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She began the night, as she began all nights, atop the partially constructed office tower at the corner of Forty-third and Fifth Avenue. The air was blustery, with a hint of warmth; stars bedecked the heavens, thick as dust. The shapes of great buildings crenellated the sky in silhouettes of perfect blackness. The Empire State. Rockefeller Center. The magnificent Chrysler Building, Fanning’s favorite, soaring above everything around it with its graceful art deco crown. The hours after midnight were the ones Alicia liked best. The quiet was richer somehow, the air purer. She felt closer to the core of things, the world’s rich chroma of sound and scent and texture. The night flowed through her, a coursing in the blood. She breathed it in and out. A darkness indomitable, supreme.
She crossed the roof to the construction crane and began to climb. Attached to the exposed girders of the building’s upper floors, it soared another hundred feet above the roof. There were stairs, but Alicia never bothered, stairs being a thing of the past, a quaint feature of a life she barely recalled. The boom, hundreds of feet long, was positioned parallel with the building’s west face. She made her way down the catwalk to the boom’s tip, from which a long hooked chain dangled in the darkness. Alicia winched it up, released the brake, and drew the hook backward along the boom. Where the boom met the mast was a small platform. She laid the hook there, returned to the tip, and reset the chain’s brake. Then, back to the platform. A keen anticipation filled her, like a hunger about to be slaked. Standing erect, head held high, she gripped the hook in her fists.
And stepped off.
She plunged down and away. The trick was to release the hook at just the right moment, when her speed and upward momentum existed in perfect balance. This would occur roughly two-thirds up the back side of the hook’s arc. She swung through the bottom, still accelerating. Her body, her senses, her thoughts—all were attuned, at one with speed and space.
She released the hook. Her body inverted; she tucked her knees to her chest. Three aerial rolls and she uncoiled. The flat-topped roof across the street: that was the target. It rose in greeting. Welcome, Alicia.
Touchdown.
Her powers had expanded. It was as if, in the presence of her creator, some powerful mechanism within her had been fully unleashed. The aerial spaces of the city were trivial; she could vault vast distances, alight on the narrowest ledges, cling to the tiniest cracks. Gravity was a toy to her; she ranged above Manhattan like a bird. In the glass faces of skyscrapers her reflected image dove and darted, plunged and swooped.
She found herself, sometime later, above Third Avenue, near the demarcation between land and sea; a few blocks south of Astor Place, the encroaching waters began, bubbling up from the island’s flooded underworld. She descended, ping-ponging between buildings, to the street. Broken shells lay everywhere among the dried husks of ocean weeds swept inward by storm surges. She knelt and pressed her ear to the pavement.
They were definitely moving.
The grate pulled away easily; she dropped into the tunnel, lit her torch, and began to walk south. A ribbon of dark water sloshed at her feet. Fanning’s Many had been eating. Their droppings were everywhere, rank, ureic, as were the skeletal remains of their feeding—mice, rats, the small creatures of the city’s clammy substratum. Some of the droppings were fresh, a few days old at the most.
She passed through the Astor Place station. Now she could feel it: the sea. The great bulge of it, always pressing, seeking to enlarge its domain, to drown the world with its cold blue weight. Her heart had quickened; the hairs stood up along her arms. It’s only water, she told herself. Only water…
The bulkhead appeared. A thin spray of water, almost a mist, shot from its edges. She stepped toward it. A moment’s hesitation; then she extended a hand to touch its frigid face. On the other side, untold tons of pressure lay in stasis, stalemated for a century by the weight of the door. Fanning had explained the history. The entire Manhattan subway system lay below sea level; it had been a disaster waiting to happen. After Hurricane Wilma had flooded the tunnels, the city fathers had constructed a series of heavy doors to hold the water in check. In the throes of the epidemic, when the electricity had failed, a fail-safe mechanism had sealed them. There they had rested for over a century, holding the encroaching ocean at bay.
Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid…
She heard a skittering behind her. She spun, raising her torch. At the edge of the darkness, a pair of orange eyes flared. A large male but skinny, the bumps of his ribs showing; he squatted, froglike, between the tracks, a rat gripped in his mouth with the very tips of his teeth. The rat squirmed and squeaked, its bald tail whipping.
