I.
I found the papers on a rare morning the Cyclops let me sleep in. I had been roaming his bedroom, exploring the half bath with its wall-sized mirror. The sink was littered with silicone eyeballs. They glowed like translucent billiard balls rolling across the marble top, an iris in place of a number. I had only spotted the balls from the far bed, as the Cyclops plucked out an eye each night, then pushed another back in each morning.

I never told Siren that he made love blind. That, for all his gusto, I stayed up wincing and pacing the blacked-out room.

The papers lay atop a silver filing cabinet in the bathroom’s walk-in closet. I could never afford such a closet if I worked a hundred cleaning crews for a hundred lives. Silk shirts were folded on hangers, polished dark shoes were lined beneath them, and the cabinet shone in the corner. On the top page, S-I-R-E-N was stamped in red letters.

My friend had disappeared by then, a loss the Cyclops stonily distanced himself from. I wondered if my grief had flattened the sizzle between us. I knelt rapt in the closet, flipping through those pages, and saw this was truer than I’d known.

*     *     *
Siren was always talking shit about getting back to her islands. I never mentioned what the Oracles said: the seas would swallow everything once the last ice melted. I was only a Saltwater human—a distinction Siren knew even if she had approached me first.

“Hey sis,” she’d called from a shoreline rock. I dragged myself out the water.

The dawn sky was rosing behind Siren, who glowed cross-legged before me. I plucked strands of seaweed from my arms, my flesh leg, my mechanical leg.

“Does that thing swim?” She pointed to my steel joint, which tapered to a retractable fin.

“Do you think I’d be alive if it didn’t?” Rummaging underwater left me cross, why I had few friends in Seca.

She assessed me with her citrine eyes. “Catch anything good for breakfast?” She gazed past the e-scooter lot to the row of Bite cafés. “I can treat.”

I peeled off the kelp-suit and toweled myself down. I assessed her too—Sirens were sexually fluid—her enviable hourglass, her tie-dyed sundress, her lava-like hair. But she didn’t flinch, just cocked her head as if I were the trap.

“I’m not hybrid, you know,” I said.

“Oh I know what you’re not,” she laughed. “I’m curious about what you are.”

Identity lines in Seca led to cold shoulders rather than invites. So I zipped up my beach bag and my yellow shift. “I insist on paying my half.”

She laughed again.

*     *     *
When I first caught the Cyclops’ eye, Siren and I were ogling human surfers. They somersaulted like extinct dolphins over the waves. But the Cyclops studied me rather than the beach bums who must’ve been his friends, given how water money congregated at the most pristine shores. I didn’t smile back. I’d grown used to ignoring the roving eyes, mostly from divorcés in convertibles.

Seca was a calculating place.

Only when the Cyclops paced before me, then zeroed in did I break gaze with the surfers lounging at the tiki bar.

“You look natural here,” he said. I assumed he was sick, what with his baby skin and single eye under that hairless brow.

“Actually, I was raised in Seca. You don’t look natural at all.”

His blue eye narrowed, intrigued, and swept over my chest. “I moved from the Wetlands. Have you heard of No Salt Inc.? I manage projects for them.”

We chatted till the beach cleared, which is how we knew, bodies squared, he’d hooked me. The following days with the Cyclops were a whirl of waterfront restaurants and yacht clubs and beach cottages I’d never cleaned. Posh denizens like him—newcomers from The South—hired more expensive services. I wore my steamed dresses and drawled my sentences and not one of those yuppies was brazen enough to ask where the Cyclops had found his “cute human.”

Siren laughed at his image when I first hologrammed it up for her. “Are you serious or are you blind?”

“He treats me well.”

“Look at him, Zweety. He has no choice.”

She was floating between parties herself. I had just joined her for a wedding between a Saltwater and a Drylander—the woman a mermaid, the hermaphrodite a hybrid—and realized I’d glimpsed this unlikely pair at a rally for Drowned Islands. I wasn’t a rally kid, so how could I know they were another coupling “between the streets and the sheets”? Siren related this with a wink over her plate of soy oysters, and mouthed try it.

The couple sat behind a driftwood table at one end of the candlelit barn. Comrade after comrade toasted to “life, water, and community,” but the couple cried fuck the rich! Everyone cheered and chanted, the paper bouquets trembling. I raised my glass too and downed my tequila in one gulp. But the Cyclops flashed before my eyes—his velvet bed, his gloomy house, his backyard that overlooked the Reservoir. I wasn’t ready to give up on the rich just yet.


Gate 1
Seca stays green by siphoning its water from the North, its workers from the East.

I’ve never seen the dust fields encircling us, the Guards at every fence. Only the eastern Dumps go unpoliced, despite thousands of squatters. Half the migrants sway in place, high on waste fumes, and half totter about, scouring for crumbs. Police patrol the westside ocean, though few venture there, the waters even fouler.

I swim daily, figuring I’ll be dead in a decade anyway. I love diving in those aubergine waters, to pebbled floors where slivers of fish and metal waft. I love breaststroking under the chainlink which splits Long Shore, to where tent cities rise like bread.

Most dwellers are middle-aged women with grandchildren wailing at their legs. The men are really teens or over sixty-five, and sit apart silently. They stream in from Jungles and Steppes that dessicate into tinder then spontaneously burn. Older migrations—from Sweetwater, as had been my parents’ case—trickled out decades ago.


II.
My father told me stories of Sweetwater that seemed like fairy tales. He held my hand on Long Shore walks and described a hundred fishes in the East-end estuary where we were born.

“I caught them standing waist-high in the river.”

His own father held doors open as they walked through one fish market after another, as if entering magical palaces. The fish were glistening pods lined on snow mounds, behind which mongers streamed back-and-forth. Scaling, hosing, slicing.

“Hundreds would appear after the floods. We had too much rain in Sweetwater.”

Too-much-rain became my child mind’s way of visualizing an unknowable past.

I joined the Gate Cleaners after my parents vanished too. Though I’d had no Gates experience when Agatha interviewed me, I’d swept and mopped plenty of houses by then for black market cash.

“I started where you are, Magdalena,” Agatha said. “Can I call you that? I worked my way up to running this agency.”

I wanted to ask if that made her feel like less of a minion. “I’m grateful for the opportunity. My parents came with nothing. They’re gone now.”

She swiveled away from the three screens on which she monitored the Gates. “You got a boyfriend or girlfriend? Any relatives or kids?” Her shock of wrinkles revealed her as human, unlike Immortals with their marble features or hybrids with their cherub cheeks.

“I got nowhere to go,” I said. “I’m a safe bet.”

She swiveled back to her screens. “That’s what they all say. Log into the e-manual on your own time. Ask the other girls where they rent their equipment.”

That was the first and last time I’d meet Agatha, who vanished as well.

*     *     *
Siren didn’t need to work and didn’t know how. Immortals had lived in spheres without money. Though Seca required coin or cash, it granted Immortals privileges. Shelter, e-mobiles, water reserves—humans and hybrids had to hustle for these. Maybe magic was a kind of money.

Siren, for instance, could make fire. She would stand before you and boom! All ten digits were matchsticks, tiny flames flickering as she gesticulated and kept talking. If your car sputtered on the road, as it did when we visited the ruins of Yosemite, she’d open your car hood and press her palms to the carburetor. Boom! The car coughed and growled again.

Countless times, Siren tended bonfires during our desert parties. For all her razzle-dazzle—she wandered bare-breasted on sequined legs—she never spun on Ayahuasca with the human hippies. She never sang with drunk hybrids who spun their own entertaining shows. She waited till we’d passed out by the fires, then crooned shanties in the most mellifluous voice. The men woke stunned, their girls glowering next to them.

Siren fed fires all through the night, often till dawn. She’d dip her hand in, grimacing as the flesh burned, whispering till the flames roared up again.

That’s why I can’t forgive any of them. Not humans nor hybrids nor Immortals, like the Cyclops. They’d pimped her out for fun, as the Cyclops did with me. No one bothered to report her missing—till I noticed my friend no longer flirted with beach bums or waited around to talk shit with me.

*     *     *
The Cyclops steered me around his parties as if I were a delightful new toy. I felt in fact like a prize doll, the way he directed me to wear the crushed silk gown he’d purchased, to apply scarlet lipstick and don bejeweled rings. Being a beautiful object was far better than scrubbing one.

After those parties, he drove us right back to his cavernous house. There was no question of staying at the rinky-dink studio I shared with two human maids. Those nights felt like secrets, the Cyclops pumping me with fantasies of comfort, which I’d lost with my parents. He’d roll over breathless while I clutched my belly, filled with his dreams.

What catapulted me out of his palm-rimmed house were small explosions: bottles flung and shattering in the night.

First it was Siren’s disappearance. One day she was driving us about Seca, her lava-like hair ribboning in the wind. The next day, she wouldn’t respond to her e-visor. Her loft had been ransacked of her vinyls, her journals, her art.

“Put on your public face,” the Cyclops would say. “Why the hell do you look so sad?”

“My friends are missing,” I’d say. “Am I supposed to pretend everything’s ok?”

Then there were weekly arrests at the growing skirmishes around water and jobs. One group might protest the monetization of flights between Eco-Nations; another group the militarization of pre-War borders. No one could tell me the ends or means for the protests, which grew more raucous, bore more casualties. We only knew, as curfews fell back and more acquaintances were locked up, that we’d grown panicky. Would we be next? Was anyone counting?

“Be grateful you’re in here and not out there,” the Cyclops would say.

“Being grateful doesn’t mean turning a blind eye,” I’d say.

Then there was my own tornado, which I could never name to the Cyclops. He liked his internal life to be as beige as his external one. I should’ve known, mornings I roamed the rooms, running my palms roughshod over dark walls and metallic things, that he was as brutal inside as his house was. Only when I caught my reflection in an onyx countertop did I think, sirens can also be silent.


Gate 2
The Main Gates are really a maze of waiting halls. After every turnstile, you hit an inspection. You wait for a day in one hall till you get the go-ahead to march to the next turnstile, the next hall. It takes at least a month to pass through the maze. So you pack as if for a trek: water, food, and clothes, if you have any.

Few babies make it in, fewer of the disabled and elderly make it out. The Underground has protested the Main Gates as eugenicist, forever. Their placards rot in museums and government buildings. Water for the poor! We are ALL migrants!

When I sweep trash and feces clumped in hall corners, I wonder if my parents entered and exited politely. Escape is haphazard: some people paddle across the sea or risk the Mountains, others jump the turnstiles after midnight, leaving bread and water for those huddled in the halls. Do my parents wait at the cusp of another world? Will I too always be waiting at gates?


III.
“Why do you keep choosing that monster over us?” Siren asked.

Long Shore was darkening fast with sunset, so kelp divers were dragging back their haul. From her wild eyes and tangled hair, I could tell Siren had been partying again. Yet her form glittered more than mine ever would on my most rested days.

“Are you jealous of him?” I asked. “Can’t you let me have this one luxury in my life?”

Siren cackled and fell backwards onto the sand, waving her arms and legs so that she carved an angel. “Come on Zweety! Where I come from, he’s a dime-a-dozen. You’re the one who needs him! You need me to feel good about yourself!”

I grabbed a handful of shells at my feet and hurled them at Siren. “You bitch! If your magic is so special, why didn’t you save your own people instead of running away here?”

She jumped up and grabbed my hair. We tussled in the sand, clawing at each other’s arms, punching each other’s gut. The kelp divers glanced at us but plodded on. They probably assumed we were Dump-dwellers fighting over water reserves.

After several minutes, the beach went dark, and we lay sodden and gasping in the sand. “I don’t think I’m special,” Siren said. “You are, Zweety. But you can’t fucking see that with your self-pity. It blinds you to everything.”

I pushed myself up on an elbow to glare at her. But she was slithering away. Her legs had gelled into a sequined fin and her neck gills had feathered up. As she did when she regretted flashing any secret corner of herself, Siren slipped into the sea.

*     *     *
I was nicknamed Zweety as soon as I crossed into Seca, though I felt salty through and through. One afternoon, when the schoolkids had pummeled me again, my father pulled me into his den. He washed my cuts with stinging iodine, then sat back and stared at me.

I sobbed. “Aren’t you gonna say or do anything? They want me dead!”

“When in Rome,” my father muttered.

“What the hell is Rome? We’re in the fucking desert! Why did you even bring us here?”

He held me to his chest until my crying trailed off. “It’s not your fault. The old stories were taught before the schools were closed. Artemesia was a girl when she was abandoned by the Greeks. She became loyal to the Persians who raised her. So when she became a great warrior, she sided against her own people.”

I pulled away from my father. He slumped in his chair, gaunt from his six-day week at the Desalination Factory. I never heard him or my mother speaking Amsterdam English anymore, their choppy, high-pitched language of love.

“How can I be friends with my bullies?”

“Magdalena,” he said. “You’ll all grow up to become someone else. If you want to protect yourself, you have to own the names they give you. That way, when you fight back, it’ll be a town spat. Everyone will go back to worrying about water.”

“Are you saying I have to accept their hate?”

“I’m saying it doesn’t matter. You have to live.”

*     *     *
I began dreaming about children just before the affair ended.

The hallucinations accompanied my cycle, both a bloodbath. I’d weep more than I had in 25 years, as if I were miscarrying. Every dawn, I started up, unsure if the faint bleating I’d heard was my e-birds, the girls I lived with, or the babies that crawled through my nightmares.

One child was as hairless as the Cyclops, a pale creature with the same bony brow and rigid smile that seemed ravenous. Another baby was my child self, before I lost my left calf, who punched the tub with ruddy fists. Another baby looked like a lover who’d disappeared in the Mountains—a winged hybrid who had also crossed from Sweetwater—waking from that dream felt as if I’d lost Phoenix anew.

What the Cyclops did have was his house by the Reservoir. He never failed to repeat how much it cost, how much his family had made in the Wetlands, how the cost of raising children in a parched world was impossible for a single woman.

“I’m just not sure,” I said nightly. This worked as an aphrodisiac on him, cueing his eye to glaze cerulean under that frowning brow, his brass-ringed fingers fussing at the fine-stitched gowns he’d gifted. I was dressed and undressed at his behest. I never mentioned my dreams.


Gate 3
The Reservoir is the lone body of water besides the ocean. It’s so clean, we dip our hands into the clear water and drink without getting sick.

The Council built the Reservoir in 2150, after the Recovery Pact between the Drylands. The Wetlands opted out, unsurprisingly, as they’d won the Water Wars.

Long and glistening, the Reservoir is bordered with wildflowers whose names I don’t know. In some lights, the lake shimmers like a glass plate. In others, it’s a purple velvet blanket. Now and then, a heron swoops its beak into the water, then flees with a fish into the sky.

I make a weekly ritual of filling the apartment’s water jug. I punch T435 into the machine for our allotment, then sit for an hour strumming the lake skin. I’ve always wanted to know if Immortals live in the Reservoir, but I never sully the water. More than a gate, it’s sacred.


IV.
The Cyclops and I began sparring whenever the breakfast water boiled. Would the migrants ever stop coming? Why should people be banned now?

Not as long as whole Eco-Nations collapse, I’d say. The continents need to be re-districted, like after the first Water War, he’d say. Along the lines of what, we’d shout. Who had water and who didn’t and what kind?!

“You make mountains out of molehills,” the Cyclops said.

He stalked before his obscenely large entertainment unit in his living room. I folded my hands as usual, staring at the wires webbing the charcoal walls.

“The molehills are actually mountains,” I said. “If you can’t see that, then you’re the one with the problem!”

The Cyclops glowered and stomped up to his bedroom. I gathered my coat and cleaning gear into my satchel and drove to what felt like home.

Long Shore was teeming that afternoon with families: everyday Joes and Janes, humans and hybrids whose loved ones had been swallowed by Seca’s jaws. On one side, there was the serene ocean, and on the other, a roiling human sea.

I had never seen these ordinary people who survived in denser neighborhoods with shacks and studios I never cleaned. But here they’d come: stricken faces of fellow maids and school peers, lost faces in a human mother’s downturned eyes or a hybrid father’s photo pin.

A few Immortals, like the Orixa, idled among us. He chatted with the beer cart boy, looking as disheveled as he would in his apartment. But I did not know him yet. I simply wondered why an Immortal, who never suffered from thirst, who could come and go more easily, would cast his lot here?

What matters now is that I spotted the Gate Cleaners before the firing squad rolled in. I waved and ran over, hoping to snag a beer with loose change. Just as I clicked open the metal tab, blockish tanks rumbled onto the beach. They lined up before the tide and aimed at the thick of the crowd.

Screams. Scuffles. Pop-popping.

I’m alive only because I was thirsty, surrounded by maids at the edge of the street.

*     *     *
I sprinted with the crowd right for nearby blocks and scanned for Siren. Not that she could be harmed in the usual way—but Guards were already spilling out of tanks, already handcuffing rally kids.

I never did find her, the friend who’d made me wonder if I were a friend. Two hours later, the bodies had been bulldozed and I was called into work. It was the Gate Cleaners who swept up the food debris, the rags and shoes left behind. We stayed past midnight—bagging plastic cups and paper fliers—from one bloodied end of the Shore to the other.

When I returned to the Cyclops’ house, the entire street had gone dark. Palm Row seemed a shadowscape of cinderblocks, as if the rich and poor had swapped places. Still, I spotted the Cyclops’ silhouette, watching the e-screen for news flashes, stalking back and forth like he was hunting something. I had the tingling sense that what he was looking for wasn’t me.

Was another woman there? He’d told me once, all Immortals cheat. But then he sank, cradling his bald head in the shadows, and I saw what he saw: a lonely misfit. No woman who had a real choice would love him more than they lusted for his pockets. I slipped the gate latch back on and started walking to the maids’ quarters.

The girls wandered about wordlessly, as if our speech had been blown away. Some wore pine green uniforms splotched with dried black blood. Others had peeled these off and walked about corridors in bras and slips. A few strolled naked—hybrids with their extra limbs, their animal weapons—everyone’s long hair unbraided. It felt like a funeral procession.

I changed into a cotton nightdress and went looking for a plaza bonfire. The night owls, warming up for night shifts, eyed me warily.

“We gotta leave Seca. We’ll be next.”

“I say it’s time to collect arms like the Fire Crew. It’s time to fight back.”

“Be careful ladies. There are people here sleeping with the enemy.”

I slipped away before the meanest girls could name me. In bed, I cradled the glass fish my father had gifted on my sixth birthday. It was a pink-swirled salmon, with yellow eyes and silvery scales, which I clipped inside my metal leg when I wore it. As I drifted off, I heard my father say when in Rome. But I’d never learned about a single ancient city. I knew only Seca, where even the humans were not my own. If anyone had bothered asking, I would’ve said, be my guest. Burn this hellhole down.

*     *     *
For a whole week, I stayed away from the Cyclops. I slept in Siren’s loft, on the sunken rose sofa we’d kvetched on for years. I told the girls I was checking on Puffer, the rotund tabby Siren had rescued from the Dumps. But Puffer loafed immovably by the window that loomed between his feeder and a pile of dirty clothes.

I was the one who curled up in Siren’s bed, smelling her blend of salt and patchouli and citrus. I was the one who played on loop her podcast “Underground Sirens.” I didn’t care for her soliloquies on elevated water prices or her banter with guests over strikes. I was listening for her raspy tone, which caught you off guard given her vulpine form. It made Siren unforgettable, so that I’d feared introducing her to the Cyclops.

I was listening too for any clue as to how she must have escaped. I refused to believe she wasn’t alive, even if there were methods for Immortals too. I scoured the e-files for guests who sounded like they might know, who hadn’t themselves been whisked off. Overnight, the Underground was being swept into a labyrinth, jails that had been built beneath the desert during the first Water War. Every morning that I walked between the maids’ quarters and the Immortals’ oasis, I felt the ground rumble. I counted the X-es on cinderblocks tagged by police.

By the second week, I’d run back to the Cyclops’ velvety bed. I detached in relief for the interminable minutes he lunged greedily at me. “I could do this forever,” he’d whoop and I’d marvel at his insatiable eye. Frozen, I’d forget my true name or those of my friends. I’d forget that more and more of Seca was thirsty for Immortal blood.


Gate 4
No human knows what lies over the Mountains except the Guards. The cobalt peaks undulate in an icy squiggle from the ocean to the Main Gates. In Seca’s calm season, dashes of green liven the rocky terrain. In Seca’s windy season, you can barely scooter within a half mile of the base. Sand blasts against your face, so that you return blinded.

Folks whisper that something extraordinary must wait beyond the Mountains. Why else would seventy percent of the Guard be posted there? Why else are protestors, who barricade the mines, never found again? How come water lines run over the peaks, then detour to mansions where technocrats live?

Folks say even First Inhabitants crossed through the Mountains’ ravines. They say early waves of migrants lost half our families there. They say runaways have met new hybrids whose gifts could free Seca, could bring more water.

I don’t believe the folklore, but Siren did. One day you’ll trust magic more than money, she said. Just make sure, Zweety, it’s not too late.


V.
There in his closet, on page after page, I read “activist purge.” I ran my thumb down every margin and paused at the final heading:

Target 1: Climate Action Now!

Target 2: Arrest Security Threats.

Target 3: Freeze Non-Profit Funds.

Under each column were the names of hybrids and humans and families I’d met over thirty years. They were something like a community, long before I imagined an exit out of Seca’s cleaning life.

Suddenly, Cyclop’s hints fell together like a puzzle: think tank, investments, water legacy. He must’ve reeled me in when I said I knew the beaches. He had heard I was close to Siren, her name famous all over Seca.

What he hadn’t admitted was that the Big Water company he advised had a growing stranglehold across the Drylands. No Salt was the sort that had drained other Eco-Nations of accessible water for the non-rich; the sort that paid newcomers to buy lovely-boned houses in neighborhoods evicting long-time denizens to the shacks.

The lock rattled downstairs and I hurriedly jammed the papers into the silver cabinet. Five minutes later, the Cyclops stood at the bedroom door, his shadow looming over me in the blind-drawn room. I perched on the bed, my satchel ready at my feet.

“I thought you’d be gone by now,” he said.

“I’ll be gone for a while since a long gig came up.”

He gave one of his strained smiles, as if pondering what our next chess moves might be. “I’ll miss you more than you know.”

“Why are you talking as if you won’t see me again?”

He gathered me up in his husky arms.

“Ouch, you’re hurting me!” I said.

He released me, eye shut and grin gone, then stalked to the sink to swap eyeballs. “Why don’t you take some leftovers before you go?”

*     *     *
Months later, I will spot the Cyclops’ house from the old Orixa’s apartment. I will peer through the bedroom window, the day awash with sun, and the street will seem endless. The Orixa will rasp from the bedroom door—citing prices for the rental-share will have irritated his lungs—and the irony will ring in my head.

I might have been living as the Cyclops’ wife inside his mansion. Now I could spy other women coming and going.

“It’s yours if you want it,” the Orixa will say.

It will be pinprick quiet, even with every window open, and a straight shot between the window and the door. The Orixa, crouching in light, will block the door, will seem stuck underwater with his breathing tube. A forgotten god who once escorted drowned slaves between realms, he will be longing for a companion.

“I’ll let you know,” I will say. “I gotta run to my next gig.”

*     *     *
The final week I ran into her, Siren told me how her islands went down.

We stood on a stranded end of Long Shore, where hybrids in ombre shirts liked to show off tricks, and Siren swept her hands across the horizon.

“It didn’t even happen in a day. It happened over years like mini-heart attacks. Do you know what that does to a people, Zweety? No, you couldn’t possibly. You grew up in this godforsaken place.”

She was in one of her moods, the dark swath of rainbow that was my friend. I put an arm about her shoulder. “I listen to ocean sounds to sleep sis. I’m not gonna stay in the desert forever.”

She knelt and wept. Ocean figures crawled out, the ones who couldn’t abide the heat bubbling beneath the water. There were selkies and apsaras, orixas and witches. They formed a baleful circle about Siren, whose hands kindled into flame. Over and over, she muttered her islands’ names.