The City We Became (Great Cities #1) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,151

up.” Something to her left is swaying from side to side, though occasionally it stops and jerks upward in an awkward, vaguely amphibianesque movement. It’s not close, hiding amid the hedges of one of the neighboring houses, but she really doesn’t like that movement for some reason. It feels like the thing is practicing for a jump.

“None of this is how it should be,” Hong says. He’s got a hand inside his suit jacket, grasping something out of sight. “She has always been enormous, monstrous, attacking when a city is newborn and weak. Not human in shape. Not speaking. Never this.”

“When you assume,” says the Woman in White, “you make an ass of u and me.”

And all of a sudden, all four of them are yanked into the other place, where time and space have no meaning and all of them bristle and vane with cranes and rusting girders and blurry Beaux Arts glass. Massive Hong Kong looms at their backs, but this is not his city; Bronca can see Manhattan’s skyscrapers better, even though he’s a little apart from them as well. Staten Island is here, too, somehow apart from the rest of them and more subdued in size and shine, even though they stand within her borders.

But between her and the rest of them stands something else. Another city, positioned as if to protect Staten Island.

It’s not any part of New York. It’s enormous, bigger than all of them combined, and everything about it feels so wrong that its very closeness makes Bronca flinch back, raising construction scaffolds in automatic defense. The new city is precisely circular in its footprint. Its towers gleam, its neighborhoods sprawl, its parks teem with animals and trees, but all of it is wrong. Those aren’t towers, Bronca thinks in rising horror. They’re breathing. Those aren’t buildings. I don’t know what the fuck— She can’t think. It’s too close. Just the sight of it hurts.

And every skew-angled building, precisely marked street, and suppurating organism of this city gleams in brilliant, perfect, unnaturally bright white.

They snap back into peoplespace, are thrown back, and there every one of them stands stunned by the awful, nauseating realization that the Woman in White is a city, another city, a monstrous city from nowhere in or even close to this universe, whose very streets are inimical to their entire universe.

“Welcome, avatars of New York,” says the Woman in White as they stand frozen in the night-shadow of her tower. Her eyes—acid yellow this time, not even pretending to be a human color—flick at Hong and away dismissively. “And Hong Kong. Is it time for the final confrontation, then? Shall we play some exciting music? Should I deliver a villainous monologue?” She laughs abruptly. It is an utterly delighted laugh that sends chilly fingers dancing down Bronca’s spine. That’s the laugh of someone who’s pretty sure they’ve already won.

Hong is breathing hard, Bronca notices, and there is a deeply shaken note in his voice as he speaks. He is a city of deep history and tradition, underneath its bright modern trappings and rebel reputation. It’s clear he does not take well to things that defy his understanding of the world. “This can’t be,” he murmurs. “We’ve fought you since the beginning. How can you be… I don’t understand.”

“Obviously.” The Woman in White rolls her eyes and shifts to stand akimbo, leaning on one leg with her hand on her hip. “Well, smart amoebas are still just amoebas, aren’t they?”

Bronca is still trying to reconcile Crazy Daisy Duke with the prim, sophisticated Dr. White—even though every newfound instinct within her affirms that they are the same person. Who isn’t a person at all. “What the hell are you, then?” she demands, hoping that her voice doesn’t shake. “Really.”

“Really?” The Woman in White grins, delighted, as if she has waited whole ages of the world to be asked this question. “Really really. Oh, yes, no more need to whisper, now that the foundations have connected, and as my transplants choose themselves. Thank you for asking, fragment of Lenapehoking, or avatar of the Bronx, or whatever you prefer to be called. My name is R’lyeh. Can you say it?”

It’s a shivery-sounding name—one that makes Bronca’s inner ears twitch and the roots of every hair follicle crawl. But while the name is otherwise meaningless to her, she sees from the corner of her eye that Queens’ eyes widen as she mouths, Oh fuck.

Then the Woman in White giggles suddenly and pantomimes holding something,