Beyond fear or anger. She’d gone to the doorway, of course. Then she grabbed its sides to brace herself, and kicked in his knee. He’d spent three months in traction, claiming he’d slipped on a brick, and never messed with her again. Six years later, having bought her own pair of steel-toed boots, Bronca had done the same thing to a police informant at Stonewall—another time she’d been part of something bigger.
Bigger. As big as the whole goddamn borough.
Stall Woman’s voice abruptly cuts off its mad rant, midsentence. Then she blurts, with palpable petulance, “Oh, not you, too.”
“Eat a bag of dicks,” Bronca says. Veneza taught her that one. Then Bronca moves forward with a purpose, with her fists clenched and a grin on her lips because in spite of herself she’s always loved a good rumble, even if it’s the twenty-first century and nobody calls it a rumble anymore. Even if she’s gotten old and “respectable.” She is still Bronca from the brickyards, Bronca the scourge of Stonewall, Bronca who faced down armed police alongside her brothers and sisters in AIM. It’s a kind of dance, see? Every battle is a dance. She was always a good dancer at the pow-wows, and these days? The steel-toed boots dwell permanently in her soul.
As she advances on the bathroom stall, its latch clacks and starts to swing open. There is only white around the edges of it—not light but white, and in the most fleeting of instants, Bronca glimpses a sliver of a room. It has a white floor, and in the distance is an indistinct geometric shape that seems to be… pulsing irregularly? What confuses Bronca more, however, is that the strange shape is at least twenty feet away. As if the stall is not a stall, but a tunnel, burrowed into the plumbing and lathing and somehow terminating elsewhere, because Bronca knows there’s no space like that in or outside of the Bronx Art Center.
But before the door can swing open by more than a few inches, and before Bronca can catch more than a fleeting glimpse of something that her mind warns against even thinking about further, Bronca braces her hand on the nearby tile wall, lifts a foot, and kicks the fucking door in.
There is an instant of resistance. A strange, soft sound, as if she has kicked a pillow, followed by a thunderhead rumble of imminent lightning.
Then the stall door blurs away from her. It’s as if it has flown off its hinges and down a rectangular tunnel sized to fit, or as if the door sees itself in a mirror of a mirror; now there are a dozen doors, a million, an impossible number wending away into infinity. There is a startled, furious wail from beyond it—Stall Woman, her voice skirling into a shriek so earsplitting that the glass in the windows spiderwebs and the industrial light fixtures sway and flicker—
Into silence. The stall door, hinged and ordinary again, slams inward from the force of Bronca’s kick and whacks into the tampon box before bouncing back. The stall is empty. There’s no tunnel, no other place, just an ordinary wall right behind the very ordinary toilet. The light fixtures stop swaying and the light steadies. There isn’t even an echo of that shriek to linger in the air.
Then, in the aftermath of this, Bronca stands where she is, swaying a little as a hundred thousand years or so of knowledge falls into her mind.
This is a natural thing. She’s the eldest of the group, after all, and the city has decided that she is the one best prepared to bear the burden of knowledge. So when the bestowing is done, Bronca stumbles back against the nearest sink and catches her breath. She’s shaking a little, because now she understands what a close call she just had.
And yet. Even though she knows what must be done—they must find and protect each other and learn to fight together, it’s crazy but it’s true—she sets her jaw. She doesn’t want this. She doesn’t need it. She has responsibilities. A grandchild to nurture and spoil! She’s been fighting all her life, goddamn it. Has to work five extra years just to be able to afford a semblance of retirement, and she’s tired. Does she still have it in her to fight an interdimensional war?
No. She doesn’t.
“The other boroughs will just have to look out for themselves,” Bronca mutters, finally making herself straighten up and head for the bathroom door.