Never rush when they can see you, Nicole Corbeau had taught them. The women moved no faster than the blooms that pulled loose from their flower crowns and drifted down.

The audience scattered.

“If you need assistance to the road, ask any of us,” Pépère said. “If you’re wearing anything cotton, and you can remove it easily, then do so, but the important thing is to get to the service station.”

“Cotton?” a man with a camera strap around his neck asked the question Cluck could see on every face. “Why cotton?”

“The fallout may contain adhesive intermediates,” his grandfather said. “Cotton will stick to the skin worse than other fabric.”

There was no screaming, no flurry of clothes tossed aside. Alain Corbeau’s voice calmed them like a song. Men took off cotton pullovers. Mothers urged children out of cotton jackets. But shirts, pants, and dresses stayed on, and the audience streamed toward the gas station at the road’s edge, quick, but not running. Alain Corbeau’s stillness assured them that, cotton or no, they would be fine as long as they took cover.

Cluck pulled his grandfather aside. “Cotton. They’re all wearing cotton.”

“They won’t be hurt,” his grandfather said. “Between the station and the pump awnings there’s enough cover.” He eyed the sky, gauging how long they had. “Half of them are already there.”

The cloud balled like chewing gum. Soon it would break into rain. Once that cloud fell, full of the plant’s adhesives, polyester would stick to their skin just as bad.

“Why did you say cotton?” Cluck asked.

“Think, boy,” Pépère said.

He heard these words from his grandfather more than his own name. Pépère always asked him questions to make sure he stayed vif, sharp. What was the difference between primary and secondary remiges? What were the components of structural coloration? If Cluck didn’t give the answer as easily as the day of the week, he heard “Think, boy.”

But his grandfather was choosing now to quiz him?

Pépère walked a few paces behind the last audience members, a wary shepherd. “What do they make at the plant?”

Cluck went with him, his muscles tense with wanting to run. “I don’t remember.”

“You remember,” Pépère said.

There had to be somewhere Cluck needed to get. The mayor’s house? Not that he knew the address. The police station? Anyone who could do something about the strands of cloud tangling overhead. This town was deaf to those sirens.

“What do they make, boy?” his grandfather asked.

“Cyanoacrylate, okay?” Cluck shouted.

The feeling of the word stayed on his tongue. Cyanoacrylate. Those six syllables rooted his feet in the underbrush. The memory of Pépère crumpling newsprint crawled up Cluck’s back. A one-paragraph story in the paper. The worker who had never been given enough safety training to know not to wear cotton. The spray of chemical eating through the man’s jeans.

Cotton and cyanoacrylate. An exothermic reaction. It ran hot and quick.

The need to run, to do something about the truth in those sirens, came back to Cluck’s legs.

“Why didn’t you tell them?” he asked.

“You don’t set off a gun in a field and then try to herd sheep,” Pépère said. “It would have panicked them. It would have taken twice as long to get them to the filling station.”

Cluck looked where his grandfather looked. The cloud swam and twirled, the surface of a bubble a second before bursting. It would rain the same cyanoacrylate that had burned through a plant worker’s jeans.

“Get to the house,” Pépère said. “Now.”

“What about you?” Cluck asked.

His grandfather nodded, a lift and lowering of his chin meant to say, Yes, I’ll be there.

He wouldn’t. He would stay until everyone who’d come to see the show found shelter. This had been his work once.

Cluck’s cousins drained from the woods.

He hadn’t seen Eugenie. It gave him the feeling of stopping short just before a hillside. He noticed the lack of her, a missing pair of wings.

“Where’s Eugenie?” Cluck asked.

She never flaked on a show altogether like Margaux or Giselle, but a little too much Melon Ball wine and she couldn’t find the ground, forget the grove of cottonwoods and maples.

Pépère searched the wings. “She wasn’t with you?”

Cluck didn’t bother going back for his shoes. The wanting-to-run feeling broke, and he took off toward the stretch of woods Eugenie wandered when she got lost.

“Boy,” Pépère called after him. “Your shirt.”

Cluck heard those three syllables. They reached him. But they didn’t register.

He got halfway across the woods. Then the cloud condensed into beads and fell. The sky rained hot, sticky drops. He kept his head down, shielding his eyes. The rain seared his neck and arms. His back felt scraped, stung with vinegar. The pain augured into his chest.

His shirt gave off a low hiss. He looked down. The fabric let off steam.

The hiss went deeper, eating through his shirt.

Cotton. His pants, the ones his grandfather once wore, were flax linen, but Pépère’s dress shirt and Cluck’s own undershirt were cotton. They were burning him like an iron.

It was getting into his body. His skin would give up and vanish. The heat would singe his lungs and his rib cage.

He ripped open the buttons on his shirt, tore it off. The rain on his hands found the cotton. The pain made him bite his cheek. Blood salted his tongue.

He pulled off his undershirt. It covered him with the feeling of wrenching away thread stuck to a scab. It left him raw to the hot chemical. It fell, and all he could do was grit his teeth against it.

Nunca llueve a gusto de todos.

It never rains to please everyone.

She got out of the water, legs free of her tail, sirens pinching her forehead.

The cloud fanned out and crept across the sky. First it looked like white cotton candy. Then it thickened, like milk curdling in tea.

She followed the lights her father left for her, candles in glass jars to help the mermaids find their way. She felt for her dress in the underbrush, pulled it on over her costume bra. Buttoned it quickly. Ran for the motel.

Then it started to rain. The canning jars hissed and flared. Whatever had blown up at the plant turned the flames different colors, like light through prisms.

First the rain felt warm, like bathwater. But then it seeped through Lace’s clothes, and she felt the sting of a shower turned all the way up. Even under her dress. Especially under her dress. Her arms and calves, her hands and feet went numb to it. But her breasts and shoulders, her back and thighs felt scalded. The searing feeling ate through her, singeing her lungs, and she couldn’t get enough air to run anymore.

Pain sucked away the tail end of a breath, and she dropped to her hands and knees. She opened her mouth for more air, but it only sharpened the feeling that each bead of rain was a little knife cutting down through the sky, piercing her hard and fast.

The woods spread out in front of her. All those trees and all that distant darkness pressed the truth into her like a hand on her chest, that she did not have the air to get up and run again. She could not get up until those little knives stopped falling. Even if she crawled to the nearest stretch of road, it would offer less cover than these branches.

But she couldn’t even move enough to crawl. All she could do was pull herself under the nearest tree, gritting her teeth against the feeling that her dress was soaked and heavy with poison. She squeezed her eyes shut, hoping to keep out what was falling from the sky. If she blinked enough of it in, it might leave her blind.

The rain burned into her. She curled up tighter, cheek against her sleeve. She shut her eyes tight enough to see comet trails of light. She tried to keep out the feeling that the rain was a million lit matches. And the strange smell in the air that was a little like apple cider if apple cider was the venom of some night creature, the rain and stars its teeth.

Cherchez la femme.

Look for the woman.

The moon showed Cluck a stripe of water. He knelt at the river’s edge and plunged in his hands, still burning from touching his shirt. The cold water hushed his palms.

“Cluck?” said Eugenie’s voice.

“Eugenie,” he called out, looking around. “Eugenie.”

Cluck stood up, fingers dripping river water. A dozen little flickers of motion pulled his eyes. The rain weighted down the tree’s branches, making them bow. Older greenery that couldn’t stand up to the chemical withered and slipped down.

The night was coming apart, because this town hadn’t let Pépère save it.

“Eugenie,” he yelled out.

“Cluck.”

He would have missed her if it weren’t for the wings looming over her. She had her back to a tree, leaves sheltering her. Her wings shone with the chemical. It slicked her flower crown and made it look heavy as glass.

Whatever she’d been drinking had flushed her cheeks, but her eyes stayed wide. The moon filled her pupils like milk in a bowl.

Cluck grabbed a handful of her dress. “Is this cotton?” He stretched the fabric, trying to tell.

She sucked air in through her teeth and pointed to his chest. “What happened?”

“Is this cotton?” His shouting cut her off.

“Silk,” she said, the word startled out of her. “Mémère’s.”

“Come on.” He pulled her with him, and they ran, the ground sticky under their feet. “Watch your eyes,” he said. Drops had fallen onto his cheeks and forehead. The fumes made him tear up.

The animals had all taken cover. No rustling in the underbrush. Only the steady rhythm of siren calls.

Eugenie stopped cold and slapped Cluck’s arm. “Look.”

About thirty yards off, a girl was curled under a tree, sparser than the one Eugenie had picked. Drops of the chemical rain trickled down.

The girl shielded her head with her arms.

Cluck knew the shape of her. He knew her hands. He’d seen her set them on her hips. He knew her hair, now frosted with chemicals.

And he knew with one look that her dress was made of cotton.

The rain would eat through her dress to her skin, and she would not know why. She was following the rules every teacher since kindergarten would have taught her. Cover your face. Protect your eyes. It held true for earthquakes, debris, hail, but not tonight. Because she was smart, and followed those rules, the rain would dissolve her.

Cluck held Eugenie’s elbows. “Get back to the house. Stay inside.” The rain on his palms cooled. He dropped his hands before they stuck to Eugenie.

“Cluck,” she said. Her pupils spread, the twin moons growing.

“Dammit, Eugenie.” He was shouting again. “Do it!”

She froze. She must have thought he didn’t know how to yell. But he wasn’t Alain Corbeau. When the sky started falling, he yelled.

She wasn’t hearing him. She only heard the panic in him. He saw it in her face. She picked up on his fear, tuned in to it like the static between radio frequencies, because she knew what fear looked like on him. She’d just never seen anyone but Dax put it there.

It threw her. He needed it not to throw her. Not now.

He grasped for something that would get to her.

“You need to make sure Noe and Mason get inside,” he said.

Georgette would have herded all the younger cousins into the house by now. But the names of Eugenie’s little brothers was all it took, and she ran.

Jugar con fuego es peligroso juego.

To play with a flame is a dangerous game.

The feeling of hands throbbed through Lace’s body.

“Don’t fight,” said a voice she couldn’t place. Those hands tore at the back collar of her dress. She cried out at the sound of ripping fabric. The back of her dress being torn from her felt like getting her body slit open.

She wrenched her head up, away from her shoulder. Heat stabbed through to her mouth. Her cheek evaporated like water on a dust road. There was nothing but pain spreading through her face.

Her hair tethered her, tangled in the weeds. She pulled, but it held her.

The boy from outside the liquor store held scraps of her dress in his hands. Her bra had gone with the fabric. Only a thin layer of nylon stuck to her breasts. The fake pearls had melted, the plastic stuck to the buttons on her dress.

She looked down at her body. The small movement seared her cheek. Shreds of her dress had stayed, burned to her breasts and stomach. Her body let off wisps of smoke, like steam off a lake on cold nights.

But there was no cold; she was all heat. Everything was. Her back and the riverbank. Her breasts and the underbrush. Her hips and the sycamores, all melting like the clocks in her father’s favorite paintings. Each losing drops until they were gone.

The boy from outside the liquor store didn’t have a shirt on. No undershirt either, just the silt brown of his chest.

What happened to your shirt? she tried to ask. The sound didn’t come. Her lips mouthed the words, but her throat didn’t help.

Had her cousins laid into him again?

The boy was talking at her, asking her things, beating her dress like it was alive.

She didn’t hear him. She watched a black feather drift from the back of his neck like a fallen piece of hair. The wind swirled it down to her arm, and it stuck. She jerked her elbow to shake it off, but it stayed. A single plume, the tip stiff with barbs, the lower half fluffy with down. Black, streaked red.

Pain spread through her cheek and neck. It burst open like a peony. The lights her father left for her flickered in their glass jars and went out.

El pez grande se come al chico.

The big fish eats the small one.

“Can you say your name?” the nurse asked. Lace knew the woman was a nurse without opening her eyes. She had all the nurse smells. Powdered latex gloves. Ballpoint pen ink. Unscented fabric softener.

The back of Lace’s scalp throbbed. She bit her tongue to keep from crying out.

“Do you remember why you’re here?” the nurse asked.

Lace’s lips scratched against each other. “The cotton candy,” she said. The cloud in the sky had looked so much like spun sugar. Waiting for a paper cone to whirl through. “Because of the cotton candy.”

She tried to curl onto her side, shifting her weight. The pain in her head rushed through her body. In the dark of her clenched-shut eyes, she saw it, the night twenty years ago. She may not have been there, but she’d heard the stories, all those trees sinking into the water. The lake swallowing the trunks whole.

No one in her family, not even the few of Lace’s uncles who saw it happen, knew how the Corbeaus had done it, except that however they did came from the strange power of their feathers. Their magia negra.

“What if they’re doing it again?” Lace asked, the sound barely enough to make the words.

“Shh,” the nurse said, soft as a faucet running in another room.

Lace and her cousins had never been allowed to talk about that night. What the Corbeaus did was like death; the women in her grandmother’s village would not speak of it because they believed the word muerte burned the lips.

“They could be out there doing it again,” Lace got out, but all she got back was more shh.

Lace had not been born twenty years ago to see what the Corbeaus had done. But she had heard the story. First when she was four, the day she picked up a crow feather off the ground, all the barbs perfect and pure black. When she came inside twirling it in her hand, her mother had grabbed it from her small fingers so hard Lace braced for her mother to slap her. Instead, her mother told her about the awful thing Lace had not yet been alive to see.

The Corbeaus had meant the accident twenty years ago to ruin the Palomas’ stretch of river, spoiling their stage and killing as many of them as they could. All at once the slow, steady current had grown turbulent, like there was a storm under the surface. Loose branches stabbed through the water. Sudden rapids tumbled in from the lake. The Corbeaus had wanted the sirenas trapped in the river’s root tangles like figurines in snow globes.

The mermaids had all escaped those waters, rough as a wild sea. And the Corbeaus’ own magia negra had turned on them. They did not love the water, so they could not control it. The lake rushed up onto its beaches, and the grove of shoreline trees where the Corbeaus held their own shows went into the water, pulled in quick as if the current had grabbed them by the roots.

Tía Lora’s husband was swept into the lake with those trees and drowned.

Lace opened her eyes, the lids heavy and swollen. The light made her forehead pulse, like having her hair pulled.

The nurse’s lilac eye shadow matched her scrubs. She wrote on her clipboard, the cap of her pen chewed like a licorice stick.

One corner of a ceiling panel lifted away from its frame, just enough to let in a black feather. Lace watched it dip and rise. It spun down and landed on the back of her hand. She brushed it away. It slipped off the sheet and through the guardrail.

But another fell.

“See?” she asked the nurse, but the nurse didn’t see.

Lace shook it off, but two more fell, then six more, then a dozen, until there was no more ceiling. Only a sky made of black feathers, brushed with the red of candy apples. Red glaze made of the same sugar as that cotton candy sky.

She screamed. Her screaming made another nurse appear, this one all blue. She came with a needle and a vial and a bag of water. Lace looked for the goldfish in the bag of water, but they’d forgotten the goldfish.

Lace said so. She told them they needed to bring back the bag of water and the candy apples and the cotton candy. Give it all back for a bag of water with a goldfish.

“Did you hear me?” Lace asked. “They forgot the fish. They didn’t give you the fish.”

But there was still no goldfish, and the feathers kept falling.

Drowsiness settled over her. Her weight fell against the bed. Her eyes shut without her shutting them, like a doll tipped backward.

Her pulse ticked under her skin, like a watch under tissue paper.

She was the fish, raw and sliced. The bag of water was for her.

Qui trop embrasse mal étreint.

Grasp all, lose all.

A nurse stopped in the doorway, hand on the frame. “You been here all night?”

“No,” Cluck said. Another nurse had sent him home around one in the morning, promising, “We’ll take care of her, don’t worry.” So he’d gone back to the trailer and changed his clothes. It took him fifteen minutes to get his pants off. Thanks to the adhesive, the linen took half the hair on his legs.

He’d come back with a milk bottle full of Indian paintbrush, bachelor buttons, a burst of wild roses. It had taken the better part of an hour to find flowers the adhesive hadn’t ruined, ones low enough to the ground that taller stalks had shielded them. On the walk back to the hospital, Cluck had almost stepped on a tourist’s Polaroid, left on the side of the road. The hot adhesive had burned through the film. Except for a corner of sky, the image never developed.

The nurse stepped into the room. “Visiting hours aren’t until eight, you know.”

“I can hide in the supply closet until then if you want,” he said.

She chuckled and joined him at the window. Cluck parted the blinds. It bothered him how much Almendro looked the same as it had yesterday. If he didn’t look too close, he couldn’t see the adhesive glossing the roof shingles like rubber cement, or the stray cats and dogs, their fur matted with it, or how it frosted cars and mailboxes like drying Elmer’s glue.

The difference was how the air felt, hot with the faint sense that the smallest noise would make everyone in this town flinch at once. The things that had changed were harder to see than the wilted plants and the tacky sidewalks. The ruptured mixing tank had left three plant workers dead, and a dozen others injured. Every family who relied on paychecks from the plant held their breath still in their lungs. And everyone else kept quiet, stunned by the noise and the rain, afraid to go outside.

None of it had to happen. None of it would have happened if the Palomas hadn’t ruined Pépère, cost him his job. Cluck’s grandfather was the only man pushing for the plant to run safer, and when they let him go, they dropped his safety procedures one by one in the name of efficiency. When the Palomas wrecked Pépère’s good name, they destroyed the credibility of all the work he’d done.

“Did you lose anybody?” Cluck asked the nurse.

She checked an IV line. “Nobody close.”

Cluck had heard the nurses talking about some workers’ wives, friends, a few others picketing at the fence, wanting answers. He didn’t have to ask why the plant workers weren’t there too. He could almost hear Almendro pulling at its own seams. Half the town would demand justice, an admission from the plant’s owners, and the other half would beg them to shut up. If the plant pulled out, there were no jobs. So the workers swallowed the last-minute shifts, the blowdown stacks that made the air sting their eyes, the non-regulation safety gear.

The nurse put her hair back with a rubber band that matched her scrubs. Her nails, that same light purple, clicked against her pen. He couldn’t imagine liking one color that much. Not even the red in his feathers. Especially not the red in his feathers.

“Try not to get me in trouble,” the nurse said, checking her watch on the way out.

The girl in the hospital bed ground her teeth in her sleep. The solvents they’d used to get the adhesive off her skin left her rawer.

Where she’d held her cheek against the sleeve of her dress, she now had a deep red burn in a blurred heart shape.

She’d probably never know that all of this was the Paloma family’s fault. She’d never know that it started twenty years ago, the night the lake had flooded onto its shores like a creek bed overflowing, and those trees sank straight down like hands had pulled them under. His mother said they disappeared under a surface so calm it must have been la magie noire, the same dark magic that gave the Palomas their scales.

The Palomas started some rumor that Cluck’s grandfather caused it, that it was some failed experiment, as if his engineering degree had taught him how to make a lake swallow trees. Cluck couldn’t prove they’d started it, but he knew. The rumors had tainted the rest of Almendro like fire blight, and Pépère had lost his job. Now he had to travel with the family, Cluck’s mother and aunts not caring that he might not want to come back to this town.

One day Cluck would go to school the way his grandfather had. He’d keep things like what happened to this girl from happening to anyone else.

Maybe his family would cut their run here short because of the accident. Maybe they’d move on, give this town space to stitch itself back together. They could move up their stop in Tuolumne County. They always got plenty of tourists there, and some of the best climbing trees Cluck had ever seen. Sturdy, well-spaced boughs. Full greenery that let the light through like tissue paper. In those branches, his cousins looked like oleander blossoms in a sea of leaves.

The girl stirred, making noises that could’ve been pain or waking up. He saw the shape of her moving in the windowpane.

“Tío Lisandro?” she asked. “Aren’t you dead?”

Any other morning, he might have laughed. Thanks to his grandfather’s clothes, he probably looked like an old black-and-white photograph in one of her family’s albums. A ghost come to life, complete with suspenders.

“Nope.” He turned around, hands in his pockets. He didn’t want her seeing his fingers. Pulling off his shirt and her dress had left them blistered and burned. Every time the nurse spotted him, she made him cover them in something greasy that smelled like a citronella candle. “Not dead. Not Lisandro either.”

But the girl wasn’t looking at him. She patted the bed around her.

He wondered when she’d notice her hair. Last night it fell to her lower back. Today it stopped just below her collarbone. The rest had been so tangled, so full of brush bits and cyanoacrylate, they’d had to cut it off.

He rubbed at the back of his neck. The falling adhesive had turned his skin raw, and now the starched collar of his grandfather’s old shirt made it worse.

She pulled at the loose fabric around her waist. “Where are my clothes?”

The strips of fabric that had once been her dress were long gone in a hospital waste bin. Her bra hadn’t made it either. It had some kind of plastic beading on it that melted like sugar.

“Hospital gown,” he said. “It’s cute. Got ducks on it.”

Her fingers found her IV. She pulled it from the inside of her elbow. The long needle flopped out, limp and bloody, and she climbed over the guardrail.

“Hey. You’re supposed to hit the button, not pull the thing out. Hit the button.” He put his hand on the rail.

She saw it before he could pull it back. He couldn’t tell if her stare was because of the blisters, or because of his third, fourth, and fifth fingers, always curled under.

He tried giving her the call button, but she was staring down at the hospital sheet. One of his feathers had fallen onto the bed, a brushstroke of red and black. Scratching at the back of his neck must have knocked it loose.

She looked up at him, eyes red from solvents and morphine, and registered that he wasn’t an orderly or a dead relative. She smelled like blood and acetone.

“What did you do to me, gitano?” she asked.

He dropped the call button. It hit the sheet and bounced.

Gitano. The Spanish was close enough to the French. Gitan. Gypsy.

She thought he’d done this to her, that the feather on the sheet meant he’d put a gitan curse on her. Her burns, her cut hair. She thought it was all him. He could tell from how she’d said the word.

This was why his family never let people see their feathers. If they hid them, they were just show performers. But if anyone saw them, they’d think what this girl thought, that they were full of dark magic.

She grabbed the water pitcher from the bedside table, holding it up like it wasn’t cheap plastic, but ceramic. Something she could break over his head. The spout splashed her hand and her hospital gown.

“Get out,” she said.

Cluck held up his hands, not caring what she thought of them, and backed out of the room.

Eugenie leaned against the hallway wall, painted the same dull salmon color as the water pitchers and emesis bins. She stood out, a brighter pink. She’d taken the cyanoacrylate worse than he had. Cluck was out in it longer, but Eugenie was paler. She’d been wandering each floor of the hospital, still in her ruined silk dress, looking like she’d taken too hot a bath. The frog who didn’t feel the water boiling.

She handed him a Styrofoam cup, and sipped from the one in her other hand. “From the cafeteria,” she said. “It’s awful, but I can’t stop drinking it.”

He followed her toward the stairwell.

A man in a suit caught his eye. He stood outside a patient’s room, looking in.

The suit was too nice for a hospital. For a funeral, maybe, but if whoever he wanted to see had gotten as far as the mortuary, he wouldn’t be here.

The suit was navy. No man in a town like Almendro paid their respects in anything but a plain black suit.

“Risk something,” Eugenie said, answering the question Cluck had almost spoken. “Risk assessment? Risk management? Something like that.”

Cluck turned his head.

“I heard him talking to one of the nurses,” she said. “I pretended I was waiting so I could get a look at his card.”

Cluck touched Eugenie’s shoulder, to tell her he’d be right back.

Eugenie grabbed his arm. Hard. He’d forgotten from when they were kids how her small fingers could dig in. When it was her and him against the bigger cousins, that grip always wore them down. She didn’t hit or kick, but she held on like a ferret, not letting go until whichever cousin she was on surrendered.

“Don’t,” she said. “It’s not worth it.”

Risk managers were his grandfather’s opposite, a photographic negative to that undeveloped Polaroid. They found so many corners to cut, they turned everything to confetti.

“None of this had to happen,” Cluck said. The Styrofoam heating his palm made him want to throw coffee on the man’s silk tie. “Don’t tell me it’s not worth it.”

Eugenie felt him pulling away, and held his arm harder. “We’re not worth anything to anyone here. We don’t even have names. We’re just les gitans, right?”

He cringed. She’d heard everything the girl said. And like him, she’d heard gitan when the girl said gitano.

Eugenie shook her head and shrugged. “So why bother?”

Si quieres tener enemigos, haz favores.

If you want to make enemies, do favors.

El gitano. She’d touched him, held ice to his bruises. The liquor store’s salt and sugar smells came back. They crept down to her stomach. She turned onto her side, fighting off the sick feeling.

Her cousins hadn’t known what he was either. If they’d been beating up a Corbeau, Justin would’ve told her, knowing Lace couldn’t have said a word. Fighting was the only way to touch a Corbeau without taking on their curse. His Corbeau blood was the thing about him Justin didn’t like, even if he couldn’t name it.

It was worse than her helping him up and putting ice to his temple. He’d gotten her out from under that tree, to here. How much touching had that taken?

But she knew now. That feather had told her.

A nurse in green scrubs tried to put her IV back.

“No,” Lace cried out, wrenching her arm from the woman’s grasp. “No, I don’t want it.”

She wasn’t letting them make her numb to how the Corbeau boy had touched her. How he’d left that net for her, even if he didn’t know she was the one he’d left it for. There was no other reason for him to be in that part of the woods. He’d set a trap for las sirenas and then saved her only because he didn’t know she was one of them.

“He did it,” she tried to tell the nurse, but the nurse didn’t listen. “It was him.”

The nurse got a better grip.

“I don’t want it.” Lace jerked her elbow away. Her forearm banged the bed rail.

The nurse dropped her arm. “Fine.”

So Lace lay there, needleless, seething at the knowledge that she had touched him, he had touched her, that her body had been against his.

The stick site prickled. The longer she had the needle out, the worse her skin stung. It shrieked with the burns and the stain of the gitano boy’s hands.

When she got so thirsty she couldn’t swallow, the nurse told her she needed to take the IV again, that she wasn’t ready to drink water.

Lace said no. After the nurse left, she drained the pitcher next to the bed. But then it was empty, and she was still thirsty. So she stumbled to the bathroom sink without turning on the light, and drank from the tap.

As soon as she swallowed, the water came up again, yellowed with stomach acid.

The nurse flicked on the light. The overhead fluorescent bleached her blond hair white. “You want it back in yet?”

Lace shook her head. Pain shot through the muscles above her jaw, and she threw up the last of the water.

“All right, girly,” the nurse said. “Have it your way.” She flipped the lamp off.

Lace ran water down the sink. The changes in light made her forehead throb.

The mirror showed a face reddened like a half-ripened apricot. The skin was tight in places, gathered like rippling water in others. The right cheek looked bloody as a garnet, but her fingers found it dry, rough as sandstone.

Her hospital gown gaped away from her body. The cotton billowed, showing her shoulders, her breasts, all the way to her thighs.

Her family might never see the blight the boy left on her. These burns veiled it. Abuela and her mother might never know if a Corbeau touching her had seared off her escamas. Lace wouldn’t look, but she knew. The rain had already burned them away.

A nurse, the blue one this time, pulled her away from the mirror. “Come on, honey.” She slipped the needle in, taped it down. Lace took it, and the fishless water made her sleepy, quiet, less likely to climb over the guardrail.

A square of fabric sat on the nightstand. Filmy, printed with roses, folded. The scarf she’d forgotten in the boy’s hands, when melting ice soaked it.

She balled it up and threw it. It fluttered to a chair and then slipped to the floor.

Her hand knocked a milk bottle she hadn’t noticed. It stood at the back of the nightstand, bursting with wildflowers. The dusk blue of bachelor buttons. The white and yellow roses that grew wild on the hillsides. Red blossoms like blooms of flame.

She must’ve looked even worse than she thought. Nobody in her family brought flowers to hospitals unless someone was dying or having a baby.

Her fingers worried the tape on her IV as she slept.

The purple nurse came back, woke her up, tried to get her to eat. Lace shook her head at the plate, because everything tasted like her dry lips.

The nurse ripped off the tape encircling Lace’s elbow. “Your friend went home?” she asked.

Lace tasted the grit of her own dry tongue. “He’s not my friend.”

“Oh, yeah? He ripped up a quarter acre of Spanish broom to get you free.”

And she’d kept her cousins from kicking his ass. It didn’t make them friends.

What curse had he left on her? What maldición were her burns hiding?

She’d throw ice cubes at the next nurse who tried to tell her “that boy saved your life.” They didn’t know anything about the Corbeaus. If they did, they’d never let them past the town lines.

The knowledge that his hands had been on her kept clawing through her skin. Maybe her family would leave her here, like starlings abandoning a nest, the sky blue of their eggs tainted by a child’s fingers.

Lace felt for the tips of her hair. They should have been at her waist. Instead, the ends bunched above her breasts. She was missing almost a foot of her hair.

The nurse drew a vial’s contents into a syringe.

“What is that?” Lace asked.

“You’ll thank me later,” the nurse said.

Lace squinted against the sun. It crawled up, a blind at a time, sharpening the light, and she slept.

She woke to her mother and Abuela whispering. But she couldn’t open her eyes, and they did not notice the twitch of her eyelashes.

“She’ll heal,” said her mother’s voice.

“I can’t put her back in the show,” Abuela said. “Not looking like this.”

“That’s what you’re thinking of?” Her mother huffed out a breath through her nose, like air wisping from a tire. “Whether you have your sirena?”

Abuela gripped a handful of Lace’s hair, the smell of her perfume warm off her wrist. Even the slight pulling tugged at Lace’s scalp, lighting up the roots.

“What will she do?” Abuela asked. “Wear a wig into the water?”

Pain fanned out through Lace’s head, and the voices flickered to nothing, like a bulb burning out.

Lace opened her eyes to her father’s hands leaving a clean dress folded on the bedside table. She recognized his hands without seeing his face, those calluses from soldering resistors at a maquiladora so he could save up enough money for school.

She tried to speak, tried to reach out to those hands. But her own hands were so heavy she could not lift them. He patted the dress, as though telling it not to go anywhere, kissed Lace’s hair, and then was gone.

She woke up scratching at her own skin, dreaming of rain. She dragged her fingers over her arms, trying to get the drops off. But it kept falling, and took her under.

The next time she opened her eyes, Tía Lora stood over her, mouthing a prayer. Her tongue flashed between her teeth, like soap in the ring of a bubble wand.

Her hands clutched a ball of pink cloth. Every time her fingers tightened or loosened their grip, the fabric shimmered like the inside of a conch shell.

Lace couldn’t move enough to cry, so the trembling stuck at the back of her throat. This poor woman. All she’d wanted was a child, and she’d lost two, each before they could be born. Both had slipped from her womb like water. Then the Corbeaus had killed her husband before they could try again. So Tía Lora made the younger Palomas her children. She taught Oscar to make foghorn sounds by blowing into empty soda bottles. She showed Reyna and Leti how to tweeze their eyebrows, not so much, so they wouldn’t look surprised the way their mother always did.

And Lace. She had taught Lace to sew, to bead. To make corn and hot water and sugar into atole that made her younger cousins sleep. To love dry lightning as much as candles in glass jars. “Because for one second, all that light, you see everything. Maybe you don’t know what you’ve seen, but you’ve seen it, and it goes with you.”

Los enemigos del hombre son los de su propia casa.

A man’s enemies are those of his own house.

The girl in the car’s side mirror looked both drowned and burned.

Lace raised her hand to her face. So did the girl. They both traced fingers over their foreheads and noses. Lips, and glue-stiff eyebrows. Left cheek, then right. The features were the same, shapes they both knew, but the feel had changed, some spots rough as salt, others smooth and raw.

She wanted to tell her father about the Corbeau boy touching her, so he could tell her it was alright, that after a week’s worth of showers she wouldn’t even remember. Her father never stood for superstitions. He had changed his last name only because his own meant something so hateful none of the Palomas would say it. He put little stock in las patrañas y los cuentos de viejas, the fairy stories and old wives’ tales that ruled this family. To Barto Paloma, the Corbeaus’ feathers and the Palomas’ scales were just aberrations in biology, no different than an algae bloom lighting up the ocean like opals.

But the shame of el gitano holding her in his arms, taking her from the woods, her body against his chest, pressed down on her. She couldn’t say it, not even to her father.

“Martha missed you,” her father said. “She says a couple nights in that room alone is enough.”

“A couple nights?” Lace asked. It had felt like a week, two.

Lace picked at a cut on her lower lip. So did the girl. The morphine wore off, and both Lace and the girl stared, each wondering how the other had gotten so ugly.

Her father parked the station wagon in the motel lot. Her family waited in the lobby. They all offered stiff hugs, hands only, space between their bodies. Except Tía Lora, who pulled her close and whispered, “You look beautiful, mija.” And Martha, la sirena anaranjada, who combed her hands through Lace’s hair and said, “Don’t worry, I kept the boys out of fights for you.” And Lace’s mother, who gripped her so hard pain pulsed through her body. “You’re fine,” her mother whispered. “You’re just fine.”

Lace’s younger cousins asked was it true that she’d gotten glued to the ground, and was it true that a ghost unstuck her. “People saw him,” Reyna and Leti’s little sister said. “But then he just disappeared,” Emilia’s five-year-old son said.

Lace shushed them, not wanting anyone to think too hard about how she’d gotten to the hospital.

When they thought she wasn’t looking, her uncles shook their heads at the lobby carpet. Her aunts dabbed at their lower eyelids, as though she’d died.

Their pity filled her arms and made her tired. She carried it back to her and Martha’s room, wavering under the weight.

Lace took off her dress and caught her reflection in the turned-off television. In the dark glass, she almost looked the same. Her mother’s nose, her father’s straight brow bone, her middle aunt’s sloped shoulders.

She turned. Even in the dim glass, her back looked covered with brandy rose petals, crushed and half-withered. But a handful of clean, pale coins still arced across her lower back. Las escamas. The scales that marked her as a mermaid.

She went to the bathroom mirror, turning her back to the glass. The birthmarks shined in the overhead light. Almost iridescent. The burning rain had left them raw and a little pink, but no scars crossed them.

They’d been spared, as though Apanchanej’s own fingers had shielded them. The rain should have burned her escamas as badly as her cheek. But they were still on her, whole and unmarred, proof that she would live and swim, reach her hands through the sheets of light that floated through the river, turn her body in the same spring as Abuela.

The air in the room felt cool and thick as water. It rushed around her, clothed her like kelp ribbons. She touched her hair to check if it was floating. She felt the weight of shells and river pearls holding her breasts. By refusing to be burned away, those escamas had written these things onto her body. They were new birthmarks, unseen but true.

Salt stung the wound on her cheek. She pressed the pads of her fingers to the tear’s path. The Corbeau boy had touched her. The rain had scalded her. But nothing in those drops or in his fingers could take the name Paloma from her.

She put her dress back on and threw the door open. She called for her mother and her father and Abuela and Tía Lora. Aunts, uncles, and cousins cracked their doors and peered out.

Apanchanej had given her a sign she would be healed. The garnet would fall from her cheek like flecks of mica. The crushed roses on her back and breasts would turn to skin again. She would swim. She would still be la sirena rosa.

“What is it, mija?” her mother asked, shaking painkillers from a bottle. Lace held her hand out to stop her.

Her fingers froze before they reached her mother’s. A dark wisp of a mark on her forearm made her still. A burn, deep and red as a crushed blackberry, fanned in the shape of a feather, the barbs as clear as scratches of ink.

She’d missed that feather. Maybe the reddening and swelling had hidden it. Or she’d dismissed it as dried blood. Or the burn on her cheek kept her staring into the mirror instead of looking down.

But she saw it now.

Her mother saw it too. The pills and bottle fell from her hand.

Lace’s aunts whispered prayers. Her cousins drew back, as though Lace had cut her hands on the thorns of la Virgen Morena’s roses. They all saw it, the messy, fluffy barbs seared into her arm.

The Corbeau boy’s feather had scarred her. It had fallen from him and branded her. Now she wore the mark of the family who’d killed Tía Lora’s husband. The net the Corbeau boy left for her would not let her go.

If the feather’s imprint had been light, the pearled skin of a healed scar or the family’s birthmarks, her aunts and uncles might not have drawn back. Her mother might not have hovered a nervous hand in front of her mouth. But this was the enemy family’s mark. They knew it as well as if a thousand obsidian feathers had fallen from the sky.

Lace’s father stepped between them all. “¡Santo cielo!” He took Lace’s arm. “It’s just a feather. You don’t know it’s theirs.”

But to the rest of them, it was currency, true as salt and silver. Lace felt the poison seeping into her blood. She should have noticed it before, felt the sting of that family’s venom.

Her father watched her. Abuela watched her. Her mother stepped back toward the yellowing wallpaper. The rest of the family fringed the hallway.

Abuela turned her back to them all. She went to the door of her room. One glance told Lace to follow.

“Lace,” her father said, his assurance that, once, just once, she did not have to do as Abuela told her.

Lace’s calves pulsed, fighting her moving. Don’t go, her muscles crackled out. You know how this will end. Don’t go.

But she shook off the feeling biting up her legs and followed.

The rest of the family let out a shared breath. When Abuela gave an order, any Paloma girl who did not want to become another Licha obeyed.

A quien dices tus secretos, das tu libertad.

To whom you tell your secrets, you give your freedom.

Lace closed the door behind her, shutting out the hallway murmurs.

Abuela faced the window, back to Lace. “At the hospital the nurses talk about how some gitano boy pulled a girl from the woods. But I said not my granddaughter.”

“Abuela,” Lace said.

“I said my granddaughter is una niña buena. If my granddaughter had been touched by one of them, she would have told us. She would have let us help her.”

“Help me?” A laugh pressed up from under the two strained words. “What would you have done?” Exorcismo? Brought her to a bruja who would push the breath out of her?

“Was that you with the gitano boy?” Abuela asked.

“He didn’t know who I was,” Lace said.

“Was that you?” Abuela asked again.

Lace would not say yes. Abuela already knew. She just wanted to make her say it.

“Those people killed my big brother,” Abuela said.

The words dragged Lace’s gaze to the floor. So often she thought of the Paloma who died that night as Tía Lora’s husband, the man who made Lace’s great-aunt a Paloma. She sometimes forgot he was also Abuela’s brother. When the lake flooded its shores, and he drowned, he was lost not only to Tía Lora but to Abuela.

Her grandmother turned from the window. The scent of her reached out to Lace. For more than half a century, she’d worn the same perfume her mother gave her on her sixteenth birthday. Her mother had scraped together enough for a tiny bottle, no bigger than a jar of saffron, and Abuela had saved up for a new one each year ever since. Cream Lace. Lace’s mother had named her for that perfume, a gift to Abuela, a sign that Lace belonged as much to Abuela as to her mother and father.

The powdery smell of violets and almond sugar curled around Lace’s shoulders. Such a sweet scent, shy and young. How did it stand up to Abuela’s wrists and neck?

Now Abuela’s face was soft as that scent, and almost as sad. “Pack your things, mija.”

The words were the slap Lace had expected. She’d braced for them. They jolted her anyway.

Lace turned her forearm, letting the light glaze over the burn. If she fought Abuela on this, everyone would know she had been touched. Abuela would tell them all. She would be the cursed thing, a burr hooking its teeth into this family.

Abuela had only just let her be seen. La sirena rosa had come to shore for one night, and then had slipped back into the water. Now she could bring a plague on her family, sure as crows making children sick. It didn’t matter that Apanchanej had spared her scales. She had let a Corbeau touch her.

A flush of shame gripped her, strong as the Corbeau boy’s hands.

“Don’t tell them,” Lace said.

“They saw it already.”

“Don’t tell them how I got it.”

Her grandmother said nothing.

Lace had obeyed. Her whole life, she’d obeyed. She’d done makeup for all the sirenas, even when it meant she couldn’t finish her own. She’d hidden her escamas even though they were the part of her body she loved most, all because Abuela was sure people would call her and her cousins los monstruos if their scales ever showed.

Lace kept her feet flat on the carpet. If she didn’t steady her own weight, she’d waver and sound desperate. Abuela would stick a knife through any break in her voice.

“What have you ever asked me to do that I haven’t done?” Lace asked.

Abuela tipped her eyes to the curtains, studying the mismatched panels.

“If you don’t tell them how I got it, I’ll do what you want, I’ll go,” Lace said. Not a question. An equation, sure and immutable as the ones on her father’s worksheets.

Abuela turned her head, half-shutting her eyes. She knew what Lace meant. Listen to me, or I will make this messy. I will be a pain in your ass.

“My dad will go against you on this,” Lace said. “You know that. If you promise you won’t tell them, I’ll convince him. He’ll let me go.”

Abuela kept her laugh behind her lips. “You can take him with you. He has the name for it.”

Lace flinched. Abuela had never forgiven Lace’s father for being born with the last name Cuervo, even after he let it go, changed it, endured the taunting of other men for taking his wife’s name.

She shrugged it away. She needed Abuela’s word. She could not have her mother and her father, and Martha and Matías, and the other sirenas, knowing she’d had gitano hands on her.

“If he goes with me, so will my mother,” Lace said.

Abuela lifted her chin.

“Don’t tell them,” Lace said. Even if her father took her side, and her mother took his, her mother would never look at her the same way. She would see the feather on her arm as a mark of her sin, un testamento of what she had let the gypsy boy do. Maybe she’d even think Lace wanted it, wanted him.

Abuela didn’t know about the net. If Lace told her now, it would sound like something she’d made up, a lie to explain why she was still out in the woods when the sky fell. To cover that she was meeting the Corbeau boy in the woods, letting him touch her, not knowing his last name. Or worse, knowing it, letting him put his hands on her anyway.

“Please,” Lace said.

Her grandmother said nothing.

“Please,” Lace said again, desperation spreading through the word like a stain.

“Fine,” Abuela said, startled.

“What will you tell them?”

“That one of the feathers found you. Is this good enough for you, princesa?”

“Thank you,” Lace said.

Her father caught her outside Abuela’s door. “Lace.” He stopped her, a hand over her forearm, like covering the mark would make it mean nothing. Like the rest of the family were children who would forget what they could not see.

He already knew what Abuela had said. The tightness in his face told her.

“Your mamá and I will go with you,” he said.

It was easy for him. The show was nothing. He could shake it all away like sand from a rug. He’d married Lace’s mother to be her husband, not to be a Paloma.

Lace wished it could be so easy for her, that she could shed the feather burn like he had shed his name.

Lace held the truth cupped tight in her palms. It fought and fluttered like a moth, but she would not part her fingers enough to let it out.

“You didn’t want me in the show forever.” She searched the words for wavering, smoothed them out with her hands like an iron. “I have my GED. I can register at any of the county colleges.”

“Then I’ll go with you,” her father said. “No me importa nada. Screw this family.”

If Lace let that happen, Abuela would lay out the full story. How much did Abuela know? That there’d been nothing left of her dress but scraps of fabric? That the Corbeau boy hadn’t had a shirt on, that Lace’s skin had been on his?

Lace stood close enough to her father so he could hear her whisper. “If you go with me, none of my cousins will learn anything.”

A wince flashed across his face. It was cruel, striking at the thing he cared about most.

“Half of them need summer school,” she said. “You’re the one who teaches them.” Her father took on the bulk of the homeschooling. Without him, no one would get a GED. “If you don’t stay, they won’t learn.”

Sadness weighted his eyebrows. He would never win against Abuela, or Lace’s mother, who had said her piece by saying nothing. Now her mother stood at the other end of the hall, her sisters and cousins keeping close as sepals around an anemone.

They were already backing away from the girl with the feather. She was a wounded thing. If they kept her, her blood would draw more of the Corbeaus’ magia negra.

“And where will you go?” her father asked.

Guilt flared through her burns, the feeling of getting too near a radiator. “Martha’s friends in Tulare County,” she said. “I can stay with them.”

“You’re better than this,” he said. “Don’t let las supersticiones force you to do anything.”

“Nobody’s forcing me,” Lace whispered, the lie stinging her tongue. “I’m getting out like you always wanted.”

Hesitation deepened the wrinkles around his mouth.

But he said, “Good,” loud enough to make sure everyone heard.

So he let her go, and the truth of why he was letting her go pressed into the back of her neck. He had never wanted this life for her. Motel rooms strung together like beads. School squeezed in between sewing costumes. Abuela’s tongue, heavy as a gavel.

La sirena rosa was not her name, not to him. Her dreams of Weeki Wachee were only good enough to him because Abuela was not in Florida, telling her maybe she was spending too much time with her math books.

If this was how he could make her more than the fabric and beads of her tail, he would do it. She didn’t know how to tell him that she’d loved her tail as much as her own skin and hair.

She went back to her room and found Martha sitting on the bed, waiting. “You’re not really gonna go stay with my friends in Terra Bella, are you?”

Lace cleared her clothes from the middle drawer.

“Where are you gonna go?” Martha asked.

“You think we’re the only mermaids?” Lace said. “They’ve got shows like us in Vegas, Atlantic City. Not just Florida.”

“Vegas?” Martha laughed. “What are you gonna do, steal my driver’s license? You couldn’t even get into a casino.”

“What about those dives in the middle of the desert?” Lace asked. They’d passed one last summer. A woman caked with waterproof foundation flipped and turned in an oversized fish tank, her plastic tail glittering. The family had stopped because they were hungry, but Abuela took one look in the door and wouldn’t go in. She said she wouldn’t sit and watch some old, fat fish-woman swimming around.

“If I can hold my breath and twirl around in a tank, I can get a job,” Lace said.

The wildflowers from her hospital nightstand sat on the dresser, half-withered.

Palomas only brought flowers to hospitals when someone either had a baby or was so close to death the priest was on his way.

“Did you all give me up for dead?” Lace asked.

“Of course not,” Martha said. “Why?”

Lace picked up the milk bottle. “Then why these?”

“We didn’t bring you those,” Martha said.

“You didn’t?”

“Should we have?” Martha looked hard at Lace’s middle. “Are you pregnant?”

“No.” Lace set the bottle back on the dresser. “If you didn’t bring them, who did?”

“The nurse said the guy who brought you in, but I don’t know. I never saw him.”

The feeling of the Corbeau boy’s hands rushed over Lace’s body. It whipped against her like blown sand.

The cornflowers. Outside the liquor store, he’d had one on his vest. It came unpinned and fell when her cousin hit him.

Wild roses. Red blossoms. The orange-haired Corbeau girl Lace had seen by the river wore them on her head. They grew wild on the Corbeaus’ side of the woods, those undaunted blooms that carpeted the abandoned campground.

El gitano. The gypsy boy brought her the wildflowers.

He didn’t know the girl he’d taken out of the woods was a sirena he’d set a trap for. He didn’t know when he was freeing her from the brush that she’d just escaped his net. All he knew was that he’d saved her life, and she’d called him names. He’d brought her flowers, and she’d chased him out of the room.

Now he was angry with her. This was no different than Justin and Alexia and her brother stealing the Camargue and being cursed with the skittishness of young horses.

She had to get the Corbeau boy’s forgiveness, like returning that stolen colt.

A soft knock clicked against the door. Lace left her clothes on the bed and answered it.

Tía Lora stood in the hall, hands full of fabric pink as a grapefruit, the cloth she’d brought with her to the hospital. It glinted, sagging with the weight of glass beads.

A new cola de sirena, a mermaid tail made to replace the one that had been lost.

Lace wondered if shreds of her old one still clung to that colander, the current pulling them like streamers.

This one was finer than the lost one, the beading more intricate, the embroidery on the fin tighter, more delicate. A sign of Tía Lora’s faith that she would swim again.

“You will come back,” Tía Lora said.

Lace had to find the gitano boy.

Tía Lora set the tail’s weight in her palms, the thread still warm from her hands.

Lace took it. “Yes,” she said. “I will.”

Un tiens vaut mieux que deux tu l’auras.

One that you hold is better than two you will have.

Cluck braced his hands on the worktable. Half the wings still needed fixing. Alula feathers had gotten knocked out of place. Primary remiges had come loose, secondaries had fallen out. Wires had gotten bent or snapped; they’d snagged on branches when his cousins came down from the trees. Some the chemical rain had ruined.

Cluck watched from the trailer window as a woman in a skirt suit met his mother at the back door.

He knew why the woman was there. He could tell by the chamber of commerce pin on her lapel. The Almendro Blackberry Festival would go on. Calling off those days of farm stands and crafters’ booths would be the same as a white flag, a sign that the town had curled up in its corner of the Central Valley to die.

Now she’d come to find out if Nicole Corbeau felt the same way.

His mother kissed the air next to the woman’s cheek.

Cluck rolled his eyes. His mother did that with anyone they needed to issue them permits. It always charmed them, made them walk away a little lighter, feeling sophisticated, unbearably French.

Great. Not only were they staying in this town, now the Palomas would too.

They should’ve just moved on to Madera County a couple of weeks early. Or scheduled a stop on the Monterey Peninsula, where slices of the ocean showed between the trees.

But his mother wasn’t willing to burn bridges. No more than she was willing to let the Palomas win.

Cluck couldn’t wait to save up enough money for community college, for an apartment that didn’t move. He’d study like his grandfather had. He’d get a job anywhere but Almendro. He’d get a house he and Pépère could live in, and Pépère wouldn’t have to go around with the show anymore. They’d be les célibataires, two bachelors in a house with a lemon tree.

Eugenie came in without knocking. Cluck let her get at the old mirror against the wall so she could check her feathers. Some Corbeaus, like Dax, pulled all theirs out. Most, like Eugenie, just checked for loose ones before each show. They never wanted the audience to sees feathers fall from their heads.

“You didn’t go see that girl again, did you?” Eugenie asked.

“Right. Because she was so thrilled to see me last time.”

Eugenie ran her fingers through her hair. “What was she so upset about?”

“I don’t know.” Probably him. A lot of people got upset about him.

“Did you tell her what happened?” Eugenie asked.

He cleaned the adhesive off a set of wire cutters.

“Do you know her?” Eugenie asked.

He straightened a few bent wires.

“Who is she?” she asked.

He threw down the wire. “I don’t want to talk about this, Eugenie.”

Eugenie pulled a last feather. “You’re cranky today, n’est-ce pas?”

“You think?” Cluck called after her, waving a hand at the wings he was piecing back together. A few were so stripped of feathers, he could only save the frames.

Cluck couldn’t even use the family’s feathers, shed or plucked. He’d tried it once, weaving a few in among the peacock feathers. His mother found out before his grandfather realized what he was doing. “These are not spare parts to use for show,” she had said. The bruise Dax left him with took two weeks to fade. But if they strapped feathers to their bodies, Cluck wondered, why shouldn’t they be their own?

His grandfather had told him, “We put ourselves on show enough for the gadje,” and Cluck understood. It was the same reason the blond Corbeaus coated their dark feathers in flour, to hide them. The show was all costumes and peacock feathers, lights hung in trees, tightrope walking. La magie of their bodies did not belong to the gadje, the people who were not like them.

His grandfather came in and tossed a paper bag on the worktable. “I bought you something.” The bag fell over, its contents sliding out. A folded pair of brown corduroy pants, and a long-sleeved crewneck shirt the red of wet cranberries.

Not this again. Since Cluck turned eighteen, his grandfather had been trying to get him into Levi’s. Last month, Pépère bought him a T-shirt the gray of a wet stone. In April, he’d left a jean jacket on Cluck’s bed.

But Cluck liked wearing Pépère’s old clothes, and the feeling that they might make him like his grandfather. The things that made Alain Corbeau would soak into Cluck’s skin.

This new shirt wouldn’t. The red was so close to the shade streaking Cluck’s feathers that he didn’t like looking at it. It made him blink first.

“One day I will die and you will have to burn my things,” Pépère said. “Then what will you wear?”

Pépère had told Cluck what his family back in le Midi did with the possessions of their dead. Nothing that belonged to the deceased was sold, especially not to anyone else Romani, who would never want to buy it anyway. Little was kept, only a few valuables given to family members. The rest was burned, especially clothes and sheets. Anything death had made mochadi, unclean.

“I don’t think we do that anymore, Pépère,” Cluck said.

“We did it where I come from, and one day you will do it for me. What will you do then, wear nothing?” His grandfather pushed the bag toward him. “If you don’t want to wear them, it’s your business. But you will keep them.”

Stubborn. That was the other thing wearing Pépère’s clothes might make him.

His grandfather coughed into his handkerchief.

Cluck could hear the force tearing the back of his throat. “Pépère?”

In the days since the mixing tank blew, his cough had gotten worse. The chemicals in the air irritated his smoke-worn lungs. He wouldn’t say so, but Cluck knew. The adhesive had settled, but the vapor still thickened the air. One more reason Cluck made sure his grandfather slept inside, not in the trailers that stayed hot at night and chilled in the morning.

“And those geniuses think they know how to run a chemical plant,” Cluck said.

“It wouldn’t be the worst they’ve done,” his grandfather said between coughs.

“What?” Cluck asked.

“T’inquiète.” His grandfather folded the linen square. “It must be time for another cigarette, n’est-ce pas?”

Pépère paused as he reached for the pack, his eyes following Cluck’s hands.

Pépère took hold of Cluck’s forearms. He turned Cluck’s wrists, showing the burns on his palms. “What’s happened here?”

Cluck kept his head down. The girl shooing him out of the room, calling him gitano, had stuck him with the feeling that taking her from the woods was some awful thing he’d done. He didn’t want Pépère knowing about any of it.

“It’s from getting my shirt off,” Cluck said. He didn’t have to lift his head to know his grandfather’s stare was on him. He felt it like a draft through a window. “The reaction with the cotton.”

Pépère gripped his forearm tighter. “I have never in your life given you reason to lie to me.”

Cluck felt the words on his shoulders, sure as hands. His grandfather had taught him everything about feathers. Remiges for flight, retrices for balance. And it was thanks to Pépère that Cluck had learned to work with the fingers he had. Nine years ago, his left hand had been so broken, he couldn’t do anything with it. He learned to use his right, buttoned his shirts with it, forced out messy writing. It felt backward as putting a shoe on the wrong foot, but he did it. His fingers healed into a half-fist and grew restless, charged like the static on a metal knob. They wanted to work. But under Dax’s eye, and his mother’s, he couldn’t let them.

When Pépère found him in the Airstream one night, his right fingers fighting with a needle and thread, he set a hand on his shoulder and said, “Use your left, boy.” Cluck had hesitated, sure it was a trick, but his grandfather took the needle from his right hand and slipped it between his left thumb and forefinger, the only two digits on his left hand that weren’t stuck curled under. “Notre secret,” Pépère had said, shutting the trailer door. Our secret.

Cluck had no right to lie to the man who kept his secrets.

“There was this girl,” Cluck said. “She was out there.”

Pépère let go of his forearms. “A girl.”

“She had on a cotton dress. My hands made it out better than she did.”

Pépère’s eyes looked dark as palm ash. “You took off her dress?”

“As much as I could, yeah.”

His grandfather let out a breath and put a hand to his temple. “The people here, they think things about us.”

Cluck didn’t need reminding. It was enough that they were performers, that they traveled from town to town. But a few of them, like Cluck and Pépère, stood out worse, a different kind of dark than the people around here were used to.

“If you touch a girl in this town,” Pépère said, “it doesn’t matter why, people will talk.”

“You think I should have left her there?” Cluck asked.

“I think you should have told me. Then at least I’d know what you’d gotten yourself into.”

“I haven’t gotten into anything,” Cluck said.

But Pépère was already halfway out the door.

Cluck’s stomach felt tight as a coil of wire. His grandfather was the one person he couldn’t take disappointing. To everyone but Pépère, Cluck was nothing more than the red-streaked semiplumes that grew under his hair. A poor substitute for flight feathers. Dax was a primary remex, long, straight, showing. Cluck was a lesser covert feather, hidden, structural. Or an afterfeather, the downy offshoot branching from the central vane.

Needed but easy to forget.

Boca de miel, corazón de hiel.

Mouth of honey, bitter heart.

The other sirenas would say not to go, that she’d get herself killed. That family would peck Lace to death like the crows they were, or turn her whole body to black feathers.

But the only way to escape the exile of the gitano boy’s hands was to face them. Justin, Alexia, and her brother had made their apology, broken free of the curse that stolen Camargue colt brought on them. As long as the Corbeau boy didn’t realize she was a Paloma, she could do the same.

The feather burn wouldn’t heal on its own. She couldn’t wait it out. She needed the boy who’d made it. She needed to show enough remorse, enough fear and reverence for the strength of his family’s magia negra, that he’d forgive her, and use that same gitano magic to lift the feather from her arm.

First she needed an offering, a sign of her contrition, the way a maize farmer’s daughter who had ignored the goddess Chicomecoatl might have brought her flowers during a famine. So Lace walked the dirt-dusted roads to the outdoor market where her aunts sent her cousins for tomatoes and Casaba melon.

People tried not to stare. Their eyes flashed toward the red heart on her cheek, pity passing over their faces. Their sympathy prodded her. Lace held her throat tight, to stop herself from screaming at them. You think this thing on my cheek is the worst I got that night? Go ask the boy with the wrecked hand what he gave me.

She clutched the coins and dollar bills in her dress pocket. “What’s good right now?” she asked a woman at a fruit stand.

The woman sucked air in through her teeth and touched her own cheek, like looking at Lace might make her grow an identical wound.

“Chin up,” the woman said. “You’re lucky. Three of our men died that night.”

Lucky. It was a word Almendro held close. Those alive were lucky. The town, still alive, was lucky. But Lace knew better. Almendro seethed with the fallout. Any man in a suit collected a set of glares whenever he crossed a street. Some plant workers’ wives, her father told her, protested outside the plant’s fence the last few mornings, but most of them had jobs too, and children, so the picketing dissipated as one after another left for their shifts.

Lucky was the word this town pinned to its shirt collar, a good-luck charm. It helped them ignore the tension, between wanting to know what had happened, and hoping half their jobs would not be gone by the time the trees shed their marred bark and ruined leaves.

Lace paid for a flat of peaches and the strangest watermelon she’d ever seen. Midnight violet, almost black, speckled with dandelion yellow, and one gold spot the size and color of a Meyer lemon. Moon-and-Stars, the paper sign said.

She stepped out from the awning, and a mist of rain dotted the paper sack, the drizzle so light Lace couldn’t hear it. She kept still, two steps from the fruit stand’s edge. The drops hit her skin. They clung to the fine hairs on her arms. She picked at each water bead, pulling at the thin shields of scabbing grown over her burns.

The memory of sirens bore into her temples. The dusk turned to night, quick as a cloth torn off a table. The clouds overhead swirled and the rain turned hot. It stuck to her, turning her clothes to ash. It would streak through her body until she was nothing but a rib cage and a rain-seared heart. She had to get them off. Every drop. She dug her nails in to rake them away.

Little threads of blood showed.

She stepped back under the awning, her pulse shuddering in her neck. Her hands trembled, the threads of blood vibrating like river grass underwater.

“You okay?” the woman asked.

Lace nodded, keeping her back to the woman. She gaped at the air, getting her breath back, waiting out the rain.

A few days earlier, she’d thought of rain as little different than the spray off a river. It was all the same, wasn’t it? All water. But now she knew better. She wasn’t willing to offer the sky her blind trust that the drops coming down were water and not poison.

Yes, all the clean, venomless storms she’d run through, all the sudden showers and downpours, told her that this rain, and every one after, should be plain water. But she wouldn’t count on it. She’d never give the sky that faith again. In place of that faith now lived her suspicion that all rain was hiding some secret she wouldn’t know until she found it burning into her skin.

She should have known all along not to trust the sky. It was where the crows lived.

Eso es harina de otro costal.

That is wheat from a different bag.

The closer Lace got to the Corbeaus’ side of the woods, the more the scent of feathers pushed up through the trees’ smells. The rain had let up, leaving the air clean and woody like damp bark, but that scent still hovered.

Lace caught a thread of it every time those black feathers blew to the Palomas’ side of town, and here it was strong as Abuela’s perfume. A dull earth smell. Something waxy like crayons. A sweetness like powdered honey that Lace might have liked if she didn’t know where it came from.

Lace set her suitcase at the base of a cottonwood tree. She buried it under wet leaves. Los gitanos couldn’t steal it if they didn’t know it was there.

She held the bag of peaches in one arm, Moon-and-Stars in the other. The sight of the old Craftsman house made an unsteady feeling jitter down her arms. But she reminded herself that the Corbeau boy couldn’t have known she was a Paloma, that if he had, he would have left her to turn to smoke, and that stilled her.

From far off, the Corbeaus’ camp looked like children’s toys. Lace had heard rumors about the travel trailers, but until tonight, she’d never seen them. They were primary-colored like alphabet blocks—clover green, weed daisy yellow, apple red, crayon blue. One was plain aluminum. Another pink with tail fins like a jet. Strings of globe lights hung between them.

The wings on the performers’ backs towered over their heads and spread out past their shoulders. Lace had never seen so much teal and bronze. Feathers brushed when one passed another.

The men wore no shirts, nothing but the flesh-colored bands that held their wings on. Lace tried not to laugh at the shine of their chests, wondering if they used Vaseline or vitamin oil. Women in antique dresses sat at outdoor vanities, rows of lightbulbs illuminating the mirrors. Their enormous wings filled the glass. They fixed their hair in soft waves and pinned curls, trailing under flower crowns.

One who didn’t have her wings on noticed Lace, a flash of movement in her mirror.

She caught Lace’s eye in the reflection. “You are early, and lost.” She patted her hair and turned around. “The show doesn’t start for an hour. You buy the tickets down the road.”

Recognition pressed into Lace’s collarbone. She knew this narrow frame, the copper hair, the sleepy flirtation in the woman’s eyes. Lace had met her in the woods.

But nothing registered on the woman’s face. Lace didn’t have on her stage makeup, only lipstick, and base that did a poor job hiding the burn on her cheek. She didn’t have on her tail, and her hair wasn’t wet. She looked nothing like la sirena rosa.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?” The woman pulled back the edge of the paper sack with her forefinger. “Are you from the grocery store?”

Lace shifted the bag so their arms wouldn’t touch. “No. I’m looking for someone.”

“Who?” the woman asked.

Lace tried holding her hand above her head to show the Corbeau boy’s height, but she didn’t know his height. She just knew he was taller than she was. “Dark hair, longish,” she said, hovering a flat hand over her shoulder. “He has”—Lace closed and opened her fist, thinking of his left fingers, curled under—“a hand.”

“Two, I’d guess,” the woman said.

“He wears old-timey clothes.”

“You mean Cluck.”

“His name’s Cluck?”

“He answers to it.” The woman gestured for Lace to follow. She stopped at a blue and white teardrop trailer. “Cluck.” She banged her palm on the siding.

The door flew open. Lace put up a hand to keep it from hitting her. The boy in the old-fashioned clothes stepped down from the trailer.

He had his hair rubber-banded in a low ponytail, but it was a little too short to stay pulled back. A few pieces had fallen out and gotten in his face.

She’d only ever seen him in the dull neon of the liquor store or through the cloud of what the nurses had put in her IV. Now he looked different. His eyebrows, low-arched, dark as his hair, gave him a serious look she’d never seen when he was talking. The way his eyelashes screened his irises when he looked down made him seem a little sad. The inner curve of his lower lip had a lavender tint that should’ve made him look sick or cold, but it just added to that sadness that started around his eyes.

He held a pair of peacock-feather wings. The breeze stroked the feathers, and the gold and sea glass colors shimmered.

Lace caught the shine of bright aqua, the same blue as the nylon net, and her stomach clenched. She tried to forget that she’d come to apologize to the Corbeau who’d probably left that net for her, the boy who’d had no reason to be on the Palomas’ side of the woods except to put those nylon threads in the water.

Cluck didn’t see her in the door’s shadow.

“As-tu fini?” the woman asked.

He turned her around by her shoulders and tied the satin ribbons to her torso, crossing them over her front so they looked like part of her dress.

The woman slid her thumbs under the ribbons, checking that they’d hold. They were the same bluish purple as the bodice, and almost vanished against the chiffon. “Tu as de la visite.” She pushed the trailer door shut, throwing light on Lace.

Cluck jumped when he saw her. He pulled off the rubber band and shook a hand through his hair. Not like he cared what he looked like but quick, out of habit, like taking his hat off before going into a church.

The woman skipped off. Her wings twitched as she ran. The plumes all moved together like a field of oats, wind-rippled.

“Here to take another shot?” Cluck asked. Sadness tinged his expression. She couldn’t have hurt his feelings. The Corbeaus didn’t bother with any opinions but each other’s. As far as he knew, she was just some girl from Almendro. What did he care what she said about him?

She pulled her eyes down from his face so she wouldn’t have to see that look.

He had his sleeves cuffed up to the elbow. A thread of blue vein ran along the muscle in his forearms, like an irrigation ditch snaking through a field. It gave Lace an idea of what the rest of his body must have been like under the loose fit of those old clothes, the kind of thin muscle that made him strong but not as big as the other men.

Abuela would murder her for thinking about a Corbeau with his shirt off. Lace tried to make herself stop, sure that Abuela would sense the thought from across town. But the more she tried to force it aside, the more the thought came floating back, like a balloon bobbing up after being held underwater. It was like the game she and her cousins tormented each other with. Don’t think of a Christmas tree. Don’t think of an alpaca. And then all they could think about for the rest of the day would be a whole herd of alpaca, or a pine forest big enough for every Christmas tree in the world.

She shoved the watermelon and the bag of peaches into his arms and flicked away the memory of that net. She pushed down the knowledge that he put into the water something that almost killed Magdalena, and could have killed her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “For what I said. For how I acted. I’m sorry.”

“Heavily medicated?” he asked.

“Something like that,” she said. “I just came to say thank you for what you did.”

“Anytime,” he said. “Well, not anytime. Never again, I hope.”

“So we’re okay?” she asked. The sooner he forgave her, the sooner the feather would heal. Her apology was the same as her cousins returning that Camargue colt.

Something behind Lace got Cluck’s attention. “Great.” He stopped a girl who looked about his age, wings on her back. He said something to her in French and set the paper bag and watermelon into her arms.

The girl eyed the watermelon. “I don’t think it’s ripe. It’s purple.”

“It’s supposed to be purple,” Lace said.

The girl startled, realizing Lace was there. Were they all this jumpy whenever anyone who was not a Corbeau came near the Craftsman house?

The girl eyed Lace, then took the fruit toward the house.

Cluck sprang toward one of the vanity mirrors, where the red-haired woman leaned over a pale-haired one, dotting color on her eyelids. The red blossoms on her flower crown almost touched the vanilla roses on the other woman’s head.

“Eugenie,” he said. “What are you doing?”

Eugenie paused her fingers. Her free hand was full of makeup brushes, the bristles color-drenched.

Cluck grabbed the brushes out of her hands. “Where’s Margaux?”

“She never showed.”

“Again?”

“She has a new boyfriend. I don’t think she’s coming back. Not this run anyway.”

Lace followed him. She needed his word, for him to pronounce her forgiven, like a priest.

He felt her shadow cut across the light. “Sorry,” he said, half looking over his shoulder. “My flake cousin flaked again.” From across the yard, the sound of ripping fabric distracted him. It sounded thin, like the shantung or dupioni her mother wore to church on Easter Sunday. Old or expensive.

“Here.” He shoved the bouquet of makeup brushes into Lace’s hands. “Hold these for a minute, will ya?” He took off toward the Craftsman house.

With a bare foot, the pale-haired woman pushed a vinyl stool toward Lace. The sole was brown, like it had been painted. It was the only thing dark about the woman. She had a pinkish forehead, and hair blond as bean sprouts. Half the women here looked like her. Where had their gitana blood gone? Had they cast it out like el Diablo?

The other women, except for the redhead called Eugenie, had hair as black as Cluck’s. But even some of them were pale as whipped-up egg whites. Same with the men.

Cluck was one of the darker ones, his forearms like the lightest peels of jacaranda bark. It almost made her sorry for him. He had that wrecked hand, and he didn’t match his relatives. Even Lace’s family teased Leti and Reyna for being light-haired güeras.

“Do you want to sit?” the woman asked, her consonants sharpened by a French accent. Lace wondered if it was real or put-on. The Corbeaus had been in this country as long as the Palomas, cursing them and stealing their business.

She sat down. The vanity was crowded with pots of color and powder compacts. Blue and green glass bottles, clusters of pastel rhinestones, and canning jars of cotton balls filled any extra space.

An open bag of cake flour leaned against the mirror. Lace didn’t ask.

The makeup brushes looked like they hadn’t been cleaned since spring. Pastels tipped the eye shadow brushes. Face powder and blush stained the bigger ones. The smallest ones had been dyed red with lip color and violet with eyeliner.

Her hands opened and closed, wanting to fix them. Lace cleaned her own brushes after making up one cousin and before starting the next. Were these people trying to make each other sick? One eye infection, and the whole show would have it.

Lace dampened a few tissues with an open bottle of alcohol, and rubbed the makeup from each brush. Yes, these things had touched Corbeau skin, but they weren’t Corbeaus themselves. If she had to look at those stained brushes any longer, she’d throw them at somebody.

She turned each one over, pressing the color out until it wiped clean. The lip and eyeliner brushes were always the worst. She squeezed the color from the base of the bristles up through the tips, and her shoulders felt heavy with missing the other sirenas. These were things she did for them. Cleaning brushes. Rubbing color from bristles. Seeing each shade come off on the tissue like a streak of paint.

The blond woman looked over at the color-striped tissues. “You do makeup,” she said, not a question.

“No.” Lace put down the brushes.

“This is what you do, n’est-ce pas?”

“Not anymore,” Lace said.

“But you did.”

“But not anymore.”

The woman closed her eyes, showing Lace her face. “Will you paint me?”

“Do your makeup?” Lace asked.

The woman nodded, eyes still closed.

“You don’t know if I’m any good,” Lace said, stalling, trying to figure out if there were enough brushes and sponges here that she could fix the woman’s face without touching her skin. “What about Margaux?”

“My sister? She has her boyfriends, she forgets we have our shows.” The woman hair-sprayed a loose curl. “She will marry one of them soon and have five hundred babies. The beauties always do.”

She said “beauties” like she wasn’t one.

“If you don’t,” the woman said, “I’ll have to go on tonight looking washed-out, and it’ll be your fault.”

“My fault?” Lace splashed alcohol on another tissue, and wiped the color stains from her fingers. “Your sister’s the one who didn’t show up.”

“But who knows where she is?” The woman opened her eyes. “And you’re here.”

Lace folded her arms, hiding the feather burn. She couldn’t keep saying no without the woman wondering why.

It couldn’t be harder than putting waterproof color on the other sirenas. She just couldn’t use her fingers.

“What do you need?” Lace asked.

“Base, blush, lip color.” The woman gestured at her temples, holding her pinched thumbs and forefingers at the corners of her eyes, opening them as she moved her hands out. “The eyes are more difficult. Liner, highlighter, shadow.”

Lace remembered the wings of color on Eugenie. The lilac pink had fanned across the bridge of her nose, all the way to her hairline, the color dotted with press-on jewels. “I think I know what you mean.”

She sponged foundation on the woman’s face, then powder, then concealer, then more powder. She brushed color onto her cheeks, and picked a green cream eye shadow that matched the woman’s dress.

A man stopped at the vanity as Lace was gluing on rhinestones. One of the winged men, his hair neat and gelled, good-looking enough to be a festival queen’s older boyfriend.

If not for his size, Lace might have laughed at his bare chest and his costume. That the Corbeaus put their men into their shows made her family trust them even less. Men shouldn’t display themselves like quetzals.

Justin and Oscar never got tired of the jokes. Male fairies. Maricas. Reinonas.

But Lace couldn’t laugh. His wings made his muscled frame even bigger. He was the kind of man Lace had feared meeting in the woods the night she first saw Eugenie.

“What is this?” he asked, his voice a little like Cluck’s, but edged with irritation.

Her spine felt tight and hard as the barrel of her father’s Winchester. Her pulse beat against the raw skin on her back, like a moth in a jar.

The woman opened her eyes. “The locals are friendly here, non?”

“She’d better be the only local you’re getting friendly with.” He left, the shadow of his wings following.

The moth under Lace’s skin shook itself off, and slept.

“Dax.” The woman stuck out her chin and laughed. “He sees to it we children follow all the rules.” She shut her eyes again.

Lace finished the color and added mascara.

A thread of black showed at the back of the woman’s neck. At first it looked like a few strands of black hair mixed in with the blond. The woman moved, and a few more threads flashed dark, like the veins on a leaf.

Lace dabbed a sponge over the woman’s eyelids, pretending she was still working so she could look. She made out the vane of a feather, the thick central shaft. The barbs looked like enormous eyelashes, spiny with too much mascara, then dusted with the palest face powder.

She blew gently on the woman’s eyelid, to seem like she was helping her mascara dry. But she moved so her breath skimmed past the woman’s temple, and down toward the hair against her neck.

A mist of white powder broke loose. It smelled like raw bread dough.

Flour. The open bag of cake flour was for covering their feathers.

Lace reached out a brush to the plume, letting a little flour frost the bristles. She held the brush so lightly the woman wouldn’t feel it. The feather gave, and the hair around it parted, showing the root.

The feather’s dark shaft vanished into the woman’s head like a vein. It was growing out of her skin.

Lace looked around at the wings on the Corbeaus’ backs, searching for black feathers. She couldn’t find any. Not where one wing met the other. Not at the edges. Not flashing dark between the eyespots.

Those wings, all peacock feathers, no black, left her lost in dark water, trying to make out the trail of her own air bubbles to show her the way to the surface.

The black feathers the wind brought the Palomas didn’t come from their wings. They came from the Corbeaus’ bodies. The stories her family told their children were as much truth as warning.

Lace’s heart felt dry as a pomegranate shell, all the fruit picked away. Her fingers worried at her sleeve, wanting to scratch the feather burn off even if it left her bleeding.

The only thing that stopped her was the truth, sliding its fingers onto her throat.

Unless the Corbeau boy declared her forgiven, she could dig her nails into her arm all she wanted. The wound would heal, and the mark would show up again, like a feather growing back among his hair.

Faute de grives, on mange des merles.

In want of thrushes, one eats blackbirds.

Eugenie followed Cluck, wiping blush and eye shadow off her hands. “You don’t think I can help?”

“You’ve never done it before,” Cluck said.

“Fine. You can do it.”

Cluck couldn’t have made up one of the performers to save his life, and Eugenie knew it. The only time he’d ever handled makeup was to cover a bruise Dax gave him, and even that he’d done badly.

“Et alors?” Eugenie stood in front of him. “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “What happened to Margaux?”

“She just left a message. She said she’s going to see some friends in Hanford.”

“Great,” Cluck said.

“So what now?” Eugenie said.

Cluck dug his fingers into his hairline. “Just let me think, okay?”

Eugenie glanced past him, toward the girl he’d left holding the makeup brushes. “You’re distracted.” Her words ended in a laugh, teasing, not reprimanding.

He didn’t look where Eugenie was looking, not wanting to prove his cousin’s point. And if he looked at Lace again, her face thin and tired, he’d think too much about her and too little about the performers with their unpainted faces. He’d want to turn her over to his youngest aunt, who was always trying to feed people, or let her sleep in the blue and white trailer until the pale, dull film of IV medications fell away.

But there was a kind of intensity in her eyes, a look like she’d pinched herself until she came out from under the morphine. It gave him hope that her coming here was about more than an apology held in that paper bag and watermelon rind. This hope, that she was here not to explain herself but for him, slid into his hand like a found penny.

The place where his feathers touched the back of his neck felt hot. “I am not distracted,” he said. He’d turned his back to that girl so he wouldn’t look at her, so the way her dress brushed the back of her knees wouldn’t make him forget how little time he had until the show started. “I’m thinking.”

“I doubt it.” Eugenie’s smile was pinched and smug. “Not with your petite copine here.”

“I do not have une petite copine, here or anywhere else. I’m trying to figure out how we’re gonna get through tonight.”

Eugenie nodded once, looking past him again. “How about her?”

“Clémentine?” he asked. His cousin was good with color. Meticulous. But that made her slow. If he let her do the makeup, they’d have to start the show at midnight. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No.” Eugenie pushed on his shoulder until he faced where she looked. “Regarde.”

The girl stood where he’d left her, hands still full of brushes. But instead of just holding them, she leaned over his cousin, sweeping eye shadow onto her brow bone.

She’d called him gitano like it was a curse, like she would never go near him or his family for their Romani blood. But now she’d planted herself among all the noise and the lights, and with every move of her hands she looked more like she belonged here.

Dios los cría y ellos se juntan.

Birds of a feather, fly together.

“Have you made me beautiful?” the woman asked.

Lace added a last dusting of loose powder. “You’re done.”

The woman turned to the mirror. Lace had evened out her skin tone, flushed her cheeks, painted her eyes mint green to match her dress.

“Magnifique.” The woman tried to put her cheek to Lace’s. Lace’s pulling away didn’t discourage her. The woman kept little more than an inch of space between their faces, and kissed the air.

Lace flinched away. She shook off the scent of the flower crown, the clean smell of wet marjoram.

Cluck stood in front of them both, arms crossed. “Clémentine.” He looked at the pale-haired woman.

“She’s very good, non?” the woman said.

He looked at Lace.

Clémentine got up and crossed the yard, her feet imprinting the damp earth. She was almost as tall as Cluck. When she was sitting, Lace couldn’t tell. Now that she was walking, Lace saw her wide, rounded shoulders supporting those wings. She looked made of white sand clay, the statue of some lost goddess.

The hollow space in Lace’s stomach grew hot and tight. She didn’t like how many forms this family took. The boy her cousins called chucho. One woman, red-haired and small, and another, solid and pretty as a vinyl-bodied doll. All growing those black feathers.

Her mother had warned her about that. “You can never tell,” she said. “None of them look the same because they mate with anything.”

“Do you want a job?” Cluck asked.

That snapped her away from watching Clémentine. “What?” she asked.

“Do you already have a job?” he asked. “Or school? Some of the schools here run year-round, right?”

“No. I mean, no, I’m not in school, but…”

“Then do you want a job?”

“Doing what?”

“What you just did,” he said. “Six nights and weekend afternoons. Eight shows a week. Replace my flake cousin.”

“I’m not part of your family,” Lace said.

“And?” He dropped his hands, slid them into his pockets.

She studied the shape of his fingers in the pocket lining. In this light, standing like he was, he looked like an old sepia photograph, with his brown hair and eyes, his white shirt and brown pants. It made him seem printed instead of real, like Lace could reach out and crumple him, let the wind take him. But then she’d wear his mark forever.

“I thought you only hired family,” she said.

“Who told you that?”

She stopped herself. The Palomas knew more about the Corbeaus than anyone except the Corbeaus themselves. If Lace wanted to pass herself off as a local, she’d have to forget anything she knew that an Almendro girl wouldn’t.

“You come through every summer,” she said. “People talk.”

“It’s mostly family, but not everybody. There’s Théo. He fixes the trailers. And Yvette. She homeschools the kids.” Cluck looked over his shoulder. “And Alexander’s around here somewhere.” He looked back at Lace. “So what do you say?”

This was what he wanted? Her apology wasn’t enough, so he wanted her hands for Corbeau work?

“We’re not as unforgiving as I seem right now,” he said. “This is probably the tenth time my cousin’s bailed in two seasons.”

If she did this for him, he’d have to take the mark off her. If she stayed long enough, maybe she could make this boy owe her a little more than she owed him, make the Corbeaus owe the Palomas. Maybe it would be enough to demand they stay out of her family’s way. Abuela would have to let her back then. Lace could come back clean, safe to touch.

All she had to do was keep brushes and sponge pads between her fingers and the Corbeaus. If her skin did not touch theirs, she would survive this.

“Okay,” Lace said.

“Great.” He shoved makeup brushes into her hands. “You start now.”

“Then sit down,” she said.

“Excuse me?” he asked.

“You’re here. I might as well start with you.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t you need your base put on?” she asked. He wasn’t even in costume yet.

“Why would I?”

The men must have worn makeup too. Not all the color that went on the women, but foundation, pressed powder.

“Aren’t you in the show?” she asked.

“Do I look like I’m in the show?” He showed her his hand, those last three fingers curled under. “M’sieurs-dames,” he called out, and the others watched him. “This is the new Margaux. She’ll be doing your makeup.” Then he left her holding the brushes, half the show standing around her.

The lights, the colors, and the wings swirled like a soap bubble’s surface. Her cheek stung like it was still bleeding. If she was going to make up a whole show’s worth of performers, she’d need a few more ibuprofen from her suitcase.

“I’ll be right back.” She set the brushes down and slipped into the woods.

Clémentine glided out from behind a tree, first the tip of a wing, then the rest of her. “Looking for this?” She held up Lace’s suitcase.

Lace’s back tensed. If this woman had touched the new tail Tía Lora made her, Lace would rip the feathers from her wings. She may not have had a bra of fake pearls to hit her with, but she had her hands, her fingernails, her teeth. She’d shred that flower crown to potpourri.

“I took nothing,” the woman said. “I did not even open it. Je promets.”

Lace held out her hand.

Clémentine moved the suitcase out of reach. “If you tell me where you are sleeping tonight, you can have it.”

Lace’s spine relaxed. This woman thought she was a runaway.

Her father had given her some money “to get to Terra Bella,” though he didn’t believe it any more than she did. At best, he thought she was going to stay with Licha.

But neither of them said so. Lace had just taken the folded bills, thanked him, and hidden the money in the lining of her suitcase.

“Ever heard of a motel?” Lace said.

“It’s the weekend,” Clémentine said. “They are already booked for this berry festival.”

Lace hadn’t thought of that.

Clémentine set the suitcase down between them. “If you work here, you stay here.”

Lace left the suitcase where it was. She was no runaway, and the woman couldn’t have been more than thirty. She wasn’t old enough to play mother.

“No, thank you,” Lace said.

“Dax won’t like it. He likes to keep track of everyone.” Clémentine looked over her shoulder, through the dip between her wings. “Is it the house you are afraid of?”

“A little,” Lace said. The deep, weathered wood and age-darkened windows made it look like a place Cluck could seal her inside of, making her a thing that belonged to the Corbeaus.

“You can sleep where I sleep.” Clémentine pointed to a yellow trailer. “Inside the house to wash, to cook. Ça y est.”

Sleeping in one of the Corbeaus’ trailers, a few feet from a Corbeau woman.

If all this would lift the feather off her forearm, Lace would do it.

She picked up her suitcase.

“Bien,” the woman said.

A donde fueres, haz lo que vieres.

Wherever you go, do what you see.

The Corbeau show was nothing like Justin said.

They didn’t just put on costumes and stand in the trees. They climbed the boughs like cats, moving as though the high branches were wide and solid. The hung lights showed the contours of the men’s bodies, and made the women’s dresses look like mint and peach milk. Their skirts trailed and billowed, the edges fluttering. Sometimes their curls came unpinned and spun loose against their shoulders.

The performers climbed with their wings folded down, leads tethered to their wrists so that when they reached the top, they could pull the wings open to their full span. Those cords gave them a way to bring the weight of their wings forward. But if they didn’t hold themselves upright, a sudden gust could still make them fall. If one of the women stepped wrong, she could catch her dress, tearing the fabric and slipping on the organza.

The men moved with as much calm as if it was their own muscle and not the trees holding them up. They pulled themselves onto higher branches as though the wings helped them instead of getting in the way, but Lace could guess how heavy they were.

The women’s flower crowns never came undone, the larkspur and paintbrush clinging to their heads like a swarm of butterflies. They danced like the branches were broad as a field. They arched their arms so softly they looked as though the wind moved them. One in a champagne-colored dress stood so far up on her toes and lifted a leg so high and close to her body she looked like a clock striking noon. A tall one wearing mauve did an arabesque and tilted her body so her pointed foot showed between her wings. Another in dusk blue spun along a bough in a row of turns, spotting with nothing but stars.

Now she knew why Justin said so little about the show. He didn’t want to admit how beautiful their enemies looked as they danced. When one of the men lifted one of the women, the wind turned her skirt to water. When he set her down, she landed so softly the branches didn’t bend.

The women leaped like they knew the branches would hold them, like the boughs whispered their reassurances as they flew. The men’s jumps from higher branches to lower ones made the audience gasp, and then applaud. The wind streamed through those feathers, and they looked like they were flying.

Even with the weight of those wings, Lace never caught them stumbling or flailing their hands to keep from falling. Each of them had balance as constant and rooted as these trees. If they extended their arms, it was part of the dance.

These winged creatures, las hadas, kept rhythm with each other, with no music but the sound of chimes hung in the trees. No metal or wood, just pieces of polished glass, the same pastels as their dresses. If the wind died down, the performers touched them, and the glass gave off shimmers of sound. They made one chime answer another, then a few more answer that one, like the staggered song of nightbirds.

When one hada stepped into the light, another faded into a bough’s shadow. It looked random, an unplanned dance, charged with a romance that made the audience forget these people were relatives.

Lace could sense the choreography under their movements. The show had the same patterned feel as the mermaids’ dance. The trick was making it look like no two nights were ever the same, so each performance brimmed with fleeting magic.

Sometimes a Corbeau woman opened her hand, releasing a shower of wildflowers, and girls who watched from the ground held up their palms to catch the cream petals. Lace could never spot the women filling their hands. They must have hidden the flowers, one hada gathering a handful when the audience was watching another.

Tourists stared up, their necks taut with the worry of watching tightrope walkers. Locals didn’t gasp, used to these shows year after year, but they still watched, smiled. Children lifted their hands and pointed whenever they spotted another fairy in the trees. After the show, the women offered children fairy stones, cheap glass pebbles full of glitter, and their small faces flooded with wonder.

Watching sowed a strange jealousy in Lace. It burrowed into her as she fell asleep on the floor of the yellow trailer. Her exile and her wounds kept her from the shutter click of families taking pictures for vacation scrapbooks. They kept her from daughters in bright dresses reaching out to touch her tail fin, wondering if it was real.

Did the women on those branches know how lucky they were to be beautiful? Lace had never been their kind of beautiful, but she’d faked it. The less stunning of the Corbeau women faked it too, now with Lace’s help.

She woke up scratching at herself, dreaming of rain. Her nails left thread-thin trails of blood, like razor cuts. Waking broke her out of the feeling that the rain was eating through her.

In the morning, Lace found another of Cluck’s feathers. It had settled into the folds of the blanket Clémentine had lent her.

Lace clutched its stem. She turned it, and red streaks showed among the black.

She thought of burning it. Instead, she tucked it into the lining of her suitcase. If she kept the ones she found, collected them, owned a little of this boy, it might give her power over him.

Her back ached as she got dressed, not from the mattress on the trailer floor, but from turning over, trying to find a way to sleep that didn’t hurt her raw skin.

She listened outside the blue and white trailer. Cluck was already throwing things around, fixing costumes. She moved to look through the cracked door. He hunched over a table, trousers on but shirtless, his hair wet. She turned away as soon as she saw his back.

As long as she could help it, she wouldn’t enter the house when he was there. She wouldn’t let him trap her inside like a firefly in a jar. It was dangerous enough being in those walls with any Corbeau.

She let herself in the back door of the house, toothbrush and makeup bag in hand. Clémentine stood at the stove in bare feet, frying an egg. Lace passed behind her.

A woman sat in the heavy-curtained dining room, her posture straight as the lines of her shoulders. She looked around forty, age softly puckering the skin at the corners of her eyes. Her hair was pulled back into a neat bun that looked better fit for a catalog than a schoolroom, but her plain linen dress had the clean, bland shape Lace would expect on a mayor’s wife.

She wrote in a heavy leather book, but did not bend over the page. She kept up straight, as though her dress was embroidered to the chair back.

“You are our new makeup girl,” the woman said, not looking up.

Lace thought of putting down her toothbrush to show respect. She didn’t know who the woman was, but if she kept the books, Lace shouldn’t cross her.

Lace just nodded.

The woman finished writing, and raised her eyes to Lace. She didn’t hide her study of the wine-colored burn on Lace’s cheek, or her uneven eyebrows; adhesive had left them in patches.

The woman’s face, her inspection, asked the question without her having to speak it. You look like this and we should trust you to make us beautiful?

Lace pressed her tongue to the back of her teeth. If she got angry, this woman might hear the sound of her uncles’ zampoñas under her breath, betraying how little she belonged beneath a canopy of glass chimes.

“Makeup doesn’t cure ugly,” Lace said. She took her things toward the downstairs bathroom.

“There are no ugly women,” the woman said. “Only lazy ones.”

Lace stopped, laughing softly. Abuela threw the same quote at her and her cousins, when she pointed out that Lace was getting a little fat, or that Martha’s modest dresses made her look dowdy, or the flare of acne reddening Emilia’s cheek.

Lace turned around. “Helena Rubinstein.”

The woman nodded once. A little light from between curtains crossed her face. “Très bien.” She motioned to a chair. “Come.”

Lace sat down, the chair legs creaking as she shifted her weight. How did the woman’s chair stay so quiet?

The table looked like an estate sale leftover. Once it must have been dark-polished wood, shining like still water. But it had been nicked and dulled so many years, it looked no grander than a wine cork. No wonder the owners left it to be rented out with the house.

“Je m’appelle Nicole,” the woman said.

“Lace.”

So this was Nicole Corbeau, Abuela’s rival.

Nicole reached for Lace’s makeup bag. “Puis-je?” she asked.

Lace nodded. She had nothing to hide in there. Her tail was in her suitcase, locked, and her skirt and blouse covered her scales.

“Are you one of the performers?” Lace asked.

Nicole laughed a curt laugh, neat as her chignon. “I was.” Her fingers searched the pouch’s contents. “Now I keep the books. Dax is my son. So is le cygnon.”

“Who?” Lace asked.

“It’s a nickname. His cousins call him Cluck.”

“Dax and Cluck are brothers?”