They’re speeding now, doing at least fifty. The tendrils shadow the sky and the air has turned cold and the smell of lightless oceans has grown nauseating and it’s getting hard to hold on to the cab’s roof. He hangs on anyway and half shuts his eyes against the wind and the burning salt of the thing’s scent and what is he doing? Pushing out the interloper. But he’s an interloper, too, isn’t he? And if he doesn’t do this exactly the right way, then only one of the interlopers here is going to walk away from this confrontation intact, and the umbrella isn’t strong enough.
Then, when the Checker is only feet away, close enough that Manny can see the slick, pore-flecked skin of the tendrils, and his side screams with agony like someone’s jabbed an ice-cold pike through him—
—he remembers the words of the woman who gave him the umbrella. I just like to hit people with it, she’d said.
Manny lets go of the OFF DUTY sign. Immediately he starts to slide back on the cab’s roof because they’re going so fast that he can barely hold on with his legs alone. But he might survive falling off the cab; he won’t survive contact with the nest of tendrils if he doesn’t get this umbrella up. He needs both hands for that, wrestling against the wind and his own fear, but in the welter of seconds that he has, he manages to lift the open umbrella above his head. Now he might die, but at least his hair won’t get wet in any sudden rain shower.
Suddenly there is energy around him, in him, blazing rusty red and tarnished silver and greened bronze and a thousand colors more. It has become a sheath around the whole cab—a sphere of pure energy brightening enough to compete with the June midday sunlight—and in its suddenly loud song Manny hears the horns of a thousand cars trapped on the FDR. The hissing air is eclipsed by the shouted road rage of hundreds of mouths. As he opens his mouth to shout with them, his cry is delight and the ecstasy of suddenly knowing that he isn’t an interloper. The city needs newcomers! He belongs here as much as anyone born and bred to its streets, because anyone who wants to be of New York can be! He is no tourist, exploiting and gawking and giving nothing but money back. He lives here now. That makes all the difference in the world.
So as Manny laughs, giddy with this realization and the power that now suffuses him, they strike the tendril mass. The sheath of energy surrounding the cab burns through it like a checkered missile. Of course, the cab is part of the power; this is why the city sent it to him. Manny feels the umbrella snag on something and he clings tighter to it, rudely not lifting it or moving it aside because I’m walking here, I have the right of way and he’s playing metaphysical sidewalk chicken with this violent, invasive tourist—Then they’re through.
Manny hears Madison yell from inside the cab as they get through the mass and see that there’s a line of stopped cars dead ahead. She slams the brakes. Manny loses his grip on the umbrella as he frantically grabs for the OFF DUTY sign, catching it even as his whole body flips onto the windshield and hood. The cab spins out as Madison throws the wheel; now, instead of flying forward, he’s being thrown around by centrifugal force. In his panic, he loses his grip on the sign and doesn’t know how he finds the strength to grab for the edge of the hood below the wipers, even as his legs come loose and most of his body flies free in the direction of the stopped traffic. If the cab flips, he’s dead. If he loses his grip and gets tossed onto the hatchback up ahead, he’s dead. If he falls off the cab and under the wheels—
But the cab finally skids to a halt, a bare inch away from the stopped car up ahead. Manny’s feet thump onto the hatchback’s trunk, not entirely of his own volition. It’s okay. Just nice to have something solid under his feet again.
“Get your feet off my fucking car!” someone inside shouts. He ignores them.
“Holy shit!” Madison sticks her head out the window, her face panicky, like how he feels. “Holy—Are you okay?”
“Yeah?” Manny’s honestly not sure. But he musters the wherewithal to sit up, and look back down the fast lane.
Behind them, the tendril forest has gone wild, its fronds whipping and flailing like a dying thing. It is dying. Where they punched through its thicket of roots, there is a Checker cab cutout like something from a kids’ cartoon—complete with an umbrella-shaped hole on top of its roof, and a hunched human silhouette underneath. The edges of the cutout glow as if hot, and the fire rapidly eats its way outward and upward, fast as a circle of flame burning through a piece of paper. Within seconds this burn has eaten its way through the base of the tendrils, then starts burning all the way up. No ash or residue remains in the wake of this process. Manny knows this is because the tendrils aren’t really there, aren’t really real in any way that makes sense.
The destruction is real, however. Once the last of the tendrils has burned away, a hovering, brightly colored knot of energy—the remnant of the sheath that surrounded the cab, now a wild, seething thing of its own—dissipates in a miniature explosion that ripples concentrically outward. Manny shudders as the wave of light and color and heat passes through him. He knows it won’t hurt, but he’s surprised when it warms the place on his side that hurt so badly before. All better now. More dramatically, tendrils that have attached themselves to the nearby cars wither away the instant the energy hits them. He feels the power roll onward out of sight as it passes beyond the nearest buildings and into the East River.
It’s done.
And as Manny climbs off the cab’s hood and settles back onto the ground, once again he feels something waft through him, from the soles of his shoes to the roots of his hair. It’s the same energy, he realizes, that suffused the cab when it torpedoed through the tendril mass—and which soothed him at Penn Station, and which guided him from there to here. That energy is the city, he understands somehow, and it is part of him, filling him up and driving out anything unnecessary to make room for itself. That’s why his name is gone.
The energy begins to fade. Will his memory come back when it’s done? No way to know. Though Manny feels he should be frightened by this realization, he… isn’t. It doesn’t make sense. Amnesia, even if it’s temporary, can’t be a good thing. He might have a brain bleed, some kind of hidden injury; he should go to a hospital. But instead of being frightened, he is actually comforted by the presence of the city within him. He shouldn’t be. He has an inkling that he just had a near-death experience. But he is.
The East River churns at his back. He looks up at the towering breadth of Manhattan: endless high-rise co-ops, repurposed banks, cramped housing projects sandwiched between ancient theater houses and soulless corporate headquarters. Nearly two million people. He’s been here one hour, but already he feels like he has never lived anywhere else. And even if he doesn’t know who he was… he knows who he is.
“I am Manhattan,” he murmurs softly.
And the city replies, without words, right into his heart: Welcome to New York.
CHAPTER TWO
Showdown in the Last Forest
Madison drops Manny off up in Inwood. “It’s way out of my way,” she says as he hauls his bag out of the car, “but there’s a great empanada place around here that I like. Anyway, I think my cab likes you.” She strokes its broad old real-leather dash, as if petting a horse. “This thing’s engine is gas-guzzling shit, but it ran smoother on the way up here than it ever has before. Maybe running over semi-visible sea monsters is good for the spark plugs, or something.”