“Yes, yes.” Hong dismisses him and focuses on Manhattan, who he seems to have arbitrarily decided is the leader of the group, probably because he’s the only other man present. “I saw you and your cohort attempting to synchronize with your primary. Did you find him?”
Manhattan shakes his head. “No. We saw him, but…”
That’s when Bronca inhales, remembering what she’d suddenly noticed during their whatever-it-was. “Those tile patterns,” she says. “I know those fucking tile patterns.” And then she turns and heads for the meeting room door. Behind her, the others are still for an instant, then she hears them scramble or stumble to follow.
Beyond the meeting room, the Center has closed for the evening. Yijing’s left a sticky note on the monitor of Bronca’s office desktop, even though she knows that Bronca only turns the damn thing on when she has to: “600K in new donations!!” Bronca stares at it for a moment, unable to process the number, then she puts the note aside to focus on something that makes sense. Like tracking down the living embodiment of New York City from clues she picked up in a dream.
By the time the machine has finished its endless boot-up sequence, she’s gone to one of her bookcases and yanked out a big photo book titled Beaux Arts Century. And by the time the others have crowded into her office to try to figure out what she’s figured out, she’s found it. “This. This!” She slaps one of the photos in the book, then turns it around for them. It’s a full-color, high-quality picture of a room with a beautifully vaulted ceiling, tiled with what looks like decorative gold bricks.
Manhattan leans down to peer at it, and a muscle in his jaw flexes. “That’s the style. Not the place.”
“Yeah, I don’t think the primary is sleeping in the Grand Central Oyster Bar,” drawls Brooklyn. She’s frowning, though. “But I do feel like I’ve seen tiles like this in other places.”
“You have,” says Bronca, grinning, “because back before people with no taste started replacing every beautiful thing in this city with cheap bullshit, it was one of the most distinctive architectural forms in the world—an art movement that was centered in New York. They’re called Guastavino tiles. Obsolete now, but back in the day they were designed to be fireproof and self-stabilizing. Perfect for a city that’s half-underground and full of flammable trash.” She taps the ceiling in the photo. “There’s only a few examples of this left in the city. So…”
“Ohhhhh, yeah, I got you,” says Veneza, sliding into Bronca’s desk chair and pulling the keyboard toward herself. Bronca sees her typing in “Guastavino tiles” and “Manhattan.”
Manhattan, meanwhile, has been thumbing through the book. “This says a lot of the Guastavino vaults were in old tenements,” he says, looking troubled. “Buildings that are derelict—” He stops. Bronca sees how his eyes widen. Then he turns the book around so fast that the motion knocks over a cup of pens on Bronca’s desk. “Here,” he says, his voice tight as he points. “Here.”
Brooklyn looks, and chuckles. “Oh, my God. Of course.”
Veneza looks, then grins, and turns the desktop monitor so they can see the web page she’s pulled up. DECOMMISSIONED SUBWAY STATION IS ARCHITECTURAL JEWEL IN THE CITY’S CROWN, the header reads. It’s the same place that Manhattan has found in Bronca’s book. “Old City Hall Station.”
“Then that’s where he is,” Manhattan murmurs. He leans on the desk, letting out a sigh of relief. “We can go and find him, finally.”
“It’s not easy to get to,” Brooklyn warns. “That station is defunct, closed to the public most of the time. Only way in—if you don’t want to sneak onto the tracks and risk electrocution, getting run over by a train, or getting arrested—is via the Transit Museum, but they only do tours once in a blue moon. I think I’ve got a favor I can call in, though.” She reaches for her phone.
“Can’t you get there on the 6 train, when it turns around?” Veneza asks Brooklyn. “Tourists do it all the time. I did it once.”
“Yeah, but they don’t let you out of the train. It doesn’t even stop.”
Hong has come to peer at the book while they’re talking. Then he shakes his head impatiently and glowers around at them. “Fine. You’ll need to get there as soon as you can. We’ll have to hope that the strength your primary gains from consuming you four will finally allow him to awaken and properly protect the city, even without the fifth borough.”
Silence falls for a moment.
Then Brooklyn says, “I’m sorry, what?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
They Don’t Have Cities There
In the morning, after Aislyn has made breakfast and eaten with her parents—and Conall, who did not look at her the entire time—she heads off to work. On the doorstep of the house she stops short, however, surprised by the sight of an enormous twenty-foot-wide white pillar taking up most of the front yard.
It’s nothing identifiable. Just a big, smooth-sided and featureless cylindrical white thing jutting up from the ground and out of sight into the sky above. Aislyn stares at it, trying to understand how someone has built something this big in their front yard without her noticing, and without anyone in her house remarking on it. And so fast, given that it wasn’t there last night! Then she realizes she can see a flock of passing Canada geese through its translucence… and she understands, sort of.
The pillar is like the flower fronds, and like the woman who always wears white; neither is From Around Here. And like the flower fronds, no one other than Aislyn can see the pillar—which is why, when her father passes her on the way to his own car, he waves without remarking on the titanic tower that now shadows his house. Her mother won’t be able to see it, either, Aislyn is pretty sure. Only Aislyn knows it’s there.
When she steps into the driveway and gets a good look at the horizon—their house is on a slight hill—she spots another, similar pillar in the distance. Somewhere over near Freshkills Park, she’s guessing.
Aislyn has a car—a used Ford hybrid that she bought a few years back. Her father hates it because he thinks only liberals should care about the environment, but he put up with her choice, and even gave her half the purchase price so that she could buy it outright without a car note, because at least it’s American made. She pays for gas and insurance with the money she earns from working at the local library, where she has an off-the-books job. (It’s nothing illicit, but it has to be off the books because she doesn’t have anything but a two-year associate’s, and the city requires a four-year degree. Her father agreed to “lose” some outstanding parking tickets for the head librarian.) But she can’t drive the car much because her father monitors the mileage, and because she suspects he’s put a GPS tracker in it somewhere. He does things like that. When Aislyn wants privacy, she takes the bus.
Right now, though, sitting in the car and staring at the tower in her yard, and thinking of the strange man—the city of São Paulo, apparently—who approached her, and thinking of Conall and her fear of leaving the island and… everything, Aislyn abruptly feels like she just can’t take much more of this.