The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

  She jerks upright—and for an instant the world changes. High-rises wheel past, buses squealing between them, docks and piers bristling into a defensive configuration. Before her looms a foreign, neon-bright skyline so immense and building-studded that it casts her into shadow. And then it is only the thin brown man again, who is staring at her with narrowed, cynical, knowing eyes.

  “Get in,” says this total stranger. Aislyn starts toward his car without a second thought.

  Before she can reach for the door handle, however, there is a stir at her feet and a playing-card-quick shuffle of realities around her—and then suddenly curling, lashing white flower fronds whip up from the earth between her and the car.

  Aislyn stops, her eyes widening, and the man curses, throwing the car into reverse and trying to back away from them. Still growing, the fronds swiftly become taller than Aislyn herself. Then they lunge away from Aislyn… toward the car, which they rapidly rise to surround and entangle. She can hear them slapping and hissing as they hit and sear at its chassis.

  And as Aislyn stumbles back from the frond mass, the Woman in White catches her from behind with tight hands on her shoulders, leaning forward to peer into her face. “Whew! He almost got you. Are you all right?”

  “What? No! Let go!” Aislyn shakes her off reflexively. Where the hell did she come from?

  In the same instant, from within the lashing tangle of white flower fronds, there is a strange not-sound—a vibration, but with no tone that her ears can detect. It sluices through part of the thicket of fronds, dissolving them, and then the car lurches forward with a screech of tires. Out of control, it skids a little onto the grassy slope off the main road, then stops, brake lights glaring.

  Aislyn barely notices, almost tripping over her puffy slippers in her haste to scramble away from both the remaining fronds and the Woman in White. The Woman looks wholly different from the last time Aislyn saw her, two days ago at the ferry station. This time she’s wearing a tracksuit, which makes it easy to see that she’s much plumper and shorter, with her white hair—streaked here and there with a few strands of faded bottle auburn—now in a shoulder-length soccer-mom bob. Her face is… Not the same woman, Aislyn realizes with a frisson of shock. This is someone wholly different. And yet… she is also the Woman in White. Every instinct that Aislyn possesses identifies her as the same woman from before. Same manic energy. Same bright, too-earnest eyes, as she holds up hands as if to soothe a skittish beast.

  (Aislyn’s mind thinks of a name, but flinches away before she can recall all three syllables. Or is it two? Three but slurred, maybe. Starts with an R. Rosie. She’ll stick to Rosie.)

  Doesn’t matter. “Stay away from me,” Aislyn snaps. She’s shaking. In her mind’s eye, she is seeing that delicate white frond growing from the back of Conall’s neck. Once, she thought those fronds were beautiful, but the Woman said she could see what was happening through them. That means she saw—and did not stop—what Conall just tried to do. It infuriates Aislyn. “I thought you were my friend! You said you would help me!”

  The Woman frowns, looking genuinely hurt and confused. “That’s what I’m trying to do! That fellow, he’s another city and I hate him, did he hurt y—”

  “Your fellow!” Aislyn feels so stupid. Was the Woman watching while Conall held on to Aislyn and invited her to suck his Nazi cock? Did she do nothing to help because it did not involve cities or boroughs or any of the other bizarre business that has taken over Aislyn’s life? “In my house! In my own home!” Somehow, this is an extra bit of insult.

  In the meantime, the brown man has gotten out of the car and is walking toward them. He’s taller than she realized at first, dressed in an open-jacketed dark suit with no tie, the cigarette a red warning at his mouth and a business card held like a switchblade in his fingers. He radiates stylish menace, and… with a deep chill, Aislyn realizes he isn’t her. Isn’t part of New York. Whatever spell he wove before, which made her want to go with him, is gone. Now she can only think that he is bigger and stronger and a man and foreign.

  Aislyn backs away from him, too. The man reaches the asphalt and stops, on the other side of the patch of wavering fronds. The fronds twitch toward him at once, and he sucks smoke from the cigarette and blows it at them without looking. It’s just cigarette smoke, as far as Aislyn can tell—but the white fronds react as if they’ve been attacked with chemical weapons. They lash away from him, squealing and shriveling, and within seconds the remaining fronds have flattened, dead and fading rapidly from translucence into absence.

  Amid the new silence, the three of them face each other in a triangle of tension.

  The Woman is staring with wide, angry eyes at the brown man. Her head has tilted to one side, and Aislyn is amazed to note that her posture is defensive, almost frightened. “I’m getting very tired of you, São Paulo.”

  “We have had an understanding for thousands of years,” says the man, who isn’t a man. She’s never heard of a city called São Paulo. Maybe it’s African, or in India? It sounds exotic like that. The pronunciation of São that the Woman used is weird, too. Something like “song,” all round and back-of-throat. The same nasal musicality is in the man’s accent when he speaks. “Once a city has been born, your attacks end. Always before, this has been so.”

  The Woman laughs a little. “Please. There was never any understanding. There can be no understanding because your kind don’t understand anything.”

  São frowns at this, then tilts his head. “Try me,” he suggests. “You never have before; you just tried to kill us. Of course we fought back! But if you can speak, and if you are a… a person, then you can explain what you want. Maybe we don’t have to fight.”

  The Woman in White’s face has become a study in incredulity. “What I want?” Her eyes narrow even as she laughs. “Oh, sometimes I hate you people. One by one, you’re fine. Better than fine—some of you are wonderful; so funny and peculiar. But there’s a thing you always do, and I despise you for it. Did you really need to hear me speak to know that I was a person, São Paulo? Do people have to protest their own assault before you’ll stop?”

  The man stiffens, and Aislyn does, too, at the word assault. But yes, it’s there in his face amid the confusion and anger: guilt. He did something, this brown foreign man. Something he felt entitled to do—maybe to the Woman, maybe to some other woman. And all of a sudden, whether or not the Woman has been complicit in what Conall did, Aislyn finds herself hating this São Paulo. It isn’t personal. In this moment, Aislyn just hates all men who feel entitled to help themselves to things they shouldn’t.

  So she glares at him. “What do you want?”

  São Paulo blinks away from the Woman in White to focus on Aislyn, plainly surprised by her tone. Or maybe he did not expect someone like her to have voice enough to speak. Maybe he’s Muslim, or some other kind of woman-hating heathen barbarian. “I came to find you,” he says. His tone stays even, but she can tell he’s puzzled by the question. “You and the others. This city requires your help to complete its maturation.”

  “Well, I don’t need your help,” Aislyn snaps. “So you can leave now.”

  He stares at her—and then he looks at the Woman in White, his eyes narrowing in suspicion. As if he’s trying to figure out whether the Woman somehow made Aislyn say what she just did. As if he cannot believe that Aislyn is capable of speaking for herself.

  At which point Aislyn. Is just. Done.

  “You don’t belong here,” she snarls. Her hands have become tight fists. “Not in this city, not on my island. I don’t need you. I don’t want you here!”

  And because Aislyn is still deep in communion with her borough after tossing Conall through the fence, still thrumming with energy and anger and thirty years of suppressed fury finally finding its outlet at last, she rejects São Paulo as fiercely as she did Conall.

  It shouldn’t work. She’s seen his other self, which is absolutely massive—bigger than the whole of New York. More imp
ortantly, he is whole and powerful in ways that New York is not. And yet. She is Staten Island. She stands upon her home ground, where he is an interloper, and he is far from the pollution-shrouded towers of his home city. So the wave of force that Aislyn used on Conall ripples forth again. It catches the Woman in White, who cries out and flings up her arms and suddenly vanishes, as quickly as she appeared. What stands in her wake is a pudgy middle-aged woman with a spray tan and deep Clairol-red hair, who blinks and looks dazed before turning away from them and starting to walk back toward the next neighborhood over, ignoring the whole tableau.

  But that was only collateral damage, because the Woman in White was not Aislyn’s intended target. The wave of You don’t belong here hits São Paulo full force, and the effect is far worse than what she did to Conall—because Conall was, after all, just a man. São Paulo is blasted by this power as if by an invisible flamethrower, and she sees him take the blow in two ways at once. On one plane he raises his arms as if to ward off Aislyn’s rage, and she sees the bones of his forearms snap just before he is lifted and flung off into the darkness beyond his parked car.

  In the other reality, she sees from up high as an earthquake shivers its way across the greater metropolitan area of São Paulo. Older buildings fall, especially in some of the city’s favelas. A quadruple-lane highway along the great city’s flank splinters like bone—although thankfully it does not break apart entirely, which would spill hundreds of vehicles into the nearby river in a Williamsburgian echo of horror. Beyond that, it’s bad, though. A city’s commuter conduits are its lifeblood. For days, the fifteen million citizens of São Paulo will struggle to work, to reach the hospital, to stay connected in all the myriad of ways that a city requires for health and life.

  In that other place she sees girders blur and realizes that something flails toward her—though she gets the sense this is more reflex on São Paulo’s part than malice. People who grow up fighting learn to hit back even as they’re going down. Reflex or not, the strike lands, and in the other place Aislyn feels the rake of urban rail lines across her core, which slice through her like claws. They hurt, a deep and terrifying burn that seems to tear something inside her—not organs or tendons, exactly, but something just as vital, though more existential. Her soul, maybe. She gasps and doubles over, clutching at her middle and blinking against pain-tears. Instinctively she knows that Staten Island has taken damage somewhere. Her island hurts with her.

  But. Aislyn is still standing, and São Paulo isn’t.

  Aislyn has subsisted for so long on mere survival that the endorphins and elation of victory, of feeling strong even for a minute, go right to her head. She starts laughing despite the pain in her middle, and for a dizzying instant she cannot stop. But then, slowly, she takes a breath, and then another, and forces herself to calm down. She sounds as crazy as the Woman in White. She feels crazy. But she can also feel São Paulo still out there, wounded somewhere in the dark, so she forces herself upright, sucking air through her teeth to get past the pain, and calls after him. “Stay away from me. Or… or else.”

  It’s not the most badass threat she could make, but he does not reply. Maybe he’s unconscious, or sulking. Doesn’t matter. She won.

  Then Aislyn staggers back toward the house, with her ribs aching and her skin flushed and her thoughts bouncing around like Daffy Duck on a woo-hoo binge. The house is lit up when she gets there, but her father is in the backyard taking a statement from Conall. Two more cop cars pull up just as Aislyn climbs the front walkway, but the men inside don’t seem to notice her as they stroll toward the backyard. Inside the house, Aislyn’s mother is at the back door watching them. No one’s thought to check on Aislyn, who’s supposed to be upstairs safe asleep—so she simply slips up the stairs and goes to her room.

  With her window cracked for fresh air, she can distantly hear her father speaking with Conall in a raised voice. It sounds like he thinks Conall was drinking and threw the lounger through the fence himself. Conall is protesting this with equal loudness. (“I’m telling you, I got jumped! It was a big Black dude!”) Aislyn is a little curious to know how the argument will resolve itself, even though she knows her father will soon go check the security videos and see Conall’s “big Black dude,” which is actually a 120-pound white woman overwritten by the illusion she fed the cameras. Some part of her still hopes for justice to prevail, and for her father to realize what a monster Conall is… but the rest of her knows better. Her father has always been right: the only true justice is having the strength to protect oneself against invasion or conquest.

  “If the city calls you, listen to it,” she murmurs to herself; her mother’s words. And São Paulo echoed this, telling her that the city needed her. But Aislyn decides in this moment to ignore the call. Her borough is what protected her—not Manhattan or Queens or Brooklyn or the Bronx. Staten Island. Everything she needs in life is right here. The city can go hang.

  With this thought in mind, she falls into bed, and exhausted sleep.

  A few miles away, in a trash-strewn train yard, MTA engineers and police gather and murmur, mystified by a series of four massive, parallel trenches that have appeared, breaching the tracks of Staten Island’s lone, nameless subway line. The trenches were actually glowing hot and smoking when they were first discovered by a sleepy conductor going off shift—as if they weren’t dug but sliced into the gravelly earth with a giant hot knife, or maybe an industrial-strength laser. Since then, they’ve cooled off enough that investigators can put ladders down to try to figure out what kind of incendiary device could have caused such damage. Each trench is fifteen or sixteen feet at its deepest point, shearing through soil, metal, concrete, bedrock, and even the electrified third rail. As if someone rent the earth itself with great, girder-sized claws.

  Repairs will be simple enough—fill the holes with rebar and cement, replace the broken tracks—though they will take several days. In that time, many of the island’s poorest people will struggle to get to and from work, or to visit their sick parents, or to pick up their kids from school. A city’s commuter conduits are its lifeblood.

  And sometimes even shallow wounds fester.

  Aislyn sleeps.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Yeah, So, About That Whole Teamwork Thing

  Bronca hates them instantly, these avatars of the other boroughs who now sit or stand in her office. Brooklyn’s the one who pisses her off the most. Oh, she recognizes the woman at once—MC Free, one of the first female MCs from back in the old days, who’d felt plenty free to start beefs with every other woman in the field and drop all the same kinds of homophobic bullshit that the men had done, while having the nerve to call herself feminist. Figures she’d turn politician. Also figures she’s the one who turns up her nose at the messiness of Bronca’s office, refusing to sit on an available chair because it’s got dried oil paint on it.

  But Manhattan is no better, with his friendly smile that shows too many teeth. She thinks at first that he might be kin; something about the set of his features feels familiar, even though he’s obviously so multiracial that he could be anything. Then she finds herself leaning toward him, listening to him a little more than the others as he speaks, and belatedly she gets it. Maybe the Dutch smiled like that when they gave trinkets to people of the Canarsee—a band of the Lenape—and laid sole claim to what all others had shared for millennia. Probably every ethnic group he meets thinks he’s one of theirs, at least partially. It’s a subtle, manipulative bit of magic, and Bronca resents the fuck out of it as soon as she figures it out.

  Queens is the one Bronca probably shouldn’t hate, because she’s just a girl too overwhelmed by everything to be one of the movers and shakers in this, but Bronca finds herself distrusting the girl’s apparent innocence anyway. She’s Queens. Queens can’t possibly be that gormless. But of course, Bronca herself is the Bronx, and the Bronx don’t trust nobody but the Bronx, so maybe her distaste for everyone else is just as inexorable as Manhattan’s charm.
If so, she leans into it, because it’s been a rough few days and she doesn’t feel like trying to be better.

  “I don’t need you,” Bronca says. It’s the third time she’s said it, and they’re not listening. She’s about to throw them out. “I pushed that culo in white out after she attacked my place. Did it by myself. I needed you then and none of you were here, so I handled it, and I don’t need you now.”

  They all look at each other. Brooklyn sighs and turns away, either giving up or just not caring, so Manhattan’s the one who tries again. He’s smooth, she’ll give him that. Could talk rings around Raul. Yijing’s probably gonna throw him her panties when he leaves Bronca’s office.

  “I don’t think I understand your objection,” he says. “Manny” he calls himself. It’s bullshit. He’s bullshit. That’s her objection. But he actually has the nerve to look hurt. “We all know what we are. I know you feel it, too. Why choose to protect only one borough when by working with us, you can secure the whole city?”

  “Because I fight my battles alone,” she snaps. “Always have. And because when I do ‘work with’ others, I prefer to do it alongside people who would walk through fire for me. Will you?”

  Of course he frowns. “Maybe. I have to get to know you first.”

  At least he’s honest. “Well, then. I don’t want to know you, so.”

  “The fire we’ve got to walk through is here, now, sis,” says Brooklyn. But she says it with her back to Bronca, while looking through the office’s inner window at the exhibit hall beyond. It’s disrespectful as fuck, and Bronca suspects Brooklyn’s not even trying to be disrespectful. She’s just naturally an asshole. “Door’s hot, alarms going off, stop, drop, and roll.”

  “I’m not your sis. And don’t act like you’d piss on me to put the fire out.”

  Poor Queens—she gave another name, but Bronca doesn’t remember it, and anyway, she’s Queens—just looks confused. “Do you all know each other?” she asks the room. “I feel like there’s bad blood here.”