The phone is still in her hand. Her mouth dry, Brooklyn pulls it back to her face. “Jojo. Go inside.”
“What?” She can see her daughter, still looking up, start a little. “Whoa!” For an instant she loses her balance, too, and Brooklyn suffers a horrified second of fearing that she will watch her only child tumble into the backyard with those things. But Jojo catches herself as her mother has already done, then looks around. “You see something, Mama?”
“Yes. Go inside! Shut your window and move away from it.” Better still—“Go to Dad’s room. Get him up and in his chair.”
“Oh, shit,” Jojo says, and immediately darts inside. She’s a smart child when she isn’t being a smart-ass—and she is herself a true child of New York, enough to know that Brooklyn doesn’t warn of danger without good reason. Under the circumstances, Brooklyn’s going to overlook the profanity.
The moment Jojo slides the window closed—with a loud thump—the white X-spiders in the backyard react, shivering and then x-ing forward a few steps. There are three now, Brooklyn sees; another has just folded its front two legs over the lip of a wooden planter that it was apparently hidden behind. She’s guessed what they are now, though. They have a different shape from the white feathers that menaced her at the 2 train station and surrounded Manhattan in Inwood Hill Park, but they feel of the same prickling, jangling antithesis of presence that everything else associated with the Enemy seems to radiate. As if they erase some tiny part of New York with every iota of its space they occupy.
And now there are six of them in her family’s backyard.
Brooklyn runs to the bedroom door and down the hall. She hears a startled snort from one of the guest rooms as her feet drum down the corridor; Manhattan, waking from sleep. Can’t wait for him to help, for whatever good he’d be. She’s only wearing satin pajamas, no shoes, and carrying no gun, not that she ever would, given how many friends she’s lost to things like that. All she’s got is an illegal-in-the-city-of-New-York collapsible baton—which she snatches from the umbrella stand as she runs past—and fear for her daughter and father, which have so charged her with adrenaline that she feels as if she could tear apart ten men bare-handed. But what’s menacing her little girl isn’t men.
Oh, but, baby. You know how to handle up on these things, too, laughs the city in her mind as she wrenches open the apartment door and the outside door and runs down the brownstone’s stoop steps. Her bare feet slap on the sidewalk as she jumps the gate—too damn old to do stuff like that without suffering tomorrow, but she manages the vault credibly, thank God for her personal trainer—and then she stops. She’s panting, shaking, and utterly horrified as she turns to face both buildings and finally understands the depth of her mistake.
Because when Brooklyn came home, to this block that is hers and to these buildings that are hers in this borough that is so much hers that deep down she would’ve been surprised if someone else had gotten the job of becoming it, she did not go inside the brownstone that her father and daughter now occupy, along with a few tenants on the upper floors. She didn’t need to, because she always keeps a few clothes and toiletries in the vacation unit. And so, when the peculiar power of the city filled the brownstone that she did enter, suffusing it with Brooklyn-ness and making it impregnable against the incursions of the Enemy, she had simply assumed that the power would encompass both brownstones. But the power does not recognize property ownership—and worse, the modified brownstone has been shorn of the stoop that once connected it to the neighborhood. This amputation is a still-healing wound that makes the building even more susceptible to attack by foreign organisms. She should’ve been even more careful to protect this one.
And because of Brooklyn’s folly, now dozens of white X-spiders twitch-crawl over the entire building’s facade. As Brooklyn watches, one of them drops onto the brick pathway and then x-wriggles under the front door, passing through the crack as easily as a sheet of paper.
Brooklyn knows not to panic. That’s how people get killed when the bullets start flying—and this is a trap, she knows, just as much as Mrs. Yu’s pool was for Padmini. This is how the Enemy has lured her out of the safe building. Instead of giving in to the urge to hyperventilate or scream or run blindly into danger, she closes her eyes. Tries to think something other than Sweet Jesus one of those things is in there with my baby. She listens to her own panting breath, which hitches because she’s not that in shape, and she prays for her city to help her somehow because God hasn’t come through yet. And that is how she finally notices
pant (gasp) pant pant (gasp)
A perfect b-girl backbeat, which some part of her mind has noticed even amid her terror.
That’s all she needs. Because she has been trained in the use of this weapon. She is a veteran of these sorts of battles. And if she must find a way to transform her old weapons into a new form? Then it’s done.
Swagger first. She squares herself, pushes back her shoulders, bounces a little on the balls of her feet. Okay. Here she goes.
“‘Battle Brooklyn? Well, let’s go.’” She whispers this aloud, to focus her mind. They are the lyrics that first made her famous—but already she is spinning new lines, remixing what she needs from aether and the memory of an entire catalog of musical history. Even as she thinks the next words, she feels the power come on, shaped more by her mind than anything else. The words are just a conduit—a construct, to which she’s already given a shape. A myth. A legend. The heroic power to tear apart ten men, or fifty fucked-up extradimensional spider monsters, with extreme prejudice.
You thinking I should go high? Nah! I go low.
She’s running at the building. Shouldering the door, low, at the lock to break it open. (It shouldn’t work. The door is heavy old wood in a metal frame. But the city has entered her bones and strengthened her muscles; she will not be denied.) Just beyond the door, the invading X-spider has already woven its web: lines of white, ugly light crisscrossing and tangling from the floor to the ceiling, forming a net meant to ensnare her for doing just this thing. Up close, Brooklyn can see that the lines aren’t just light. They are living things themselves, strands that whisper and shiver, covered in weird little holes like the thorns of roses turned inward—But she is Brooklyn, goddamn it, and when she makes claws of her hands and slashes at the spider-strands like a cat, a sheath of power surrounds and protects her fingers as the webs tear and burn away to ash. She hears the spider—because web and creature are one and the same—shriek once, and then go silent.
I’m the core of this city, either live or compost.
Your appealing lines really? Like rinds your rhymes tossed.
There is another shriek, from further into the apartment. Jojo. In her father’s bedroom.
There ain’t no way, no level you could defeat this.
I’m a queen, a boss, with no weakness. / I’m Superman, but the kryptonite don’t work. I’m too advanced, you tyke.
Brooklyn runs in to find Jojo and her father all right—but not for long, because a big X-spider is sliding into the room between the frames of the window. The damn things are infinitely two-dimensional when they want to be. But as two of its legs finish the slide through and spread out to brace against the wall, its body puffs up and the legs become thicker, cylindrical things again. And now Brooklyn sees that the little holes all over its legs are moving. They are tiny, tooth-ringed mouths gawping open and shut—