she seems to know how to use in ways that he does not yet, and this frightens him. So does the avid, greedy malice in her unstable eyes. “You are Manhattan, where money talks and bullshit walks! Do you never sleep, young man? I see you aren’t wearing silk and satin.”
Manny tries not to let the nonsense confuse him. What matters is he faces an adversary who radiates danger. How does one fight spectral alien sea-tentacles in human form? He has no umbrella here, no antique cab… nothing but the Shorakkopoch rock, which he doesn’t know how to use.
On FDR, he followed his instincts, and they eventually led him to the solution. Keep her talking, his instincts say now, so he obeys again.
“On FDR,” he says, meeting the woman’s bright-eyed gaze, “I killed your creature with an umbrella. Or…” He amends himself as intuition flutters at the back of his mind. “No, not your creature. You?”
“Just a little bit of me. A toe, to hold.” She lifts a foot, which is clad in a simple white-leather ballet flat, and waggles the toe. Her ankles are swollen; too much time sitting at a desk, Manny guesses, and apparently being possessed by monsters from the beyond does nothing for the circulation.
“I’d expected to lose that toehold,” the woman continues, with a long-suffering sigh. She turns and starts pacing, clutching the cell phone to her breast with a melodramatic sigh. “We usually do, when you entities actualize, or mature, or whatever you call it—and we did lose it, later. Someone came along and stubbed our toe, damn it. Such a vicious little thing he was. Positively thuggish. But after he was done with me and I lay bleeding and hating in the cold depths between, I found that my toe still held. Just a little. Just one toe, in just one place.”
“FDR Drive,” Manny says. His skin prickles with chill.
“FDR Drive. Until you tore even that toehold loose. That was you, wasn’t it? You people all look alike to me, but I smell it now. Like him, but not.” Her head tilts from one side to the other as she says this. It is a gesture that feels both contemplative and contemptuous. “Too late, of course. Before you ever got there, I’d infected quite a few cars. Now we have hundreds of toes, all over the Tri-state area.” She bounces a little on the balls of her feet, then frowns down at herself as if annoyed by her momentary paucity of toes.
In Manny’s mind, fountains of tentacles are erupting on highways and bridges throughout a hundred-mile radius. He tries not to let her see how much this idea frightens him. What does it mean? What are they doing? What will they do, once they’ve infected enough cars and people and—
“What the fuck are you talking about?” asks Bel.
She rolls her eyes. “The politics of spacetime fractionality and superpositioning,” she snaps, before dismissing Bel again and sighing at Manny. Bel just stares at her. “Well. You’re obviously part of that other one, which means that you have four more bodies out there somewhere. Four more, oh… what do you people call those? Organs?” She stops abruptly, frowning to herself, then rounds on Bel and points west. “You! Human! What is that?”
After a deeply worried glance at Manny, Bel follows her gesture to Spuyten Duyvil Creek. She’s pointing past it, actually, at a dramatic-looking cliff beyond which is dotted with houses and condo buildings. “Westchester?” Bel suggests. “Or maybe the Bronx. I wouldn’t know, I’ve only been here a couple of weeks.”
“The Bronx.” The woman’s lip curls. “Yes. That’s one. Manhattan is another. The one I fought, he is the heart, but you others are the head and limbs and such. He was strong enough to fight us even without you, but not strong enough to stand, after. Not strong enough to push me out now. Thus does the toehold become an entire foot.”
In spite of everything, Manny is actually beginning to understand. “Boroughs,” he murmurs in wonder. I am Manhattan. “You’re talking about the boroughs of the city. You’re saying I really am Manhattan. And”—he inhales—“and you’re saying there are others.”
The woman stops pacing and turns, too slowly, to study him again. “You didn’t know that until just now,” she says, her gaze narrowing.
Manny goes still. He knows he’s made a mistake by showing his hand, but only time will reveal how bad a mistake it was.
“Five of you,” says the woman in white,