The City We Became (Great Cities #1) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,143

ever felt,” Hong says.

Bronca groans softly, bending and grinding a fist into her midriff as if she’s got heartburn. “Urgh. I feel like I’m going to be sick.”

Manny doesn’t feel sickness, but he definitely feels something. An offness, a wrongness. An… imminence. He looks down, his perception caught half in and half out of the real world, and frowns at a whispery rustle at the edges of his hearing. “Why does it sound like there’s something moving underneath us?” And why is there something familiar about the sound?

Bronca looks at the floor, too—and all of a sudden, her eyes widen. “Because there is. Rising toward us.” She grabs Veneza and hauls the girl to her feet. “Everybody out! Now!”

“What? Why?” asks Brooklyn. But she’s moving.

Then they can all feel it. Something is growing underneath the Center—a layer of wrongness between them and the city’s bedrock, interfering with the bond they should feel by simply standing on their home ground.

Manny curses and grabs Paulo, since he’s nearest. Paulo does not protest, though he stumbles a little, shaky on his feet. Veneza comes up on Paulo’s other side, however, and between the two of them they’re able to keep up as the rest pelt for the door. Bronca swings a little right as they’re hurrying down a corridor so that she can yank on a fire alarm panel. An old-fashioned clanging bell starts to go off. Manny remembers her mentioning that there are artists who sometimes spend the night in the Center, upstairs. But even as the alarm goes off, the building’s lights flicker.

They begin to hear a sound. A whispering susurrus. A many-layered slither, rising into a growl beneath them. And they’re not running nearly fast enough.

Manny tries to think, tries not to be afraid—and then for some reason, he finds himself thinking about his one experience of being on a subway. That rush between express stops, hurtling through the dark in the belly of a gleaming metal sheath. That sense of endless, perilous, chaotic speed—

It isn’t much. He’s not in his home borough. Still, abruptly there is a stir of city-energy, and the ghostly shape of a subway car shimmers into visibility around them as they run. Manny’s feet seem to lift off the ground and he zooms forward, fast as a train’s acceleration; Padmini yelps and Bronca curses as they’re all swept along. Then the world rushes past with a whiff of rat droppings and the blare of an industrial horn, and suddenly they have shot through the front windows of the Center and its shutters, too, their bodies briefly as intangible as the ghost-train—

Then they are on the sidewalk across the street from the Center, stumbling and crying out as the train screeches to a halt there. “Holy shit,” Veneza blurts. “That was wilder than the Cyclone!”

But as the phantom subway fades away and they turn back to the Bronx Art Center, a column of white erupts from the ground around the building and flings itself skyward. It is not completely here, not quite in this world; for a moment they can still see the Center within the rising mass, and the building itself seems undisturbed. But the column rises to quickly become thousands of white tendrils, each more massive than the flare that Manny once battled in an FDR fast lane. They interlock as they grow, enveloping the entire block in seconds. Manny can only stare, reverberating with the same stunned horror as the others, while the tangled wall of white rises before them. Fifty feet high. Sixty, and the tendrils have begun to tighten their weave and solidify together into a singular mass. Eighty feet high.

A tower.

“Oh, no, no, no,” Bronca breathes as they crane their necks, watching the thing form. It will be as high or higher than the strange arch over at Hunts Point, it’s already clear. “The keyholders. I don’t think any of them could have… I have to get them out!” And she actually starts back across the street, before Brooklyn and Veneza both drag her back.

“You can’t,” says Hong. It’s softer than Hong usually speaks, but no less brutally true, for that. Bronca shudders all over and groans, anguished.

“We should go.” Padmini is shaking visibly, her eyes wide and distraught. “We shouldn’t be this close.”

Manny heartily agrees. Traffic on the street in front of the Center is a wreck—cars veering away and stopping in the middle of the street, others speeding up and getting the hell out of Dodge. None of