“So eager to be eaten?” Paulo’s soft voice startles Manny into turning sharply. He’d actually forgotten Paulo was there, for a moment. And then he twitches with the reminder.
“I… didn’t think about the eating thing,” he admits. It makes him want to touch the primary a little less, but only a little.
Paulo’s not much more than an etching in the dark, illuminated more by reflected moonlight than Manny’s phone light. He’s watching Manny, though, and his sadness is visible.
“I’m his,” Manny blurts. It’s defensive, but he’s feeling a little raw right now. “He’s mine.”
Paulo inclines his head in acceptance. “I will admit some envy,” he says gently. “To be part of a group going through this together is astonishing to me, and wonderful in many ways. I went through my own rebirth alone, like most cities.”
It’s a perspective shift that Manny wasn’t expecting. “You knew him, then? Before…” He gestures at the bed of newsprint.
“Of course. That’s how it usually works. The youngest city sees to the next.” Paulo sighs a little, into the dark. “It should have been Port-au-Prince. But I was happy to see this one make it through… until he fell into my arms, and then vanished.”
Manny considers this as he gazes down at the sleeping figure. He tries to imagine the primary awake, vibrant, able to laugh and dance and run, and it’s easy. He’s so vibrant now, even asleep. But then Manny imagines his vibrancy muted, voice undergirded with the same loneliness that all of them have noticed in São Paulo, and it hurts to think of it. Even though it means Manny’s death, he can’t help thinking: I’m sorry we’ll leave you so alone.
“What is he like?” Manny finds himself whispering. In the close, quiet confines of the alcove, even this carries.
He can actually hear Paulo smile. “Arrogant. Angry. Frightened, but unwilling to let his fear restrict him.” After a moment, Paulo moves around the bed of papers, to the primary’s other side. He’s smiling down at the boy, with unmistakable fondness. “He pretends to be less special than he is, because the world has punished him for loving himself. And yet he does. He knows he’s more than whatever superficialities strangers see and dismiss.”
Is that what the city of New York is like? Manny’s been here three days, but it feels right so far. He sighs. It’s a shame. He really wanted to make a life here.
He looks up at Paulo. “I need the others, to touch him.”
“Yes, I can see that. We must rely on your comrades and Hong, then.”
Manny’s lip curls. “I’ll rely on my comrades. Hong can go to hell.”
Paulo laughs once. “Don’t be too hard on him,” he says, to Manny’s surprise. “Before he was a city, he lived through the Opium Wars. He’s watched so many die—cities as well as ordinary people—that his attitude is understandable. If infuriating.”
Manny frowns, trying to remember what he can of Chinese history. “Jesus, that’s… Hong is almost two hundred years old? What, are we immortal?” Unless we’re eaten.
“No. But we live as long as our cities do, provided we don’t go picking fights with our fellow city entities.” He grimaces, putting a hand to his ribs, though he lowers it just as quickly. “Healed at last. If I were home, the bones would have knit in moments.”
“Just other cities? The Enemy can’t harm you anymore?”
“Oh, I imagine it can, now that it has taken this more virulent, intent form.” Paulo shakes his head. “The process has been wrong since at least New Orleans. Probably longer. Maybe now the others will finally listen, and do something—and I pray it is not too late already.”
Something Paulo has said troubles Manny. “Have a lot of cities been killed in the process of being born?”
“Countless numbers, over the millennia. More lately.” When Manny’s eyes narrow, Paulo half smiles and then begins rummaging in his pockets for a cigarette. “Yes, it is exactly as you think: the deaths are accelerating. I suppose that follows, if the Enemy has been weakening new cities even before they quicken. What a horrifying development.”
“It wasn’t like that for you?”
Finding his cigarette and lighting up, Paulo regards him over the faint orange glow before exhaling smoke. “No. There was unrest in my city, certainly. The military dictatorship that had taken over the country—most likely backed by your country’s government, thank you for that—decided to clean up the favelas by destroying them, evacuated or not. As I was from one such favela, I objected. So did São Paulo, which chose me to become its voice and champion.” Manny sees the memory warm his eyes for a moment. Then Manny recalls that the military coup Paulo just mentioned was sometime in the 1960s. Paulo looks great for a seventy- or eighty-year-old.
“When the Enemy came,” Paulo continues, after another long, appreciative drag on his cigarette, “it tested my resolve as was traditional. I and my city met it in the rubble of a shattered marketplace, where I blew its harbingers to hell with a rocket launcher I had stolen from the soldiers.” Manny laughs, startled. Paulo so often has a genteel air—ah, but there beneath the stylish professional veneer, Manny can see a cold brutality to match his own. He strongly suspects that Paulo did his own share of hurting people, back before he became a multidimensional entity.
Did you choose to be different? Manny wants to ask. Is that why the city claimed you for itself?
But just as he opens his mouth, a loud clack echoes throughout the empty old station. It’s a familiar clack, Manny realizes; the same thing they heard when the subway train’s lights went out. It’s followed by more clacks, faint metallic groans, pops like sprung rivets. He’s not too troubled by the sound—some kind of electrical shutdown procedure, probably—until he realizes it’s getting louder. Speeding up, rather than slowing down: clack clack clack clack CLACK CLACK CLACK KRIIDONK.
Silence for a moment. Then Manny hears something new and awful: a low, grindingly slow, distressed-metal screech. There is a tinkle of cracked, falling glass. He tries to think of what else that sound might be, but only one conclusion feels possible: The train is moving. With no one aboard, and while powered down. The train is moving in a way that no train is meant to move.
Behind them. On the platform they just vacated.
Paulo throws him a wild-eyed look. Manny knows. He must prepare a construct to channel the city’s power. Think of some quintessentially New Yorkish thing, a habit or a gesture or a symbol, then wield it as a weapon. They stand in Manhattan, upon the concrete and beneath the dirt of his own borough. Manny should be nearly invincible here.
But as the clacks and metallic screeching grow deafening, and the thing that has come for the primary avatar crawls crunching and ravening up the steps, Manny finds that amid his sheer and absolute terror, his mind has gone completely blank.
Aislyn jerks awake to the sound of shouting, right outside the house. Then the whole house shudders, as if with an earthquake.
Startled, she fumbles first for the knife under her pillow—though Conall is not home, she knows. He and her father are out for the night, her father on shift, Conall God knows (or cares) where. Only her mother is home, and Aislyn knows from experience that on nights like this, when she is left to her own devices, Kendra Houlihan will be deep in a bottle of gin. Aislyn doesn’t know if it counts as alcoholism when you only drink yourself into a stupor once a week or so, but… well. Aislyn is effectively alone in the house.