The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

  That’s a cry of pain. Bronca starts down the steps again, compelled by that voice. It’s not from downstairs. It’s all around her, and yet… not. Distant in a way that makes it sound like it’s not in the building. Not anywhere nearby.

  “I know it I know it I know… made me for this, but am I not a good creation?” Gasp. Sob. Now the voice hitches. “I… I know. I see h-h-how hideous I am. But it isn’t my fault. The particles of this universe are perverse—” There’s a long pause this time. Bronca has almost reached the ground level when the voice chokes out, now thick with bitterness, “I am only what you made me.”

  Then silence. Bronca pauses for a moment with her hand on the ground-floor door’s latch, listening, but there’s nothing more. She sets her jaw and turns the latch.

  On the ground level, where it’s dark except for low-power lighting, she can hear them clearly: several people moving around inside. How did they get in? Doesn’t matter. What does matter, she sees when she passes Murrow Hall, is that they’ve pulled all of the photographs of Unknown’s work off the walls. The frames have been haphazardly piled in the middle of the hall—and someone’s sprinkled lighter fluid on them, she realizes as she gets close. Her nose wrinkles, half at the smell and half in fury. She catches the edge of her favorite, which is facedown on top, and turns it over… to find that someone has scratched all over the young man’s sleeping face with what looks like a black marker. “Oh, you motherfuckers,” she snarls.

  “There are remarkably few of your kind who actually do that,” says a voice that makes Bronca stiffen with recognition. Stall Woman. That was her in the stairwell, too, Bronca realizes now, though her voice was less clear there.

  “I expected much more mother-fucking, when I first came to this city,” Stall Woman continues. She isn’t distraught anymore; now she sounds detached, bored even. “Given how often New Yorkers use the term, I honestly thought there would be mothers getting fucked in every alley. A veritable plague of mother-fucking, unless of course mothers like being fucked, which I presume they do. Then I suppose I should call it a bounty of mother-fucking. But there really isn’t that much at all. Strange.”

  Bronca looks up. Murrow Hall has a thirty-foot ceiling, which is why the taller installations usually end up in it. Right now, however, Bronca spies something moving in that corner of the room. Under the white paint, somehow, as if the paint is still wet; she inhales a little at the sight. The shape under the paint is spiderlike, although flat to the wall, and lacking several legs. Not large, maybe palm-sized? Whatever it is, it doubles in circumference as Bronca watches, and then doubles again. Abruptly there is a tearing sound, and the crack—because that’s what it is—suddenly splits apart. The wedges of the opening begin to peel back, not like something organic, but like something computerized. Pixels overlapping each other, piling up and then spilling away to reveal a space beyond.

  What should be there is the ceiling of the next gallery over, or maybe some insulation and ductwork. What Bronca actually sees, however, is a white ceiling that is much farther away than it should be—farther than is possible, given the dimensions of the Center. The second floor, maybe? It’s throwing off Bronca’s sense of perspective. But the color of the ceiling that she sees is different from the warm white paint used throughout the Center. This is gray-toned, cool. The texture is off, too: grainy, rougher than drywall, flecked with tiny crystals here and there. Pretty. But there’s also something off in the proportions, in a dizzying way that makes no sense to the eye.

  Bottom line: it is very much not any space within the Center that Bronca has seen. And Bronca’s got the sudden sense that once again, she’s catching a glimpse of what was really happening in Stall Woman’s stall that day.

  She shouldn’t look. The lexicon warns… but she cannot tear her eyes away from that tiny, flat, featureless spot of otherness.

  And as Bronca keeps staring, something small slips through this opening. It’s whip-fast—so fast that her eyes cannot follow it. It’s on the floor in front of Bronca in an instant, and it’s already bigger, elephantine. There is another waver, and for an instant Bronca yelps as suddenly there is a wall of pebbled, grainy whiteness in front of her, immense… then it’s human-sized. Just a lump of white clay, uncurling and taking shape. A person, straightening and turning to Bronca—and Bronca catches her breath and stumbles back as she realizes the person has no face.

  There is another pixel-flicker, and the person resolves suddenly, becoming a smiling woman in white.

  She is not the same woman Bronca met that morning. Bronca has looked up the sponsors of the Better New York Foundation by this point, and spotted “Dr. White” in a photograph; her family name is actually Akhelios, not White. From a big wealthy Greek shipping clan known for its right-wing political contributions. This is not Dr. Akhelios, who was brown-haired and ordinary in the photo. The person who has materialized before Bronca is definitely not ordinary. She is tall as she draws herself up and adopts an oddly elegant pose: something like ballet third position, with her hands held before her upturned, gracefully and unnaturally poised. Her hair is the same tawny white as that of the woman Bronca met before, but there the resemblance ends. The Woman in White has the kind of angular, high-boned face that Bronca has only ever seen before on high-fashion models, and other women deemed beautiful for their ability to act as living props. This one is even more modelly than most, however—in a way that pushes her past beautiful and into uncanny valley territory. Her cheekbones are just a little too defined, her lips too perfectly Cupid’s bow, her eyes just a touch too far apart. The smile that she wears seems fixed, painted on… but that, at least, is familiar. Somehow, even though this is a completely different woman, Bronca knows she’s finally met the real Dr. White.

  There is a call from the Murrow Hall entrance, and Bronca turns to see that her old friends the Alt Artistes have clustered there, blocking her exit. It’s not all of them—just Manbun, Holliday, and Fifteen, the lattermost wearing some kind of hilariously silly ninja getup that looks more like oversized black satin pajamas—but that’s still three more people than Bronca can easily fight, if it comes to that. In the dim night-lighting they are grinning; she sees the gleam of their teeth. They think she’s in trouble.

  The fact that they’re right makes her maybe more belligerent than she strictly needs to be as she turns back to White. “Trouble at home?” she asks, remembering the groveling, resentful tone that she heard in the stairwell.

  White does something shruglike. It’s too sinuous a movement to just be a shrug—too much head, not enough shoulder. “We all have a board, of sorts, to answer to.”

  Bronca laughs a little, surprised to feel sympathy. “I think I’ll take my board instead. Do you even have a PhD? What’s it in, Weird Shit?”

  White laughs. Her mouth opens very wide as she does so, showing nearly all her teeth. “By the standards of my people, I’m barely more than an infant, hopelessly unteachable. By yours, I am ancient and unfathomable. I have knowledge of mysteries you haven’t even begun to wonder about. It’s very nice to meet you in person, though, The Bronx.”

  “Bronca.” She knows why White is calling her that, but goddamn it, her name is her name.

  White considers, then shrugs. “Such meaningless things, names. You cling to them in this world, where all is chaos and separation and differentiation—and I understand.” Her hands move, extend, implore; her expression turns tragic. “I have lived in this world for countless human lifetimes! I’ve seen how your kind—especially your kind of your kind, must fight simply to be seen as the same kind, and not be consumed into the mass. Which is why I regret more than ever what must be done.”

  As Bronca puzzles over this, White splays the fingers on her upraised hands. All at once, the white walls of Murrow Hall, stripped of Unknown’s vibrant paintings and pathetic in their barrenness, blossom with colors and slashes of paint. New murals suddenly unspool over the walls as if with a colossal paint roller, though the hand of their p
ainter remains unseen. But Bronca’s stomach clenches as she recognizes the style of this work—and sees faceless, paint-strewn figures resolve out of the spreading swirl of colors. They stand around the walls, a watching crowd, a few seated or kneeling while others climb, elbows and knees a-jut, over the walls themselves. One of these last, a creature that is more radial than symmetrical with five leglike limbs, tilts its head sharply toward her—

  Bronca jerks her gaze away. The mural is on every wall, though, and spreading over the ceiling in her peripheral vision. Her heart’s pounding. The mural scares her far more than Manbun and his buddies ever will.

  “I don’t understand,” says the Woman in White. Her head tilts suddenly, sharply, in a parody of puzzlement. There’s no kindness in her voice anymore. “Wasn’t it you who tried to barge into my toilet stall? Didn’t you want to come in and see me? And I left the door open for you, too, oh yes I did, but then you kicked me, and the door shut. Rude.” Her smile vanishes abruptly, replaced by annoyance. Then she sighs. “But I haven’t given up on you, The Bronx. My offer—from the toilet?—still stands. If you work with me, I’ll help you. There’s no need for you and your favorite individuals to die in the conflagration to come, or at least not for some time as you reckon it. I can see to it that you, The Bronx, are the last to be enfolded. All I need you to do is find him for me.”

  And she gestures down at the pile of Unknown’s photographed art. On top is Bronca’s favorite, still beautiful despite its desecration.

  Looking at this, at the clean lines that are still visible despite the marker and the distancing secondhandness of photography, steadies Bronca through her fear. She remembers the day she found the real image. It was a mural that someone had painted onto the wall of a crumbling low-rise in the South Bronx, near one of the 4 train stations. Another brickyard. Bronca can’t seem to stay out of them. But then, amid decay and despair, she’d seen this. The self-portrait of a young man who’d drawn it without hands, without paint, from miles away. The city painted it for him; that was why the eye for that painting felt different. And now the avatar of New York is somewhere underneath the city, she knows instinctively; somewhere in the subway tunnels. He’s sleeping in the image, and at last Bronca understands what this means. Something has gone wrong. The avatar’s sleep is unnatural, enchanted, a desperate last-ditch measure to conserve strength while the city labors through an unexpected crisis. The reason the city is so dangerous, so infested with the Woman in White and her ilk, is because all of its defenses are at their lowest ebb, and faltering.

  Why? Why is the city’s avatar sleeping?

  It comes to her almost painfully fast, as if the city has just been waiting for Bronca to ask this question. Because New York is too much for one person to embody. Because its avatar embodied it anyway when the city needed him—and he fought, and won, because otherwise the city wouldn’t be here—but doing this, using that much power, nearly destroyed him. Now he waits for Bronca and the others, the ones who are meant to help him. They must heal him. He can’t wake up without their help.

  Bronca could tell the Woman in White this. She doesn’t know which subway station the painting depicts, but she could share what she does know. Right now, Murrow Hall’s walls are an open doorway into another universe—one that is so fundamentally inimical to everything that Bronca is (human, woman, individual, flesh, matter, three-dimensional, breathing). One step in any direction might take her there. A shove. A tug—and even one moment spent there, clashing with its alien atoms and trying to breathe its alien air, will rend her to her core. (Is there air? Is that a thing that would exist in such a place?) She knows this as surely as she knows her own names, as surely as she knows her own kin and skin. The Enemy is not just at the gates but at her throat, and if she means to live, she has no choice but to surrender.

  But there is something else she knows as well as skin: that she is a warrior.

  Not born, maybe. Chris once told her that she had a gentle soul wrapped in razor wire, but the sharp edges are not her fault. The world trained her to violence, to ferocity, because it hates so much of what she is. This isn’t the first time Bronca has been surrounded on all sides by those who would invade her, shrink her borders, infect her most quintessential self and leave only sanitized, deadened debris in their wake. It’s not even the first time she’s had the power to fight back.

  This is just the first time it’s happened since she became the goddamn Bronx.

  “No,” Bronca says to the Woman in White. “I don’t fucking think so.”

  The Woman sighs. “I’m sorry, then.” She makes a little twitching movement with one hand. Something behind Bronca makes a sound. It’s nothing she can easily describe. Da-dump, at its baseline: a low, gulping, almost musical double reverberation, like something electronic. Except this is organic, she knows. It is the hunting cry of a beast that has no voice, an organism that has never known laws of physics congruent with her own—and it is close. The Artistes, sycophants that they are, snicker or start jeering. They can see whatever’s coming for her, she guesses—though Fifteen abruptly blanches as he gets a good look at it. He steps back quickly, shaken, and looks away. By the angle of his gaze before he retreated, Bronca knows the thing is right behind her.

  And Bronca… laughs.

  She can’t help it. Some of this is nerves. The rest is fury. These people. They have come into her borough, her territory, and ripped down good art. They’ve tried to force her to accept their disgusting mediocre bullshit instead. And here is this white woman, who is not a white woman at all but who has tried to manipulate mechanisms of power against Bronca just like the worst of them, demanding that Bronca capitulate. Like fuck she will.

  The Woman in White frowns at Bronca’s laughter.

  “I don’t know who the hell you think you are,” Bronca says, and she is spreading her arms. “And I don’t know what you are. But you don’t know who I am if you’re coming at me with this weak-ass game.”

  The Woman’s eyes narrow. “You’re The Bronx.”

  “Yeah,” Bronca says. “And I’m also the one who got all the knowledge of how this works.” She is setting her feet. “The others probably don’t know how to do this yet, but I do.”

  A wind has begun to blow within the hall, stirring papers hanging along the Center’s corridors. Bronca does not notice. The world has divided into two: Murrow Hall, where the Woman in White curses as jittering figures amid the wall-mural draw back in what Bronca suspects is alarm; and the other New York. There’s a Murrow Hall in the other New York, too, but what has changed is its perspective and focus. Now Bronca stands expansive, mountainous. She has legs bolted to a million foundations, and arms of a hundred million joints of rebar. The flesh that fills the gaps is the soil where a thousand generations of Bronca’s mothers grew and thrived, which has been invaded and poisoned and built over again and again—but it survives still. Survives strong.

  And before her, small and insignificant, cavorts a white blankness of a thing. It’s dangerous; that much she knows. It can hurt her very badly—both of her. All of her. It can drag her true self into a place where the completeness of her can be killed for all time, never to recover or be reborn. That will destroy the Bronx. Without the Bronx, all of New York will die.

  So Bronca touches a steel-clad toe to the ground, lightly as any dancer. It lands with the pounding force of ten thousand block parties, boom cars, and drum circles—and sends forth a wave of energy that obliterates everything in its path. Everything that’s not of New York, that is.

  Around the Woman in White and Bronca, the mural is suddenly empty of people. The Alt Artistes have fallen to the ground, unconscious or groaning, because Bronca’s manifestation has killed every tendril of White in the Center. It was in them. It was in the bathroom, Bronca notes with belated chagrin, infesting the third stall; damn it, she should have double-checked. It has grown into the electrical system and begun crawling up inside of the stairwell walls, damaging the children’s murals al
ong the way—but now that contamination is gone.

  Now it’s just the two of them, living city and eldritch abomination, face-to-face and ready for the showdown to come. Today? Maybe. Bronca waits to see.

  And after a long, pent moment, the Woman in White exhales. She is unharmed by Bronca’s attack, which is peculiar. However, she says, “I’d hoped to recruit you to my cause.” Her voice is soft. Humility, maybe—but Bronca knows better than to try to interpret anything she does by normal, human standards. “We have so much in common, you and I. We both want to survive! We’ve both had to stand on our own, ally-less and undervalued, lost in the shadow of our supposed betters. We’ve both chosen to do what’s right, regardless of what it will cost us in the end.”

  Bronca shakes her head, unwilling to feel sympathy anymore. “I’m not a settler from another damn dimension.”

  “No, you just threaten the existence of an infinity of dimensions, and more lives than your species has numbers to count,” White snaps. Bronca frowns, but then the Woman sighs. “I suppose I cannot blame you, however. We all do what we must. Very well; I can’t destroy you—yet. We’ll meet again, perhaps, when circumstances have changed.”

  With this, the Woman in White jerks her head a little. The murals on the walls—figureless swirls of muted color now—vanish, rolling up into nothingness as readily as they appeared. There is one last soft da-dump behind Bronca before it, too, fades into silence. She would swallow to relieve her dry throat in the thing’s wake, but it’s important to show no weakness right now. She is the Bronx. The Bronx don’t back down.

  The Woman in White inclines her head. There is respect in this. “My minions won’t bother you again,” she says, “until the day that all masks are set aside, of course.”