“Those aren’t actively chasing us down the street like the damn Starbucks, though.” Bronca shakes her head, peering down the length of Second Avenue. “I could try Lex or Park, but the real problem is that there’s one of those things on every other corner—especially near Grand Central and the other tourist spots.” Fleetingly she finds herself wishing that they’d brought Manhattan with them. Maybe he could’ve somehow secured the route against this.
“This doesn’t make sense!” Queens cranes her neck to see the porcupine thing on the next block. It’s very still, but Bronca doesn’t trust it. It’s also one of the newer buildings on the block and might be more flexible than the older, unrenovated bird-Starbucks. “Starbucks has been in the city for years! It has to be part of New York by now.”
“Starbucks is everywhere,” Hong rumbles. “All over my city, too. Big chain stores make a city less unique, more like every other place. We do not have time for your breakdown, Bronx.”
Bronca freezes, then turns around in her seat. “Disrespect me again,” she snaps. “You will be walking back to JFK from that corner right there. Hope nothing eats you on the way.”
There must be enough true fury in her voice; he looks away and takes a deep breath. With brittle, exaggerated politeness, he says, “Apologies. Do you have an alternate plan?”
She’s not really mollified, but they’ve got other problems. In answer to his question, she sets her jaw and pulls the car away from the curb.
“What are you going to—” Queens begins.
“I’m gonna drive like a motherfucking New Yorker, is what I’m going to do,” Bronca snarls. And then she cuts off a truck and accelerates to fifty.
Queens cries out, and Bronca hears her scrambling for the seat belt that she should’ve already had on. The truck blats an air horn at Bronca. “Honking’s illegal! You’re gonna get a ticket!” she shouts—but she’s grinning, in spite of herself. It’s been a shitty few days. So at full speed she rockets down Second Avenue, cutting neat zigzags across the traffic, threading the needle between two Land Rovers, shooting through an intersection just as its light turns red. Hong curses Cantonese behind her. A right-lane car pass. An impatient swerve around a slow-moving pedestrian. There’s a police speed monitor on one side of the road down by Twenty-third, reminding drivers that the speed limit in the city is twenty-five, and it blinks a baleful red seventy as she blasts past.
But the Starbucks monsters can’t touch them. After ten blocks, silvery flickers of light have begun to appear around Bronca’s Jeep, licking at the edges of her vision. After fifteen, it’s not a peripheral thing anymore; a sheath of white light surrounds them. A snakelike Starbucks lunges out of the lobby of a chain hotel, its ghostly, stretched-wide mouth open, and just past its translucent white gullet, a tired-looking barista slumps on his knees, scrubbing up a spilled iced something. But the snake’s spectral teeth bounce off Bronca’s car as if it’s tried to bite a rock. And Bronca blazes on.
The cops don’t stop her, or even seem to see her. Hong and Queens have sat back, gripping the armrests and making sure their seat belts are buckled. Brooklyn, bless her, helps by shouting out the window at any car that looks as if it’s about to impede their route. “Are you blind, motherfucker?” and so on. Adding to the construct, Bronca now realizes, blending the power of their two boroughs into one massive, preemptive wave of Get The Fuck Out The Way. Now the sheath of energy is bullet-shaped, and long enough that it physically shunts aside cars that are going too slow or about to cut them off. Bronca’s grinning like a clown. Brooklyn’s laughing, too, giddy with it. It’s beautiful.
Second Avenue ends at Houston, so the GPS starts directing them on a more zigzagging route toward Brooklyn. Now they’re in the Lower East Side. The only Starbucks in the area is a tired old fishlike thing on Delancey, which can’t even make it past its own curb when it tries to flop at them. Bronca does the speed limit past that one, just as an extra unspoken fuck-you.
The Williamsburg Bridge is gone, long may it rest. There’s something in the water past all of the warnings and roadblocks and memorial photo walls, something white and heaving and organic that seems to fill the entirety of the East River, and enormous enough to tower over the lone support pylon that remains standing in the bridge’s wake. As they pass Delancey, the white thing slowly undulates, even as they watch. It radiates a sickly greenish-white light that hurts Bronca’s eyes, and she swerves off Delancey sooner than she might have, because of it.
“Oh no,” Queens murmurs in a soft, horrified voice. “That’s the thing that broke the bridge. It’s real, but I didn’t think it would still be there.” No one answers her, mostly because there’s nothing to say.
Instead, Brooklyn taps Bronca’s phone. “I’m adjusting the route to take us over the Brooklyn Bridge. No chain stores on the BQE.”
“Yeah, okay,” Bronca says. Then she pulls over to the curb again, while they’re on one of the smaller streets where this is still possible.
“What—”
“I hate driving in Brooklyn,” she says, unbuckling her seat belt. “Handle your own damn borough.”
Brooklyn laughs in spite of herself, and gets out to switch places with her. “You want to drive once we get to Staten Island?” she asks Queens, while they buckle in.
“I don’t drive, remember?” Queens looks sheepish.
“Oh, right, forgot.”
“How can you not know how to drive?” Hong asks, scowling.
“Because usually, New Yorkers don’t need to,” Bronca snaps at him. Not that she’s any big fan of Queens, either, but it’s habit to defend other women when men start ragging on them, and the fact that Queens is New York and Hong Kong is an out-of-towner just adds impetus. “Now shut up again. I was starting to not hate you.”
The rest of the ride to the island is uneventful. Still, they all see them as they crest the Verrazano, which gives them a good view of the island: more towers. Two of them, at least, though there’s also a humped, nodule-covered thing in the distance that is either a really ugly stadium or yet another weird structure.
Brooklyn slows down in Staten Island—not just because the streets here are narrower and there are a lot of cops around, but also because they can sense the avatar of Staten Island, now that they’ve entered her domain. It’s a strange feeling, but not altogether different from that new deep awareness they all have of the primary, which has lingered in them since they did their little group-vision thing. It is as if there is a lodestone in their heads, sort of, with one end that points toward City Hall instead of north. The other points toward somewhere in the middle of Staten Island—an area that Hong pointed out to them on Google Maps, which is called Heartland Village.
To get there, they must drive through a sprawling, hilly woodland, which that night is full of strange shadows. They’re tense the whole way, watching the spaces between the trees, ready for anything. Nothing happens, but the unease lingers—getting worse, Bronca notes, as they move deeper into the island’s territory. Before long, they’ve pulled onto a neat little street where all the houses are cute two-story single-families interspersed with semi-attached double houses. They are eerily similar in frame, these homes, though they’ve all got different paint jobs and siding and hedges. It’s the suburbs, where conformity trumps comfort. Bronca’s never liked places like this.