The City We Became (Great Cities #1) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,18
brightening enough to compete with the June midday sunlight—and in its suddenly loud song Manny hears the horns of a thousand cars trapped on the FDR. The hissing air is eclipsed by the shouted road rage of hundreds of mouths. As he opens his mouth to shout with them, his cry is delight and the ecstasy of suddenly knowing that he isn’t an interloper. The city needs newcomers! He belongs here as much as anyone born and bred to its streets, because anyone who wants to be of New York can be! He is no tourist, exploiting and gawking and giving nothing but money back. He lives here now. That makes all the difference in the world.
So as Manny laughs, giddy with this realization and the power that now suffuses him, they strike the tendril mass. The sheath of energy surrounding the cab burns through it like a checkered missile. Of course, the cab is part of the power; this is why the city sent it to him. Manny feels the umbrella snag on something and he clings tighter to it, rudely not lifting it or moving it aside because I’m walking here, I have the right of way and he’s playing metaphysical sidewalk chicken with this violent, invasive tourist—Then they’re through.
Manny hears Madison yell from inside the cab as they get through the mass and see that there’s a line of stopped cars dead ahead. She slams the brakes. Manny loses his grip on the umbrella as he frantically grabs for the OFF DUTY sign, catching it even as his whole body flips onto the windshield and hood. The cab spins out as Madison throws the wheel; now, instead of flying forward, he’s being thrown around by centrifugal force. In his panic, he loses his grip on the sign and doesn’t know how he finds the strength to grab for the edge of the hood below the wipers, even as his legs come loose and most of his body flies free in the direction of the stopped traffic. If the cab flips, he’s dead. If he loses his grip and gets tossed onto the hatchback up ahead, he’s dead. If he falls off the cab and under the wheels—
But the cab finally skids to a halt, a bare inch away from the stopped car up ahead. Manny’s feet thump onto the hatchback’s trunk, not entirely of his own volition. It’s okay. Just nice to have something solid under his feet again.
“Get your feet off my fucking car!” someone inside shouts. He ignores them.
“Holy shit!” Madison sticks her head out the window, her face panicky, like how he feels. “Holy—Are you okay?”
“Yeah?” Manny’s honestly not sure. But he musters the wherewithal to sit up, and look back down the fast lane.
Behind them, the tendril forest has gone wild, its fronds whipping and flailing like a dying thing. It is dying. Where they punched through its thicket of roots, there is a Checker cab cutout like something from a kids’ cartoon—complete with an umbrella-shaped hole on top of its roof, and a hunched human silhouette underneath. The edges of the cutout glow as if hot, and the fire rapidly eats its way outward and upward, fast as a circle of flame burning through a piece of paper. Within seconds this burn has eaten its way through the base of the tendrils, then starts burning all the way up. No ash or residue remains in the wake of this process. Manny knows this is because the tendrils aren’t really there, aren’t really real in any way that makes sense.
The destruction is real, however. Once the last of the tendrils has burned away, a hovering, brightly colored knot of energy—the remnant of the sheath that surrounded the cab, now a wild, seething thing of its own—dissipates in a miniature explosion that ripples concentrically outward. Manny shudders as the wave of light and color and heat passes through him. He knows it won’t hurt, but he’s surprised when it warms the place on his side that hurt so badly before. All better now. More dramatically, tendrils that have attached themselves to the nearby cars wither away the instant the energy hits them. He feels the power roll onward out of sight as it passes beyond the nearest buildings and into the East River.
It’s done.
And as Manny climbs off the cab’s hood and settles back onto the ground, once again he feels something waft through him, from the soles of his shoes to the roots