“Or maybe,” says Brooklyn, who has moved to lean against the wall, her arms folded, “it’s just like what always happens with Staten Island. We should have expected this.”
Manhattan rounds on her. “What?”
She laughs humorlessly. “Right, you wouldn’t know, new guy. Staten Island is the sore thumb of this city. The rest of New York votes blue, the island goes red. The rest of us want better subways; the island just wants more cars. You know why the Verrazano Bridge toll is so high? They wanted that. To keep the ‘riffraff’ from Brooklyn out!” She makes a disgusted noise. “So if anybody’s gonna stab an ally in the back, it would be that borough.”
“We can’t awaken the primary without all of us.” Manhattan still hasn’t raised his voice, but his words have grown clipped, his tone dangerous. “We need her.”
“Then one of us is going to have to go talk to her,” Bronca says. “Convince her to work with us.”
Silence.
Hong sighs and takes a silk handkerchief out of his pocket, mopping his face and neck with it unnecessarily. “He was right; this is worse than London. Though I suppose that’s why this ‘Staten Island’ turned on the rest of you, if she figured out the danger.”
“What danger?” Bronca frowns at him in confusion. “What’s London got to do with—”
Then Veneza exclaims in muffled delight and emerges from the freezer. In one hand she’s got a plastic grocery bag, which has been partially wrapped around some kind of square tray inside. Immediately she crouches, and yanks the bag open. “These are frozen, but you can still kind of suck on them,” she mutters. “I was worried my mala half brother would eat them when he comes over to my place, because he would, so I stored them here at work, then forgot about them… Ha!”
And she triumphantly lifts a small round chocolate-looking thing out of the plastic container.
“What the fuck,” Brooklyn says.
Veneza rolls her eyes. “Brigadeiro. Some kind of Brazilian candy thing, like, oh, truffles. My dad’s Portuguese, not Brazilian, but we eat them, too, because yay colonialism. And it’s not specific to São Paulo, but…” Hurrying over to the couch, Veneza crouches and holds the brigadeiro to the man’s lips. If Bronca hadn’t already been staring, she might not believe what she now sees: São Paulo shivers all over and gains more clarity, just at the touch of the sweet. Now he’s full color, if still a bit undersaturated. Veneza murmurs something in Portuguese, coaxing, which seems to help in itself; he shivers brighter, closer to human color. São Paulo opens his mouth. She pops the little thing in—and to everyone’s relief, after a moment he starts to chew. “Ah, beleza. Fucking beautiful. I was just faking the São Paulo accent, though; I hope he doesn’t think I was making fun—”
São Paulo opens his eyes. “Valeu,” he replies, and then sits up.
Queens claps in delight. Then she slides over to crouch beside Veneza, stage-whispering to ask if she can have one of the brigadeiros.
Hong regards São Paulo with disfavor. “Good, you’re not dead.”
São Paulo glares at him blearily. “It took you three days to get here?”
“I had to take a plane. Planes take time.”
“It still shouldn’t have taken—” Then São Paulo’s eyes narrow. “The Summit. You notified them, and they balked. That’s what took you an extra day.”
Hong snorts a little in amusement, and then he takes out his smartphone and starts scrolling through it. “I’ve told you that it’s nothing personal, Paulo. The old ones hate the younger cities on principle. And maybe they think you’re arrogant.”
“Of course I’m arrogant, I’m São Paulo. I’m also right, and they don’t want to admit it.” Paulo extends his arms for some reason, examining them as if he expects to see something other than his own limbs. He flexes his hands, and whatever he feels satisfies him, so he relaxes. “So they’ll deny the facts on the ground and make this to be incompetence on my part. You keep asking me why I hate them? This is why.”
“I set the bones when I found you. Healed them with some Café do Ponto coffee that I had in the car. Thank fancy New York airport coffee shops for that, and thank me for my foresight. Brazilian cigarettes taste like shit, by the way.” Then Hong finds whatever he’s looking for on his phone. “Here’s a thing that should concern all of us.” He turns his phone around.
Bronca comes over to see, as do the others. Paulo glances at the image from where he is, and sighs. The others gasp, but all Bronca can make out is a blur. With an irritated sigh, she pushes through them and takes the phone from Hong, lifting it close enough to see.
It’s an aerial photograph of New York City, taken at sunset. She’s seen photos like this before, artsy shots taken from drones or helicopters and using specialized equipment. This one is typical in centering Manhattan—but unusual in not excluding the other boroughs from the shot. The helicopter seems to have been hovering somewhere around the midpoint of the island, maybe over Central Park, pointing south. In the foreground spreads lower Manhattan, with its cluster of skyscrapers huddling uneasily on the tongue of landfill that makes up that part of the island. To the left—the image is slightly curved, a deliberate distortion probably meant to suggest that New York encompasses most of Earth—is probably Long Island City, Queens, and maybe Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, curving away toward the Verrazano Bridge. To the far right is Jersey City, or maybe Hoboken; Bronca can’t tell. All of it sparkles in energy-efficient LED-lit squares. The photographer has added a slight orange filter, to warm the coldness of the lights and give the whole image more life. It’s New York at its brightest and most beautiful.
Except for the farthest point of the image, across a dark stretch of water from the lowermost tip of Manhattan. Staten Island.
Its lights are much dimmer—so dim, in fact, that Bronca wonders why she hasn’t heard anything about a brownout. But as she squints at the image, she realizes the problem isn’t dimness. It’s that Staten Island seems much farther away than it should be. She blinks, shakes her head. No. The borough is where it should be, but its perspective is off. An optical illusion, maybe, caused by the distortion of the photograph? Whatever it is, it looks as if Staten Island is miles farther from Manhattan than it actually is.
Her thumb bumps a button on Hong’s phone by accident, and the image shifts to let her see that the photo is part of some kind of social media thread. Most of it’s in Chinese, but there are a few English-language posts. “MORE TERRISM?!” shouts one spelling-challenged alarmist.
Hong takes his phone back. “This has never happened before,” he says. It’s mostly to Paulo, though he glances at all of them. His jaw is tight. “Cityspace is cityspace. Peoplespace is peoplespace. They are different universes, normally bridged only through us. Yet this photo reflects the fact that one borough of this city, in cityspace, is actively attempting to withdraw from the rest. And the denizens of peoplespace have noticed.”
Paulo has pushed himself to his feet, though he needed Veneza’s help to get all the way up. (She blushes, Bronca notes, when he nods to her and murmurs something that’s probably good thinking on the brigadeiro in Portuguese, and which she’s clearly hearing as come with me to the Casbah.) “This is what I’ve been trying to tell all of you old shits,” Paulo snaps, his accent lengthening the last word into sheets, though otherwise his English is only lightly inflected with another tongue. “Something here is impeding the normal postpartum process—something more than just the fact that this city hasn’t finished its maturation. The dimensional overlap is unstable. The Enemy is too active, active in ways it never has been—”