It’s my sister’s, anyway. I just like to hit people with it.” She grabs the umbrella and hands it to him, pointy tip first.
“Thanks!” He grabs it and trots back to the cab. “Okay, we’re golden.”
Madison frowns at him, then at the tendril flare, as she opens the cab’s driver-side door to get back in. “I can’t see what’s beyond that thing,” she says. “If there are cars, and I can’t brake in time—”
“Yeah. I know.” Manny vaults up onto the Checker’s hood, then its roof. Madison stares while he turns and arranges himself to sit straddling the roof, one hand gripping the OFF DUTY sign. Fortunately, Checkers are high and long, narrow-built for city streets. He can get enough of a grip with his legs to hold on, though it’s still going to be dicey. “Okay. Ready.”
“I am so texting my weed man as soon as this is over,” Madison says, shaking her head as she gets into the cab.
The umbrella is key. Manny doesn’t know why, but he’s okay with accepting what he can’t quite understand, for now. What’s really bothering him is that he’s not sure how to use it. Given that everything in him cries out that the forest of tendrils is dangerous—deadly if it so much as touches him, maybe because the tendrils look like anemones, which sting their prey to death—he needs to figure it out fast. As Madison starts up the cab, he experimentally lifts the umbrella, metal tip pointing toward the tendril mass like a jouster’s lance. It’s wrong. The right idea, but the wrong implementation; weak, somehow. The umbrella’s an automatic, so he unsnaps its closure and presses the button. It pops open at once, and it’s huge. A golf umbrella—a nice one, with no hint of a rattle or wobble as Madison accelerates and the wind pulls at the umbrella. But still wrong.
The tendril mass looms, ethereal and pale, more frightening as the cab accelerates. There is a beauty to it, he must admit—like some haunting, bioluminescent deep-sea organism dragged to the surface. It is an alien beauty, however, meant for some other environment, some other aether, and here in New York its presence is a contaminant. The very air around it has turned gray, and now that they’re closer, he can hear the air hissing as if the tendrils are somehow hurting the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen they touch. Manny’s been in New York for less than an hour and yet he knows, he knows, that cities are organic, dynamic systems. They are built to incorporate newness. But some new things become part of a city, helping it grow and strengthen—while some new things can tear it apart.
They’re speeding now, doing at least fifty. The tendrils shadow the sky and the air has turned cold and the smell of lightless oceans has grown nauseating and it’s getting hard to hold on to the cab’s roof. He hangs on anyway and half shuts his eyes against the wind and the burning salt of the thing’s scent and what is he doing? Pushing out the interloper. But he’s an interloper, too, isn’t he? And if he doesn’t do this exactly the right way, then only one of the interlopers here is going to walk away from this confrontation intact, and the umbrella isn’t strong enough.
Then, when the Checker is only feet away, close enough that Manny can see the slick, pore-flecked skin of the tendrils, and his side screams with agony like someone’s jabbed an ice-cold pike through him—
—he remembers the words of the woman who gave him the umbrella. I just like to hit people with it, she’d said.
Manny lets go of the OFF DUTY sign. Immediately he starts to slide back on the cab’s roof because they’re going so fast that he can barely hold on with his legs alone. But he might survive falling off the cab; he won’t survive contact with the nest of tendrils if he doesn’t get this umbrella up. He needs both hands for that, wrestling against the wind and his own fear, but in the welter of seconds that he has, he manages to lift the open umbrella above his head. Now he might die, but at least his hair won’t get wet in any sudden rain shower.
Suddenly there is energy around him, in him, blazing rusty red and tarnished silver and greened bronze and a thousand colors more. It has become a sheath around the whole cab—a sphere of pure energy