The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

  Brooklyn stares at the console. “Are you kidding me? A what, a racist white dude march? In New York? At almost midnight? What are they trying to do? They’re not even going to disrupt the city’s traffic much.”

  “Well, they’re disrupting us pretty fucking well,” Bronca mutters, turning onto Second Avenue. “Bet NYPD isn’t even going to stop them. Or else they’ll arrest any counter-protestors or people these guys pull out of their cars for a beatdown.”

  “But a march of angry white men, though,” Queens says worriedly. “That’s never good.”

  It most definitely is not. And Bronca muses that it’s damned strange for New York—which has its share of racists, God knows; the city’s special in a lot of ways, but not that one. Generally, however, the ones in the city are content to live and let live, as one must in any major city, especially if one doesn’t want to get knocked the fuck out on the subway.

  “Like New Orleans,” Hong murmurs, so softly that Bronca almost doesn’t hear him.

  “What?”

  In the rearview mirror, his stone face has gotten stonier. “What killed New Orleans was bad luck,” he said. “A series of terrible coincidences—institutions breaking down, old hatreds taking new form, subcultures choosing just the wrong moment to make a drastic change. So I thought at the time.”

  Then Bronca gets it. “You think this march is, what, bankrolled by Better New York? To force us onto a different route?”

  “I have no idea. But city avatars are generally quite fortunate. Helpful coincidences fall into our laps with great frequency. It’s part of what we are, how our cities help us. Your city is weak.” Bronca sees him shake his head in the rearview. “Or perhaps something else is working even harder, to counter its efforts.”

  There’s nothing they can say to that. Dread works best in complete silence.

  They hit Second Avenue at Spanish Harlem. Working-class neighborhood, late on a weeknight; Bronca’s unsurprised to see that the streets are mostly empty. Only the bodegas stand open, sentinels of The City That Never Sleeps And Occasionally Needs Milk At Two A.M. Gentrification here has taken the form of endless coffee shops. For the last few blocks these have been indie places, proudly touting their locally roasted pour-overs, all with different decor and sign fonts. Then comes the proof that it’s all over for the neighborhood’s original character: they pass a Starbucks on the corner. Bronca thinks. She can’t be sure. Because it is so covered in white tendrils and stiffer projections that she can barely see its logo or facade.

  It’s like some kind of animal. The overlapping, moving layers of white tendrils have given it a kind of brindle-furred appearance, blurring the building’s overall boxy shape. It’s a typical New York multiuse building: ground-floor business, apartments above. The apartment portion has a few tendrils on each level, but nothing like the monster down below.

  And when that monster abruptly ripples all over like water, and forms a huge, inhuman, vast-mouthed face—

  Bronca swerves. It’s reflex. There aren’t many other cars on the street, but two taxis and an Uber immediately honk, because sudden swerves do not mesh well with Manhattan traffic patterns at speed. When they’ve passed the Starbucks, Bronca looks at it in her rearview while Brooklyn slews around in her seat to stare, and Queens does the same. “What the fuck,” Queens says. She’s hyperventilating a little. Then her phone rings; she answers it. They all hear Aishwarya again, calmer than before but still sounding tense as she asks some question. “I can’t talk right now, I’m so sorry,” Queens murmurs before hanging up on her.

  Hong mutters something in Chinese. Then: “You need to ready a construct. If you have to fight—”

  “Oh, fuck!” Bronca cries, and this time she has to not only swerve, but lunge into the bike lane—as on the right side of the street, another Starbucks that is covered in glittering white feathers suddenly hops a little out onto Second Avenue. At them. The building attached to it lurches a little, but Bronca can see that it’s happening but not happening: something of the building, its solidity, is still there, even as in the other world it becomes a monster and comes at them. This particular Starbucks must have late open hours. Bronca can see human figures through the skin of the creature, blank-eyed as they sit at its window bar to sip their drinks, unperturbed by its lumbering attack.

  And two blocks farther down, Bronca can see another building, this one vaning colossal white porcupine spikes as it readies itself to pounce.

  The car that Bronca just cut off in order to escape the bird-Starbucks is leaning on its horn, the driver furious. Bronca doesn’t blame him. She pulls ahead to the next block and then stops at the curb, shaking as she grips the wheel and catches her breath. (She keeps an eye on the bird-Starbucks in the rearview, but the thing seems unable to go more than a few feet from its foundations. After glaring at Bronca in the mirror and snapping its glass-door beak at her once or twice, it drools foul-looking coffee-ground sludge before grudgingly backing into its former position.) The furious driver pulls around her, gesturing out the window and yelling something in the universal language of Fuck You Learn To Drive, before heading off.

  “It’s every Starbucks,” Brooklyn says, squinting down the street.

  “Not just them, look.” Queens points at a Dunkin’ Donuts that is heavily overgrown with corkscrewing wirelike stuff; from a distance it looks like a massive white ’fro. Across the street is some kind of café that has developed a silky white chin curtain, which scraggles over the sidewalk. “That Au Bon Pain there looks like it’s going to start telling jokes at open mic improv any minute now.”

  “Those aren’t actively chasing us down the street like the damn Starbucks, though.” Bronca shakes her head, peering down the length of Second Avenue. “I could try Lex or Park, but the real problem is that there’s one of those things on every other corner—especially near Grand Central and the other tourist spots.” Fleetingly she finds herself wishing that they’d brought Manhattan with them. Maybe he could’ve somehow secured the route against this.

  “This doesn’t make sense!” Queens cranes her neck to see the porcupine thing on the next block. It’s very still, but Bronca doesn’t trust it. It’s also one of the newer buildings on the block and might be more flexible than the older, unrenovated bird-Starbucks. “Starbucks has been in the city for years! It has to be part of New York by now.”

  “Starbucks is everywhere,” Hong rumbles. “All over my city, too. Big chain stores make a city less unique, more like every other place. We do not have time for your breakdown, Bronx.”

  Bronca freezes, then turns around in her seat. “Disrespect me again,” she snaps. “You will be walking back to JFK from that corner right there. Hope nothing eats you on the way.”

  There must be enough true fury in her voice; he looks away and takes a deep breath. With brittle, exaggerated politeness, he says, “Apologies. Do you have an alternate plan?”

  She’s not really mollified, but they’ve got other problems. In answer to his question, she sets her jaw and pulls the car away from the curb.

  “What are you going to—” Queens begins.

  “I’m gonna drive like a motherfucking New Yorker, is what I’m going to do,” Bronca snarls. And then she cuts off a truck and accelerates to fifty.

  Queens cries out, and Bronca hears her scrambling for the seat belt that she should’ve already had on. The truck blats an air horn at Bronca. “Honking’s illegal! You’re gonna get a ticket!” she shouts—but she’s grinning, in spite of herself. It’s been a shitty few days. So at full speed she rockets down Second Avenue, cutting neat zigzags across the traffic, threading the needle between two Land Rovers, shooting through an intersection just as its light turns red. Hong curses Cantonese behind her. A right-lane car pass. An impatient swerve around a slow-moving pedestrian. There’s a police speed monitor on one side of the road down by Twenty-third, reminding drivers that the speed limit in the city is twenty-five, and it blinks a baleful red seventy as she blasts past.


  But the Starbucks monsters can’t touch them. After ten blocks, silvery flickers of light have begun to appear around Bronca’s Jeep, licking at the edges of her vision. After fifteen, it’s not a peripheral thing anymore; a sheath of white light surrounds them. A snakelike Starbucks lunges out of the lobby of a chain hotel, its ghostly, stretched-wide mouth open, and just past its translucent white gullet, a tired-looking barista slumps on his knees, scrubbing up a spilled iced something. But the snake’s spectral teeth bounce off Bronca’s car as if it’s tried to bite a rock. And Bronca blazes on.

  The cops don’t stop her, or even seem to see her. Hong and Queens have sat back, gripping the armrests and making sure their seat belts are buckled. Brooklyn, bless her, helps by shouting out the window at any car that looks as if it’s about to impede their route. “Are you blind, motherfucker?” and so on. Adding to the construct, Bronca now realizes, blending the power of their two boroughs into one massive, preemptive wave of Get The Fuck Out The Way. Now the sheath of energy is bullet-shaped, and long enough that it physically shunts aside cars that are going too slow or about to cut them off. Bronca’s grinning like a clown. Brooklyn’s laughing, too, giddy with it. It’s beautiful.

  Second Avenue ends at Houston, so the GPS starts directing them on a more zigzagging route toward Brooklyn. Now they’re in the Lower East Side. The only Starbucks in the area is a tired old fishlike thing on Delancey, which can’t even make it past its own curb when it tries to flop at them. Bronca does the speed limit past that one, just as an extra unspoken fuck-you.

  The Williamsburg Bridge is gone, long may it rest. There’s something in the water past all of the warnings and roadblocks and memorial photo walls, something white and heaving and organic that seems to fill the entirety of the East River, and enormous enough to tower over the lone support pylon that remains standing in the bridge’s wake. As they pass Delancey, the white thing slowly undulates, even as they watch. It radiates a sickly greenish-white light that hurts Bronca’s eyes, and she swerves off Delancey sooner than she might have, because of it.

  “Oh no,” Queens murmurs in a soft, horrified voice. “That’s the thing that broke the bridge. It’s real, but I didn’t think it would still be there.” No one answers her, mostly because there’s nothing to say.

  Instead, Brooklyn taps Bronca’s phone. “I’m adjusting the route to take us over the Brooklyn Bridge. No chain stores on the BQE.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Bronca says. Then she pulls over to the curb again, while they’re on one of the smaller streets where this is still possible.

  “What—”

  “I hate driving in Brooklyn,” she says, unbuckling her seat belt. “Handle your own damn borough.”

  Brooklyn laughs in spite of herself, and gets out to switch places with her. “You want to drive once we get to Staten Island?” she asks Queens, while they buckle in.

  “I don’t drive, remember?” Queens looks sheepish.

  “Oh, right, forgot.”

  “How can you not know how to drive?” Hong asks, scowling.

  “Because usually, New Yorkers don’t need to,” Bronca snaps at him. Not that she’s any big fan of Queens, either, but it’s habit to defend other women when men start ragging on them, and the fact that Queens is New York and Hong Kong is an out-of-towner just adds impetus. “Now shut up again. I was starting to not hate you.”

  The rest of the ride to the island is uneventful. Still, they all see them as they crest the Verrazano, which gives them a good view of the island: more towers. Two of them, at least, though there’s also a humped, nodule-covered thing in the distance that is either a really ugly stadium or yet another weird structure.

  Brooklyn slows down in Staten Island—not just because the streets here are narrower and there are a lot of cops around, but also because they can sense the avatar of Staten Island, now that they’ve entered her domain. It’s a strange feeling, but not altogether different from that new deep awareness they all have of the primary, which has lingered in them since they did their little group-vision thing. It is as if there is a lodestone in their heads, sort of, with one end that points toward City Hall instead of north. The other points toward somewhere in the middle of Staten Island—an area that Hong pointed out to them on Google Maps, which is called Heartland Village.

  To get there, they must drive through a sprawling, hilly woodland, which that night is full of strange shadows. They’re tense the whole way, watching the spaces between the trees, ready for anything. Nothing happens, but the unease lingers—getting worse, Bronca notes, as they move deeper into the island’s territory. Before long, they’ve pulled onto a neat little street where all the houses are cute two-story single-families interspersed with semi-attached double houses. They are eerily similar in frame, these homes, though they’ve all got different paint jobs and siding and hedges. It’s the suburbs, where conformity trumps comfort. Bronca’s never liked places like this.

  Here they stop, however. Because growing from the lawn of the house that probably belongs to their target, there is another white tower. That’s a bad sign in itself, Bronca thinks—but as they start toward the house, white curling vine-like things appear out of nowhere, erupting from the soil and spinning down from the nearby tower and thickening and drawing together and solidifying, forming a human-sized tangle… until the Woman in White stands before them, arms folded, legs braced apart, and feet planted solidly on the lawn.

  This time she has a mane of white hair that is long and raggedly straight. Very Seventies chic, which matches the pointed, narrow, sloe-eyed face that she currently wears. Incongruously, she’s wearing booty shorts and a loose tank top. She looks like an evil midcareer Joni Mitchell.

  And this time, she isn’t alone. Looming out of the hedges behind her and from the neighbors’ lawns, Bronca can see huge, attenuated, spindly shadows—which had at first seemed like just ordinary castings from the streetlamps. It quickly becomes clear that they are something more when they begin to sway and move. There are sounds accompanying this movement: a lilting series of hoots, dry crackings like the breaking of tree limbs, faint low vibrations as something heavy, but mostly unseen, humps across the lawn sods. No pretty paint people here. Bronca almost misses them, after she gets a not-good look at a few of the shadow things.

  “I can’t see anything well,” Queens says, in a hushed tone. “Why can’t I see them? I have to look off to the side. When I look at them directly—”

  “Yeah,” Bronca says. “I’m getting the sense that she’s got new tricks every time she shows up.” Something to her left is swaying from side to side, though occasionally it stops and jerks upward in an awkward, vaguely amphibianesque movement. It’s not close, hiding amid the hedges of one of the neighboring houses, but she really doesn’t like that movement for some reason. It feels like the thing is practicing for a jump.

  “None of this is how it should be,” Hong says. He’s got a hand inside his suit jacket, grasping something out of sight. “She has always been enormous, monstrous, attacking when a city is newborn and weak. Not human in shape. Not speaking. Never this.”

  “When you assume,” says the Woman in White, “you make an ass of u and me.”

  And all of a sudden, all four of them are yanked into the other place, where time and space have no meaning and all of them bristle and vane with cranes and rusting girders and blurry Beaux Arts glass. Massive Hong Kong looms at their backs, but this is not his city; Bronca can see Manhattan’s skyscrapers better, even though he’s a little apart from them as well. Staten Island is here, too, somehow apart from the rest of them and more subdued in size and shine, even though they stand within her borders.

  But between her and the rest of them stands something else. Another city, positioned as if to protect Staten Island.

  It’s not any part of New York. It’s enormous, bigger than all of them combined, and everything about it feels so wrong that its very closeness makes Bronca flinch back, raising construction scaffolds in autom
atic defense. The new city is precisely circular in its footprint. Its towers gleam, its neighborhoods sprawl, its parks teem with animals and trees, but all of it is wrong. Those aren’t towers, Bronca thinks in rising horror. They’re breathing. Those aren’t buildings. I don’t know what the fuck— She can’t think. It’s too close. Just the sight of it hurts.

  And every skew-angled building, precisely marked street, and suppurating organism of this city gleams in brilliant, perfect, unnaturally bright white.

  They snap back into peoplespace, are thrown back, and there every one of them stands stunned by the awful, nauseating realization that the Woman in White is a city, another city, a monstrous city from nowhere in or even close to this universe, whose very streets are inimical to their entire universe.

  “Welcome, avatars of New York,” says the Woman in White as they stand frozen in the night-shadow of her tower. Her eyes—acid yellow this time, not even pretending to be a human color—flick at Hong and away dismissively. “And Hong Kong. Is it time for the final confrontation, then? Shall we play some exciting music? Should I deliver a villainous monologue?” She laughs abruptly. It is an utterly delighted laugh that sends chilly fingers dancing down Bronca’s spine. That’s the laugh of someone who’s pretty sure they’ve already won.

  Hong is breathing hard, Bronca notices, and there is a deeply shaken note in his voice as he speaks. He is a city of deep history and tradition, underneath its bright modern trappings and rebel reputation. It’s clear he does not take well to things that defy his understanding of the world. “This can’t be,” he murmurs. “We’ve fought you since the beginning. How can you be… I don’t understand.”

  “Obviously.” The Woman in White rolls her eyes and shifts to stand akimbo, leaning on one leg with her hand on her hip. “Well, smart amoebas are still just amoebas, aren’t they?”

  Bronca is still trying to reconcile Crazy Daisy Duke with the prim, sophisticated Dr. White—even though every newfound instinct within her affirms that they are the same person. Who isn’t a person at all. “What the hell are you, then?” she demands, hoping that her voice doesn’t shake. “Really.”