The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

  In the front yard are four women and an older man. The man, who is maybe Japanese, is picking himself up off the ground. In one of his hands is a strange, bright red envelope covered in gold foreign characters, which he’s holding like a shuriken from one of the anime shows Aislyn used to watch. His glasses are spiderwebbed on one side. Of the women, the stocky short-haired Mexican-looking one stands with her feet planted, crouched low like she’s about to do a wrestling move, even though she’s old enough to be Aislyn’s grandmother. She’s also wearing the biggest, ugliest old boots Aislyn’s ever seen. The tall, stately Black lady is vaguely familiar, though Aislyn can’t place her face. She’s in a skirt suit that is covered in dirt all along one side, and she’s barefoot. On the curb nearby, neatly positioned next to her sensible heels, is a pair of small gold-loop earrings. The third woman, who sits shaking on the ground, is Indian and plump and young enough to be Aislyn’s own age. She seems all right despite the shakes, but she’s brushing at her own arms as if frantically trying to wipe something away.

  And above them all floats the Woman in White, who glows as if a white sun shines through her skin. There are other things in the front yard, too, moving at the edges of Aislyn’s vision, other things that—She shudders and resolutely does not look at them again.

  The Woman beams over her shoulder as Aislyn steps outside. “Lyn, my dear! Sorry that we woke you. Did you sleep well?”

  “What the hell?” Aislyn stares at the strangers in front of her house. They’re mostly in the driveway and on the lawn, though keeping well away from the big white tower. But all at once, Aislyn recognizes them—even though she’s never met a single one of them before, she feels certain. She knows them without sight or name, as well as she knows herself. The big Black woman? Can’t be anyone but Brooklyn. The mean-looking old lady, The Bronx. The nervous-looking Indian girl. Queens. They are her, and she is them. “We are New York,” she murmurs, and then flinches. No.

  They’re missing one, because the old Japanese guy definitely isn’t Manhattan, though Aislyn senses at once that he, too, is a city. Another substitute. Who’s standing, or trying to remain standing since he seems unsteady on his feet, in the flower bed. In Aislyn’s flower bed, where she grows herbs and chamomile for her tea. She can see his filthy, foreign foot planted square on the dill.

  The anger comes on faster than Aislyn’s ever gotten angry in her life. It is as if Conall has broken a dam within her, and now every bit of fury she has ever suppressed over thirty years just needs the barest hair trigger to explode forth. She steps out of the house and onto the walkway, and there is shimmering, terrible light around her as she summons forth every drop of belonging that her island can give her, which is a whole heaping lot. The foreigner and her other selves all turn to stare at her, eyes widening at the manifestation of her power. They are awed by her and it’s delicious. She bares her teeth.

  “Get off my lawn,” she says.

  What happens next is instantaneous. One moment, they’re trampling Aislyn’s herbs and the grass that her dad works so hard to keep neat. Next moment, all four of them have been picked up and flung backward by some invisible force, hurtling them away from the grass and driveway onto the street. The Woman in White, who isn’t technically standing on Aislyn’s lawn, remains where she is; the rest of them land on the asphalt of the street with cries or groans or curses. The Woman claps in delight when she sees what Aislyn’s done.

  The other avatars look shocked, except the Japanese guy, whose expression is unreadable as he picks himself up. Queens, grimacing and stumbling a little, helps up the one who is the Bronx. The Bronx rubs her hip, then picks up each of her booted feet and then puts them down, carefully, as if she cannot believe they have been moved without her volition.

  “That’s what you did to Paulo,” says the Queens girl, sounding both astonished and horrified. “My God, why are you attacking us?”

  “Because I don’t know you,” Aislyn snaps, “and you were standing on my lawn.”

  “You know who we are,” says Brooklyn. She’s frowning, and favoring her right wrist. “You have to, by now. And you know what that is.” She nods toward the Woman in White.

  “Yeah,” Aislyn says, offended now. “That’s my friend.”

  “You’re crazy.” The Queens girl is shaking her head in disbelief. “Oh my God, you really are batshit crazy. You know what she’s going to do to you? To the whole city, if she can?”

  Aislyn hates being called crazy. Her father says it all the time; all women are crazy, as far as he is concerned. She loves him, so she does not protest when he says it, but these are strangers, so now she feels free to hate.

  “She doesn’t want to,” Aislyn says coldly. “She has to. Sometimes people—” Aislyn’s father. Her mother. Herself. She flinches with this thought, then sets her jaw. “Sometimes people do bad things because they have to. That’s just life.” Aislyn folds her arms. “And there can’t be anything there, in her world, that doesn’t already exist here. It’s just that there, people try to be decent. So maybe…”

  She falters at the looks on their faces. They’re just staring at her as if they don’t understand. As if she’s wrong. Who the hell are they to judge her, though? Yes, maybe they’re the destiny she’s spent her whole life yearning for, but it has shown up on her front lawn and trampled her herbs and slapped her in the face with insults and disrespect, and now that it’s here she’s pretty sure she does not want this destiny. Destiny is rude and ugly, and maybe—

  “Maybe I don’t want the rest of the city to be okay,” Aislyn snarls. “Maybe it should all go to hell.”

  Eyes widen; there are gasps. The Japanese guy’s mouth has set in a hard, resigned line. Then the Black lady’s face contorts with anger, and she starts forward. “Now, see, what you’re not gonna do is leave my daughter to die because you’re a selfish xenophobic little heifer. Come the fuck on here.” The Bronx, obviously having reached the same conclusion, also strides toward Aislyn. Both of them plainly intend to force her to go with them.

  Aislyn stumbles back. “You can’t—You’re going to kidnap me? My dad’s a cop, I’ll—”

  “Uh uh uh,” says the Woman in White. The two older women stop as the Woman in White moves between them and Aislyn, while Aislyn presses back against her house’s front door, panting a little with an incipient panic attack. But the Woman in White is smiling—as she turns and opens a door in the air.

  Through an arched entryway is a small cavern lined with black, glittering walls. On the floor of this cavern, Aislyn can see another young woman, this one chubby and brown-skinned, with loose curly hair. She’s lying on the ground in this place, and she appears to be unconscious. She’s also covered in gross-looking sticky wetness of some kind.

  “Oh no,” groans the Bronx-woman, going still with shock. “Veneza?”

  “Always check your back seat,” says the now-grinning Woman in White. “I used to think that was a euphemism for making sure your ass was on straight! But no, it literally means check your back car seat; you people never make jokes when I expect them.” She sobers. “If you want her back with her shape and sanity intact, you’ll leave. And leave me with my friend here.” She turns a winning smile on Aislyn.

  “And then you’ll destroy the city,” says the Japanese guy.

  “Naturally. But I’ll at least make sure it’s quick and painless, all right? We’ve never wanted to cause suffering. That’s your people’s way.” She lifts her chin a little. “We can be civilized. You stand down. I bring my city into this world and use it to begin erasing this universe and all of its antecedents and offshoots. If you like, I can create a temporary pocket universe where some members of your species will survive the collapse, though of course without the support of nearby universal branches or a city’s power, it will eventually succumb to entropy. But it should last long enough for your brief, unidirectional lives to end naturally. Peacefully. We all win.” She beams.

  The Japanese man scrunches his face i
n confusion and rapidly growing denial. “What?”

  But the old woman, the Bronx, shakes her head. Her lips are pressed tight together. “That’s not how this fucking works,” she says. “You don’t get to do this. You don’t roll up in here and threaten to kill everything we love, and claim to be civilized while you do it.”

  “Oh my God,” says Queens. She’s staring at the girl in the cavern, and her face is distorted with disgust. When Aislyn looks into the cavern to try to understand what Queens is so horrified by, she realizes belatedly that the cavern walls have begun to flex in a strange, arrhythmic way. When one of the walls shifts in an odd way, Aislyn glimpses something hard and ridged slide out from behind it. A comb? she wonders. She thinks it’s a comb. It’s black, like a comb meant for men or Black people. The comb’s teeth are irregular, and needle-sharp at the tips, and they curve a little. Inward, toward the young woman, almost like

  teeth they are teeth not a comb teeth teeth teeth

  And the place that the girl lies within isn’t a cavern at all.

  A fold of the glittering (glistening, Aislyn realizes, her gorge rising; it is glistening with saliva) cavern wall shifts aside a little, to bare a narrow, vertically oriented throat that vibrates for an instant. The sound that emerges is not a voice, but a dead, flat throbbing tone. Ump. It flexes again. Dad. Ump.

  It’s the Ding Ho. A Ding Ho has that poor girl in its open mouth, threatening to swallow her alive.

  “You’re the most horrible thing in the world,” Queens says. She’s crying, but her fists are clenched. “Veneza isn’t even one of us. She’s just ordinary! Why would you hurt her?” She raises those plump fists, ready to fight. All three of the other parts of New York are tensing, crouching, preparing themselves to fight the Woman in White. To fight Aislyn’s only friend.

  Aislyn clutches and shakes her head. It’s too much. She just wants it to be over already. So she shuts her eyes and clenches her fists, and wishes with all her might that every one of these dangerous strangers would just go away.

  Everything then happens very quickly.

  The thing emerges from the stairway tunnel slowly, more of a bulging forward than an active movement. Fast glacial. Ghostly in its shifting, fluttering white shapelessness. It’s easy to see the bones of the subway train that it used to be, underneath what it is now: a living, flexible, snakelike thing covered in a proliferation of white tendrils so thick as to resemble fur. That fur ripples back in waves, pressing against the tiled stone, easing the passage of the train through the narrow archway mouth in the same way that cilia move things through the small intestine. As Manny and Paulo watch, the elongated nose of the train oozes to the side, turning and questing about like a living thing on the hunt, reshaping itself by the moment… and finally focusing on Manny, Paulo, and the sleeping primary.

  Paulo holds his cigarette the way Manny remembers holding a knife. He blows a hard puff of smoke at the train-beast, and despite a gap of yards, the thing flinches, its unearthly light flickering momentarily as the tendrils covering its nose die away. Underneath is the metal and wire of the former front train car, now horribly distorted into a bullet-like shape—but after a moment, tendrils from the unaffected portion of the car grow rapidly forward again. New ones sprout on the denuded nose, and within seconds the whole thing is as it was before.

  Then a line seems to peel its way down the length of the thing, and it splits apart from the tip. Two halves of a whole. A mouth. And at their core, a black throat lined with jagged, broken-off subway seats.

  Paulo curses softly, stepping back. There is fear on his face. Manny flexes his fists, stepping forward as fear for the primary eclipses any fear for himself. He still hasn’t thought of a construct, but there is a growl in his chest; all has faded into a red haze of instinct. “He’s mine,” he snarls. His voice has deepened, reverberating; Paulo throws him a startled glance. “Mine! You can’t have him!”

  The train monster hisses like sliding doors, and splits further. Now it’s a mouth in four parts, wormlike and wrong. The lower mouths end in molars formed from the train’s metal wheels, now razor-sharp and spinning with manic, devouring speed. There’s even a tiny uvula back there, dangling above the wheels: a red pull-knob on a chain, behind which a cracked sign reads EMERGENCY BRAKE.

  And, horror of horrors, it is talking. “S-staaaaand… c-c-clear,” it purrs, in a distorted, singsong electronic voice. “Closssssing… d-d-d-dooooooooors…”

  But Manny does not stand clear. He stands to fight. And he is changing, too. He is bigger, suddenly, taller; he feels his button-down pop loose and his jeans rip as all at once his head and shoulders brush the ceiling. He clenches his fists and bares his teeth and no longer cares about pretending to be the good-looking, friendly creature others see. All that matters is the primary. All Manny wants, all that he is built to do, is protect him.

  And as black fur and shimmering city-power sheaths Manny’s limbs, and as his shoulders broaden and grow heavy with superhumanly strong muscle, he has one last fleeting thought before he becomes in sum total the beast he has always been within:

  I’m really going to have to watch some better movies about New York.

  Then King Kong pounds the floor, and charges forward, fists raised, to do battle.

  The world ripples around Aislyn’s house. “Go away!” Aislyn screams. “Leave me alone! None of you belong here!”

  And because belonging is as quintessential to Staten Island–ness as toughness is to the Bronx and starting over is to Queens and weathering change is to Brooklyn, and because they stand upon Aislyn’s ground where she is Staten Island and her will becomes supernatural law—

  Her voice echoes and the wave of city-energy that ripples along the grass and leaves and air and asphalt is like a thousand-clarion hurricane blast—

  And then they are gone. Their car is gone. All of the awful, spindly creatures that have been drawing closer around Aislyn, their movements too illogical and jittery to contemplate and their voices rising and falling in soft inhuman jibbers, are gone—even the one that held the unconscious girl in its mouth. When it vanishes, there is a faint, startled ump? But then Aislyn’s front yard is quiet and empty again, at last.

  Only the Woman still floats nearby, because Aislyn didn’t mean her.

  Aislyn stands trembling in the wake of all this, her hands loose, her head swimming. She’s tired. Exhausted, suddenly. It takes a lot, she realizes, to drive away so many parts of herself. But sometimes, to survive, that’s just what you have to do.

  She folds herself down into a crouch and covers her head with her hands and sits there on her house’s doorstep, shaking and rocking back and forth. After a moment, the Woman lands with a light tap of feet on the concrete beside her. Then a hand touches Aislyn’s shoulder, gentle and warm.

  “Friends,” says the Woman. “Right? Facing the big, scary multiverse together.”

  It’s surprisingly comforting. “Yeah,” Aislyn murmurs softly, not lifting her head, although some of her shakes ease off. “Friends.”

  She feels that sudden sharp sting again, high on her shoulder, near the back of her neck. The pain of it fades quickly, however—and in its wake, as the Woman in White takes her hand away and sighs in satisfaction at last, Aislyn feels warmer. Safer. No longer confused at all.

  She lifts her head and smiles up at the Woman in White, who smiles back in warmth and welcome. And for the first time in perhaps Aislyn’s whole life, she no longer feels alone. A whole city cares about her! So what if that city is not New York.

  Quietly, all over Staten Island, more towers and oddities begin to grow. It is the infrastructure of a different city, laying the foundations of a different world. And now, only one thing can possibly stop it.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  New York Is Who?

  They reappear in front of the Charging Bull of Wall Street, collapsing in a pile beneath its bronze nose. Tourists do stuff like this all the time for selfies, so neither the super-early-morni
ng joggers—it’s nearly dawn—nor the cluster of nuns on their way to morning prayers pay them much attention. There lie the unremarked-upon avatars of New York, or three out of the five at least, panting and dazed and trying to get their bearings after suffering a colossal defeat.

  Bronca’s still a little out of it when she struggles up enough to check on Veneza, who appeared with them. Young B’s seen better days. Her brown skin is more sallow than it should be, and her hair is lank and still wet with… something… that stinks. It’s an utterly alien stink. The waste products of incomprehensible metabolic processes from a completely different evolutionary pathway, bad breath from beyond. But as Bronca ignores the stink and checks to make sure Veneza is still breathing, Veneza’s face scrunches and her eyes crack open. Even then Bronca is worried. She can’t see any of those white things growing on Veneza anywhere, but the poor girl was in Squigglebitch’s hands… mouth… for a while.

  As soon as Veneza sees Bronca, however, she groans. “I was headed out of town. I was. Don’t start with me.”

  The complaint eases a lot of Bronca’s fears at once, and she lets out a weak laugh. “I wasn’t going to. Just glad you’re alive.”

  “Yeah. Eu também.” Veneza sits up, rubbing her eyes. “God, fuck, I thought I was gonna die. Just looking at some of those things… I felt like everything in me was just ready to shut down. They shouldn’t exist. That place shouldn’t exist.”

  “What?” That’s Brooklyn, who is climbing to her feet and ineffectually trying to hide the giant split torn into her skirt. It’s nothing indecent, but she’s the type.

  “Nice legs,” Bronca says, just to fuck with her. Brooklyn grimaces back.

  “That place. Where Squigglebitch is from.” When Veneza lowers her hand, her expression is haunted, and that’s when Bronca sees the strain. She’s playing it off well, but there’s deep, atavistic fear in her face. “It wasn’t actually where she was from. She didn’t take me there, thank God, because I don’t think… It was more like a halfway point, where things from both places could exist. That’s where she hangs out when she’s not here. Except it’s wrong all in itself, yeah? Nothing’s supposed to work that way. I just don’t understand how buildings could be built like that.”