The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

  It is unexpectedly comforting, this possibility. When he settles down to rest, he drops off to sleep almost immediately, and dreams eight million beautifully ruthless dreams.

  INTERRUPTION

  The instant Paulo climbs out of the cab, he knows what he’s seeing. The apartment building is unobtrusive in nearly every way, except that it is more Queens than any other part of the sprawling borough that Paulo has seen. It has become the locus for a city avatar’s power.

  He can also sense the prickle of the Enemy’s work nearby—but somehow, unlike Inwood, this breach has done less harm. After the cab leaves (with a substantial bill, since Paulo told the man to drive around a bit so that he could pinpoint the area of disturbed dimensional integrity), he slips down the narrow dark gap between the framework houses, and hops over the chain-link fence so that he can get a better look at the site. An aging plastic aboveground pool. It has the same pale, acrid scent as whatever infected the monument rock at Inwood. More power has been applied here, decisively and precisely, excising the infection with a surgical efficiency that Paulo cannot help but reluctantly admire. Between this and its proximity to the apartment building locus, and possibly other factors that Paulo cannot fathom, it seems unlikely that this site will attract… hangers-on.

  He hears a voice calling in Chinese to someone else within the house, and quickly he exits the backyard. At the apartment building, he presses the buzzer for the topmost apartment, meaning to work his way down. When an indistinct feminine voice, fuzzy with feedback, murmurs through the intercom speaker, he says, “I’m looking for someone who knows about what happened to the pool in the backyard next door.”

  There is a pause. Then the voice says, again indistinctly, “[Something something] ICE? We’re here legally, and whichever [something] reported us can go to hell!”

  “I’m most definitely not with ICE, the police, or any organization you’ve ever heard of.” Paulo steps back, onto the building’s walkway, so that anyone looking out the window can get a good look at him in the walkway lighting. He sees someone at the window, but they’re there and gone too quickly for him to discern. Going back to the intercom, he debates whether to ring the apartment doorbell again or move on to the next floor. Then there is another indistinct murmur through the speaker, and the building’s front door buzzes to let him in.

  On the fourth floor, a plump fortysomething woman in a sari cracks open the door to peer at him, without bothering to take the chain lock off. Paulo can see a middle-aged man in the background, on his feet and scowling belligerently, with a baby’s feeding bottle in one fist. The woman is defensive, too, but Paulo understands this. Everyone is wary of strangers, in a city.

  Her gaze rakes him as he reaches the top landing of the stairs. “You don’t have permission to enter,” she says at once.

  “I only want to speak,” he says. “I can stand right here and do that.”

  This makes her relax fractionally. “What now?” she asks, in accented, annoyed English. “Are you a reporter? I heard that someone mentioned it on Twitter, but it’s still hard to believe you’ve come about a pool. It’s the middle of the night.”

  “My name is São Paulo,” he says, expecting it to mean nothing to her. Most of the Americans he meets have never even heard of him. Or else they think he’s part of California. “I’m looking for—”

  Her gasp catches him by surprise. “They said—oh. You’re real?”

  He lifts an eyebrow. “Quite real, yes.” There’s only one reason she would ask such a question. “You’ve seen things that aren’t real lately?”

  She shrugs. “Craziness. Everywhere in this city. But most recently, next door, yesterday. Other people came, who talked about the craziness. They were… like you.” She narrows her eyes at Paulo then, as if trying to discern something she cannot articulate. “I don’t know.”

  “Other people?”

  “One was, mmm, Manny? I think that was the name. The other was Brooklyn Thomason, one of those city council people. Tall and Black, both of them, fair man and dark woman. They said our Padmini was Queens.”

  They’ve begun to find each other, even without his help. Paulo can’t help smiling. “And they’ve left? Can you tell me where…?”

  She tilts her head, thoughtful, and her gaze is suddenly shrewd. The man in the background has come forward and now stands just behind her, and their stances are alike: subtly protective. The man follows the woman’s lead, however, and the woman says, “Who are you to ask, then? They said something was hunting them. Someone. A woman.”

  Paulo’s skin prickles all over, as it did at the Inwood rock, and by the suspicious swimming pool. Could the Enemy have reactualized harbingers already? It is as if the birthing-battle did nothing. “That should not be,” he says, slowly and softly. “But… hunting. Yes. I believe that’s true.” New cities usually had very healthy survival instincts, because they had to. If the avatars of New York believed that a hostile foreign presence was hunting them down, they were probably right. “A woman, you said?”

  Her mouth pulls to one side. “I suppose you’re not a woman. Still, why should I tell you anything?”

  “Because I’m here to help them.”

  “Lot of good you’ve done so far.”

  Paulo inclines his head in acknowledgment of this. It’s not an apology. “Truthfully there isn’t much I can do,” he says. “My task is to advise. In the end, the battle is theirs to fight, and survive. But I can’t even advise them if I can’t find them—and any knowledge, at this stage, will help. They need every bit of help they can get.”

  The woman considers this. Paulo thinks his honesty has helped; she doesn’t have a high opinion of him, but at least it’s marginally positive. Her husband murmurs in her ear in some other language, and even without translating the words, Paulo can recognize a Don’t tell him anything, we don’t know who this man is.

  The woman nods a little, but there is a sad look on her face as she regards Paulo again. “I can’t help her, either,” she says at last. “She’s my cousin’s daughter. Smart girl, good, pretty when she bothers to try, but they sent her here alone, can you believe it? It was all they could afford. And only us to look after her.”

  “She has more people to help her now,” Paulo says, as gently as he can. Her concern is genuine. He can’t reassure her, sadly. If this woman’s cousin is indeed the avatar of Queens, then she is in terrible danger and might not survive. But Paulo can be truthful about this much. “A city is never alone, not really—and this city seems less solitary than most. More like a family: many parts, frequently squabbling… but in the end, against enemies, they come together and protect one another. They must, or die.” The woman is watching him now, sorrow giving way to fascination. “There are five other people out there who will be this for her. Six, if you let me help.”

  After a long moment, she sighs. “They were tired,” she says. “Hungry. They went to Brooklyn—with Brooklyn—to rest for the night.”

  They should not be either tired or hungry. Nothing about this city’s birth is going as it should. Paulo restrains a sigh and says, “That could be good. If they know how to create protective loci…” He glances around at the walls of the apartment building’s corridor, seeing more than the ugly wood paneling. In a place protected in this manner, they would be proof against attack. Safer, together, than they could ever be with Paulo. He nods to himself. “Then the three of them can take care of one another, for now. But that leaves two alone.” The Bronx. Staten Island.

  “They said they would go to the Bronx in the morning. It sounded like they had an idea of where to look.”

  It leaves the avatar of the Bronx to fend for themselves until then, but if the others have some inkling of the avatar’s location, then they’re doing better at tracking each other down than Paulo is. “What of Staten Island?”

  “What about it?” The woman looks skeptical now. “They said they didn’t know how to find that one.”

  Staten Island is th
e smallest borough, according to Wikipedia. Geographically vast, but only a few hundred thousand people in population. There’s a chance that Paulo might find the avatar simply by going there and driving around, if he rents a car. Cities—even small ones—make a weight upon the world. With enough proximity, one can feel the pull they exert.

  “Then I’ll begin there,” Paulo says. He reaches into a lapel pocket, past the half-empty pack of cigarettes, and pulls out a business card. Paulistanos are infamous workaholics; other Brazilians joke about their obsession with meetings and office politics and all the trappings of business. There is a touch of power in the card when he hands it to her, but he does not attempt to expend that power. She’s not one of his, after all, and Queens is likely to take it poorly if Paulo gets pushy with her relatives. He merely says, “Please give your cousin that number when you speak to her again. The country code for the call, assuming she has an American phone, will be fifty-five.”

  She takes the card and frowns at it. There’s nothing on it except, in elegant block capitals, the words MR. SÃO PAULO, and a phone number. Underneath the name, though above the number, is a smaller subhead: CITY REPRESENTATIVE. “Why should she have to make an expensive international call to talk to you? Get an American phone.”

  “Forcing others to acknowledge my point of origin provides a latent strengthening effect.” She draws back a little, utterly confused. Paulo nods to her, and to her husband, then turns to go.

  “Is that all, then? Just call you?”

  “Yes.” Then Paulo stops at the top of the steps. “No. Tell her to text me the location of the Bronx, and I’ll meet them there after I’ve found Staten Island.”

  “They said they didn’t know exactly where the Bronx—”

  “They will.” That they’ve managed to find each other thus far is proof that the city is helping them, however weakly—pricking their intuition, calling their attention to seemingly innocuous details or facts, guarding their places of rest. That won’t be enough to keep them safe for long, but it helps. They need every bit of help they can get.

  The woman shakes her head, sighing. “She has studies. A job, a life. When will all of this be over?”

  “When they find the primary avatar,” Paulo says. But this feels like a lie. Something strange is happening in this city—something he’s never seen before, and that the others have never mentioned. No way to be certain that it will end when the city is whole, because nothing here has gone the way it should. So he amends, “I hope.”

  Then he heads off, to track down the smallest borough.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  No Sleep in (or Near) Brooklyn

  Brooklyn tells herself that she’s just crashing in the vacation unit to be polite. Padmini’s stressed out, poor child, considering she only just learned about all this city business a few hours ago. And Manhattan—despite being a scary motherfucker behind that nice face of his—is still a new kid in the big city. Brooklyn tells herself that she’s sticking around in case they need anything.

  It’s a lie, though. The bed she’s lying on is new, with a fancy European-style mattress and one-thousand-thread-count sheets, but it’s still her old bedroom. And as Brooklyn settles in to rest, having cracked open the window so she can listen to the night sounds of the city—crickets and passing cars and the soft laughter and music of a house party somewhere on the next block—she finds herself needing comfort, too, and finding it in the familiarity of the old walls, the old ceiling, the old scent of the place that’s still there, ever so faintly, underneath the new paint and hardwood floors. Back in the day, her room would’ve been sweltering; they couldn’t afford air-conditioning units or the resulting electric bills, just fans. And Brooklyn would’ve been looking at the night sky through burglar bars, which everyone needed at the height of the crack epidemic. Still. Back then she had been a teenage girl so full of dreams, whose only real worries were passing the Regents and not getting knocked up by her boyfriend of the time. (What was his name? Jermaine? Jerman? Something with a J. Lord, she couldn’t even remember.) She hadn’t yet become MC Free, vanguard of a movement; she was just a kid trying out freestyle lyrics in the dark, forgetting half the best ones because she kept falling asleep in the middle of composition.

  And back then, she sure hadn’t been expecting to transform into a goddamn living embodiment of this wild, incredible, stupid-ass city.

  But there is a kind of poetry to the whole situation that Brooklyn accepts—because this wild, incredible, stupid-ass city has given her so much. That’s why she ran for city council, after all: because she believes that only people who actually love New York, versus those merely occupying and exploiting it, should dictate what it is and becomes. Becoming a borough is just the literalization of something she’s always done, so she’s okay with it. More than she ever expected to be.

  She knows who it is as soon as the phone rings. “Are you coming home?” asks Jojo, in a carefully bored tone so as to let Brooklyn know she doesn’t actually care. It’s cool. She’s fourteen, which she thinks is almost grown, so she absolutely resolutely does not miss her mama.

  “I’m right next door.”

  “Which is why I asked if you were coming home.”

  Brooklyn sighs, although it’s fond. “I told you. This place still feels like home to me, baby. Just let me have this for a little while, okay?”

  Jojo’s sigh is almost a match for her own, but Brooklyn hears the amusement in it. “You’re so weird, Mama.” Then, in the background of the phone, Brooklyn hears her getting up and doing something involving a grunt and a wooden rattle—oh. Opening her window, too. “I guess you used to look out at this view and think up lyrics?”

  “Mostly I just looked at the sky. Did you finish that paper you were supposed to do for English?”

  “Yes, Mama. Five paragraphs, just the way the SAT likes it.” Singsong boredom. “I miss Ms. Fountain, who used to let us write interesting stuff.”

  Brooklyn agrees. Jojo has gotten into one of the coveted specialized high schools of the city, Brooklyn Latin. It’s a more old-fashioned school than Brooklyn likes—actual classes in Latin and uniforms and other stuff that would’ve made Brooklyn herself vomit at that age, but Jojo chose it, and she’s mostly thriving there. The beloved Ms. Fountain, like a lot of teachers in the city who don’t want to squeeze in with roommates for the rest of their lives, decided to accept triple the pay from a tony private school up in Westchester—and Brooklyn can’t blame her one bit for that. She feels sorry for Jojo, though, and the other public school kids who’ve lost a good thing.

  “Well, that’s why I proposed that program I told you about,” she says to Jojo. “To help public school teachers get affordable housing.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” It’s not really disinterest. Jojo is usually more invested in Brooklyn’s current life as a politician than she is in Brooklyn’s past life as a rapper, which makes Brooklyn very happy. The girl is distracted now, though. Over the phone, there’s another sound: the cell phone bumping up against a window screen. “I can’t see anything.”

  “You gotta open the screen, baby.”

  “Ew, Mama, mosquitoes will get in! I’ll get West Nile malaria.”

  “Then you better kill them. The sky over the city has too much light, baby. You can see the stars a little, but you gotta work for them.” Brooklyn grins. “Can’t let anything stand between you and what you want.”

  “Is this another lecture about goals? You said you were gonna stop lecturing me about goals.”

  “It’s a lecture about the stars.” And also goals.

  There is a moment’s pause while she hears Jojo rattling the screen and finally getting it up. “Oooh. I do see… three stars in a row. That’s Orion’s belt, isn’t it?”

  “Probably.” Now it’s Brooklyn’s turn to go wrestle with her bedroom window. Fortunately she had the shitty, paint-crusted old single-panes replaced during a gut renovation a few years back; the new double-paned windows are much easier to open. Once
she’s raised the screen and poked her head outside, she looks up. “Oh, yeah. Definitely Orion.”

  Then she looks over. The two buildings have flush back ends. In the dark, her daughter’s silhouette waves at her, and she waves back.

  Then Brooklyn pauses as she notices something else in the dark, down in the paved backyard of the other building, where her father sometimes likes to barbecue for the family. At other times of year it’s mostly just occupied by an old ironwork table and some uncomfortable chairs, and a lot of dead plants in pots. (Her father gets after her for those, but she’s busy. Green thumbs take time she doesn’t have.) She keeps meaning to get a landscaping company in, have them do something interesting with the space.

  Right now, however, there is a strange glowing thing stretched over one corner of the yard.

  She leans farther out the window, frowning as she tries to figure out what that is. Did somebody string up a tangle of neon tape? Do they even make such a thing? But this does not have the slightly yellow glow of things made with luminescent dye. It’s untinted white and ghostly, and seems to waver a little as she looks at it, as if it isn’t quite there.

  Then it moves.

  Brooklyn jerks violently, and there is a terrifying instant in which she tips a little, where she’s balanced herself against the bottom windowsill in order to lean out. It would only be a one-story fall, but people have died from less. She catches herself, fortunately, and gets a grip on the window frame, though her hand has gone sweaty and numb with chill.

  Because now that she’s gotten a good look at it, there is something like a three-foot-wide spider moving around the backyard that her daughter leans out over. It has only four legs—if those even qualify as legs. They don’t taper. They don’t bend as they come away from the tiny central body; the whole creature must just be lying on the ground, spread out along the concrete flagstones in a flat cross. That’s all it is. But when it moves, it is vaguely spiderlike, contracting into a single flat line and then scissoring out into four lines again, all joined at a small rounded hub. An eldritch daddy longlegs, brought to you by the letter X.