“If all goes well,” Bronca continues, “the city becomes whole. The Enemy can’t touch a whole city, not directly, or at least not without a lot of effort. But the birthing process can go wrong. If the Enemy catches the primary avatar, for example, and rips him to shreds before the city can do its thing, then the city isn’t born; it dies. It dies hard. We don’t know the names of some of the cities that have died this way, but the ones we do know will tell you what we’re up against: Pompeii. Tenochtitlán. Atlantis.”
“Atlantis isn’t a real thing,” says Brooklyn. Then before Bronca can say it, she inhales. “Or… it isn’t a real thing anymore. What you’re saying is that it was a real thing once, but its avatar failed.”
Bronca nods. “In Plato’s stories, Atlantis was swallowed up by earthquake and floods. But the real disaster is that Atlantis became just a story. It failed so catastrophically that the entire human race shifted into a branch of realities in which Atlantis never existed at all.”
They all stare at her, and each other. “Holy shit,” Veneza murmurs, which seems to cover everyone’s expressions. “Jesus, B.”
Bronca lets out a slow, careful breath. “Yeah. But we’re good on that count; our primary succeeded. New York obviously survived.”
Now they all start talking at once. Manhattan blurts, “Then why is he sleeping—” and Brooklyn pronounces, “Well, something seems to have gone wrong,” and Queens shakes her head and says in an irritated tone, “Then why does he need us?” And Veneza gives Bronca a skeptical look and says, “Uh, are you sure about that? Because, squiggly shit.”
As noisy and rude as children. Bronca pushes through their talking. “It survived,” she says, and pauses ’til they shut up, which at least doesn’t take long. “But the battle was hard. And the primary, who did not understand that we were necessary to him, fought alone.” Brave, strong young man, her Unknown. “He won, but it took all his strength. He fell into… well, I guess we could call it a coma. He can’t wake up, can’t strengthen the city as he should, until we find him. And we need to find him. We’re not supposed to do this alone.”
With deliberate emphasis on this last line, she looks at Brooklyn, who still radiates visible weariness even after they allowed her a day to recover. Brooklyn, already frowning, catches this look and understands instantly, inhaling a little. But then, surprisingly, she turns to gaze at Manhattan. “Guess I owe you more than I thought. Bad time for a coma.”
Manhattan nods, looking amused. “If I’d realized what was happening sooner, I would’ve helped more. Next time, don’t go charging off in your pajamas alone.”
Meanwhile, Queens has shaken off her irritation; now she looks excited. “The equations always suggested simultaneous events, not purely conditional. The cat is alive and dead in the box! A universe for each outcome, and probably one in which it’s both!” She beams at all of them, clearly expecting them to share her excitement.
“Uh, right,” Manhattan says.
Queens sighs with the air of someone who is used to not being understood. She takes out her phone and starts texting someone, her bottom lip poked out a little.
Brooklyn’s expression turns grim. To Bronca, she says, “You said becoming a city punches through other universes.”
So she’s not stupid. Bronca inclines her head to the woman, in respect if not in approval. “Yes.”
“Okay, so.” Brooklyn visibly braces herself. “So what happens to those universes that our city punches through?”
Manhattan’s got a terrible look on his face. Queens goes on an entire face journey—shock to calculation to dawning horror to anguish. She puts her hands to her mouth.
“They die,” Bronca says. She’s decided to be compassionate about it, but relentless. None of them can afford sentimentality. “The punching-through? It’s a mortal wound, and that universe folds out of existence. Every time a city is born—no, really, before that. The process of our creation, what makes us alive, is the deaths of hundreds or thousands of other closely related universes, and every living thing in them.”
Brooklyn shuts her eyes for a moment. “Oh my God,” Queens breathes. “Oh my God. We’re all mass murderers.”
“What’s done is done, though,” Manhattan says. His voice is soft, his gaze distant and unreadable. “From the moment we came to be.”
Queens flinches and stares at him, openmouthed. “How can you say that? What’s wrong with you? That’s… what, trillions of people? I can’t even begin to calculate it! All dead? And we killed them?” She looks on the verge of tears. Her hands have begun to shake. “For fuck’s sake!”
Bronca’s expecting Manhattan to go cold again. He does that so easily, she’s noticed, even in just the few hours that they’ve known each other. Instead, however, he looks away for a moment, then takes a deep breath and moves to kneel in front of Queens. He takes her shaking hands in his own, and looks her in the eye, and says, “Would you prefer to offer up all of your family and friends to die instead? Maybe there’s a way we can.”
Everyone goes still. It sounds like a threat, even though it’s just a suggestion. Bronca’s not sure how Manhattan makes such a quiet statement sound so awful—but maybe it’s the fact that there is compassion in his gaze, instead of coldness, when he says it. Coldness would be reprehensible, horrifying. Compassion is worse, because it cannot be dismissed as evil.
And Padmini stares at him for a long, pent moment. Then, slowly, her shakes still. She shuts her eyes and lets out a long breath. Manhattan doesn’t move, doesn’t press. It’s not the approach that Bronca would have taken… but then, Bronca’s approach would probably have been wrong. Something about Queens makes Bronca feel toward her as she does toward Veneza—as if Queens is younger than she actually is, a surrogate daughter to be protected. She isn’t, though. Padmini is Queens, land of refugees who’ve fled horrors, blue-collar people working themselves to death, and spare daughters mortgaged for an entire family’s future. She knows all about brutal choices and unavoidable sacrifice—and Manhattan’s question, cruel as it seems, is one that respects this knowledge.
Finally, like the shading of the evening sky toward night, Bronca sees the change come over Queens as she accepts the inevitable. She doesn’t slump, but there is nevertheless an air of sorrow about her as she presses her lips together. “Of course not,” she says to Manhattan. It just pisses me off, that’s all.” She takes her hands out of his… but then nods to him, in graceful concession. “The world might be awful, but we don’t have to like it that way.”
Manhattan, to Bronca’s surprise, smiles at this, with his own air of sorrow. “Exactly,” he says. Then he gets up and goes over to the little window that looks out on the main gallery, his back to them.
Bronca lets out a long, uneasy sigh. This was hard knowledge for her, too, when it came. And yet. “It’s also nature,” she says. “Many things die so that something else can live. Since we’re the ones who get to live, we should offer thanks to those worlds for contributing themselves to our survival—and we owe it to them, as well as our own world’s people, to struggle as hard as we can.”