In token of which, Brooklyn finally just turns away and hurries after the others to Bronca’s car.
Manny stares after her for a moment longer, registering only belatedly that he, alone among them, has no family or loved ones to worry about. Except New York itself. Himself.
He gets in the cab with Paulo, and Madison pulls away from the curb quickly, as eager to get away from the tower as any of them. Now Manny can focus, at last.
“On my way,” he murmurs very softly to the air. Paulo glances at him, but says nothing. He knows exactly who Manny’s talking to. “See you soon.”
And as Veneza anxiously drives away from the others and tries to convince herself that surprising her asshole father down in Philly really is a better choice than staying to face an interdimensional apocalypse—
—something in her back seat gulps, very softly,
Da-dump.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Gauntlet of Second Avenue
It starts as soon as they’re in the car. Bronca takes out her phone so that she can use navigation. She squints at the thing as she always does, laboriously pecking out letters and numbers with one finger until Queens says, “I’ll do it,” and reaches up from the back seat to take the phone from her. “Just start heading for Staten Island.”
It’s no worse than what she’s put up with from Veneza, but Queens isn’t Veneza. “Ask before you take things from people, heathen.”
“I’m just trying to be efficient! I need a destination address.” Her fingers fly across the keyboard with the uncanny speed of anyone younger than thirty. Bronca starts driving. Since Brooklyn’s on the phone in the front passenger seat, Queens looks at Hong.
“I’m Hong Kong,” he snaps.
“Oh, yes. I guess you wouldn’t know.” Queens opens out the map as Bronca starts driving. “But can you at least point to where you found Paulo? She’s probably somewhere near there.”
While she and Hong haggle over the approximate last known location of the Staten Island avatar, Brooklyn gets off the phone again. She’s been talking more quietly this time, and Bronca hasn’t bothered her because she recognized that tone and pitch of voice. That’s how parents sound when they’re trying to say goodbye to their kids, possibly for the last time. It’s what she probably should be saying to her own son… but Mettshish is in his thirties and lives in California, and frankly that’s likely to turn into an argument, which she doesn’t have the strength for at the moment. And orphaning a grown man is an entirely different thing from doing it to a fourteen-year-old girl. If anything, Bronca wishes she could say farewell to her grandchild, due to be born in three months or so… but maybe it’s best that she be only a mystery to the child, and not a tragedy, when they tell stories of her.
In the wake of her phone call, Brooklyn gazes out the window for a while, brooding, and Bronca lets her. Not much that can be said in a moment like this. But eventually she tries. “Sending her to her dad?”
Brooklyn snorts with such bitterness that Bronca immediately knows it was the wrong thing to ask. “Her father’s dead, so I hope not.”
Ouch. “Drugs?”
Brooklyn turns to glare at her. “Cancer.”
Ah, shit. Bronca sighs. “Look, I didn’t mean—I just used to listen to your music, sometimes, and you always talked about getting with guys who were dealers or bangers or… you know.”
“Yeah. A lot of dudes like that are just doing what they have to do to take care of people they care about, which makes them more decent than your average nice upstanding predatory lender or whatever. But regardless, what I talked about in my music wasn’t always what I was doing in real life. Shit, I thought only white people believe everything they hear in rap is real.” She shakes her head and stares at the road.
Bronca feels herself getting heated. It’s the wrong place and the wrong time and the wrong target, and she’s old enough to know that she’s only sniping at Brooklyn because this is something she can control, unlike the rest of their whole awful situation. But even knowing all this… well, Bronca’s never going to be a very good wise elder, if she even makes it that far.
“Yeah? It’s not real?” She keeps her eyes on the road, but her hands have tightened on the steering wheel. “I remember some of your lyrics that were pretty fucking real. ‘And if a bitch tries to hit it, I’ll gut her with my gat,’ you remember that one?”
Brooklyn is groaning and angry-laughing at once. “Oh, here we go. I apologized for those lyrics, years ago, publicly. And I donated a thousand dollars to the Ali Forney Center—”
“You think that makes up for it? You know how many queer kids get stabbed or shot to death—” She takes a corner to get them lined up for the Bruckner Expressway and slews a little, forcing her to cross-control the wheel more than usual to get them back on track.
“Please, please, get into a catastrophic car accident,” Hong sighs from the back seat. “Destroy half the city in a single collision, do all the Enemy’s work for her. Then I can go home.”
Bronca sets her jaw, fuming. But in the silence, Brooklyn lets out a long, slow breath.
“I know an apology don’t make up for it,” she says. She’s slipped back into her old-school Brooklyn accent, dropping the politician voice, and somehow this eases a little of Bronca’s temper. Neither Brooklyn is false, but this one feels a little truer to MC Free, and that’s the part of her Bronca’s got beef with. “I know it don’t, okay? I damn sure got called a dyke enough myself just for stepping into a ring that dude rappers thought was theirs by default. Motherfuckers tried to rape me, all because I didn’t fit into what they thought a woman should be—and I passed that shit on. I know I did. But I got better. I had some friends slap sense into me, and I listened when they did. And I figured out that the dudes were fucked in the head, so maybe it wasn’t the best idea to imitate them. Shit, back then, most of us were just…” She gestures in frustration, then sighs heavily. “Bullshitting, right? High on the hype. Cooning for a record deal and suburban white-boy dollars. I just…” She sighs. “Fuck. It’s done.”
Bronca looks at her, reading the deep weariness and sorrow of her. And sincerity. So she drives on in silence for a while, letting the aethers settle, before she finally says, “Sorry about the ‘drugs.’ That was, uh, racist. Technically prejudiced because the power dynamics are basically flat, but…” She grins in an attempt to ease the awkwardness. “I have Black friends? Also aunties and grandmothers.”
She can almost hear Brooklyn roll her eyes. Still, after a moment, quietly: “I did lose a lot of friends to drugs, so I’m a little…”
Touchy. Yeah. “Me, too.” She snorts. “I am the Bronx.”
An answering snort, followed by a tired, dry, “And I am Brooklyn.”
“You fight crime!” says Queens, beaming. Brooklyn turns and looks at her until she sits back and shuts up.
They’re taking a route that should get them there fastest, even though it means paying a pirate’s ransom in tolls. But right before they’re supposed to transfer from the Bruckner to FDR, Bronca’s phone bleeps a warning. “Uh, there’s an accident or something on FDR,” Queens says, frowning as she leans forward to peer at it. She reaches forward and taps something. “There’s an alternate route through the city that seems clear.”