The City We Became (Great Cities #1) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,115

it again. It glows off of you. Like a damn aura.” She shakes her head, smiling to herself a little wistfully. “I get on the train to go home every day, and sometimes I look around and see all these people glowing. Filled with the beauty of this city.”

Bronca, frowning, lifts her head to stare at Veneza. Veneza is looking through the glass block window that dominates one side of Bronca’s office. You can’t really see anything through it—just the blurry shapes of people as they pass along the sidewalk, and the occasional bus. Still. It’s a little bit of the city, moving and vivid and alive. The colors and light of the glass play over Veneza’s face in a way that makes her momentarily ethereal. For not the first time, Bronca wishes that she’d had a daughter. Veneza is amazing, everything she could have wished for in a child. But Bronca is content to have an amazing friend instead.

With a slow, tired smile, Bronca sighs. “Yeah. Okay. An hour. Uninterrupted.” Then she will apologize to the other parts of herself, swallow a bit of pride, and join them as she knows she should. She still doesn’t fucking like them, and might never. But. She needs them to save the city that Veneza loves. That’s enough of a reason to put up with all this shit.

Veneza grins as if she hears this thought, and heads out to tell the others.

Bronca’s surprised by how much the others don’t know. She is the one who was given to know the history of the whole business, but she thought they would’ve gotten something. It lessens her anger a little; if they literally had to figure out everything from scratch, including how to find each other, then maybe she can cut them some slack. It also turns out that they intended to find her the previous day, but then they lost it to Brooklyn nearly burning herself out by sealing off the entirety of her borough. Bronca resists the urge to yell at them about this, because they’re not supposed to do that. They need each other, working together, to amplify the power and reduce resistance and do other stuff for which there are no words. They need the primary avatar to focus all of it. But she can’t yell at them, not even Brooklyn, because they didn’t know. And, really, that’s her fault.

So it’s time she explains a few things.

While Yijing and Jess handle the business of the Center, Bronca has a sit-down with her fellow boroughs in the staff break room. Veneza’s there, too—mostly to keep Bronca in line, she jokes, but it’s not really a joke and Bronca is grateful for her presence. (The others give Veneza the hairy confused eye for a moment, then Veneza starts offering around the bag of microwave popcorn she’s brought. Queens goes, “Ooh, kettle corn,” and that’s it, Veneza’s in.) It’s actually been several hours rather than just one, because Bronca had to divert some time to interviews by two news crews who showed up unannounced to cover the vandalism and arrests. Naturally, spotting a city council member on the premises, they roped Brooklyn Thomason into commenting, too. Brooklyn gave a pretty good impromptu speech, too, answering the question of what a council member from a different borough is doing helping a Bronx institution with, “An attack on the Bronx is an attack on all of New York,” which even has the virtue of being true.

So now they’re all sitting around eating delivery pho. With real food in her, Bronca’s inclined to be a little less of an asshole, so they’re all getting along better. Brooklyn even apologized for being an asshole back, and it turns out they actually tried to call her when it became clear they wouldn’t make it to the Center before this morning. (Uselessly. Voice mail’s full of hate messages and nobody listened to it.) They’re all buddies now. Which is good, because Bronca’s got some stuff to tell them.

“Okay, so,” she begins. “We’ve got to find Staten Island. With four of us together, that should actually be pretty easy; we’re already calling to her, but together we can narrow down her location and go to her—if she doesn’t find us first. But what we really need to focus on, even while we’re looking for SI, is tracking down the primary avatar.”

They stare at her like she’s just spoken in Munsee. (She checks with Veneza, because sometimes when she’s tired she