He shakes his head, and none of them speak for a moment. It’s hard to argue with the tight-jawed tragedy in his face.
“Look,” Brooklyn says. She sighs and leans against a wall. “Without Staten Island… You can’t ask us to sacrifice ourselves if we don’t even know that it’s going to work. If it takes dying to make her safe, I can pay that price. In a heartbeat. But I’m not going to leave my daughter motherless for nothing.”
“What if you go find Staten Island?” Veneza’s voice is hesitant; when they turn to her, she is sitting against the far wall of the room, knees drawn up and arms wrapped around them, looking tired and unhappy. Manny can guess why. He hasn’t quite sussed out the relationship between Bronca and Veneza—surrogate-mother-and-daughter, superhero-sidekick, or maybe just odd-couple best friends. Love is love, however, and it probably bothers Veneza a lot to know that she’s going to lose Bronca if they see this through. “What if all of you go to her, and convince her to help? It’s the one thing you haven’t tried, but it seems… I don’t know. The obvious next step.”
It’s true. Yet Manny finds himself disliking the idea, and for a moment he is flustered as to why. He’s never been to Staten Island. What is this reluctance to go there? Is he afraid of an avatar who is clearly violent and might be crazy? That basically applies to all of them—himself more than most. Or is he somehow being affected by Manhattanites’ collective distaste for the littlest, least-loved borough?
“It’s worth a try,” Brooklyn says, at last. She sounds reluctant, too. All of them look reluctant, which backs up Manny’s theory. But no one objects.
Hong rubs his eyes. “None of you seem to realize how urgent a matter this is. While we waste time with endless chatter, what’s happening in this city is escalating, rapidly. Each person infected infects others. Each new structure that grows unchecked infects many. It’s clear that the Enemy is building toward some goal, and I don’t know what it is, but you need to stop it. Now, before it gets worse.”
“We are being urgent,” Padmini snaps. “A few days ago I was doing coursework, today I’m actually standing here and not leaving while strangers try to convince me to kill myself. This is as fast as I get.”
“If we go to City Hall,” Manny begins. Padmini groans, and he glares at her, annoyed. “If we go now, and can’t wake the primary, we’ll have wasted a lot of time. I think we should split up. Some of us go get Staten Island. The rest see if we can do anything at City Hall—or just keep the primary avatar safe, if not.”
Padmini blinks. Bronca looks duly impressed. “Agreed. Surprised to hear it from you, but agreed.”
Manny lets out a slow breath, attempting patience. “I want the primary to live. I haven’t made any secret of that, but I can’t see why you wouldn’t, too, given what’s at stake.”
Bronca snorts. “You’re the one who’s in love with him, Mannahatta.”
“Not suicidally,” Manny snaps, although he’s also blushing. “What good does it do me to save his life and then die at his feet? I want… more than that.” Jesus. He’s going to blow some blood vessels. But it’s the truth. “I’m going to fight for more than that.”
“That’s almost sweet,” Brooklyn says. She’s smiling, albeit with a hint of sadness. “I hope you get what you want. I hope we all do.”
Bronca lets out a little tired sigh and shakes her head. To Manny, she says, “I take it you’re Team City Hall?”
“Of course.”
She eyes Padmini. “You?”
“I don’t want to go anywhere near City Hall,” Padmini declares.
“Team Staten Island, then,” Hong drawls. “Since São Paulo should not return to that borough, he’ll obviously have to—”
He tenses, midsentence. Paulo, too, frowns and turns, his eyes unfocusing. Manny’s trying to figure out what’s the matter—and then it hits all of them, too. A sinking sensation. A strange gravitic dip, which is all the stranger because it does not exist in the real world, where there is light and time and space and they all stand upon a floor. Something in the other place. Close, whatever it is.
“What is—” Padmini begins. Paulo shakes his head, frowning.
“Nothing I’ve ever felt,” Hong says.
Bronca groans softly, bending and grinding a fist into her midriff as if she’s got heartburn. “Urgh. I feel like I’m going to be sick.”
Manny doesn’t feel sickness, but he definitely feels something. An offness, a wrongness. An… imminence. He looks down, his perception caught half in and half out of the real world, and frowns at a whispery rustle at the edges of his hearing. “Why does it sound like there’s something moving underneath us?” And why is there something familiar about the sound?
Bronca looks at the floor, too—and all of a sudden, her eyes widen. “Because there is. Rising toward us.” She grabs Veneza and hauls the girl to her feet. “Everybody out! Now!”
“What? Why?” asks Brooklyn. But she’s moving.
Then they can all feel it. Something is growing underneath the Center—a layer of wrongness between them and the city’s bedrock, interfering with the bond they should feel by simply standing on their home ground.
Manny curses and grabs Paulo, since he’s nearest. Paulo does not protest, though he stumbles a little, shaky on his feet. Veneza comes up on Paulo’s other side, however, and between the two of them they’re able to keep up as the rest pelt for the door. Bronca swings a little right as they’re hurrying down a corridor so that she can yank on a fire alarm panel. An old-fashioned clanging bell starts to go off. Manny remembers her mentioning that there are artists who sometimes spend the night in the Center, upstairs. But even as the alarm goes off, the building’s lights flicker.
They begin to hear a sound. A whispering susurrus. A many-layered slither, rising into a growl beneath them. And they’re not running nearly fast enough.
Manny tries to think, tries not to be afraid—and then for some reason, he finds himself thinking about his one experience of being on a subway. That rush between express stops, hurtling through the dark in the belly of a gleaming metal sheath. That sense of endless, perilous, chaotic speed—
It isn’t much. He’s not in his home borough. Still, abruptly there is a stir of city-energy, and the ghostly shape of a subway car shimmers into visibility around them as they run. Manny’s feet seem to lift off the ground and he zooms forward, fast as a train’s acceleration; Padmini yelps and Bronca curses as they’re all swept along. Then the world rushes past with a whiff of rat droppings and the blare of an industrial horn, and suddenly they have shot through the front windows of the Center and its shutters, too, their bodies briefly as intangible as the ghost-train—
Then they are on the sidewalk across the street from the Center, stumbling and crying out as the train screeches to a halt there. “Holy shit,” Veneza blurts. “That was wilder than the Cyclone!”
But as the phantom subway fades away and they turn back to the Bronx Art Center, a column of white erupts from the ground around the building and flings itself skyward. It is not completely here, not quite in this world; for a moment they can still see the Center within the rising mass, and the building itself seems undisturbed. But the column rises to quickly become thousands of white tendrils, each more massive than the flare that Manny once battled in an FDR fast lane. They interlock as they grow, enveloping the entire block in seconds. Manny can only stare, reverberating with the same stunned horror as the others, while the tangled wall of white rises before them. Fifty feet high. Sixty, and the tendrils have begun to tighten their weave and solidify together into a singular mass. Eighty feet high.