The City We Became (Great Cities #1) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,57

that they might be as intelligent as white people because they knew how to make a buck. But he didn’t think they had souls.”

“Oh, but he was an equal-opportunity hater,” Yijing drawls, folding her arms and glaring at the men. “In the same letter, he went in on pretty much everybody. Let’s see—if I recall, Black people were ‘childlike half-gorillas,’ Jews were a curse, the Portuguese were ‘simian,’ whatever. We had a lot of fun deconstructing that one in my thesis seminar.”

“Shit, even the Portuguese?” Veneza looks impressed. She’s half-Black and half-Portuguese, Bronca recalls, and doesn’t get on well with her Portuguese relatives.

“Yep.” Bronca puts one hand on her hip. They haven’t yet covered the painting—which isn’t a painting—but Bronca now knows better than to look into it for more than a moment. Jess and the others should be safe, because this attack was aimed solely at the city of New York, or a sufficiently significant portion thereof. “I could see it if you were trying to turn a mirror on Lovecraft. Show how twisted his fears and hatreds were. But this painting reinforces them. This shows you New York as he saw it, the chickenshit little fuck, walking down the street and imagining that every other human being he met wasn’t human. So, gentlemen, again, what part of ‘we don’t do bigotry’ do you not understand?”

Doc looks stunned that Bronca’s still talking. Strawberry Manbun looks like he’s holding in a whole heaping mass of mad—but he puts on a smile and nods for one of the others to rewrap the painting. “Okay,” he says. “You gave it a chance and you still don’t like it. Fair enough.”

It isn’t enough. Guys like this aren’t really interested in fair. But Bronca steps out of the way to let the group wrap up and remove their work, ending up next to Yijing. For the next ten minutes or so, she and Yijing get to play United Flavors of Stink Eye at Manbun’s whole operation.

But there’s something weird about the whole group of them, Bronca muses while they work. Well, weirder than a bunch of rich-kid “artists” thinking that a taste for stereotypes and fetish porn make them avant-garde. First there’s the painting. Doc and the rest seem immune to it, too, which means they’re ordinary people, not like Bronca and the five others who are even now wandering around somewhere in the city, probably trying to figure out what they should do with themselves. But no one ordinary could have painted that thing. Second, there’s the fact that they even tried this. Why waste time trying to get the Center to put their shitty art on display? Why not just use that as a pretext for the meeting, then come out of the gate with the big bad painting and catch Bronca with the element of surprise? Which means there must be more to this. Bronca narrows her eyes and looks them over for any sign of a wire.

She sees nothing—and, she grudgingly concedes, she wouldn’t know what to look for. She hasn’t kept up on surveillance technology for a good twenty years or so. Her son gave her a smartphone, and she actually likes being able to watch movies on it, but it still feels like only yesterday that people were using rotary phones and dialing letter-number combos—

Something flickers. Bronca blinks, her attention caught. Wait, is that a wire after all? Down by Strawberry Manbun’s ankle, as he carries the other end of a crate containing a piece of the bronze sculpture. No. Bronca might not know anything about covert listening devices in the twenty-first century, but she’s pretty sure they don’t look like… a loose shoelace? He’s wearing thong sandals, so it can’t be that. (She grimaces at his nasty toenails.)

But there, floating just above the long bones of his foot: something is sticking out of the skin. It looks like an especially long and wispy hair. White, not strawberry blond. At least six inches long… although as Bronca watches, it stretches upward as if trying to touch the crate he’s carrying. Nine inches. A foot, just shy of the crate’s wooden wall—and then it stops and contracts. Not long enough, apparently. It resumes its initial position, just resting along Manbun’s foot, just a hair trying to play it cool. Maybe it’ll try again once it’s grown some more.

Bronca doesn’t know what it is, exactly. It does not exist within the lexicon of knowledge that she has absorbed, and that