Rahel flashed me a blinding, sharp-toothed smile. “Then put on comfortable shoes.”
I sighed and fell into step with her. Some days, it just doesn’t pay to have fashion sense.
New York is interesting on every level, but especially on the aetheric. In the physical world it’s layered like a wedding cake, history on history; dig far enough down in those sandhog runnels and you’d find graffiti left by the original Dutch settlers, and by the long-ago-evicted Indians before them. In Oversight, New York isn’t about bricks, cement, and streetlights— it’s all about perceptions and energy. One enormous storage battery, stuffed with good, evil, rage, peace, fury, love, hate, and ambition. It shoots up into the aetheric for miles, a fantasyland of constantly changing illusions.
It was brighter today than it had been the last time I’d seen it, a kind of fierce pride spiking from every structure, even the tenements tainted by anger and despair.
The Twin Towers still existed, on the aetheric plane. When we came into a space where the buildings would have once been visible, I stood and gaped, feeling cold prickles all over my not-quite-human skin. The ghosts of the two buildings rose like glittering ice into the gray sky.
“How?” I stuttered, but I already knew. It was there because it lived in the hearts and minds of millions, maybe billions of people, and until that faded, it would remain in the aetheric. “Because we remember.”
Rahel nodded soberly and said, “Humans have power. Creating, destroying, remembering… all acts of great power. Greater than any of them know.”
There was something humbling about it. I could sense the incredible force of power even from where I stood. “Can we go there? Take a closer look?”
“Not you,” she said. “Too young. Too much power. For you, it would be like standing in the heart of a sun.”
She shooed me on. We moved at the fast pace of foot traffic. This time of day, rush hour was in full swing—people striding to work, women in business suits and Air Jordans, bike messengers weaving in and out of the honking, stinking, creaking flow of traffic next to the sidewalk. Every other car was yellow, with rates on the side. Everybody seemed to have a big purse, a backpack, or a briefcase. Half of them were on cell phones.
“ So I said to him…”
“… bitch, back up off of that before I slap you stupider than you look…”
“… I mean, how dumb can you be? Obviously, it’s a chicken!”
I wondered if any of them realized how their personal lives sounded to the rest of the world. Or cared. I wondered if anybody had been listening to us. If they had, nobody cared. Just another day in New York, apparently.
We weren’t moving as invisible, but that didn’t stop people from barreling ahead into our space at frightening rates. Rahel dodged to avoid a particularly focused blond woman in an Ann Taylor jacket and a Kmart skirt. She had a cell phone headset over her bleached hair, smart-girl glasses perched at the end of her nose, and wasn’t taking crap from anybody. I recognized the type. Black belt in shopping, no kids, no dogs, no husband, money market account diversified into international growth and mutual funds. Probably lived in a pricey but tiny closet on the Upper West Side and worked at Citibank or Chase.
She noticed us, and even for New York we were clearly not the usual sight. For just a second her gray eyes touched Rahel and locked on like missiles, and then she swerved and blasted past us, back to talking tensely about the latest slide of the Dow Jones. Rahel smiled. “Sometime tonight, she’ll have a dream. A dream about flying, or falling, or monsters. And she won’t know why.”
“You did that?”
“No,” she said. “They do it to themselves. We are not safe to look on for long, you know. Not for them.” She glanced over at me, and frowned. “Or perhaps she’ll just have a nightmare about your hair.”
“What about my—” I caught sight of it, reached up and dragged a tight curl down to focus on it. “Dammit. I’m Shirley Temple again.”
Rahel pulled me to a stop and over to the side, under the shelter of a red-and-white striped awning in front of a dusty shoe store. The pavement was spotted with pigeon poo and ages of tobacco stains. She stood in front of me, blocking me from bystanders, and brushed her long-nailed fingers gently over my head. I felt the curls relaxing. “There,” she said. “Remember that feeling. Just reach for it when you need it.” She studied me more closely. “Your eyes.”
I neutralized them to the serene dove gray that I’d managed earlier. She nodded.
We waded back into foot traffic again, and had a nice twenty-minute walk. I don’t recommend that in cool shoes.
At the end of what I was coming to think of as the Manhattan Death March, the big foursquare bulk of the Empire State Building loomed over us, cool shadows rich and deep with history. “Aren’t we taking the tourist thing a little far?” I asked, staring up. The building was awe-inspiring in its achievement; I wanted to take a look in Oversight, but I knew that if I did I’d never get my hair and eyes straight again. Better to stick to the simple things, for now.
“Inside,” Rahel said, and pushed me to the big revolving glass doors. I pushed, shuffled, and emerged into the big genteel lobby, under the steely gaze of a phalanx of security guys in snappy blue sport coats. The place smelled of fresh paint and old wood, and there was so much to see, even without resorting to Oversight or rising into the aetheric. Gorgeous deco touches, a sense of weight and history to the place that made me want to sit down and soak it in. So many people had come through here, over the years, bringing with them their fears, their loves, their hopes and dreams.
I could feel the echoes of them trapped in every tile on the floor, in every steel beam of the structure. It felt… deliriously weighty.
Visitors were queuing up behind a maroon velvet rope next to a sign that said tours. There was a metal detector involved, and I was sure the German shepherd sitting pretty in the corner wasn’t there for his health.
“Walk through the detector,” Rahel said. “Don’t touch anything.”
“Um, people in line—”
“Go around them.”
I did. Nobody glanced my way. Now that I concentrated, I could feel something hanging around me— a kind of gray veil, a don’t-see-methat wasn’t quite invisibility. Rahel’s doing. I was getting better at figuring that out, anyway; I couldn’t even sense it before. I waited until there was a pause in people going through the detector and darted in, zipped through, and felt the weirdest sensation, a kind of burn deep inside. Whoa. Weird.
The dog was looking at me. At first I thought he was just staring in my direction, but he watched me as I walked across the lobby, and as Rahel joined me I nudged her and jerked my chin in the direction of our furry friend.
She nodded. “Animals see us as we are,” she said. “Dogs don’t feel threatened, but beware of cats. They can be unpleasant.”
“O-kay.”
She pressed the button. We waited. Eventually a likely candidate arrived, and we crowded in fast, cutting off the flow of tourists with a fast-closing door. Rahel pressed a button—which floor, I didn’t see— and then turned and stared into the empty corner of the metal box.
“Um…” I was at a loss for words, for once. “Is there something…”
“Quiet,” Rahel snapped. “I’m thinking.”
I was quiet. I listened to the creak of the elevator, the hiss of cables as they hauled us up toward heaven. Distant voices dopplered past one floor at a time, snippets of conversation that wove in and out too fast to catch.
I became aware of something else. A low-level hum somewhere in the far corner of the elevator, a sound where there should be no sound. No presence.
“What’s that?” I asked, but before I got more than the first word out, Rahel was moving. Spinning away from me, slamming into the empty space of the corner, grappling with something that was shadow and darkness and then…
And then I saw it. Definitely not human. Black, fluid, like an spilled shadow, a stain on the world. Rahel was trying to hold it, but it slid away from her like oil, oozing past her, flowing toward me.