The World We Make Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2022 by N. K. Jemisin

  Cover design by Lauren Panepinto

  Cover images by Shutterstock

  Cover copyright © 2022 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Map by Lauren Panepinto

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  First Edition: November 2022

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Jemisin, N. K., author.

  Title: The world we make / N.K. Jemisin.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Orbit, 2022. | Series: The great cities ; book 2

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022026624 | ISBN 9780316509893 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316509916 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS3610.E46 W67 2022 | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20220624

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026624

  ISBNs: 9780316509893 (hardcover), 9780316520874 (signed edition), 9780316509916 (ebook)

  E3-20221001-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  Prologue

  Chapter One: Living Just Enough in the City

  Chapter Two: It’s a Hell of a Town

  Chapter Three: You Might Be Fooled If You Come from Out of Town

  Interruption: Tokyo

  Chapter Four: These Vagabond Blues

  Chapter Five: Tentacles Rule Everything Around Me

  Interruption: Istanbul

  Chapter Six: Have Your People Zoom Our People

  Chapter Seven: Manny Manhattan and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Fuck-You Day

  Interruption: Elsewhere

  Chapter Eight: The Sixth Boroughs

  Chapter Nine: Mind the Crap

  Interruption: London

  Chapter Ten: You Can’t Make It Here, You Can’t Make It Anywhere

  Chapter Eleven: Doink Doink Boom

  Chapter Twelve: Bagels, Meet Baguettes

  Chapter Thirteen: The Pizza of Existential Despair

  Chapter Fourteen: Brooklyn’s Get Me Bodied Shop

  Chapter Fifteen: Run Up, Cities Get Done Up

  Chapter Sixteen: We Are New York?

  Chapter Seventeen: These Streets Will Make You Be Brand-New

  Coda

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  Also by N. K. Jemisin

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  PROLOGUE

  Call me Neek.

  No, I’m not hunting no fucking whale. Giant squid, maybe. Got some homoerotic shit going on, too, yo. Maybe I should write a book. Instead of Moby-Dick I’ll call it Suck My Interdimensional Dick—a thriller, or maybe a horror, with some comedy and romance and tragedy. Little for everybody. It’s gonna be a hit ’cause I got publishing and Madison Avenue all up in me, plus like a million hustlers and grifters and corner boys who all can sell you your own kidneys before lunch. All of whom. Guess I should talk proper when I’m slinging shit about literature.

  Pssh, fuck it. Point.

  Neek. New York City. NYC, only pronounce the Y like “ee,” not “why.” I know why. It’s not the name my mama gave me, but she claim I’m not her son anymore anyway, so fuck it. Been time for changes.

  New York always changes. We who become cities are evolving, dynamic entities, constantly adjusting to the needs of our citizens, endlessly pushed and pulled by state politics and international economies. Lately we gotta deal with multiversal politics, too, but whatever. We can take it. We’re New York.

  Been three months since the city came to life. Three months since the Williamsburg Bridge got smashed by a giant tentacle from beyond; three months since millions of citizens got partially infected by a multibodied, mind-influencing alien consciousness and walked around looking like gotdamn Sasquatches ’til we fixed it; three months since a whole-ass extradimensional city started trying for squatters’ air rights over Staten Island. Most New Yorkers can’t see or hear all this shit. Lucky. But ever since New York became the newest and loudest member of an international resistance against the encroachment of hostile quantum possibility collapse, we been dealing with more than the usual day-to-day fuckshit.

  Por exemplo:

  Periodically R’lyeh sends forth a hollow, tooth-aching, atonal song that echoes across the whole city. The song’s a problem; listen to it for more than a few minutes and you start thinking Mexicans and birth control are what’s really wrong with the world, and maybe a nice mass shooting would solve both problems. But then, like, mad numbers of New Yorkers feel the sudden urge to turn up their bike-handle speakers so the whole neighborhood can hear them blasting Lady Gaga, or they throw a house party that bumps ’til dawn despite a million complaints to 311, or they start walking around their apartment in heels knowing it’s gonna piss off their downstairs neighbor, or they start loudly complaining about all the other motherfuckers being loud. All of this drowns out the song. So, thanks to so much of New York being so damn New York, we okay.

  Also been three months since six of us became something more than human, closer to eldritch abominations ourselves—or gods, or living symbols, or hairs on a dog’s back that occasionally steer its teeth. I carry within myself the hopes and hatreds of almost nine million people. I’m also just me. Still human in all the ways that matter: I bleed, I sneeze, I scratch my ass when mosquitoes bite—and they still bite, little evil-ass zebra-striped motherfuckers as resistant to pest control as the rats and pigeons. I still sleep, though only when I want to now. Went a whole week without once, just to see, and it was fine. But I spent too many years not getting enough sleep when I was on the street, so these days I like doing it whenever I can.

  Weirdest change is I don’t need to eat. When I skip that for a week, I don’t get shaky and cold the way I used to, but sometimes I get, like, phantom food in my mouth? Cheesecake dense as concrete, burnt too-salty pretzels, a Coke and a slice. Sometimes it’s roasted chestnuts, even with no street vendor around. Sometimes what I pick up is stuff I never had before, but I know what it is because I am New York. Lobster Newburg and red clam chowder and a lot of other weird shit got invented here.

&n
bsp; But mostly? I eat, even if I don’t need to, because I still get hungry. New York is always hungry.

  New living arrangements these days. Manny got us a five-bedroom in Harlem, in an old building that’s been gut renovated to make it fancy. Place is nice: three bathrooms, a kitchen that’s not galley, a loft that the floor plan calls a “study,” a huge common space that’s big enough for a sectional and a dining table, wraparound balcony, pretty tin ceiling. Roof-deck. Penthouse, even. I like it: fancy as fuck, a little old New York and also some new. Manny don’t like it because he’s the part of New York that wanted a new start from his old life. He wanted ordinary. Shouldn’ta become Manhattan, then.

  And since it turns out Manny’s rich as fuck—he paid the whole year’s rent up front—the landlord lets him move in whoever he wants. Breaking the old lease left Manny’s roommate Bel out in the cold, so Manny made an offer: take a payout for Manny’s half and stay at their old Inwood place, or claim an open bedroom in the new apartment for the old rent. Bel picked the latter ’cause usually a place like this would be three times as much. Me and Veneza—Jersey City—got two of the rooms. She’s paying her old rent; I get it free. Fifth room is still open because Manny’s hoping one of the other New Yorks will take it. It don’t really matter if we live together. Easier for Veneza since New Jersey Transit is a pain in the ass, but it ain’t nothing for everybody to get together when we need to do city stuff. City magic’s faster than the subway, and all of us are getting good at using it. We didn’t need this apartment.

  I get why Manny did it, though: for me. City picked a little homeless batty boy who didn’t finish high school to be its rep. Manny’s cool with the rest but didn’t like the homeless part, so now I got a permanent address and a roof over my head for whenever I want it. I don’t always. Sometimes I just be… over it. Artist, got other shit on my mind. I can walk all night so sometimes I do, for days at a time. I need the sidewalks rising to meet my feet the way bodega cats lift their asses when you knuckle near their tails. I need to slip over the barrier at the edge of the subway platform, past the patches of fermenting piss, to breathe the mingled aromas of rat poison and ozone. I need to crouch down by the East River to poke the slime growing on the rocks, wondering what kinds of chemicals are trying to soak through my skin. People who travel, they talk about how clean other cities are. Not much gum on the sidewalk in Toronto; wild. In Bern, crews empty street garbage cans ten times a day. Nice, I guess? But to be New York, I gotta stay dirty. Even if I shower every day and do laundry every week—with a washer and dryer in the house! living in the lap of luxury—I still gotta know the trash. I gotta be one with the trash, owoowoo, ommmm.

  Veneza asked if it bothers me to have somebody paying my way, and maybe? A little? The fuck else am I supposed to do, though? This ain’t the kind of city where you can start from nothing anymore and have a real chance, and I started with less than nothing. American Dream been a sucker bet. I do my part around the apartment. Can’t cook for shit but I clean when they let me, oh and also? I keep the whole fucking city from dropping off the face of existence. So there’s that.

  Anyway. Not the first time I had a sugar daddy. Just the first time I wasn’t actually fucking him for my keep.

  (Ay yo, I offered. I ain’t a savage. He said no.)

  So now it’s late-ish, close to midnight. I stand on the balcony staring out at Harlem and the Heights and the Upper West Side, not thinking about anything. It’s autumn now, getting chilly at night, so after a while I head in ’cause I’m cold. If Veneza’s awake, she’s not making noise in her room. If Bel’s up, his TV is still on, because I see light flickering under his doorsill. My room’s on the other side of the house, near Manny’s, ’cause that’s the room I picked. (In case.) When I pass the bathroom, the door is ajar and I see Manny leaning on the counter, staring at himself in the mirror. I don’t really mean to creep, but he’s pretty as hell and right now he’s wearing satin pajama pants with no shirt, so yeah, I take it in. He’s all kinds of cut. (Muscle, I mean. He won’t let me see the other part that might be cut.) The muscle don’t usually show with the preppy way he dresses. Likes to play harmless. The truth shows now, though: there’s a long scar on his lower back that was obviously stitched at some point, and another scar on the shoulder blade, old and keloided, wider at the bottom than at the top. I seen scars like that on dudes who look ten times harder: knife marks. Guns attract too much attention for some kinds of business, see. I’m guessing the long scar is from surgery, because it crosses a smaller, fainter scar. If he got stabbed or shot right around there, he probably lost a kidney. That’s my Manhattan: neat and proper on the surface, walking near-death experience underneath.

  He’s either lost in thought or checking out an ingrown hair real hard. At first I figure he doesn’t know I’m there, but then his eyes shift to me in the reflection. That part kind of shuts down the horny, because for once he isn’t trying to pretend he’s not… whatever he was, before the city claimed him. (My bet’s hitman. Veneza’s got ten on corporate espionage. Bronca’s stuck on CIA, but she came up in the Sixties and thinks everybody’s CIA.) I get why Manny feels like he needs to play nice, but when a Black man puts on a friendly mask like that, it means he thinks less of you. Means you’re too chickenshit to handle the real him. I like that for me, he shows all his beauty and all his beast, all the time.

  “We’re getting complacent,” he says. I like that he doesn’t waste my time with small talk, either.

  I push the door open more and lean against the sill. “Maybe we just taking a break after all that crazy shit last summer.”

  “The Enemy still floats over Staten Island. Think she’s taking a break?”

  “Nah. But Squigglebitch ain’t human, so—” Whoops. I cut myself off with a little wince.

  He smiles thinly and says the obvious. “Human beings get time off, yes. We are the city that never sleeps.”

  “A’ight, fine, I get it, Scarface.” I sigh and fold my arms. “Well, you probably got bazooka money. So let’s roll up on Staten Island and start shooting up in the air.”

  He smiles. It’s got a tired edge ’cause I know I’m being a pain in the ass. Then he turns to face me, leaning back against the sink edge. Aww, bye booty, but hello to the front, mmm. He catches me looking and blushes, which is hilarious. Fine as he is, I know full well Manny been drowning in pussy, bussy, and all the ussy in between, his whole grown life—but with me, sometimes it’s like I’m talking to a virgin. Even now he ducks his eyes, bites his lip, spends a second trying to figure out if he should flirt back and what he’ll do if I take him up on it… and then he takes a deep breath and decides to act like everything’s normal between us. It’s not as insulting as if he pretended to be nice. That’s mistrust and disrespect; this is something else. Fear, maybe. Wish I could figure out what the hell it is about me that scares a dude like him.

  “No bazookas,” he drawls, “and I can’t think of a construct that could possibly have enough power to even reach R—that city, let alone hurt it.” By unspoken agreement, we mostly avoid saying the name of our enemy. It hurts to say, and none of us likes stinking up the conversational air. I don’t like saying “NYPD,” either.

  Manny continues: “But there are things we can do. Strategies we should consider—like asking around to find out if other cities have useful intel. Maybe figuring out which alternate dimension she came from, and dealing with her at the source.”

  There’s a big ol’ chunk of knowledge that pops into the heads of baby cities when they get reborn—a lexicon, compiled by the other living cities to give the babies at least a fighting chance. I don’t know how the other cities compiled it or how they make sure new cities get it at birth. It’s missing a lot of important shit, too, which is why they also send the next-youngest city to help out and explain. And the process still got some bugs, because when the others woke up after I went down, only Bronca got the lexicon, out of the boroughs. Bottom line—I got the lexicon and Manny don’t, s
o I explain: “We already know more than the other cities. None of them ever had to deal with her after birth, and all they ever seen was fucked-up tentacles and shit. She wasn’t even she, for them.”

  “But now they know there’s more to her. They know she has a name, and that she works through manipulating institutions and systems as much as individuals. If I were a living city who suddenly realized the Enemy was in real estate, I would look back on every bit of city planning over the last fifty years with a different eye. Education budgets, policing, zoning, liquor licenses, public transportation, even popular culture—and the signs would be there. She’s been playing the long game, stifling progress and weakening cities to make them easier to destroy, and once you know what to look for, the cancer is everywhere.”

  Yeah, but. I sigh. “My daddy died of cancer.”

  Manny blinks, sobers, and doesn’t say anything. I never talked about shit like this with him before. Don’t know why I’m saying it now. “He knew something was wrong, but he also knew he had other shit to worry about, like trying to keep a roof over our head. So he ignored it when stuff hurt, or when he pissed blood. Health insurance was shitty so he didn’t go to the doctor, who was just going to tell him something he didn’t want to hear and push him to start treatments he couldn’t afford. He figured he could leave us a bunch of medical bills, or he could leave us life insurance.” I shrug. It hadn’t even been that much money. Our family still fell apart after he died. But that was the choice he made.

  Manny chews on this. “You think the other cities would rather deny the obvious than acknowledge how bad the problem really is.”

  “Some of ’em, yeah. Denial’s easy, fixing shit is hard. And what’s the alternative, putting the city through chemo?” I shrug. “Ain’t everybody up for—”

  Before I can finish this thought, something hits me. That’s what it feels like—not a punch but a goddamn truck, smacking me out of nowhere and hitting so hard that for an instant I go blind. It’s not physical, though I grunt and fall to my knees as if it is. It’s sensory, and extra-sensory. It’s here and elsewhere. It’s screaming.