Bronca rubs at the small of her back. “Well, now we know what her super-special power is, I guess: magic xenophobia.” She looks around, then looks around again. Her stomach clenches. “Hong.”
They all look. Hong is nowhere to be seen.
“Maybe he’s gone back to his city?” Queens grimaces. “He did keep saying that he wanted to. Maybe he recovered first and…”
“I’m going to hope so,” Brooklyn says grimly. “I’m actually going to hope he’s just that much of an asshole, abandoning us while we were out of it.”
Because the alternative is that the strange, impossible, and instantaneous transit from Staten Island somehow left Hong… elsewhere. In limbo, maybe. Or nowhere at all.
That’s too much for Bronca to contemplate, so she doesn’t, focusing instead on practical matters. “And where’s my fucking—oh.” Her old Jeep, none the worse for having been teleported across New York Harbor, is sitting next to the bull. There’s already a parking ticket stuck under one of the wipers. Well, at least it wasn’t towed. She sighs. “Come on, then. I’ll drive us to City Hall.”
She starts forward, then stops as Queens grabs her arm. “You’re not listening to me,” Queens snaps. “This is pointless. We can’t wake up the primary, not without the fifth borough. What are we going to do, go there and let him eat us for nothing?”
“Yes,” Brooklyn says, glaring at her and moving around them to go to the car. “Either that or we go back to Staten Island to knock that little dumb-ass in the head and bring her along anyway. But that’ll probably take another hour, and somehow I don’t feel like we’ve got that much time left anymore. Going to see the primary is the next best thing.” She slaps at her clothing, finds her phone in a back pocket of the skirt, and then grimaces. “I don’t have Manhattan’s number. Why the hell didn’t we exchange numbers?”
“He’s underground, anyway, so reception would be iffy,” Bronca replies. She finds her key fob and unlocks the doors.
“Do you just want to die, then?” Queens, not following them, looks from one to the other in disbelief. “Are all of you crazy?”
“Yeah, we are,” Bronca says with a single weary laugh. “We’re New York, remember; we’re all fucked in the head. Can’t talk too much shit about Manhattan, really.”
“I’m not giving up,” Brooklyn says to Queens. She puts a hand on her hip; her expression is implacable. “Don’t you dare try to make it sound like that, young lady. Giving up is what you’re doing. So go on, run back to Jackson Heights and hide, and hope that woman and her monster things don’t get you. Or leave town, and we’ll all hope the next Queens steps up to try and save people—”
At this, Queens flinches. “I want to save people! You think I don’t? But we don’t even know if this will work…” And then she trails off, wincing; her shoulders sag in defeat. “But… ah, shit.”
Bronca has managed to get her hip to stop hurting, which feels like a victory. “What.”
Veneza has peeled off the light sweater she had on—last night, a lifetime ago, she’d been complaining that the Center’s air-conditioning was too much. The sweater is now smeared with God knows what, so she leaves it on the ground under the bull’s nose. “Sniff that, capitalism.” Then she, too, heads for Bronca’s car.
“I was just thinking that you’ve run the numbers.” Queens is looking at them sadly, and smiling. “I guess I should’ve run them, too, but all of this has been… too much. It’s there in the probabilities, though, right? Running means we have zero chance to save the city. Trying to talk sense into Staten Island, nonzero chance, but so small as to be meaningless. Trying to wake up the primary, even with just the four of us… is the best chance we have.” She shakes her head, then finally sighs and starts toward Bronca’s car. “I hate that there’s no ninetieth-percentile scenario, though.”
“Yeah, sucks, don’t it?” Bronca claps Queens on the shoulder, and they all get in.
Brooklyn’s phone is down to a sniff of power, but it warns that there’s been some kind of police incident at the Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall Station. She calls one of her magical aides and makes arrangements. “Someone from the Transit Museum’s going to meet us,” she says as she hangs up, then tosses her phone onto the floor. “They can let us into the old station.”
“I do have a car charger,” Bronca says, pursing her lips at the dying phone.
“Leave it,” Brooklyn says, turning to look out the window. “I’d only call my daughter again.”
Bronca sighs and thinks, I really hope they don’t name my grandchild something corny.
At City Hall, parking is a nightmare. It takes half an hour to get there, even though it’s not far; they might have walked faster, even if they’d stopped on every corner to watch the sunrise. The traffic has likely been caused by the weird white structures that seem to be sprouting all over the city now, at a rapidly accelerating rate. Bronca drives past a gnarled treelike thing with yawning distorted faces in lieu of boles, which has webbed up the little park between two financial services’ corporate headquarters. There’s another small one on the south lawn of City Hall Park, like a white humped frog without legs or eyes. Just a mouth and warts, rooted to the ground and shivering as if it’s cold.
Worse than the structures are the people. More and more of the financial and political warriors Bronca sees have tendrils growing somewhere on them. Some have just one or two, but a few are covered in the things, like albino Sasquatches strolling along in Manolo Blahniks.
“Getting worse,” Veneza says unnecessarily.
“Yeah, noticed,” Bronca replies.
She feels Veneza turn to stare at her. “You know she’s like you, right? A city. Just not from this world.”
Bronca sighs, questing briefly for a parking spot before finally grabbing a narrow slot that’s very likely going to get her towed. Fuck it. “Yep. Noticed that, too.”
“And you know she wants to come here? That’s what those white things all over the city are about. She called them ‘connector pylons.’” Veneza grimace-smiles. “She’s trying to connect herself to us. Bring her city here—right on top of New York.”
“What? How?” asks Brooklyn. Bronca shuts the car off, so thrown that she forgets to put it in park first; the engine chugs to a halt with an aggrieved sound.
“I don’t know how. But have you noticed the shadow?”
Bronca stares at her. Brooklyn frowns—then abruptly gets out of the car, looking up at the sky. She swears. Bronca does the same, aware of Queens scrambling to follow.
There’s nothing to see, she thinks at first, except unoccluded blueness; it’s a typical June morning, with the sun almost seeming to leap above the horizon now that dawn has broken. Except… Bronca frowns around, noticing at last that the ground is shady. The trees and people cast shadows, but these are thin, almost blended in with the general lack of light. It’s a bright morning, or it should be. There isn’t a single cloud in the sky. The sun’s light should be saturating this area, turning all the shadows stark. It isn’t, though.