The bus driver is walking toward them, yawning and scratching himself. Aislyn needs to wrap this up. “Sure, go ahead.”
The Woman leans close and whispers into Aislyn’s ear a word that tolls throughout her skull like the most dire of great bells, shaking her bones enough that she stumbles and falls to her knees. The world blurs. Her skin prickles and itches and grows hot all over, as if burned by the wind of the word’s passing.
Then someone else has crouched before her. “Ma’am?” It’s the bus driver. Aislyn blinks and looks around. She’s in front of the bus she needs to take home. How did she get here? Was there someone else here just now…?
The driver asks, “Ma’am, do you need me to call 911?”
“No…” Aislyn shakes her head, trying to convey that she’s all right. But is she? The dizziness is fading but she feels wrong, all over. When she recovers enough to look down at her arms, which are bare given the light sundress she’s wearing, she blinks to see them covered in faint, but rising, puffy welts. Hives. She’s breaking out in hives.
The driver has seen them, too. He frowns, drawing back a little. “Ma’am, if you’re sick, you shouldn’t ride on public transportation.”
“A-allergies,” Aislyn murmurs, staring at her arms. She’s allergic to pine nuts and basil, but she cannot imagine where she might have encountered any surprise pesto. “Just allergies. I, uh, I’ll be okay.”
The driver looks skeptical, but he helps her up, and when Aislyn is clearly able to walk on her own, he shrugs and gestures for her to board.
It’s ten minutes into the ride, with Aislyn staring at the passing buildings and people and not-thinking other than to wonder whether she should start carrying an EpiPen, when she remembers the Woman in White. With a start, she looks around, but there are only the other bus passengers, a few of whom favor her with disinterested looks in return. The Woman has vanished, as easily as she appeared.
And yet. Aislyn’s gaze alights on the STOP REQUESTED sign, and stops there… because just over the driver’s head, dangling about a foot down from the sign, is another of those lovely white floral fronds that the Woman in White pointed out at the station.
Don’t worry. I’m here.
What was the Woman’s name again? Something that started with an R is all Aislyn can remember. The rest was a blur of incomprehensible foreign sounds.
Rosie, Aislyn decides. She will call the Woman Rosie. It fits her, even; Aislyn smiles as she imagines the Woman baring a biceps on an old-fashioned poster. I WANT YOU, reads the caption. No, wait; Aislyn’s getting her vintage posters mixed up. She can’t remember Rosie the Riveter’s slogan.
Well, it doesn’t matter. Feeling immeasurably better, Aislyn resists the urge to scratch her hives, and settles in for the rest of the ride home.
INTERRUPTION
Something is very wrong at Inwood Hill Park.
It’s always difficult for Paulo to tell where he’s going in another city. As a child—just himself, a quick and sharp-toothed favela rat, long before he’d become twelve million people—he had an uncanny sense of direction, enabling him to tell which way was east or south just by glancing at the sun. Even in strange places he’d been able to do that, but the ability vanished when he became a city. Now he is São Paulo, and his feet are configured for different streets. His skin craves different breezes, different angles of light. North and south are the same everywhere, of course, but in his land, it should be winter—never cold in São Paulo, but certainly cooler and drier than the muggy, searing summer heat of this ridiculous city. Every day that he spends here, he feels backward, upside down. Home isn’t where the heart is; it’s wherever the wind feels right.
Ah, he has no time for such maunderings.
The grid pattern of Manhattan and the pleasant Brazilian Portuguese voice of Google Maps both make up for his lost sense of direction, and presently he reaches the place that pings on his senses as intrusion, interference, inimical. Enemy. That sense has grown stronger in the hours since New York’s birth, rather than weaker, as it should have—and it is changing, too, in a way he’s never before experienced. Rising everywhere, tugging at his awareness like magnetic lines. Developing poles. The one at FDR Drive he expected, given the events that preceded New York’s birth, though he means to go and inspect that site next in case it holds more clues. The one in Inwood is new.
He strolls through the park, enjoying the cooler air and fresher scents of greenery, though he remains wary. At first he sees nothing to explain the looming, prickling sense of wrongness that tugs him along, worse on one side of his body than the other as he orients himself. It’s a workday and the park is nearly empty. The birds sing beautifully, however foreign their songs sound to his ear. Mosquitoes torment him; he waves at them constantly. That, at least, is no different from home.
Then he wends his way around a particularly thick stand of trees, and stops.
At the foot of the narrow walking path is a clearing, beyond which is a wide grassy meadow that overlooks what his map calls Spuyten Duyvil Creek. At the heart of the clearing is what he expected to see: a simple monument to the site where Europeans bargained to turn a beautiful forested island into a reeking parking lot and glorified shopping mall. (Paulo is aware that this opinion is uncharitable. He is disinclined to correct himself while he is stuck in New York.) It’s a rock with a plaque on it. It also, he guesses given the history, represents a place of power for anyone who hears the city’s voice.
The first thing he understands is that a battle has taken place here. The scent that tinges the air holds no longer purely green vegetation, but a saltier, briny whiff as well. He knows this scent. There’s money all over the ground—and again, understanding something of the nature of Manhattan, Paulo knows at once that someone has used the money as a construct, to more precisely aim the power of the city. Aim at what? The Enemy. He does not know what form the Enemy took, but that’s the only possible answer. And whoever fought the Enemy here won, or at least managed to walk away unbloodied.
But—this is the second thing Paulo understands, though it was the first thing he saw—the Enemy has left its mark, too.
The clearing is full of people. At least twenty of them mill about near the monument rock, chattering. He hears some of the chatter when the wind shifts. (“—cannot believe how low the rents are here, so much better than Brooklyn—” “—authentic Dominican food—” “—I just don’t understand why they have to play their music so loud!”) A couple of the people in the clearing carry food or drink: one woman has an expensive-looking waffle cone topped with at least three scoops; one’s got a bottle of Soylent visible in his back pocket; one’s actually sipping from a plastic wineglass of rosé. Most of them are white and well dressed, though there’s a smattering of browner or grungier people.
None of them are talking to each other, Paulo notes. Instead they simply speak to the air, or into darkened cell phones held up to their mouths in speaker mode—or, in one man’s case, to the small dog he carries in one arm, who keeps licking his face and whining and squirming. None of them face each other. The ice cream in the woman’s hand has mostly melted, and three colors of dairy goo run down her arm and onto her clothes, apparently unnoticed. Pigeons have begun to gather where the melted ice cream puddles at her feet.