“You don’t belong here,” she snarls. Her hands have become tight fists. “Not in this city, not on my island. I don’t need you. I don’t want you here!”
And because Aislyn is still deep in communion with her borough after tossing Conall through the fence, still thrumming with energy and anger and thirty years of suppressed fury finally finding its outlet at last, she rejects São Paulo as fiercely as she did Conall.
It shouldn’t work. She’s seen his other self, which is absolutely massive—bigger than the whole of New York. More importantly, he is whole and powerful in ways that New York is not. And yet. She is Staten Island. She stands upon her home ground, where he is an interloper, and he is far from the pollution-shrouded towers of his home city. So the wave of force that Aislyn used on Conall ripples forth again. It catches the Woman in White, who cries out and flings up her arms and suddenly vanishes, as quickly as she appeared. What stands in her wake is a pudgy middle-aged woman with a spray tan and deep Clairol-red hair, who blinks and looks dazed before turning away from them and starting to walk back toward the next neighborhood over, ignoring the whole tableau.
But that was only collateral damage, because the Woman in White was not Aislyn’s intended target. The wave of You don’t belong here hits São Paulo full force, and the effect is far worse than what she did to Conall—because Conall was, after all, just a man. São Paulo is blasted by this power as if by an invisible flamethrower, and she sees him take the blow in two ways at once. On one plane he raises his arms as if to ward off Aislyn’s rage, and she sees the bones of his forearms snap just before he is lifted and flung off into the darkness beyond his parked car.
In the other reality, she sees from up high as an earthquake shivers its way across the greater metropolitan area of São Paulo. Older buildings fall, especially in some of the city’s favelas. A quadruple-lane highway along the great city’s flank splinters like bone—although thankfully it does not break apart entirely, which would spill hundreds of vehicles into the nearby river in a Williamsburgian echo of horror. Beyond that, it’s bad, though. A city’s commuter conduits are its lifeblood. For days, the fifteen million citizens of São Paulo will struggle to work, to reach the hospital, to stay connected in all the myriad of ways that a city requires for health and life.
In that other place she sees girders blur and realizes that something flails toward her—though she gets the sense this is more reflex on São Paulo’s part than malice. People who grow up fighting learn to hit back even as they’re going down. Reflex or not, the strike lands, and in the other place Aislyn feels the rake of urban rail lines across her core, which slice through her like claws. They hurt, a deep and terrifying burn that seems to tear something inside her—not organs or tendons, exactly, but something just as vital, though more existential. Her soul, maybe. She gasps and doubles over, clutching at her middle and blinking against pain-tears. Instinctively she knows that Staten Island has taken damage somewhere. Her island hurts with her.
But. Aislyn is still standing, and São Paulo isn’t.
Aislyn has subsisted for so long on mere survival that the endorphins and elation of victory, of feeling strong even for a minute, go right to her head. She starts laughing despite the pain in her middle, and for a dizzying instant she cannot stop. But then, slowly, she takes a breath, and then another, and forces herself to calm down. She sounds as crazy as the Woman in White. She feels crazy. But she can also feel São Paulo still out there, wounded somewhere in the dark, so she forces herself upright, sucking air through her teeth to get past the pain, and calls after him. “Stay away from me. Or… or else.”
It’s not the most badass threat she could make, but he does not reply. Maybe he’s unconscious, or sulking. Doesn’t matter. She won.
Then Aislyn staggers back toward the house, with her ribs aching and her skin flushed and her thoughts bouncing around like Daffy Duck on a woo-hoo binge. The house is lit up when she gets there, but her father is in the backyard taking a statement from Conall. Two more cop cars pull up just as Aislyn climbs the front walkway, but the men inside don’t seem to notice her as they stroll toward the backyard. Inside the house, Aislyn’s mother is at the back door watching them. No one’s thought to check on Aislyn, who’s supposed to be upstairs safe asleep—so she simply slips up the stairs and goes to her room.
With her window cracked for fresh air, she can distantly hear her father speaking with Conall in a raised voice. It sounds like he thinks Conall was drinking and threw the lounger through the fence himself. Conall is protesting this with equal loudness. (“I’m telling you, I got jumped! It was a big Black dude!”) Aislyn is a little curious to know how the argument will resolve itself, even though she knows her father will soon go check the security videos and see Conall’s “big Black dude,” which is actually a 120-pound white woman overwritten by the illusion she fed the cameras. Some part of her still hopes for justice to prevail, and for her father to realize what a monster Conall is… but the rest of her knows better. Her father has always been right: the only true justice is having the strength to protect oneself against invasion or conquest.
“If the city calls you, listen to it,” she murmurs to herself; her mother’s words. And São Paulo echoed this, telling her that the city needed her. But Aislyn decides in this moment to ignore the call. Her borough is what protected her—not Manhattan or Queens or Brooklyn or the Bronx. Staten Island. Everything she needs in life is right here. The city can go hang.
With this thought in mind, she falls into bed, and exhausted sleep.
A few miles away, in a trash-strewn train yard, MTA engineers and police gather and murmur, mystified by a series of four massive, parallel trenches that have appeared, breaching the tracks of Staten Island’s lone, nameless subway line. The trenches were actually glowing hot and smoking when they were first discovered by a sleepy conductor going off shift—as if they weren’t dug but sliced into the gravelly earth with a giant hot knife, or maybe an industrial-strength laser. Since then, they’ve cooled off enough that investigators can put ladders down to try to figure out what kind of incendiary device could have caused such damage. Each trench is fifteen or sixteen feet at its deepest point, shearing through soil, metal, concrete, bedrock, and even the electrified third rail. As if someone rent the earth itself with great, girder-sized claws.
Repairs will be simple enough—fill the holes with rebar and cement, replace the broken tracks—though they will take several days. In that time, many of the island’s poorest people will struggle to get to and from work, or to visit their sick parents, or to pick up their kids from school. A city’s commuter conduits are its lifeblood.
And sometimes even shallow wounds fester.
Aislyn sleeps.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Yeah, So, About That Whole Teamwork Thing
Bronca hates them instantly, these avatars of the other boroughs who now sit or stand in her office. Brooklyn’s the one who pisses her off the most. Oh, she recognizes the woman at once—MC Free, one of the first female MCs from back in the old days, who’d felt plenty free to start beefs with every other woman in the field and drop all the same kinds of homophobic bullshit that the men had done, while having the nerve to call herself feminist. Figures she’d turn politician. Also figures she’s the one who turns up her nose at the messiness of Bronca’s office, refusing to sit on an available chair because it’s got dried oil paint on it.