The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

  Her thumb bumps a button on Hong’s phone by accident, and the image shifts to let her see that the photo is part of some kind of social media thread. Most of it’s in Chinese, but there are a few English-language posts. “MORE TERRISM?!” shouts one spelling-challenged alarmist.

  Hong takes his phone back. “This has never happened before,” he says. It’s mostly to Paulo, though he glances at all of them. His jaw is tight. “Cityspace is cityspace. Peoplespace is peoplespace. They are different universes, normally bridged only through us. Yet this photo reflects the fact that one borough of this city, in cityspace, is actively attempting to withdraw from the rest. And the denizens of peoplespace have noticed.”

  Paulo has pushed himself to his feet, though he needed Veneza’s help to get all the way up. (She blushes, Bronca notes, when he nods to her and murmurs something that’s probably good thinking on the brigadeiro in Portuguese, and which she’s clearly hearing as come with me to the Casbah.) “This is what I’ve been trying to tell all of you old shits,” Paulo snaps, his accent lengthening the last word into sheets, though otherwise his English is only lightly inflected with another tongue. “Something here is impeding the normal postpartum process—something more than just the fact that this city hasn’t finished its maturation. The dimensional overlap is unstable. The Enemy is too active, active in ways it never has been—”

  “Yes, yes.” Hong dismisses him and focuses on Manhattan, who he seems to have arbitrarily decided is the leader of the group, probably because he’s the only other man present. “I saw you and your cohort attempting to synchronize with your primary. Did you find him?”

  Manhattan shakes his head. “No. We saw him, but…”

  That’s when Bronca inhales, remembering what she’d suddenly noticed during their whatever-it-was. “Those tile patterns,” she says. “I know those fucking tile patterns.” And then she turns and heads for the meeting room door. Behind her, the others are still for an instant, then she hears them scramble or stumble to follow.

  Beyond the meeting room, the Center has closed for the evening. Yijing’s left a sticky note on the monitor of Bronca’s office desktop, even though she knows that Bronca only turns the damn thing on when she has to: “600K in new donations!!” Bronca stares at it for a moment, unable to process the number, then she puts the note aside to focus on something that makes sense. Like tracking down the living embodiment of New York City from clues she picked up in a dream.

  By the time the machine has finished its endless boot-up sequence, she’s gone to one of her bookcases and yanked out a big photo book titled Beaux Arts Century. And by the time the others have crowded into her office to try to figure out what she’s figured out, she’s found it. “This. This!” She slaps one of the photos in the book, then turns it around for them. It’s a full-color, high-quality picture of a room with a beautifully vaulted ceiling, tiled with what looks like decorative gold bricks.

  Manhattan leans down to peer at it, and a muscle in his jaw flexes. “That’s the style. Not the place.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think the primary is sleeping in the Grand Central Oyster Bar,” drawls Brooklyn. She’s frowning, though. “But I do feel like I’ve seen tiles like this in other places.”

  “You have,” says Bronca, grinning, “because back before people with no taste started replacing every beautiful thing in this city with cheap bullshit, it was one of the most distinctive architectural forms in the world—an art movement that was centered in New York. They’re called Guastavino tiles. Obsolete now, but back in the day they were designed to be fireproof and self-stabilizing. Perfect for a city that’s half-underground and full of flammable trash.” She taps the ceiling in the photo. “There’s only a few examples of this left in the city. So…”

  “Ohhhhh, yeah, I got you,” says Veneza, sliding into Bronca’s desk chair and pulling the keyboard toward herself. Bronca sees her typing in “Guastavino tiles” and “Manhattan.”

  Manhattan, meanwhile, has been thumbing through the book. “This says a lot of the Guastavino vaults were in old tenements,” he says, looking troubled. “Buildings that are derelict—” He stops. Bronca sees how his eyes widen. Then he turns the book around so fast that the motion knocks over a cup of pens on Bronca’s desk. “Here,” he says, his voice tight as he points. “Here.”

  Brooklyn looks, and chuckles. “Oh, my God. Of course.”

  Veneza looks, then grins, and turns the desktop monitor so they can see the web page she’s pulled up. DECOMMISSIONED SUBWAY STATION IS ARCHITECTURAL JEWEL IN THE CITY’S CROWN, the header reads. It’s the same place that Manhattan has found in Bronca’s book. “Old City Hall Station.”

  “Then that’s where he is,” Manhattan murmurs. He leans on the desk, letting out a sigh of relief. “We can go and find him, finally.”

  “It’s not easy to get to,” Brooklyn warns. “That station is defunct, closed to the public most of the time. Only way in—if you don’t want to sneak onto the tracks and risk electrocution, getting run over by a train, or getting arrested—is via the Transit Museum, but they only do tours once in a blue moon. I think I’ve got a favor I can call in, though.” She reaches for her phone.

  “Can’t you get there on the 6 train, when it turns around?” Veneza asks Brooklyn. “Tourists do it all the time. I did it once.”

  “Yeah, but they don’t let you out of the train. It doesn’t even stop.”

  Hong has come to peer at the book while they’re talking. Then he shakes his head impatiently and glowers around at them. “Fine. You’ll need to get there as soon as you can. We’ll have to hope that the strength your primary gains from consuming you four will finally allow him to awaken and properly protect the city, even without the fifth borough.”

  Silence falls for a moment.

  Then Brooklyn says, “I’m sorry, what?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  They Don’t Have Cities There

  In the morning, after Aislyn has made breakfast and eaten with her parents—and Conall, who did not look at her the entire time—she heads off to work. On the doorstep of the house she stops short, however, surprised by the sight of an enormous twenty-foot-wide white pillar taking up most of the front yard.

  It’s nothing identifiable. Just a big, smooth-sided and featureless cylindrical white thing jutting up from the ground and out of sight into the sky above. Aislyn stares at it, trying to understand how someone has built something this big in their front yard without her noticing, and without anyone in her house remarking on it. And so fast, given that it wasn’t there last night! Then she realizes she can see a flock of passing Canada geese through its translucence… and she understands, sort of.

  The pillar is like the flower fronds, and like the woman who always wears white; neither is From Around Here. And like the flower fronds, no one other than Aislyn can see the pillar—which is why, when her father passes her on the way to his own car, he waves without remarking on the titanic tower that now shadows his house. Her mother won’t be able to see it, either, Aislyn is pretty sure. Only Aislyn knows it’s there.

  When she steps into the driveway and gets a good look at the horizon—their house is on a slight hill—she spots another, similar pillar in the distance. Somewhere over near Freshkills Park, she’s guessing.

  Aislyn has a car—a used Ford hybrid that she bought a few years back. Her father hates it because he thinks only liberals should care about the environment, but he put up with her choice, and even gave her half the purchase price so that she could buy it outright without a car note, because at least it’s American made. She pays for gas and insurance with the money she earns from working at the local library, where she has an off-the-books job. (It’s nothing illicit, but it has to be off the books because she doesn’t have anything but a two-year associate’s, and the city requires a four-year degree. Her father agreed to “lose” some outstanding parking tickets for the head librarian.) But she can’t drive the car much because her father monitors the mileage, and
because she suspects he’s put a GPS tracker in it somewhere. He does things like that. When Aislyn wants privacy, she takes the bus.

  Right now, though, sitting in the car and staring at the tower in her yard, and thinking of the strange man—the city of São Paulo, apparently—who approached her, and thinking of Conall and her fear of leaving the island and… everything, Aislyn abruptly feels like she just can’t take much more of this.

  So she looks up at the rearview mirror, where a thin, barely visible white tendril wafts about. “Hey,” she says. “Can you come here? I need to talk.”

  For a moment nothing happens. Then, abruptly, the rearview mirror changes. One second, it features a stunning view of the Houlihan driveway. In the next, it opens onto a vast space. She can’t see it well—only a hard gray-white floor, which is so stark with shadows that it feels like there’s a spotlight somewhere, just out of view. She can’t see what’s making the shadows, but then one of them shifts, and a moment later the Woman in White sits up from somewhere below the rearview mirror. She’s different again, Aislyn notes. Still white, but this time there is a hint of epicanthic fold about her eyes, and exotic angles to her cheekbones and the spacing of her nose. Russian, maybe? Her brows are white. Her hair—Aislyn blinks.

  “Lyn, my person-shaped friend! I figured out why you were angry with me last night. What a bad boy that minion was. And how foolish, to get grabby with a city! You could have smushed him.”

  Aislyn nods absently. “Are you bald?”

  “Am I—” The Woman pauses. Abruptly, lush tawny-white hair tumbles around her face, nearly crowding her features out of the mirror. One lock falls artfully over an eye. “No, I am not bald.”

  “Ohhhhh-kaaaaay.” Then Aislyn frowns, remembering that she is supposed to be mad at the Woman, after all. Despite Conall’s subdued manner, Aislyn’s father had been delighted with him that morning, slapping the younger man on the back and calling him “son.” Apparently the current story is that somebody came into the backyard, and Conall fended the intruder off despite having drunk too much to remember the intruder’s face. A real hero, in Matthew Houlihan’s eyes. “So you know what Conall did.”

  “Yes, that one.” The Woman smiles brightly. “You should know that the guide-lines—the things you keep calling flowers?—don’t control people, not precisely. They just… guide. Encourage preexisting inclinations, and channel the energies from same into more compatible wavelengths.”

  What Aislyn gleans from this gobbledygook is that Conall got grabby because Conall is a grabby bastard to begin with, who might have attacked Aislyn whether he had a flower growing from his neck or not. But that, and the explanation, does not console her. “Why are you putting anything in people?” she asks. “I didn’t think it meant much at the ferry station. Now, though…”

  It is indisputable that the flower fronds, or guide-lines or whatever they’re called, have a purpose. That this purpose is something other than control makes it no less unnerving. What does happen, then, when the guide-lines get inside a person? Aislyn has a sudden memory of watching a nature show on a slow day, about parasites. One episode had been all about a fungus that grew inside ants as a kind of webwork throughout their bodies, eating them as it grew, and controlling their behavior. Then once all the juicy bits of the ant were gone, the fungus popped out of their heads in order to release its spores.

  From the back of the head, Aislyn remembers, incidentally. What would be the nape of the neck on a person.

  In the mirror, the Woman in White leans closer, narrowing her eyes. “Hmm, you’re getting the wrong idea, I can tell,” she says. “It’s not, uh, whatever you’re thinking. Let me explain. But this is awkward. Hold on a moment, I’ll come to you.”

  Something shoots from the mirror, past Aislyn’s face and into the back seat. Aislyn catches her breath and jerks away in pure reflex, but she doesn’t quite have time to register what she’s seeing as something frightening. As far as she can tell, it’s just a long, thick tongue of featureless white substance, which skeets through the mirror frame as if it isn’t glass, but the opening of some kind of tube or delivery chute. What she sees when she turns is not a puddle of goo, as she is half expecting, but feet. White, featureless boots, attached to nothing, although the bottoms of the boots are beginning to develop texture and color. Then something pixels up from these to form legs, primly crossed at the ankle. Then hips, a waist, all of it achieving realistic definition only belatedly—and finally the Woman in White sits there, beaming, with a little clutch purse in her lap.

  There is an instant in which Aislyn’s mind tries to signal an alarm, doom, existential threat, all the usual fight-or-flight signals that are the job of the lizard brain. And if the gush of substance had been different somehow—something hideous, maybe—she would have started screaming.

  Three things stop her. The first and most atavistic is that everything in her life has programmed her to associate evil with specific, easily definable things. Dark skin. Ugly people with scars or eye patches or wheelchairs. Men. The Woman in White is the visual opposite of everything Aislyn has been taught to fear, and so… even though intellectually Aislyn now has proof that what she’s been seeing is just a guise, and the Woman in White’s true form could be anyone or anything…

  … Aislyn also thinks, Well, she looks all right.

  The second thing that stops her is the latent, not-quite-acknowledged realization that the Woman is dangerous. What will happen if she screams? Her father will come running to defend what’s his, and Aislyn is fairly certain that the Woman cannot be harmed by any ordinary human being. And then will the Woman put one of those parasite-flowers into him? He is already a man inclined toward violence and control. Will he become worse? She will do nearly anything to avoid this possibility.

  The third, and possibly most powerful of the things that stop her, is that she is agonizingly lonely, and the Woman has begun to feel something very like a friend.

  So Aislyn does not scream.

  “Now, you just drive to work,” the Woman in White says, reaching forward to pat Aislyn’s shoulder. Again there is a fleeting ghost of a sensation, like a sting that is short-circuited on its way to causing pain. Aislyn flinches now, realizing what that sting means—but there is no white tendril on her shoulder when the Woman takes her hand away. The Woman sighs a little. Aislyn lets out a shaky breath.

  (She does not parse the Woman’s sigh as disappointment. She does not parse her own sigh as relief. The alternative is to challenge her own belief that the Woman in White isn’t so bad. This would force her to question her own judgment and biases and find them wanting. And given how hard she has fought lately to feel some kind of belief in herself, she is not ready to doubt again. So it’s fine. Everything is fine.)

  Focusing on what matters, Aislyn jabs a finger at the huge white towerlike thing in her front yard. “What is that?”

  “Mmm, think of it as an adapter cable,” says the Woman in White. “You know what those are, don’t you?”

  “Yes. But that’s not a cable.”

  “Of course it is. It’s just a very big adapter cable.”

  Aislyn shakes her head. She’s going to lose it in a minute. “Okay. Fine. What’s it adapting, then?”

  “Weeeeelllll, an adapter usually connects one way of doing a thing to a different way of doing a thing, right?” The Woman shrugs. “You want to listen to music. You have speakers designed to work with one kind of music-maker, but all of your music is on a different kind of music-maker. Yes? Irritating and inefficient. There’s a simple fix for the problem, however.” She gestures at the white tower.

  It shouldn’t make sense, but it does. Aislyn shakes her head slowly. “But what, I don’t know, way of doing a thing, could you possibly be adapting with that?”

  “My universe to yours.”

  “I—” Aislyn stares. Then closes her mouth. She really can’t think of anything else to say to that.

  The Woman sighs impatiently and then waves a
hand at the steering wheel. “Drive, drive! I don’t want you attracting any more attention by veering from your usual routine. I can’t watch you all the time. That’s why that nasty little São Paulo almost got to you last night.” Then she grins in delight, clapping her hands in just a little too much glee—but it is infectious, her giddy delight. “But you showed him, didn’t you?”

  It had felt good to send that awful man tumbling. Just like Conall. São Paulo’s car is gone today, she notes, and there have been no police or emergency vehicles around that morning, so she assumes he got up and drove himself away. With two broken arms? No matter. Aislyn smiles to herself, then turns to the steering wheel and starts up the car. “Yeah. Okay. But if you’re going to ride to work with me, you have to tell me what’s going on.”

  “That’s the plan, lovely.” Aislyn pulls out of the driveway as she hears the Woman settling into her back seat. There is an odd moment when the car bumps across the gutter into the street. The whole vehicle seems to dip lower than usual. The struts groan, and she hears something in the car’s undercarriage scrape loudly against asphalt. The Woman in White mutters something like “Damned gravity, always forget the exact ratio,” and then the car rises back to its usual height and pulls away with no more difficulty.

  “The adapters are possibility,” the Woman says as Aislyn drives. Aislyn tries to look at her in the rearview because it’s polite to meet another person’s eyes during a conversation, but the Woman isn’t sitting in that area of the back seat. “A just-in-case. And I have no choice but to put them in the few rare places where this universe’s muons have become somewhat friendlier—which unfortunately means your front yard. Also, on top of the ferry station, over at that park that used to be a landfill, and at that college you used to attend. Where do you work?”

  “The public library branch at—” Then Aislyn understands. She went to the park after work once, and was ogled the whole time by a park service employee who was picking up the trash. That was last month or so. “You’re putting those things wherever I go?”