Now, instead, she counted.

  Two arms, two hands, ten fingers touching metal, speeding, slipping in the dark—no. Two arms, two hands, ten fingers touching concrete, the fingers on the right hand colder, slimier than the rest. Fifteen breaths in, fifteen breaths out in between—

  “That is so unsanitary.”

  The voice wasn’t a number and, in that moment, it was not welcome.

  Milagros tracked from cuffed boots up dark jeans and a long, tan coat that covered most of the guy standing in front of her. And his face. She stared transfixed by the white patch in his hair and how it seemed to blend into his forehead, and his left eye, which was half brown and half blue, like someone had dipped a paintbrush in water.

  Her mind paused on something about him.

  “I mean your hands, of course,” he said, eyes narrowed. “Can you stop staring?”

  Milagros startled, her gaze falling to the floor and then up again, to his right, fully brown eye. Back to the floor.

  Two hands, ten fingers.

  “I’m sorry.”

  The guy crouched down, hands on his thighs, presumably for balance and not just to remind Milagros that hers were still on the floor. Hands on thighs, hands tapping out a rhythm.

  “You were in the train,” Milagros thought out loud, shame sneaking into her voice.

  He had seen her lose it.

  “I’ll forgive you because you’re clearly freaking out, but please stop touching the floor. Just—here, sanitize.” He held out a bottle of Purell and squeezed far too much onto Milagros’s open hand.

  She tried to rub the mysterious floor slime away.

  “Thank you.”

  “Better?”

  No. Maybe.

  “I’m okay,” she answered.

  He tilted his head to the left, so her gaze went back to that two-toned eye.

  “You seemed pretty scared in there.” He nodded toward the now-empty tracks. “Had you never seen her before?”

  The question was an electric current all the way from her sanitized fingers to the base of her skull.

  “Qué?”

  His eyes widened. “Uh, parlez-vous français?”

  She blinked, surprise quickly becoming frustration.

  “What?” she snapped, this time in the correct language.

  “What?” He said it so loudly it echoed. He turned his head enough for Milagros to see the plastic device fitted behind his ear. He tapped it once and leveled her with an amused gaze. “You’ll need to speak louder.”

  Milagros wasn’t sure if embarrassment or annoyance was winning out. She took a deep breath. “What did you say before—had I never seen what?”

  “The dragon. In the train. I thought that’s why you’d screamed, unless I was wrong? Would honestly not be the first time. You’d be surprised—or maybe not—with how many people scream for no reason on the train. Especially tourists.”

  The pause in the conversation when he stopped talking was almost as loud as his shouting earlier.

  Milagros scrambled back up, except that standing didn’t really make a difference.

  The dragon. In the train.

  The guy looked up from his crouch, a crease between his mismatched eyes. “Did you not see it? Dude, not again—”

  “I saw it.” The words were quiet, but to Milagros they felt like three distinct gunshots. She repeated, louder, for his benefit: “I. Saw. It.”

  “Her,” he corrected, smiling. “Okay. Good. This would have been so awkward otherwise.”

  “Have you?” The wrong words sputtered out of her. “I mean, of course you have. Otherwise why would you have said—you called it a dragon?”

  He stood up like his body was made not of muscles and bones, but of something more fluid, like wishes and secrets.

  “I called her a dragon,” he repeated. “I know it’s hard sometimes to see her fully—most people think she’s like a serpent. If you’ve seen her before, why were you so scared?”

  People. He knew other people who could see. Here. In Brooklyn. Milagros’s mind raced with a thousand questions she needed to ask all at once, so many she couldn’t get any of them out.

  But something about what he’d said, about the way he’d said it, snagged her suspicions and ripped.

  “Who wouldn’t be scared?” She said it as a question, but did not allow an answer. “It was trying to take me again.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “Again?”

  Milagros took a step back, suddenly feeling like she had exposed too much, too fast, too soon. The memory of Cecilia’s and Gabriel’s faces in the train moments ago, watching her in fear, still burned behind her eyelids. And they knew her. They might not have been able to see the monster, but they could have at least believed her.

  Her mamá would have, if Milagros had dared to call, to worry her, but she hadn’t. She wouldn’t.

  She meant to leave the station, but the allure of finding someone here who could see what she saw, who might understand, kept her in place.

  Milagros didn’t—couldn’t—say anything, but knew the moment it clicked for him.

  “You’re that girl? The one they found on the top of the train last year? No way.” He stared much like she had been before, fascination stark across his face. “Are you?”

  It struck her then, his surprise, his admiration.

  It struck her, his lack of disbelief.

  Milagros was glad that he barreled through without waiting for her reply.

  “Wow. Wow. The girl on top of the train. You know, my aunt swore up and down that it’d been the dragon when the news broke. Up and down. She’s never gonna let anyone hear the end of it after this. Was it incredible?”

  His words were sparklers set afire, but to Milagros they felt like scorching iron, searing and branding something deep in her gut.

  She exploded.

  “Incredible? To blink and be on top of a moving train? To feel yourself slipping off?” She was shaking for the second time today, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care. “You think it was incredible when I made my fingers raw trying to hold on? Or when I fell off the back of the train? Yes, what an honor! The best part was th—” She stopped, choking on her own rage. She couldn’t say it.

  A year and she still could not say it.

  For the first time in this uneven conversation, he was the one looking stricken. Milagros almost hit him, but she balled up her hands and reined it in. She’d gotten really good at reining in her entire self this past year.

  “I’m sorry—”

  She did not let him finish. “Are you?”

  He seemed to weigh her question and find it wanting. “The dragon is very important to us. We consider her favor to be a blessing.”

  Milagros had not felt blessed a year ago; she did not feel blessed now. She felt like someone had taken her familiar places and made them into jagged edges and dark corners. She felt robbed. Lonely.

  “I don’t want any blessings,” she spat.

  He shifted slightly. He’d clearly expected Milagros to be delighted about what he had to say, and instead found something else, something he did not like.

  “I followed you out because I assumed you needed help adjusting after seeing the dragon. I didn’t realize you had already adjusted and decided to be wrong about it.”

  For a moment, she couldn’t even formulate words to match her disdain for his opinion and general existence. “What do you even know?”

  He scoffed. “No, of course. You’re the only person in the whole world to ever be afraid of something you don’t understand. What was I thinking? Maman avait raison, je dois cesser d’essayer.”

  Milagros did not know what that meant, but she did not like it.

  He shook his head, whatever else he might have said swallowed by the noise of an incoming train. No tingling awareness came with it and for that, at least, Milagros was grateful.

  “You can’t be afraid forever, you know,” the guy said, putting something in her hand before getting on the train.

  She didn’t know why she’d accepted it or why, after the train had left, she slipped the small card in her pocket instead of throwing it away.

  Tía Yocelin had waited a week and two days before calling Milagros to the kitchen, marroncito in hand, to discuss her “ataque de nervios” in the subway.

  Two barely-there wisps had been softly swinging from the branch of eucalyptus hanging by the stove behind her, and it had been easier to watch them instead of watching Tía Yocelin and her disappointment.

  The wisps stayed in the kitchen, but the disappointment clung to Milagros and stuck.

  Later, when Cecilia knocked on her bedroom door, Milagros did not answer. The soft whine of old hinges accompanied her cousin’s steps anyway, followed by her sigh.

  “Don’t be angry, Milagros.” The bed dipped under Cecilia’s weight, but Milagros held herself still so she wouldn’t roll into her cousin.

  “I’m not crazy,” Milagros said, for what felt like the hundredth time in the last few hours.

  Cecilia’s discomfort was almost a living thing in the silence. “Mom’s just worried, you know? We all are. Gabriel, too.”

  “You might have left the island too young, but your mom knows better.” The pressure built up right at the border of Milagros’s eyes, at the base of her throat. “She knows.”

  Cecilia sighed. Again. “It’s just Dr. Pedrano. You’ve talked to him before.”

  Milagros curled into herself, arms folded over her head, turning away so at least she wouldn’t have to see the genuine worry on her cousin’s face. That was the second-worst part: the concern. The first was that no one believed her.

  Almost no one.

  Milagros waited, holding back the tears and pain until Cecilia got tired of being understanding and left. Even after she was alone, it was hard to let out what she had been trying so hard to keep in. The tears rolled down the side of her face and onto the pillow, but the pain had nowhere to go.

  For a while, she counted.

  It wasn’t until she’d run out of things to count and the tears had dried on her cheeks that she pulled the crumpled and re-flattened card from under her pillow.

  She’d already stalked his Instagram account, first in anger, then out of curiosity, then with a sort of inexplicable giddiness. He had posted photo upon photo of every corner of New York: a fountain in Central Park, the lions from the New York Public Library, a bench from somewhere called Anne’s Garden, a street cat, an old couple sitting in front of a Shake Shack, a bodega on a corner in the Bronx.

  Everywhere. Anywhere.

  Milagros had scrolled a year back in his posts, careful not to like anything accidentally, when she realized what she was seeing. It was a blur sitting on the cat’s back, or a vagueness around the end of the bench. Just a small detail hidden in every photo.

  The strangeness, captured. A secret displayed for the world to never notice.

  But she’d noticed. He’d noticed.

  It had, on some level that worried her, soothed her.

  And so here she was, fingers poised over the phone, his number already typed in, about to regret her decisions.

  You’re photographing them

  His reply was almost immediate.

  What do you think?

  Have you always been able tosee them?

  Do you always talk to people without introducing yourself?

  YOU do.

  Touché.

  So?

  Milagros.

  So?

  Since I was a baby. My mom likes to say I saw a faery before I saw her face, but that honestly seems like a lie.

  You think they’re fairies?

  I don’t like your tone.

  You don’t know my tone.

  I don’t like your implied tone. I do think they’re faeries. Some people call them /others/, but that seems kinda shitty.

  We call them the strangeness.

  Did you know your dragonkilled a man?

  Tell me.

  I wasn’t the only person taken outside of the train half a year ago. There was a man, too.

  Milagros paused, started a new sentence only to delete it. She stared at the screen, waiting for him to say something so she could pretend she had nothing else to add.

  She couldn’t do it anymore. She typed.

  He tried to help me. I was scared and he was trying to calm me down. He had a family. Not with him on the train. Just in general.

  What happened to him?

  He was found dead on the tracks that same day.

  You think the dragon did it?

  I know.

  It wasn’t part of the news story. No one believed me when I told them. No one does.

  I do.

  Do you believe me that the monster in the subway is evil?

  Do you think she did it on purpose?

  Milagros didn’t respond.

  Milagros Honora Cordova García was not reckless, despite what her current situation might suggest.

  Maybe it was past midnight, and maybe she was sitting in a deserted Brooklyn train station. Maybe the wooden bench was uncomfortable and the walls smelled of things she would rather not identify. Maybe she would die.

  But it wouldn’t be because she hadn’t thought it through.

  Do you think she did it on purpose?

  She watched the tunnel stretching into the distance at both ends, the only illumination coming from the few lights mounted on the curving walls.

  To signal stairs and exits.

  To mark repair boxes.

  To make it easier to see.

  Milagros had heard every explanation from Tía Yocelin and “Doctor” Pedrano, both quoting Google like it was a Bible, and these the verses to prove that her mind was conjuring monsters from the ordinary.

  They couldn’t prove it. Because she wasn’t.

  A train burst from the tunnel with a vengeance, as if in warning. It stopped for no one to get out and no one to get in, then sped away.

  Twenty minutes until the next one.

  Milagros jumped down onto the tracks, water—or what she hoped was just water—splashing up her jeans, critters scratching and squeaking while they scurried away.

  Those first few steps into the tunnel were slow, caught between one painful hesitation and the next. Milagros hadn’t even reached the first light embedded in the wall when that far-off awareness tickled between her shoulder blades.

  For a moment, she froze.

  For a moment, the doubts drowned her. What was she doing, ankle-deep in who knew what, risking death by train to meet something that had already killed at least one man?

  Do you think she did it on purpose?

  Milagros took one more step, two.

  The heaviness of the monster suddenly filled up the space, electricity sparking along its edges like a herald that brought nothing.

  “¿Dónde estás?” The words burst out, raw with frustration and fear. “You’ve been calling me, haven’t you? I’m here. I’m here, where are you?”

  The echo of her own questions came back as the only answer, water dripping off the curving tunnel and onto her face. It didn’t matter. In the silence, it did not matter.

  Milagros opened her mouth and screamed.

  No words, just one long, awful screech of fury, tinted with the knowledge of how her life had been warped by one event, how much of her now hinged on this fear. And then—

  The eyes blinked open in front of her, the shape blurry through her unshed tears. Milagros was somehow two years younger again, a girl catching her first glimpse of something familiar in a new country.

  The monster’s body flickered behind the eyes, arching up then dipping down, some parts made of shimmering light and others solid and too real. Marc had called it—her—a dragon, and now Milagros saw what he meant.

  “¿Por qué yo?”

  She didn’t know what she expected in answer. The dragon had never spoken, not in words, nothing apart from awful, pain-filled sounds, but Milagros waited anyway, breath held in.

  Lower lids made of night slid slowly up then back down, the dragon rising at such an angle that Milagros could see dark teeth against the shifting brilliance of the head.

  “There was a man that day,” Milagros whispered. “There was a man. He grabbed me. He was trying to calm me down and he grabbed me, and then he was found dead.”

  The dragon’s eyes were impassive, her body softly curling down the length of the tunnel.

  Seconds and minutes and hours and days of guilt clasped like a collar around Milagros’s throat, almost choking her, but she forced out the words: “Did we kill him?”

  The dragon moved past Milagros and curved back around, a warm ribbon loosely wrapping around a small girl, settling on shoulders that needed comfort.

  Milagros stepped into that warmth, but it was not enough.

  “I need to know.”

  The dragon leaned her horned head against Milagros, like a feather on hair. She talked, not in words but in memories trickling out of her ancient core like new rain.

  Milagros felt the sprouting of new feelings: Contentment twined with indifference. The idea of a face, someone reaching out, an almost-forgotten home. Tiredness stretching out to become everything, sleepless years in the darkness. Stark surprise, the shock of the known in an unknown place.

  Then, quickly: delight, hands, noise, so much noise, fast, excitement, searching, searching, finding, pulling, chaos and fear and regret.

  A loss.

  Sadness. A deep, unmistakable loneliness.

  The dragon’s touch had been barely a touch at all, but when it pulled away Milagros doubled over with the sudden loss.

  It took a long while for thoughts to come back, even longer for the words to match them.

  The hurricane of her mind settled itself around the ruins of what she used to believe.