She’s so damn stubborn. “Well, if I’m not in imminent danger that you can save me from, get the fuck out. Because I don’t want to think about what will happen if those things grab you.” When Veneza’s jaw sets, Bronca pulls out the big guns. “Please. Do it for me.”
Veneza winces, but some of the stubbornness goes out of her. “Damn it. Fine. Okay, then.” She frowns a little, though, troubled. “But why could I see it, when Yeej and Jess couldn’t? They didn’t move, actually, while it was happening. It was like they were in a freeze-frame, with the lights down low. Same with those guys who brought the painting. You, though, were normal-looking. And me, I wasn’t frozen at all. Why?”
“There are always people around who are closer to the city than others. Some of them become like me, and others just serve the city’s will, as needed.”
Veneza gasps. “Oh, shit, you mean I could’ve been like you?”
“Maybe, yeah, if you weren’t from Jersey.”
“Oh, fuck.” It’s a testament to the fact that Veneza isn’t a kid, though she acts like one sometimes, that she doesn’t seem thrilled by the prospect of developing extradimensional superpowers. She grips the Jeep’s door handle instead, as if she needs it to feel more secure. “Jesus, B. So, I mean, it’s awesome that, uh, you’re a city? Congratulations! I want to be accepting of this new stage in your identity formation. But if people are showing up at work to try and swallow you with paint-monsters, what are you going to do if you get doxxed? Those things in your house.”
Bronca’s been trying not to think about that. “Hell if I know.”
Veneza remains silent for the rest of the ride to Jersey City, which is only another ten minutes or so. When Bronca pulls up to Veneza’s apartment building—a small, nondescript low-rise across the street from a half-vacant lot—she stops at the curb. Veneza doesn’t get out, though.
“You need to crash with me?” she asks Bronca, in perfect seriousness.
Bronca blinks in surprise. “You live in a studio.”
“Right. No roommates. Luxury living.”
“You don’t have a couch.”
“There’s a whole two-by-six trash-free space on my carpet, I’ll have you know. Or hell, share the bed. I changed the sheets, like, five days ago. Seven! Eight. Okay, I’ll change the sheets.”
Bronca shakes her head, bemused. “No homo. Not with you, anyway.”
“I swear I won’t ravish you in your sleep, B.” Veneza glares at her despite the banter. “Even though you did just tell me that an entire universe’s worth of city-eating monsters is out there trying to fuck you up, so maybe you could stop worrying about your virtue for a minute and think about your life instead?”
She really is a sweetheart. Bronca sighs, then reaches over to ruffle her puffs. Veneza pretends to dodge, but then she permits it because she doesn’t really mind, and because Bronca makes sure they still look cute afterward. “I can keep those things out of my building,” Bronca says. “I think. But to do even that much, I need to be in New York. The city I’m part of? Which is not the city we’re in right now?”
“Oh.” Veneza sighs. “Right. Forgot this whole thing has rules.”
She gets out of the car, taking more time to get her purse out of the back seat than is strictly necessary. By this, Bronca knows she’s still trying to think of a way to help. “Hey.” When Veneza looks up, Bronca nods at her. “I’m gonna be fine. I was at—”
“‘Stonewall, I stomped on a cop,’ yeah, I know. Informants aren’t paint-monsters from the fucking id.”
It’s called the Ur, Bronca thinks, but she’s scared Veneza enough. “Either way, I got this. Good night.”
Grumbling, Veneza shuts the door.
Bronca watches ’til she’s inside, then heads home. And as the city welcomes her back within its borders, she prays to any god that will listen, across any dimension, that her friend will be safe.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Thing in Mrs. Yu’s Pool
The Queen is in Queens, contemplating the stochastic processes of a trinomial tree model, on the strange warm day when everything changes. The Queen—whose real name is Padmini Prakash—doesn’t want to be working on her Computational Analysis project, which is why she happens to be daydreaming about some Lovecraft meta that she read on Tumblr, and looking outside, in the moment of the city’s rebirth. The meta wasn’t so much interesting as funny, science-side Tumblr arguing with fantasy-side over the comical notion that non-Euclidean geometry could somehow be sinister, and concluding that Lovecraft was probably just scared of math. The view through her window isn’t especially interesting, either. Just a westerly view of Queens’ myriad of neighborhoods and churches and billboards, with the very Euclidean spires of Manhattan looming beyond. It’s a bright, sunny June day, all of 11:53 a.m., and the day’s a-wasting as Americans say, so with a heavy sigh, Padmini turns her attention back to her work.
She hates financial engineering, which of course is why she’s getting a master’s degree in it. She would prefer pure mathematics, where one might elegantly apply theories toward the cleaner (or at least decontextualized) goal of understanding processes, thought, and the universe itself. But it’s a lot harder to get a job in math than finance these days, especially with the H-1B lottery getting tighter and the ICE gestapo waiting to swoop in on any pretext, so here she is.
Then something—instinct, maybe—prompts Padmini to look up again. Thus she is staring directly at the Manhattan horizon in the precise moment when a titanic tentacle curls up from the East River and smashes the Williamsburg Bridge.
She actually doesn’t know which bridge it is, at first. She can’t remember one from another. Still, the tentacle must be pretty big for her to be able to discern that it’s a tentacle at all. That’s not real, she thinks, with the instant scorn of any true New Yorker. Just two days before, big white film-production trailers took over her entire block. That happens all the bloody time these days, because movie people invariably seem to want multicultural working-class New York as backdrop for their all-white upper-class dramedies—which means Queens, since East New York is still too Black for their tastes and the Bronx has a “reputation.” Given that the tentacle is enormous but translucent, rising above the waterfront condos of Long Island City and flickering like a poorly connected monitor—or cheap special effects—naturally Padmini concludes that it’s some kind of hoax: 2012 called; it wants the Tupac hologram back. And then she giggles, inordinately pleased by her own cleverness. Math Queen’s got jokes.
But the tentacle is awfully heavy-looking as it strikes the bridge. Padmini must concede that they got that detail right in the special effects; heavy masses displace more air than smaller things, and the lag caused by that much friction would make for visibly sluggish momentum. This tentacle is going just a little too fast to be in free fall, but Padmini figures they can tweak it in postproduction. Or maybe they’ll play it off by saying the tentacle is just phenomenally strong? That wouldn’t ruin the audience’s suspension of disbelief.