“What…” There’s only one way to know. Bronca steels herself. Let me die as Tundeewi Loosoxkweew, she thinks. As Fire Burns Woman, as Turtle Clan. As the warrior Chris always called me. And then she reaches for the boy’s head, too.
Something stops her hand. It doesn’t feel like anything at first, just a progressive slowness, until her hand grows still and will go no farther. Queens starts, then stretches out a shaking hand. Hers stops, too. They all look at Brooklyn, whose expression has gone bleak. She knows it’s pointless. But because they need her to, she reaches out. Her hand stops on the same invisible barrier.
Above them, through the skylight, the daylight fades more. It’s like an eclipse, Bronca recalls, thinking of that strange, eerie twilight she’s seen a handful of times over the course of her life. R’lyeh draws near, she thinks, and flinches at the welt this whips across her thoughts.
“It’s coming,” Paulo says unnecessarily. He’s looking up. They’re all looking up. His expression is grim.
“So she’s really going to do it,” Queens says, her voice now full of despair. “She’s going to—to put a city from that place, here. On top of this one. What does that even mean?”
“That a lot of people are going to die,” Brooklyn says. “You heard her. Bringing that city here will somehow cause this whole universe to collapse.”
“How can that be? I don’t understand any of this.” Queens groans, rubbing a hand over her hair.
“You should’ve gone, too,” Bronca says to Paulo. It’s useless, but she’s never been able to keep herself from saying, I told you so. Probably the biggest reason why she’s single now.
Paulo takes a deep breath. “There’s a not-insubstantial chance that whatever happens will simply push me back home to my city. Until the universe ends, in any case.”
“Do you think Hong, then—?”
“Uh. Old B?”
They all turn, startled. That’s because Veneza sounds dazed. When she looks up, she’s breathing harder, her face all over sweat. But she doesn’t look ill or faint, which Bronca is glad to see, because she doesn’t want to think about what it means if that awful creature stung her or bit her or poisoned her in some unearthly way. Maybe it’s foolish to fret so over one person’s life when the entire city is about to get cosmically curb-stomped, but that’s how the human heart works sometimes.
So she goes over to Veneza. “Yeah, kid? What—”
And then she stops. Veneza abruptly backs up a step. Bronca stops, too. They stare at each other, eyes widening.
She is a dirty, tired little thing—struggling in the shadow of greatness, but proud of what she has. Potential is what she’s got, in spades, and she stretches out stubby little piers and puffs a sunken chest of long-vanished industry and tosses her crown of new, gaudy skyscrapers as if to say, Come at me, I don’t care how big you are, I’m just as badass as you—
“No,” Bronca breathes, stunned.
“Um,” Veneza says. She’s shaking a little. But she’s also grinning. “Man, what the fuck.”
“What?” Manny looks from Veneza to the rest of them and back. Queens is just as visibly confused.
“Nothing that matters,” Brooklyn murmurs. Her head is bowed; she’s already mourning her family.
Paulo, however, is staring at Veneza, his eyes wide with realization. A strange look comes over his face. He scrambles around the newspaper pile, fast, and grabs Veneza by the arm so hard that she yelps. Bronca reacts immediately, grabbing his arm in turn. “Hey, what the hell are you—”
“Living cities aren’t defined by politics,” he says. It’s almost a shout, so urgently does he speak. “Not by city limits or county lines. They’re made of whatever the people who live in and around them believe. And there is no other reason for her to have instantiated, here, now, than—” He gives up on words and yanks Veneza again, toward the newspaper pile. Bronca gets it this time. Her hand has gone numb. She lets him go, then hurries to follow.
The little room has begun to darken. Part of that is because the museum director’s flashlight is starting to run down, but it’s also because the sunlight is gone, completely gone. When Bronca looks up, she can see blue sky, but it’s a dark blue, as if the stars are about to come out. And when she squints, she sees that something is solidifying out of nothingness, an unearthly foundation forming in the air high above New York—
Veneza resists Paulo, looking wildly back at Bronca. “B! B, this is freaking me out, what—”
Bronca bats at Paulo until he lets go, then she pulls Veneza into the circle around the primary avatar. “Every single person I’ve ever met from Jersey City says they’re from New York,” she says, speaking with low urgency. “Not to New Yorkers, because we’re assholes about it, but to everybody else. And the whole world accepts that. Right? Because to most people with sense, a city that’s in spitting distance of Manhattan, closer even than Staten Island, might as well be New York. Right?”
There is a sound building around them, above them, throughout the city. A rumble would come from the earth; this is a low, howling siren, like a choir of ten thousand voices screaming at once. Or—no. Like wind howling as it is displaced, shoved aside so fast that the air grows hot. Bronca has not heard anything like it since Hurricane Sandy’s freight-train blasts of destruction, and this is much worse. R’lyeh comes.
But the others get it now. Even Veneza, who’s staring at all of them. Tears have welled in her eyes. She’s grinning, elated—because, Bronca realizes very belatedly, this is what she’s hoped for. She’s been with them since the beginning, after all, watching and wanting to help. Understanding enough to envy, perhaps. And the city of New York, which gobbles up any newcomers foolish enough to want in, has reacted accordingly.
It’s impossible not to smile, too, even here at the end of the world. Joy is joy. Bronca takes one of her hands, letting her love show; they are family now. Manny takes the other, his expression intent.
“What are you, Young B?” Bronca asks her. She’s grinning.
Veneza laughs, tilting her head back like she’s drunk. “I’m Jersey City, goddamn it!”
Manny’s expression clears finally. He exhales in relief as strange mechanisms within his psyche shift and bring into focus the path forward. They all feel this. “And who are we?” he asks them, just as the little chamber goes dark.
All of it, that is, except for the light that surrounds the primary on his bed of tabloid tales and buried ledes. He’s glowing, they see at last. The light never came from anywhere else.
And as they watch, he inhales, stretches, rolls onto his back, and opens his eyes.
“We’re New York,” he says. And grins. “Aw, yeah.”
They are New York.
They are the single titanic concussion of sound from every subwoofer and every steel drum circle that has ever annoyed elderly neighbors and woken babies while secretly giving everyone else an excuse to smile and dance. It is this sound, a violent wave of pure percussive force pouring from a thousand nightclub doors and orchestra pits, that slams upward and outward from the city. If it were happening in peoplespace, there would be a lot of hearing impairments in its wake. It happens in the place where cities dwell—and where rude R’lyeh has actually dared to try to usurp New York’s seat upon the world. Oh no the hell you don’t, they snarl, and shove the interloper away.