Veneza abruptly gets up and exits Bronca’s office, leaving the door open. It’s getting late, though sunset-tinted light still comes in through the main gallery window because they haven’t put down the shutters yet. They all stare as she stops at the big window, bathed in slanting red rays, and leans forward, peering at something in the distance. Then she points out the window, and turns to call to them, “A tower, right? Uh, like that?”
They all hurry into the main gallery and cluster at the window beside her.
It’s difficult to see from here. Small with distance, though it arcs above the trees and buildings and the zooming cars of some kind of highway. Manny has to squint to see it—but it looks like a cross between a giant toadstool and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis: an arch that is irregular, misshapen in its twists and curves, and flattened at the top. There are slowly undulating streamers coming off the flat top’s edges, attenuating into a thinness too difficult to see clearly from this distance and angle. It’s easy to guess where most of those streaming, moving tendrils are going, though. Down. Thinning into filaments and spreading onto the streets below.
“I saw that when I went out for lunch today,” Veneza says softly as they all stare. “I thought it was, you know, a guerilla art installation, bad marketing gimmick, whatever. I was going to go check it out after work today. But when I texted a friend about it—she lives there, it’s Hunts Point—she said she didn’t see anything.”
Bronca groans softly. “I live in Hunts Point. Fuck, that thing is probably right over my house.”
Hong regards Veneza for a moment. “It wouldn’t be a good idea to go near it.”
“Yeah, you think?”
“What is it?” Paulo asks.
“No idea.” Hong sighs. “I suppose you were right about this city being an unusual case.”
“Yes, I was.” Paulo glares at him. “Thank you ever so much for throwing me under the bus, by the way.”
“You’re welcome,” Hong says evenly.
“Look,” says Bronca, in a soft tone of horror. She’s pointing at the street right in front of the Center. On a sidewalk across that street, a group of Latino teenagers walks by, perhaps heading home from an after-school activity. They’re laughing and joking with each other, punching each other as boys do, making a lot of noise in their young joy.
There are six of them. Three have tendrils curling up from the backs of their necks or shoulders. One of the infected ones has fronds all over his arms, too, and a small one growing from his face just below one eye.
Everyone falls silent for a while.
Bronca breaks the silence with a noisy deep breath. “I need… shit. Let’s go for a walk.” When the stares turn to her, she tightens her jaw. “Just around the block. I’ve been in here without a break for going on forty-eight hours. I need more than just talking with you people to get a feel for what’s really happening out there.”
They look at each other. Hong starts to open his mouth, and Paulo elbows him. Bronca makes a sound of annoyance, then turns to go on her own.
Manny immediately moves to join her, though she stops and glares at him. “You can’t go alone,” he says. She narrows her eyes at him, and it’s definitely an intimidating look, even though she’s shorter than him. He doesn’t care. (He’s faced worse, he knows, though he doesn’t remember what.) “None of us can go anywhere alone until this is done.”
“This is bullshit,” Padmini mutters. Veneza claps her on the shoulder awkwardly, but then moves to join Bronca and Manny.
“Do you have a construct ready, to defend yourself should the Enemy attack?” Hong asks.
Bronca curls her lip at him; it’s not a smile. “I always have my boots.” She’s not wearing boots at the moment, Manny notices, but Hong seems satisfied with that. Hong eyes Manny, who grimaces as he realizes he doesn’t. It’s not difficult to guess what Hong means—but what quintessential Manhattanism can he think of to weaponize in a crisis? He’s been here three days and spent less than one of them in his own borough.
Well—He reaches back and finds his wallet. There’s the debit card. As long as he’s not broke.
Hong gives him a skeptical look, then nods at Bronca. “Well, it’s her borough, anyway. Try not to get in her way.”
Manny winces, but follows Bronca and Veneza outside.
The instant they step outside, however, Bronca stops, frowning. Manny notices her wince and put a hand to one hip, as if it pains her. “Shit, I should’ve come out of there before. Everything feels wrong.”
“Yeah, but it’s a dry heat,” Veneza says. Bronca only shakes her head and starts walking, with a noticeable limp.
The Center sits on the gradual slant of a hill, so they start up its slope toward some smaller avenue that Manny can see up ahead. Everything looks fine to his eye, apart from the occasional people or cars that pass by with tendrils on them. There are no big, FDR Drive–esque plumes of tendrils that Manny can see, but if this many denizens of the borough are being infected, then there’s something, somewhere. Those structures, maybe. Maybe the thing on FDR Drive was developing into something like them—a tower—when he stopped it.
Bronca strides forcefully despite her age, glancing at every example of the infected and muttering something in a language Manny can’t parse, for once. Something that apparently isn’t spoken much in Manhattan. She’s rubbing at her side, too, in addition to the hip. Both gestures feel familiar. When she does it again, grimacing as if she’s got heartburn, Manny says, “When I fought that thing on FDR, it felt like it was digging into me, not just the asphalt.”
Bronca sighs. “Oh, good. I was worried it was rheumatism.”
At the corner, however, Bronca comes to an abrupt halt in front of them, her face a study in shock. Manny tenses, sliding a hand into his pocket for his debit card, but what she’s staring at is simply an empty rubble field on the opposite corner. It looks like a building there has been recently torn down. There’s nothing left but tumbled bricks, and a newly painted plywood fence announcing whatever’s coming soon to replace it. He can’t see anything to be upset about, but Veneza, too, inhales as she sees it. “Oh noooo,” she says. “Oh, my God. Murdaburga.”
“What?” asks Manny.
“Murdaburga’s gone!” Her whole posture radiates tragedy. “Those were like the fattest, juiciest burgers you ever had. And that place had been there longer than I’ve been alive. It’s a Bronx institution. When the fuck did they knock it down? And why? There were always people inside buying burgers. I thought it was doing okay!”
Bronca sets her lips in a grim line and stomps across the street, her shoulders tight. Manny hurries to keep up. When she stops again, he realizes she’s staring at the poster that’s been put up on the fence. LUXURY LIVING, it reads at the top, above a lovely architect’s drawing of a modernist mid-rise stack building.
“Condos,” she snarls, in the same tone that others might say cobras. “Murdaburga was the storefront on a building that dozens of families lived in for years. I’d heard there was trouble a couple of months ago, something about jacked-up rents—but my God. They just threw all those people out. For overpriced, ugly-ass condos.”