immediately, and dreams eight million beautifully ruthless dreams.
INTERRUPTION
The instant Paulo climbs out of the cab, he knows what he’s seeing. The apartment building is unobtrusive in nearly every way, except that it is more Queens than any other part of the sprawling borough that Paulo has seen. It has become the locus for a city avatar’s power.
He can also sense the prickle of the Enemy’s work nearby—but somehow, unlike Inwood, this breach has done less harm. After the cab leaves (with a substantial bill, since Paulo told the man to drive around a bit so that he could pinpoint the area of disturbed dimensional integrity), he slips down the narrow dark gap between the framework houses, and hops over the chain-link fence so that he can get a better look at the site. An aging plastic aboveground pool. It has the same pale, acrid scent as whatever infected the monument rock at Inwood. More power has been applied here, decisively and precisely, excising the infection with a surgical efficiency that Paulo cannot help but reluctantly admire. Between this and its proximity to the apartment building locus, and possibly other factors that Paulo cannot fathom, it seems unlikely that this site will attract… hangers-on.
He hears a voice calling in Chinese to someone else within the house, and quickly he exits the backyard. At the apartment building, he presses the buzzer for the topmost apartment, meaning to work his way down. When an indistinct feminine voice, fuzzy with feedback, murmurs through the intercom speaker, he says, “I’m looking for someone who knows about what happened to the pool in the backyard next door.”
There is a pause. Then the voice says, again indistinctly, “[Something something] ICE? We’re here legally, and whichever [something] reported us can go to hell!”
“I’m most definitely not with ICE, the police, or any organization you’ve ever heard of.” Paulo steps back, onto the building’s walkway, so that anyone looking out the window can get a good look at him in the walkway lighting. He sees someone at the window, but they’re there and gone too quickly for him to discern. Going back to the intercom, he debates whether to ring the apartment doorbell again or move on to the next floor. Then there is another indistinct murmur through the speaker, and the building’s front door buzzes to let him in.
On the fourth floor, a plump fortysomething woman in a sari cracks open the door to peer at him, without bothering to take the chain lock off. Paulo can see a middle-aged man in the background, on his feet and scowling belligerently, with a baby’s feeding bottle in one fist. The woman is defensive, too, but Paulo understands this. Everyone is wary of strangers, in a city.
Her gaze rakes him as he reaches the top landing of the stairs. “You don’t have permission to enter,” she says at once.
“I only want to speak,” he says. “I can stand right here and do that.”
This makes her relax fractionally. “What now?” she asks, in accented, annoyed English. “Are you a reporter? I heard that someone mentioned it on Twitter, but it’s still hard to believe you’ve come about a pool. It’s the middle of the night.”
“My name is São Paulo,” he says, expecting it to mean nothing to her. Most of the Americans he meets have never even heard of him. Or else they think he’s part of California. “I’m looking for—”
Her gasp catches him by surprise. “They said—oh. You’re real?”
He lifts an eyebrow. “Quite real, yes.” There’s only one reason she would ask such a question. “You’ve seen things that aren’t real lately?”
She shrugs. “Craziness. Everywhere in this city. But most recently, next door, yesterday. Other people came, who talked about the craziness. They were… like you.” She narrows her eyes at Paulo then, as if trying to discern something she cannot articulate. “I don’t know.”
“Other people?”
“One was, mmm, Manny? I think that was the name. The other was Brooklyn Thomason, one of those city council people. Tall and Black, both of them, fair man and dark woman. They said our Padmini was Queens.”
They’ve begun to find each other, even without his help. Paulo can’t help smiling. “And they’ve left? Can you tell me where…?”
She tilts her head, thoughtful, and her gaze is suddenly shrewd. The man in the background has come forward and now stands just behind her, and their stances are alike: subtly protective. The man follows the woman’s lead, however, and the woman says, “Who are you to