“Get in,” says this total stranger. Aislyn starts toward his car without a second thought.
Before she can reach for the door handle, however, there is a stir at her feet and a playing-card-quick shuffle of realities around her—and then suddenly curling, lashing white flower fronds whip up from the earth between her and the car.
Aislyn stops, her eyes widening, and the man curses, throwing the car into reverse and trying to back away from them. Still growing, the fronds swiftly become taller than Aislyn herself. Then they lunge away from Aislyn… toward the car, which they rapidly rise to surround and entangle. She can hear them slapping and hissing as they hit and sear at its chassis.
And as Aislyn stumbles back from the frond mass, the Woman in White catches her from behind with tight hands on her shoulders, leaning forward to peer into her face. “Whew! He almost got you. Are you all right?”
“What? No! Let go!” Aislyn shakes her off reflexively. Where the hell did she come from?
In the same instant, from within the lashing tangle of white flower fronds, there is a strange not-sound—a vibration, but with no tone that her ears can detect. It sluices through part of the thicket of fronds, dissolving them, and then the car lurches forward with a screech of tires. Out of control, it skids a little onto the grassy slope off the main road, then stops, brake lights glaring.
Aislyn barely notices, almost tripping over her puffy slippers in her haste to scramble away from both the remaining fronds and the Woman in White. The Woman looks wholly different from the last time Aislyn saw her, two days ago at the ferry station. This time she’s wearing a tracksuit, which makes it easy to see that she’s much plumper and shorter, with her white hair—streaked here and there with a few strands of faded bottle auburn—now in a shoulder-length soccer-mom bob. Her face is… Not the same woman, Aislyn realizes with a frisson of shock. This is someone wholly different. And yet… she is also the Woman in White. Every instinct that Aislyn possesses identifies her as the same woman from before. Same manic energy. Same bright, too-earnest eyes, as she holds up hands as if to soothe a skittish beast.
(Aislyn’s mind thinks of a name, but flinches away before she can recall all three syllables. Or is it two? Three but slurred, maybe. Starts with an R. Rosie. She’ll stick to Rosie.)
Doesn’t matter. “Stay away from me,” Aislyn snaps. She’s shaking. In her mind’s eye, she is seeing that delicate white frond growing from the back of Conall’s neck. Once, she thought those fronds were beautiful, but the Woman said she could see what was happening through them. That means she saw—and did not stop—what Conall just tried to do. It infuriates Aislyn. “I thought you were my friend! You said you would help me!”
The Woman frowns, looking genuinely hurt and confused. “That’s what I’m trying to do! That fellow, he’s another city and I hate him, did he hurt y—”
“Your fellow!” Aislyn feels so stupid. Was the Woman watching while Conall held on to Aislyn and invited her to suck his Nazi cock? Did she do nothing to help because it did not involve cities or boroughs or any of the other bizarre business that has taken over Aislyn’s life? “In my house! In my own home!” Somehow, this is an extra bit of insult.
In the meantime, the brown man has gotten out of the car and is walking toward them. He’s taller than she realized at first, dressed in an open-jacketed dark suit with no tie, the cigarette a red warning at his mouth and a business card held like a switchblade in his fingers. He radiates stylish menace, and… with a deep chill, Aislyn realizes he isn’t her. Isn’t part of New York. Whatever spell he wove before, which made her want to go with him, is gone. Now she can only think that he is bigger and stronger and a man and foreign.
Aislyn backs away from him, too. The man reaches the asphalt and stops, on the other side of the patch of wavering fronds. The fronds twitch toward him at once, and he sucks smoke from the cigarette and blows it at them without looking. It’s just cigarette smoke, as far as Aislyn can tell—but the white fronds react as if they’ve been attacked with chemical weapons. They lash away from him, squealing and shriveling, and within seconds the remaining fronds have flattened, dead and fading rapidly from translucence into absence.
Amid the new silence, the three of them face each other in a triangle of tension.
The Woman is staring with wide, angry eyes at the brown man. Her head has tilted to one side, and Aislyn is amazed to note that her posture is defensive, almost frightened. “I’m getting very tired of you, São Paulo.”
“We have had an understanding for thousands of years,” says the man, who isn’t a man. She’s never heard of a city called São Paulo. Maybe it’s African, or in India? It sounds exotic like that. The pronunciation of São that the Woman used is weird, too. Something like “song,” all round and back-of-throat. The same nasal musicality is in the man’s accent when he speaks. “Once a city has been born, your attacks end. Always before, this has been so.”
The Woman laughs a little. “Please. There was never any understanding. There can be no understanding because your kind don’t understand anything.”
São frowns at this, then tilts his head. “Try me,” he suggests. “You never have before; you just tried to kill us. Of course we fought back! But if you can speak, and if you are a… a person, then you can explain what you want. Maybe we don’t have to fight.”
The Woman in White’s face has become a study in incredulity. “What I want?” Her eyes narrow even as she laughs. “Oh, sometimes I hate you people. One by one, you’re fine. Better than fine—some of you are wonderful; so funny and peculiar. But there’s a thing you always do, and I despise you for it. Did you really need to hear me speak to know that I was a person, São Paulo? Do people have to protest their own assault before you’ll stop?”
The man stiffens, and Aislyn does, too, at the word assault. But yes, it’s there in his face amid the confusion and anger: guilt. He did something, this brown foreign man. Something he felt entitled to do—maybe to the Woman, maybe to some other woman. And all of a sudden, whether or not the Woman has been complicit in what Conall did, Aislyn finds herself hating this São Paulo. It isn’t personal. In this moment, Aislyn just hates all men who feel entitled to help themselves to things they shouldn’t.
So she glares at him. “What do you want?”
São Paulo blinks away from the Woman in White to focus on Aislyn, plainly surprised by her tone. Or maybe he did not expect someone like her to have voice enough to speak. Maybe he’s Muslim, or some other kind of woman-hating heathen barbarian. “I came to find you,” he says. His tone stays even, but she can tell he’s puzzled by the question. “You and the others. This city requires your help to complete its maturation.”
“Well, I don’t need your help,” Aislyn snaps. “So you can leave now.”
He stares at her—and then he looks at the Woman in White, his eyes narrowing in suspicion. As if he’s trying to figure out whether the Woman somehow made Aislyn say what she just did. As if he cannot believe that Aislyn is capable of speaking for herself.
At which point Aislyn. Is just. Done.