After visits from the Whale, when the Lifemaker retreats to his chambers, Lúcio swims to the aquarium by the window, where he and Olga watch the fish fly by. The largest swim near the front, their sinuous bodies waving against the stars. The smaller ones swim behind. Floating freely in space, the mansion is surrounded only by night, except when the shoal passes by, their scales turning the black view red. Olga, the Lifemaker’s sister, likes the sunfish, always giggles at the sight of his gaping mouth. Lúcio prefers the Guide, the final member of the procession. Her curved teeth gnaw at the dark. Lúcio has never left his aquarium, and the Guide’s mouth makes him imagine chewing the walls, diving into the sky, swimming in space. Most of all he likes the light hanging from the top of her head: the small circle blinking yellow at the end of her esca, the call to any wanderers lost in the void. A promise: There is always something to find. There is always a path to follow.

Olga leans close to the window, her forehead touching the glass. The Whale and the Lifemaker argued tonight.

“He said she didn’t understand Cantala,” she says. Lúcio remembers the dry, short sobs coming from the Lifemaker’s room after the Whale took his latest project. “So he wanted to set up that little trap to ‘show her.’” The Lifemaker took several sleepless nights to make Cantala, hunching at his desk, endless scribbles blooming on his notes. Lúcio remembers the mornings where he’d shake his head and rip pages apart, only to go back to the pieces in the afternoon, head going back and forth from the skeleton to the aquarium. Ah, Lúcio, I think I like this one, he had said. “I told him—that’s just how it is, with the Whale. Not every piece is going to be a winner. But, well, you know Carlos.” Her sigh clouds the window’s glass. “I think he might go back to the Kid, now. Finish him, finally.”

Lúcio wants to scoff: The Kid is never ready. Instead, he looks outside and imagines swimming with other fish. The aquarium’s glass turning into a window, the handle turning unlocked, a tunnel forming from him to the Guide’s light.

Whenever the Whale comes, she is full of questions: She wants to know which materials the Lifemaker used, why he chose those body parts, what makes this creature different from the ones who came before. Lúcio has watched the Lifemaker rehearse his answers, many times, in the privacy of his office. His most recent project, Cantala, was built around the concept of a hybrid brain: human neurons bound to a monkey’s, woven inside a cage of carefully grown vines. In order to showcase the centerpiece, Cantala’s scalp had been removed, and the Whale ran her tongue over it carefully, slowly. She wouldn’t harm its delicate nature. For a moment Cantala had been fully covered by her tongue, as if ceasing to exist while she tasted her.

“It’s beautiful,” the Whale had said. The Lifemaker seemed to grow. “But a monkey and a human—it’s a little derivative.” The Lifemaker seemed to shrink. “It makes sense, somewhat—both in the tradition of human makers creating hybrids of their own kind, and as a natural culmination of your earlier work. It’s just, well, I’ve seen it before.”

After his talk with Olga, Lúcio swims through the aquarium pipes to the Lifemaker’s office. Lúcio’s aquarium extends through the entire mansion, tunnels of glass attached to every ceiling, descending to a few tanks and smaller fish bowls here and there. Olga built it all. Every time she comes by to visit her brother, she has a new plan to add to the glass maze where Lúcio lives. The water is cold, according to the thermostat, but Lúcio has never known anything else. He passes the library, the kitchen, the lab. He swims above the storage room where the Kid stays—swims faster, then.

He finds the Lifemaker by his desk. The walls tower around him. From his pipe on the ceiling, Lúcio can pretend they are the same size. He could open his mouth and swallow the Lifemaker whole, along with all the lives inside him.

The Lifemaker twists a puzzle cube in his hands. “Did Olga tell you about my little trick?” He doesn’t look at Lúcio as he speaks, tearing colors apart. “Worked well. The Whale closed her mouth and the trap went off.”

The Whale can hold anything inside herself. She has carried all of the Lifemaker’s creations in her stomach, to the other realms. She licks them and discusses them with him before leaving. She is always honest about how his work tastes.

“I just wanted to pay her back a little.” The Lifemaker lets go of the cube. “‘Derivative.’ Stupid beast.” He pulls his sparse grey hair, as if he’s trying to drag something out of his head. “Now I’m screwed. She threatened to never come back—can you imagine?”

Lúcio pictures the Whale’s body jolting as the trap pierced her gums. It’s hard for him to imagine someone so big in pain.

“I think she will come back,” Lúcio says. The Whale asks a lot of questions, and the Lifemaker leaves their conversations seeming exhausted, but she keeps coming back because she loves his work. That’s why she wants to know everything, taste every piece. The Lifemaker might complain, but he’s always excited the day before she visits. He always wants to know what she thinks of his creations, as if they only become real once seen by her.

“Oh, sure.” The Lifemaker lets go of his hair. He tilts the cube with his finger until it stands like a lozenge. “She wants the Kid. She says it’s about time he’s ready.”

Lúcio swallows. The Kid is never ready. He can’t help but feel envious, though, imagining the Kid getting to leave the mansion. A creature like that wouldn’t swim with the fish in the sky, but maybe he’d find others like him, his own shoal. Lúcio imagines swimming between other bodies, the Guide’s light behind him, making him a piece of a whole she protected. “What if,” he says, “you try something else?”

The Lifemaker turns to him. “Like what?” Lúcio wonders if there is a way to see his reflection in the Lifemaker’s eyes. He’d be even smaller, then, inside his eyelids. “I don’t have anything ready. Except for you, which, well, you know—I only give her my best work.”

The Guide’s light flickers in Lúcio’s mind, then goes out. He feels silly. The other fish were built for freedom. He was built for the aquarium, for the mansion’s walls. “Of course,” he says. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to, either. It was just a thought.”

The Lifemaker raises his finger, allows the cube to be a cube again. He’s not listening. He’s already gone, his mind out the window, beyond any star Lúcio can see.

Lúcio doesn’t know when the Lifemaker started making lives. Olga says he wanted to since they were children. It’s hard to imagine the pair of elderly siblings as kids. The Lifemaker’s face, especially, agrees with age, seems to mold around his wrinkles.

Olga said he started with animals. He didn’t take many risks with his craft until later in his career, when he began to make other humans. Then he started adventuring with hybrids and never looked back.

Lúcio himself had been a side project, a quick return to form during a time when the Lifemaker and Olga were estranged. He had wanted a simple project then, and a goldfish was easy to make. The human vocal cords were a special touch.

“It’s delicate work, on such a small canvas,” the Lifemaker had said, his index finger and thumb two reddish smudges pressed against the aquarium’s cold glass, curling around Lúcio. “Solid, but overdone. I just needed the distraction.”

Lúcio took no offense. The Lifemaker worked hard on the creatures he gave to the Whale. Lúcio had watched him glue feather after feather in tissue made from the inside of oysters, measure every organ in a grown man’s torso to build half of each one from metal scraps, dye a human’s hair deep dark before sewing it onto an owl’s body.

“It’s all in the details, Lúcio,” he had said. He ran his hand over the owl’s back, raising up each feather in its wake.

The Lifemaker made the Kid way before Lúcio; according to Olga, way before he even thought of him. The first version of the Kid was the one who looked most like a boy. That one came closest to being ready. The Lifemaker made him in a frenzy, working for weeks without stopping; pitched him to the Whale as his greatest creation.

Lúcio doesn’t know when the Lifemaker decided the Kid wasn’t ready. All he knows is one day he took him to the lab to make a few final adjustments, and that was years ago and the Kid is still around. Since then, the Kid has been a boy and a girl and then a boy again; he has had wings that he flapped to awkwardly float from one chair to the other; he has walked on all fours and crawled and hopped on a single wooden leg. Right now he has two human legs, one arm and two extra fingers growing from his left shoulder. His head is a smaller version of the Guide’s: The Lifemaker carved the sharp teeth in a particularly productive month. The small light hanging from his forehead is pale, weak against the mansion’s darkness. Truth be told, Lúcio finds him unpleasant. He wanders around the hallways, his mouth flopping open and closed, teeth clicking in a frantic echo, chewing on something no one else can see.

The Lifemaker says he’s going to go back to working on the Kid for years now. Sometimes he will pick him up, twist him around, remove or add an eye or two, but he never really seems intent on finishing him. So Lúcio is surprised when, the next day, the Kid walks into the lab, the little light in his forehead bouncing up and down with his steps.

Lúcio cringes. He can’t help but feel like this version of the Kid is an insult to the dignity of the Guide, a kind of cheap perversion.

“Come on, now,” says the Lifemaker, sitting by his examination table. The Kid walks straight to him. “Come on.” The Lifemaker gestures to the table. The Kid tries to pull himself up, but his single arm is not strong enough. “Oh, sorry, I forgot,” the Lifemaker says. He picks the Kid up by his waist and places him on the table. The Kid’s pale eyes sink onto him. “Turn around. Raise your arm.”

The Lifemaker pulls up his sweater, loose around his shoulders. Olga brings the Kid everything he wears. It’s all gonna be a little big on you, she had said on her latest visit, handing the Kid a bag. I’m still not the greatest seamstress. The Kid had held the bag for a while.

“You can lower your arm now,” the Lifemaker says. He runs a hand down the Kid’s back. His skin is smooth, the Lifemaker always careful to not leave scars on his projects. Lúcio remembers the brief period when the Kid had small wings growing from his shoulder blades; how he used to flap them trying to reach the ceiling, bumping on the wall on his way up. He had been so agitated. The Lifemaker woke up in the middle of the night to drag him to the lab. The dejected chicken wings sat, hastily removed, on a corner of the desk for days.

He asks the Kid to lean forward, to stretch, to lie down on his side. Lúcio turns the Kid into pieces in his mind, tries to imagine the Lifemaker going through them, deciding what to keep and what to throw away.

The Kid can’t talk: The vocal cords are always among the final touches the Lifemaker gives to a project, and the Kid is never ready. He makes sounds, sometimes, depending on which head he has. Right now, the anglerfish head announces itself mostly by the clicking of teeth.

He plays with a few toys. Some are gifts Olga brought for him, others are rejected pieces from previous projects. Lúcio has swum over the Kid in those times, watching him wave a wooden arm up and down, his chest heaving with what must be his version of laughter. Once, the Kid placed a ceramic eye on the floor and flicked a round metal engine against it, sending it spinning endlessly across the room. That was back when he had thumbs.

Lúcio avoids him. The sight of the Kid is abhorrent. Lúcio can slide in and out of every room without bothering anyone, can blend in with the mansion to exist as quietly as the walls. He doesn’t waste anyone’s time demanding attention. Meanwhile, the Kid, unfinished, thrives on being a nuisance. He flaunts his inadequacy, never tries to hide or behave. Worse, he has a fascination with the aquarium, spending long stretches of time standing in front of the tanks.

“Do you know what his plan is for the Kid?” Lúcio asks Olga. “Did he say?”

Olga is working on a new aquarium. She shows Lúcio the sketch: It’s a spiral, the tube curving on top and then behind itself as if hiding. “Do you like it?” she asks.

“Yes,” Lúcio says, impatient. He floats in the large tank that takes over almost a full wall of the dining room. The day Olga brought it, Lúcio dove all the way to the bottom as she stood outside, smiling. The tank could be big enough for the two of them, and what a shiny thought that was, a world made for more than one. “I’m just not sure what he can do. I mean, what hasn’t he tried yet?”

“Oh, Carlos will think of something,” Olga says. She closes her notebook and parts a slice of bread, crumbs falling on the cover. She bites half, then feeds the other half to Lúcio through the feeding tube.

“Do you think the Kid can be finished?”

“Anything can be finished.”

The crumbs feel dry in his mouth. “Do you,” he pushes the words out, throws them up, “do you think the Whale would take something else?”

Olga’s thumb flicks the corner of the notebook where she draws homes for Lúcio. She seems to pick her next words carefully, assembling a creature out of well-chosen pieces, so it doesn’t break out of her control, so it doesn’t hurt anything. “The Whale takes what she is given.”

If Lúcio swam a little upward, he could see the window on the other side of the kitchen, the oval one with the pink curtains. The space there is an egg of darkness, circled by something as soft as a hand. Like a round crumb Lúcio could swallow.

“It’s up to Carlos, really,” Olga says. “It’s his art. He decides what he wants to show or not.”

Lúcio knows it’s impossible. He doesn’t want to seem pathetic, longing for impossible things. “That’s fair. I wouldn’t want to, anyway.” Maybe if he says it a lot, it will become true.

Olga goes back to drawing. Lúcio eats his crumbs, watches the sky behind her and chews.

The Lifemaker works on a clay mold on his desk. The Kid stands in front of him, periodically waving the wooden arm up and down. From the aquarium, the mold looks human, which is absurd—will the Kid get a human head again? What was the point of getting rid of the first one? The Lifemaker’s fingers create small wells in the clay. Lúcio imagines the Kid’s vision narrowing, dark shadows festering in the corner of his eyes. He shivers. He doesn’t want to imagine what the Kid sees.

The pipes in the lab circle the ceiling, allowing Lúcio to swim around until he is looking at the Lifemaker instead. His grey hair shines under the pale light. He squints, hands sliding over the block of clay, pressing on the corners, smoothing them out. His thumbs rub the brown matter with precision, as if he’s digging to find something else inside. He barely notices Lúcio, but it’s fine. Whatever he’s willing into being will never get as much attention from anything else.

The next morning, the Lifemaker throws the block away. For the next three days, he tries other things. He sands a parakeet’s skull, builds a dolphin’s fin, braids a dozen cow teats. None of it works. He throws them all away, his gaze going between the Kid and his worktable with offended hurt, as if the Kid’s existence is a testament against everything else he could be.

Lúcio alternates between them and the windows. Sometimes lone fish fly by, tails pushing them forward with steady motions. When Lúcio thinks of swimming in the sky, he wonders how it feels to travel without transparent walls surrounding him. Sometimes, he thinks it might be like falling. Other times, in the dark, the aquarium seems to contract around him. The windows feel like breaths, then, and he wishes someone would build more of those.

One of those nights, he ends up in the storage room. The pipe there descends from the ceiling to a small, oval aquarium.

Tonight the Kid is quiet. He sits on the mattress and drags his feet on the floor. Earlier, the Lifemaker worked on reorganizing his fingers. He removed two from his shoulder, but couldn’t decide where to put them back. The remaining finger stands wrapped in white gauze.

The sight is not gruesome: The bandages are clean and Lúcio has seen much worse. What makes him stop is the Kid’s hand, which reaches up and touches the gauze, fingers caressing the cotton over the now empty space on his body. His feet drag loudly against the floor.

“You should leave it alone,” Lúcio says. “I mean, you might open up a stitch.”

The Kid looks at him. His eyes are close together, separated by the antenna. His hand rests on his shoulder, holding onto what is no longer there.

“Sorry,” Lúcio says. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

The Kid walks to the aquarium. He leans so close his face blocks most of Lúcio’s view of the room. Staring straight ahead, the light hanging from his antenna becomes a third eye.

“Sorry,” Lúcio repeats. The Kid lets go of his shoulder, his hand coming to rest against the aquarium.

Before Lúcio can say anything, the Kid’s image blurs; his pale eyes vanish under heavy mist, the dot of light a small remnant under the fog he blows on the glass.

They stare at each other, wordless. Behind the fog, the Kid’s face turns ethereal, as if he’s floating. But Lúcio can see the edges, the scales blending with the human skin of his neck. Behind the fog his features appear resilient, loud—as if he could never be anything else, as if he is exactly as he should be.

The Kid tilts his head a bit, and Lúcio wonders, what does he see? Does he think I look ready, too?

A small line cuts through the foggy glass, a sharp trail of reality. The Kid runs his finger over the surface, creating a small curve, revealing his face only in that tiny breach. It’s like he’s carving a mask.

The curve closes and turns upward. His finger slides slowly but intentionally.

He’s making a circle.

Lúcio waits for him to finish with impatience. Afterward, though, the Kid just moves on, his hand going to another side of the tank and drawing a triangle. He traces lines to meet in the inside of the shape, like several fingers stretching out at once.

“Is that what you always do?” Lúcio says, thinking of the corners of the aquarium he doesn’t like to visit, the spots he avoids because of the lingering sense of the Kid’s presence. How many shapes he must have made there, how many drawings no one has ever seen.

The Kid nods. He touches the surface next to the circle, the glass now an empty canvas. But he doesn’t move.

Lúcio takes a moment to understand what he’s waiting for.

“Oh,” Lúcio says, a bit hesitant. “Uh, I don’t know. A square?” The suggestion feels silly, but the Kid obeys, drawing a small square in quick gestures. The resulting sight gives Lúcio a strange sensation. Something inside him clinks.

The Kid makes a star right next to the square, then looks at him as if saying your turn.

Lúcio summons every shape he knows (oval, lozenge, rectangle) but none of them feel right. He takes his time. The Kid doesn’t seem to mind, standing there with a quiet, gentle expectation.

The spiral Olga showed him blooms in his mind, the line curling on itself in her notebook. The image weighs heavy with affection. Suddenly, Lúcio wishes the Kid could see it.

“Can you do something like this?” he says. He’s unable to sum up the image in one word—he wants to cling to certain parts, to the soft angle in the first curve, to the smaller space between the second and the third, to the line as Olga made it. So he swims, right and down and very slowly, and the Kid follows him, his finger now Lúcio’s to guide. The growing spiral gives him an itch, an urge to do it once more, two, three times. “That’s. That’s it,” he says. The complete drawing, the result of his movements, fills him with a sad pride. The spiral doesn’t look like Olga’s, not really—the first curve is too open, the point where the second and third meet too wide—but it’s there. It’s only there because of him.

Lúcio feels big.

The Kid draws a wheel next. Afterward, Lúcio guides him to an oval, a different attempt at the same spiral, a sharp triangle reminiscent of the Guide’s teeth. For some drawings he thinks a lot, for others not so much. Whenever it’s the Kid’s turn, Lúcio tries to recognise whatever shape is forming. He doesn’t always manage but when he does it’s like finding out what he’s thinking, like some kind of touch.

The Lifemaker sews the two removed fingers onto the Kid’s hand. The Kid kneels next to his chair, arm pulled across his lap.

“Try moving them,” the Lifemaker says. The Kid tries to curl his fingers, but the new ones don’t obey. “You’ll get used to it.” The Lifemaker pushes the Kid’s new fingers into the same position as the other four. Was that how he made Lúcio, too? Lúcio’s first memory is opening his eyes in the tank, but how many attempts had failed before?

That night, after the Lifemaker leaves, the Kid draws on Lúcio’s aquarium with his four original fingers, the new ones twitching at times and messing up the lines he’s trying to make. They stick to simple figures, then. The Kid draws a wobbly star around Lúcio, and it feels like a gift.

The Lifemaker returns in the morning. He examines the Kid’s fingers, pleased by how well they’re healing. He holds them down, his hand covering the Kid’s smaller fist as he whispers, “Good. Looks good.”

He turns to his schematics. The Kid takes his hand under his chin, rubs the spot he touched.

“I scribbled something in bed yesterday,” the Lifemaker says, seemingly to no one, going through pages. He searches his pockets, then slaps his forehead, leaving to get the draft in his bedroom.

His papers lie scattered on the table. When the Lifemaker closes the door behind him, the Kid leans closer. Lúcio swims to the pipe right above. They look at numerous previous versions of the Kid, some of which Lúcio remembers, others he has never seen.

The Kid pulls a specific paper from the bottom of the pile. It’s a picture of a small boy, fully human. The Kid’s chest heaves until Lúcio realizes he’s making some kind of joke. He fakes a laugh, but the view of the very first idea for the Kid disturbs him. He imagines the versions of himself that might still lie in a drawer next to the Lifemaker’s desk, midnight ghosts who never met the morning. If Lúcio saw them, he might not even know they were ever meant to be him. But the Kid recognises himself, pointing to the head and the shoulders and the shorter neck and the longer legs, marking every difference.

Lúcio wants to ask if it hurt, those first moments, when he opened his eyes to the world. But he knows better. It never hurts to be made. It’s the undoing that hurts, the reshaping, the becoming endless versions of yourself.

The Lifemaker comes back, new schematic in hand. With a pen, he makes markings on the Kid’s head. The lab’s light flickers, the old lightbulb finally going off, but the Lifemaker goes on. He extends a measuring tape around the Kid’s face, tightening it under his eyes. The bright dot hanging from the Kid’s forehead is the only thing illuminating the room. As the Lifemaker leans forward, the light catches certain angles of his face, casts shadows in others. As if the Kid could be shaping him, too; as if he is becoming something else.

When he makes progress on the Kid, the Lifemaker’s humor improves. He whistles as he walks through the mansion. He invites Olga for dinner, drinks with her in the dining room saying he’s figured it out, this is it, the Whale won’t know what to say. He looks happier than Lúcio has seen in a while.

Their drawings grow more elaborate: They make the Guide together, and when the Kid’s finger closes the gap at the end of the tail, Lúcio feels accomplished. It doesn’t come close to the Guide’s majesty, but it’s her shape, just filtered by his movements. Not her, but a version of her a little bit his.

“There you are,” Olga’s voice comes from the doorway. She walks in as the Kid is drawing his idea—a large round shape Lúcio thinks might morph into the Lifemaker—and leans in to watch. “Oh, what is that?”

The Kid ignores her, his finger in the middle of a downward curve. Olga notices the other drawing.

“Did you make that?” Her tone is hard to read. Lúcio feels strangely exposed. “Is that the Guide?”

“Yeah,” Lúcio says. Then, emboldened, he lets out: “I drew it.” The words sound needy. He waits as Olga looks at his drawing. He feels uncomfortable seeing someone looking at what he made. He wonders if the image is ugly in her eyes, or silly. Suddenly it’s as though whatever Olga thinks of the drawing will change it forever, the reflection in her pupils reshaping every line. While drawing, he hadn’t considered anyone else’s gaze, but now the threat of her opinion holds him like a soft, large hand, ready to hold him up or drop him on the ground.

“It looks good!” she says.

Her smile is how Lúcio imagines a caress must feel. He wants to make a thousand more drawings. He wants to show them all, to everyone. He has just eaten the heartiest meal of his life.

The Kid finishes his piece as Olga leaves. It’s not the Lifemaker, but the Whale, large and powerful, a blend of concave angles and semicircles. Lúcio exclaims in appreciation. The Kid stomps his feet. With the Whale and the Guide between them, they could both be outside, flying.

They draw for the rest of the night, until the Kid grows too tired. After he goes to bed, Lúcio wanders the pipes all over the mansion. Since he and the Kid started drawing, the aquarium feels smaller than ever.

Olga and the Lifemaker sit at his desk, both working in the dark, under candlelight. Olga draws, her lips pressed together, humming softly as her pen traces her next sculpture. The Lifemaker hunches forward as if the materials are wild animals prone to run away from him at any moment. His forehead is bright against the light, and his expression is loose, filled with a feeling Lúcio now identifies as relief.

Seeing them together makes Lúcio wonder about the time they spent estranged, when the Lifemaker made him. Olga had told him she could barely recall the reason they fought in the first place. She said human siblings fought, that it was in their nature—hadn’t been the first time for them, and “certainly won’t be the last.” Lúcio wondered who the Lifemaker would create, then, next time she wasn’t talking to him. He wondered about having a companion so certain even inevitable separation could feel temporary. Was that how the fish in the shoal felt, swimming ahead of the Guide? Knowing that even if they lost their way, they could always find it back, and wouldn’t ever have to be alone?

Olga stops drawing for a moment, rests her pen. Her eyes wander her brother’s face. “Seems like it’s going well,” she says.

The Lifemaker glows. Lúcio thinks back on Olga’s smile, earlier, after seeing his drawing. He and the Lifemaker have eaten from the same table. “Thank you,” the Lifemaker says.

“I can’t believe he’s leaving,” Olga says. The Lifemaker’s fingers sink in the clay. “You know he and Lúcio have gotten close. Saw the two of them playing today.”

The word playing pokes Lúcio’s chest.

The Lifemaker seems a bit intrigued by this, but not enough to look away from his work. Olga’s face shows sadness. “Lúcio drew the Guide,” she says. “He thinks about her. I think he’d love to be out there, even if he won’t admit it. Poor thing.”

Shame floods Lúcio’s mouth. The drawing—the stupid drawing; the little play between him and a creature still only half-done—turns into a flashlight in his mind, a brand to burn his body with everything he never wanted to say. Why hadn’t he thought of that? The fog, the lines—under them he had turned transparent, his desires naked, every trace a hole through which one could peek into the most pathetic parts of him.

He swims away, wanting a hideout that doesn’t exist. No dark corners are dark enough. He remembers the Kid’s drawing—the Whale. How long had he longed for her, observed her, to commit those traces to memory? And there it is, ugly and loud, the pity that tainted Olga’s words. Lúcio is not immune, no—he too can look through the lines on the glass and divine what moves the hands drawing them, see what wants fill the Kid’s mute, anglerfish head, flinch at their shapes.

The entire next day Olga is at the mansion, Lúcio hides. He avoids the Lifemaker after she leaves, too. Only when the Kid is called back to the lab does Lúcio gather the courage to swim inside.

The Lifemaker is still giddy. The finished mold sits in his hands, a human face merged with an anglerfish’s: an antenna growing between eyebrows, sharp teeth in a much smaller mouth. He places it over the Kid’s current face. The clay makes a stranger out of him.

“What do you think, Lúcio?”

There is only one answer in his mind, and he wants Lúcio to give it anyway.

But Lúcio is still thinking of the drawing, the hunger he naively bared on the walls between him and everything he dreams of. Shame curled up inside him all night, and now it’s waking up, stretching into pettiness.

“It looks odd,” he says. “It doesn’t fit well.”

The Lifemaker stills. “You … you think so?”

“It’s like a weaker version of Cantala,” Lúcio says. Not necessarily a lie—he can spot Cantala in the corners of the mold’s eyes. Maybe he could spot other creations, too, if he tried. Fingerprints.

The Lifemaker looks weak himself. He turns to the mold as if he hadn’t seen it before. “I … I suppose you’re right.” His voice sounds small. Maybe smaller than Lúcio.

He removes the mold and leaves the lab. The Kid stands there, half-done, waiting. Lúcio avoids his eyes.

Later that night, the Lifemaker breaks the mold. He smashes the clay on the ground, the pieces all around him, like he has broken several things at once.

“Thank you for being honest, Lúcio,” the Lifemaker says, breathing heavily. “The Whale would know. It’s just me trying to compensate for Cantala.” He rolls a strand of hair several times around one finger and pulls. “You’re a smart one, my friend. I remember when I made you—I wanted you to be smart.”

Lúcio swims low, closer. He’s never heard this before. “Why?”

“For conversation, of course,” the Lifemaker says with a flippant gesture.

Lúcio imagines the Lifemaker then, when Olga wasn’t talking to him, sitting in his lab alone every night. The dark hallways, no sound other than his scribbling, the occasional noise from the Kid, his carving of materials. What else could he have imagined, then? In that empty house where he could make anything? He screamed in the pit inside his mind, and his longing echoed throughout, and he dug through clay and want and at the bottom he found Lúcio. At the bottom, his hands held his pain and bent it into something else.

“When the Whale comes by to get him,” the Lifemaker says, “I’ll be ruined. She will find me so pathetic.”

The drawing of the Guide is vanishing somewhere on a glass wall, sinking into Lúcio’s mind where no one else can see. Lúcio is a bit relieved. No one needs to know how much he thought of her.

He ruminates on that relief, swimming closer to the edge of the aquarium, as close as he can get. How many unborn failures lie inside the Lifemaker’s head? How many showed something he hadn’t foreseen, something he wanted buried? How many of them could hide the fingerprints on their skin, the marks that would bind them to Lúcio, to Cantala, to the Kid—and, always, to the Lifemaker? The longing Olga read in Lúcio’s drawing, whatever the Lifemaker thinks the Whale will see on the Kid—fingerprints on glass and clay, betraying the fears and longings of those who left them. Lúcio thinks he finally understands why the Lifemaker hurt the Whale. He remembers his shame when Olga saw through his drawing. Could anyone do as the Lifemaker wanted—create without revealing? Maybe giving shape to your pain always means letting others drag their tongues over it.

Lúcio wishes he could touch the Lifemaker, now. All the hurt he gave life to, while trying to stay hidden. Lúcio wishes he could sink his head next to his creator’s and tell him he understands.

Instead, he presses his face to the glass. “Let me go with him,” Lúcio says. “I want to go with him.” He wonders if the Lifemaker has ever heard him say anything other than the echoes of his own pain. Keeping him in the darkest corners of his home, in the hopes no one else would hear: I am the shape of his loneliness. I am a wound he brought into being. Lúcio’s face hurts against the aquarium’s wall. There’s so much else he could tell people. So much else he wants to be. “Let me go.”

The Lifemaker stands up, and Lúcio repeats his mantra, over and over. He will say it until it carves a way out.

For a week Lúcio follows the Lifemaker all over the house: keeps him from sleeping, interrupts his work, ruins his meals. Contrary to his expectations, the Lifemaker doesn’t get angry. Instead, he focuses on menial work on the Kid: fixing his clothes, giving him shoes.

The only breaks Lúcio takes are to draw. He draws the Guide, draws things part her, part tunnels. The Kid gives his own take on her image, makes her huge with small versions of her face all over her body. They draw the shoal. Soon what Lúcio wants most in the world is to cover every reachable glass wall, breathe on every corner of the Lifemaker’s house. Lúcio pushes through the embarrassment of his desire, lets it all be loud.

Olga stays with them, her smile hard to decipher. Lúcio wonders what her fingerprints look like, where they lead: For so long he never thought to look for them, living inside of anything she made.

The Lifemaker comes in at one of those moments. He glances at the drawings. Then his gaze sinks onto the Kid. What does the Lifemaker see in him? From which hole in his soul did he crawl? Maybe Lúcio will never know. Maybe no one will, or everyone. It’s an answer that can’t be found until someone else’s eyes find him and form the question. Everything needs to exist, first.

The Lifemaker looks at Lúcio. Lúcio wishes he could ease his fear; wishes he could promise that whatever part of him his body carries, he hopes to carry gently.

He knows he can’t promise that.

“Let me go,” he says instead. “I want to go.”

The Lifemaker nods. He reaches forward and splays his fingers over the glass, then pulls back, surrounded by fog. Through the handprint, Lúcio sees his face so clearly.

The Whale arrives on time, her body twisting in a mass of darkness blacker than the sky. The Kid leaves, and Lúcio goes with him. The Lifemaker opens up the lid of the aquarium with shaky hands. Lúcio swims outside, into the night sky, and brushes his face as he passes, a last touch on his birthplace.

They see the Whale docked at the entrance, her huge eyes turned toward them. Her tongue is eager but gentle. Lúcio, who has only ever been touched by the Lifemaker, trembles as the wet warm tissue covers him, hides the sky. For a moment the world turns pink and grey. Whatever she tells the Lifemaker, they can’t hear.

After tasting them, she opens her mouth wide. Her massive tongue extends for the Kid to step onto. Lúcio flies by his side as he stumbles forward, though he won’t follow him in. The Kid finds his grounding quickly. He turns to Lúcio and jumps, feet sinking into soft tissue and bouncing upward as his chest heaves in his now familiar laugh.

Take your time, the Whale says, though her mouth doesn’t move. Her voice is softer now. The tunnel of her throat is dark red marked by the hanging shape of her uvula. The walls are curved inward, tightening into the distance. Her warmth pulses, inviting, and her insides could lead one anywhere, the path to all paths.

The Kid’s silhouette is stark against the red tunnel. The light on his esca colors the whale’s gums pink.

“Goodbye,” Lúcio says.

The finger on the Kid’s shoulder wriggles. He turns his back to Lúcio as he walks inside. His esca carves his small shadow in the Whale’s tongue. In that light, with the entire universe ahead of him, he is shaped by other worlds, and he could be anything he wants, even beautiful.

Lúcio doesn’t wait until he vanishes. He swims upward, above the Whale. He watches her body glide beneath him, and in her blue vastness is surprised to find an ending, the curved tips of her tail trailing behind. He looks over at the mansion: the dark smooth walls, the single tower standing upright, the jagged rocky underside bearing it all.

He thinks: It’s small.

Then he thinks: no. But he can go farther.

He swims ahead as he sees the first colors of the other fish glimmering in the distance. Two yellow giant carps reach him first, swimming together as if they were one. As Lúcio approaches, they open a way for him, a gate to the mass of silver sardines bouncing light like moving stars. Their small bodies brush Lúcio in flickers of touch, making him giggle in both fright and surprise.

Swimming to the side, he is flanked by the massive moonfish. Lúcio stays close to him for a moment, delighted to notice the lack of teeth in his gaping mouth, big enough to swallow a comet. Blue ribbon eels swim above with a swishing noise. Lúcio follows them for a bit, swimming between their curves, up and down the loops of their moving tails, as if he’s sewing something. Way ahead, the Whale lets out a comforting hum that thrums through the sky all the way to his body, her voice its own kind of current. Lúcio looks down. A mass of grey skin streaked with bright white startles him. He has to swim a bit upward to watch the endless sleek texture thin out in lines blooming in the triangular shapes of a manta ray’s wings. She is almost as big as the Whale. Lúcio has never seen her, swimming so far below the view afforded by his tiny window.

So much more, he thinks, looking every which way. So much more.

Later, when he passes by another mansion, or a house, or a ship, he will catch a glimpse of the people inside, and he will think of Olga and the Lifemaker, will hear them talking in the kitchen, ideas for lives and homes bouncing between them. He will think of the fish around him as drawings, lopsided lines showing up on a new canvas. He will wonder about the texture of ink. And when he swims beyond the shoal’s rear, exploring and later turning back to follow the great light ahead, he will think of the Kid, the small brightness he carries. The windows he will make.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Aigner Loren Wilson

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors