The City We Became (Great Cities #1) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,63

“This is the change in the city that you’ve been sensing, and the truth you have to remember. Whatever you see… first and foremost, it’s real. Second, it can be dangerous. Understood?”

Veneza shakes her head slowly, but Bronca suspects this is less denial than amazement. “Can you make, I don’t know. Any part of the city, do anything?”

“Yeah, I can—some parts easier than others—but that’s nothing.” Bronca curls her finger again, and the pipe grumbles back into place. Then she lifts her other arm, grinning as she watches Veneza because even though this is the dance and she knows what will happen intellectually, it’s still an altogether different thing to experience. And some things are best experienced through the eyes of the young.

So when the river rises into the air, the whole five-hundred-foot-wide expanse of it, and curls an elbow and a wrist and long, watery fingers like some kind of immense, spectral Rosie the Riveter parody, it is Veneza’s delight that settles Bronca’s heart. Bronca never wanted this. And even though she knows why she was chosen, how important it is, she has not known how to feel about any of it, except resignation and frustration and dread. Now, though, as Veneza goes, “Holy fucking shit,” it feels good for the first time.

She allows herself a bit of smugness. “It is pretty damn rad, huh.”

“Nobody says ‘rad’ anymore, Old B, damn.”

“Yeah, well, they should. Always liked that one.”

“You know, though…” Veneza frowns a little. “This is pretty small, if it’s… symbolically part of you? I mean, if that’s your arm, then the rest of you ends, like, just across the street from the park.”

“It’s not exactly proportional.” Nor does the borough emulate her body in any predictable shape or way. This riverbank has a thousand potential fingers to her five, for example, and some of them have claws. The borough’s heart is actually a different river—the Bronx River, of course. The borough’s teeth, rotting but still sharp, are the isolated projects; its ears are a thousand recording studios, all born of the boogie-down sound. And its bones are the stones underneath it all, ancient as ancestors.

Veneza can’t seem to take her eyes off the water-arm. “Can you make it flip me off?”

Bronca snorts and turns her hand to lift the middle finger. The river follows, twisting about, and when a fifty-foot column of water lifts from the middle of its fistlike mass, a spritz of droplets hits them both in the face. “Oh, gross,” Veneza cries—but she is laughing even as she mops herself off. Then she blinks, staring. Because Bronca has lifted the river from its bed… and yet there is the river, flowing along quietly as it has for millennia.

“This isn’t the same kind of real as what you’re used to,” Bronca says gently.

“What, it’s a hallucination? Goddamn polluted river water in my face—”

“It’s not a hallucination. It’s just that… reality isn’t binary.” She sighs and uncurls her arm, relaxes her fingers. The great water-arm shifts back into the middle of the river and straightens out, becoming again the river that it has been all along.

“There are lots of New Yorks,” she explains. “In some of them, you turned right coming out of the subway this morning. In others, you turned left. And you also rode a dinosaur to work, and somewhere else you ate some funky ant-ball snacks at lunch, and somewhere else you’ve got a side gig as an opera singer. All of those things are possible. All of them have happened. Got it?”

“Like science fiction?” Veneza tilts her head, eyes narrowing in thought. “The many-worlds interpretation? Quantum physics? Is that what we’re talking about?”

“Eh, if it wasn’t on Star Trek, I don’t know.” Though Bronca does have a vague memory of a weird episode about a mirrored universe where everyone was evil, somehow signified by men wearing goatees? And in this universe they wear manbuns. Whatever.

“I’m going to tell you a creation story,” Bronca says. “It’s not like the ones my people tell. Not even like the ones your people tell. The one I’m about to tell you is…” She considers, then laughs as she thinks of a term. “More like a unified field theory of creation. So try to follow along.

“A long time ago, when existence was young, there was just one world that was full of life. No one can say if it was bad or good. It was life.” She shrugs.

The river beside them runs through other planes where other Broncas