The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

  At her desk she pushes herself up, driven to her feet by restlessness. In the same instant, not far off, a subway goes by along one of the elevated tracks. For an instant she is rushing along with the train, is the train: fast, powerful, aching for a coating of graffiti along her sleek-but-boring silver skin—and then she is just herself. Just a tired young graduate student, past her prime at the ripe old age of twenty-five according to fashion magazines, leaning close to the window of a borrowed bedroom and trying to understand how the world has suddenly changed.

  All at once, her mouth goes dry with the instinctive awareness that something else is wrong, and this time it’s a lot closer than the East River.

  Near. Here. Her head whips about almost of its own volition, almost as if something has taken hold of her ponytail and yanked on it to direct her attention where it is needed. There: the backyard. Not the one attached to her own building, which is paved over and contains only weeds and the rusted-out barrel of their downstairs neighbor’s former barbecue pit. The one next door. Mrs. Yu lives in that garden apartment, and she’s decided that a backyard needs a pool, probably because she used to live in Texas where that was a thing people did. It’s just a little aboveground thing, dingy and cracked after only two New York winters. At barely more than eight feet wide, it takes up nearly the entirety of the yard. Still, it’s a hot June day, so two of Mrs. Yu’s grandsons are hard at play in the water, giggling and squealing loudly enough to almost—almost—drown out the screams from Williamsburg.

  And do they not notice the way the water suddenly changes color, as the bright blue plastic bottom of the pool transforms into something else? Something grayish white. Something altogether stranger than plastic. Something… moving, with a slow organic undulation that Padmini can see even through the rippling water.

  No. They don’t notice because they are unironically playing Marco Polo, yelling at each other in a mix of Mandarin and English and splashing wildly to get away from each other. One’s got his eyes closed, the other is fixated on the first, and neither has put his feet down on the pool bottom. They’re small boys, but the pool is tiny, too. They’re going to touch the bottom eventually.

  Padmini is up from the desk and tearing through the apartment to reach the door before she can think. If she did think, she would decide that she’s being foolish. If her conscious mind were fully engaged, she would tell herself that even if her sudden intense belief about touching the grayness at the bottom of the pool is rooted in any sort of truth, she cannot possibly make it to the ground level, and to Mrs. Yu’s front door, in time. She cannot make it through Mrs. Yu’s house quickly enough, if the old woman even lets her in without first wanting a half hour’s worth of small talk because Mrs. Yu is lonely, and into the backyard, before the boys touch the bottom of the pool. If she were thinking, she would convince herself that her sudden intense belief is irrational. (Really? she would ask herself in scorn. And what’s next, stepping on a crack really does break your mother’s back?)

  But she knows it’s real. It has been given unto her to understand the mechanics of the whole business, so she instinctively knows that water is the helpmeet of the Enemy: not a doorway in and of itself, but a lubricant of sorts, facilitating easier traverse. The thing in the pool will do worse than kill the boys; it will take them away. To where and for what? Who knows, but it can’t happen.

  So in her panic, Padmini pelts through the door of the apartment and halfway down the fourth-floor flight of stairs without so much as stopping to grab her keys. (The door swings wide open behind her. Aishwarya Aunty calls after her in startlement; her baby cousin starts crying. Padmini doesn’t even close it.) She puts her hand on the bannister and thinks, Now, must get there now—

  —and because she is what she is, she envisions herself accelerating to get there, not magically but mathematically, through the walls and the backyard fences and air and space. The transit from point A to B would take

  time, where

  is the surface gravity of the arc of a hypocycloid—

  And the instant she thinks this, a voice inside her head answers, Oh, that’s what you want to do. Okay, no problem.

  Then the walls of her old building bend around her, warping, until she is not running down stairs but flying, more than flying, rushing through a tunnel as if she is a bullet and the whole world has become the gun—

  And then she is running across grass, she is in Mrs. Yu’s backyard, she is at the edge of the pool grabbing one boy and hauling him out by the shoulders. He screams, kicking, and punches her in the face, knocking her glasses onto the grass. The other boy screams, too, for their grandmother. Padmini has the first boy on the grass, he’s safe there, the grass is solid ground and feels right, but the boy is still screaming and he kicks at her, grabs her hair, tries his damnedest to impede her as she tries to get up for the other boy. The first boy weighs all of fifty pounds, but he goes for her knee and then punches her in the belly. “I’m—” Padmini cries, but before she can get the next word out there is an entirely different kind of scream from the pool that stops both of them cold.

  Mrs. Yu comes out onto the back porch, a bamboo strainer brandished in one hand. She stops and stares at the pool. They all stare, in fact.

  In the pool, the other boy has stood up on the grayish-white bottom—which, close up, is not just grayish white but mottled, and some of it is scarred, because it is skin and not plastic or earth. And now tendrils of that grayness have whipped up from the bottom of the pool to wrap themselves around the boy’s legs.

  After a moment’s horrified staring down at himself, the boy starts screaming again, this time splashing wildly to get out—but he can’t use his legs. As Padmini watches, the tendrils move up and over his trunks, up his waist. He swats frantically at them and they whip up to catch one arm, lickety-split, pinning it down. And his feet are gone, all of a sudden. They have vanished into the now-amorphous gray substance, which is bubbling and rising around him, swallowing him from the ankles up and dragging him under—

  Mrs. Yu shouts and runs down to the pool. Padmini belatedly shakes off shock and runs over as well. Between the two women, they grab the boy’s flailing hand. The gray stuff is fearsomely strong as it pulls on him. Padmini pulls back with everything she’s got, but she is an overweight, overworked graduate student, not the Rock. The boy is terrified, his face staring up at them even as fingers of the gray stuff start worming up around his face. She can’t stand the sight of it. She doesn’t want to touch it, and indeed every particle of her screams against doing so because it is somehow inimical to her—and yet she cannot let this child be taken without using everything she’s got to fight back.

  And, suddenly, she thinks of fluid mechanics.

  Fluid mechanics are beautiful. The equations jump and ripple, push and ebb. It is nothing to Padmini to run the equations for flow velocity through her mind. Nothing to change the variables to increase that velocity, down close to the boy’s skin. Water is a lubricant, but if she can just imagine something that is a better lubricant… between his skin and the gray substance, faster and more fluid than water should ever be…

  The pool is a tumbling rapids of churning water. Padmini cannot see the tendrils anymore amid the froth, but she is hyperaware of them as she pulls, and Mrs. Yu pulls, and even the first boy grabs onto Mrs. Yu’s waist from behind and pulls. “No!” Padmini shouts in defiance at the gray thing in between desperate gasps for air, but meanwhile she is thinking,

  where f equals infinity if that’s how much force it takes to get this disgusting thing off the child—

  It works. The thing’s tendrils slip free, and the boy comes skeeting out of the pool as if buttered and fired from a buttered-child cannon. Padmini takes the brunt of the blow, which is good because Mrs. Yu has osteoporosis. The boy bowls Padmini back, and though she lies winded on the ground with a small, sobbing child curled up against her, she is elated. Ecstatic! Who knows if the thing in the pool will stay there, or if she’ll be able to s
ave anyone if it crawls out of the water and tries to eat them again. It doesn’t matter. For the first time in years, it seems, she’s done something not just because she’s expected to do it, but because she’s chosen to do it, and done the hell out of it besides.

  “And don’t fucking bring your squamous eldritch bullshit here,” she gasps, grinning, without really hearing herself.

  It is as if these words set off a bomb. She feels something, a wave of outgoing force, seem to tingle away from her feet and the crown of her head and her butt where it crushes the grass as she sits up. She can even see the wave as its energy crawls across the grass and over Mrs. Yu’s apartment building—and the old pool. There is a hiss from somewhere below the pool as this force moves across it. The water in the pool roils; the boy in her arms cringes and makes a sound of fear. But Padmini knows that this is a good thing, this change. She staggers to her feet (the boy is heavy), but by the time she’s up, she already knows what she’ll see. Mrs. Yu’s pool bottom has turned back to pale blue plastic. The portal to another place, where pool bottoms are made of devouring skin, is gone.

  So Padmini wraps her arms around the weeping child, shuts her eyes, and privately vows to make an immediate offering at her tiny, neglected puja table. Well, the bag of fruit she bought last week has already manifested flies and might have gone moldy. Okay, she’ll offer incense instead, the really good stuff.

  And a little while after all this, two very weird strangers show up.

  “Good thing we came here first,” Manny says. He’s standing by the backyard pool that almost swallowed Queens. It’s just an ordinary pool now, but in the other world that Manny can see, the entire empty, twilit backyard (it never seems to grow fully dark in Weird New York, or fully light) is layered over with the massive, glowing parallel marks of something that has clawed at this place, and very nearly rent it open. The marks are healed now, just. Manny can feel their rawness. Worse, the air smells of strange, oceanic aldehydes, and somewhere else—not in Weird New York, but troublingly close by—he can hear the very faint, lingering roar of frustration from something immense and inhuman that almost broke through.

  Back in this world, he can hear Mrs. Yu through the apartment window, still saying soothing things to her grandsons while she feeds them to calm them down further. The younger boy has taken no lasting harm from his encounter with the pool-bottom monster, though Manny’s pretty sure he’ll never be coaxed into a swimming pool again, and even bath time might be a problem from here forth. Not that he blames the boy. Manny’s creeped out just standing five feet from where it happened.

  “Is it really a good thing?” Brooklyn asks. Mrs. Yu’s place sits on a gradual hill. They gaze out over endless backyards and houses, sloping away from where they stand. “We got here too late. If that young lady hadn’t figured out how to push this thing back into wherever it came from, we’d have gotten here to find all these people dead. Or… gone.”

  Manny shudders at the thought. Some things, he understands instinctively, are worse than death. “I guess you’re right. She got lucky. We all have been, so far.” Though he does not add, But it only takes one mistake. Brooklyn knows it anyway.

  “It sounds like the thing that was in this pool is a more, uh, violent version of the patches of tendrils—or feathers—we’ve seen,” Manny says. And then he has a horrifying thought. “It might even be the same thing. I keep thinking about how, at the park, she kept switching between ‘we’ and ‘I’ like the pronouns were interchangeable. Like she couldn’t keep the words straight, and they didn’t really matter anyway.”

  “Maybe this isn’t her first language.”

  That’s partly it. But Manny suspects the problem is less linguistic than contextual. She doesn’t get English because English draws a distinction between the individual self and the collective plural, and wherever she comes from, whatever she is, that difference doesn’t mean the same thing. If there’s a difference at all.

  “Those things in the park did what she wanted,” Brooklyn says. “It’s also clear that she’s responsible for what happened at the bridge, somehow, and apparently FDR Drive. And here. You saw how much time it’s taken us to travel from one point in the city to another; she couldn’t possibly be in all these places personally. Some of this stuff happened at the same time, across the city from each other. So maybe she’s… I don’t know. Like a fungus. Everywhere, all over the city, but we only see the bits that poke up here and there.”

  “Ew,” says the woman they’ve come to meet, who excuses herself and then turns away from where she’s been carrying on an intent conversation with an older woman nearby. She’s still sitting on Mrs. Yu’s backyard steps. The older woman, standing beside her, settles into an aggressively defensive posture with her arms folded and chin jutted forth, but she says nothing as Padmini speaks. “Did you have to go to fungus?”

  The living embodiment of the borough of Queens is a tiny thing, busty and dark brown, with a wealth of long black hair that’s stiff from having been soaked in chlorinated pool water and not rinsed before it dried. She’s introduced herself to them as Padmini—“Like the actress?”—and has apparently resigned herself to having a name they do not recognize. Manny has to work very hard to remind himself to call her Padmini, however, because of course her name in his head is Queens. But that is a name she must choose. He has no right to force it upon her.

  Brooklyn smiles at the girl wearily. “I call things like I see them—but you’re right, fungus isn’t where I wanted to go, either. Speaking of other things I don’t want to hear but that do have to be said… This thing came directly at Manny and me, but attacked a neighbor in your case. Any idea why?”

  “Why are you asking me?” Padmini looks aggrieved. She starts to wring out her hair again. It’s actually dry, but the gesture has the look of a nervous tic. “Before, what, three or four hours ago? I didn’t know about any of this.”

  They have by this point explained everything to her that they can. It’s gone more smoothly than Manny expected, probably because Padmini just saw a pool try to eat two children. It’s been awkward, too, however, because Padmini’s relative—the older woman, whom Padmini has introduced as Aishwarya Aunty—has come down to see why Padmini apparently ran out of their apartment at full tilt and then teleported to the neighbor’s backyard. Aunty hasn’t said much, but she’s hovering and radiating protectiveness in a way that Manny would admire if so many of her hostile glares weren’t directed at him and Brooklyn.

  But he knows the answer to Brooklyn’s question, so he decides to interject.

  “Going after collaterals is good strategy,” he says, sighing as he slides his hands into his pockets. “Family, neighbors, coworkers—anyone who isn’t capable of defending themselves. Start some kind of high-profile chaos involving people the target cares about, which might both lure her out of a safe position and distract her with worry or grief. Then attack while she’s off guard.”

  He’s abruptly aware that Brooklyn has narrowed her eyes at him. He knows why. There’s just nothing he can do about it. Her voice is neutral, though, when she speaks. “How was she in a safe position beforehand?”

  “Yes, how?” That’s from Aishwarya Aunty, who looks like a taller, fortysomething version of the avatar of Queens, and is pretty regal herself in a gloriously sunset-orange-themed cotton sari. “If you aren’t just crazy.” Padmini tries to hush her.

  Manny turns to point at Padmini’s apartment building. It’s an ordinary-looking wooden frame house, four stories high. She’s told them she lives on the top floor with Aishwarya and Aishwarya’s husband, and their new baby. “That building,” Manny says. “It’s glowing, isn’t it? We all see that?”

  Brooklyn turns to look, and Padmini gasps. Glowing isn’t exactly the word for what they’re seeing, Manny suspects, but it’s close enough. The sun has slanted toward sunset, backlighting the building in a way that would be eerie if this were Amityville instead of Jackson Heights. That’s not what Manny wants them to
notice. What he hopes they see, and what all of them except Aishwarya clearly do, is that Padmini’s building is different from Mrs. Yu’s, and from every building around it. Brighter, somehow. More defined? Almost as if the building has been Photoshopped for greater sharpness while the rest of the block retains a fuzzier contrast. Somehow, that building is right in a way that the Checker cab had been, now that Manny thinks about it—and his own apartment building, once he’d stepped off the elevator. He noticed the change at the time, but hadn’t understood it.

  “I don’t think the Enemy can get into that building,” Manny says. “Something has made it more Queens, so to speak, than the rest of Queens.”

  “You’re saying I did that?” Padmini shakes her head. “I didn’t do anything. Until you two showed up, I had no idea why any of this was happening. Why would I be able to—” She gestures at her building in frustration.

  “I don’t know. But I wish you could tell us how you did it. This thing is targeting us one by one, and I don’t think it’s going to stop. There doesn’t seem to be an instruction manual or a wise old mentor anywhere to help us figure out the rules, but if we keep playing catch-up, it’s going to win, eventually.”

  Manny sighs and rubs a hand over his face, suddenly very tired. It’s been a long day. Between them is a little plate of baozhi that Mrs. Yu put out for them, and he bends to take one, suddenly ravenous. It’s delicious. He takes another.

  Brooklyn sighs as well. “Look, I’m worn out, and I missed lunch riding up to Inwood to save this one from the feather monster.” She jabs a thumb at Manny. “I think we need to rethink trying to do this all at once. Not going to do anybody any good if we drop where we stand.”