Chapter Text
You serve on the city council for Gypsy Danger. You hope to be its mayor.
You are already its mother—-or its Frankenstein, you think. You have left the word for it in Raleigh’s head. Young maps of the city’s arteries and districts often reference your files directly. You have run satellites and sonar for your own cartography when you needed better sources. The most cited map in the last annual period includes samples of your handwriting in two languages: a dot of Japanese near an apartment building, and two M’s in cursive English near the knee.
You have seen every part of the city, or remembered it. You’ve followed voltage drops to where braver thieves had their own wires hooked into nerves. You’ve scooped out schools of sterile fish from the water cells that cool the core. You’ve taught the post how to deliver mail to homes damaged by Knifehead, sections of addresses that go missing mid-digit. Eight months ago, you stayed awake for forty hours, two days of lifting food and batteries along a buoy chain, all the homes on one ankle on the lookout for a missing boat.
Today, you find Raleigh near the support beams of the shoulder, grids of beams and welds older than either of you. Smoke from industries in the torso steams up through the gaps and arches, going white and cumulus in the cold air. Raleigh’s jacket has a little blue on the sleeves. The city’s joint pistons will push up into step angle in ten weeks, and many homes will need to be reanchored, but the girders on the shoulders have kept these unchanging shapes for years. Raleigh could tell you which beams in those shapes are original, though, and which have been lost in injury and replaced, recast from their rubble in nuclear ironworks. But you think you can see it too, and not in the fade from the drift. You can look up and spot coral sections of scaffolding—-there, along the left—-that have become physical histories of repair.
Far beneath you, in all the world you occupy, Gypsy Danger wades in its own ocean. Whatever your own sense for the city’s wounds, Raleigh has felt it torn out of his own flesh. You might be something like Raleigh’s Frankenstein as well.
You’ve seen other cities ruined by kaiju, or swelling fire, or emptiness. Chrome Brutus withered away from its own core. A necrosis of abandonment took the neighborhoods of Romeo Blue. What had happened to Nova Hyperion was still not understood. Something tectonic. Your father made homes and a library for many of Nova’s refugees.
Raleigh asks you for the news, so you put it into sentences for him. One of Crimson Typhoon’s three great arms is still without power after a scheduled blackout. The triplets have had trouble ferrying generators through a section a Vietnamtown without electricity. Striker Euereka has lifted of one its arms—-in just six days!—- to bridge with Tacit Ronin. Cherno Alpha, the oldest and largest of the remaining jaeger cities, is now halfway through its seasonal rotation, an equinox marked by parades and drinking. It continues the great spiral that will carry it out of the climate system it creates. But though you need to understand these stories, it’s only this quiet moment with Raleigh that feels real to you. Market carts go up by pulleys. Cloud water drips from plastic sheeting. A line of students files past a glass-domed greenhouse, an orb hung like an ornament on a tether hook.
Gypsy Danger does not just have to be restored. It has to be living.
Raleigh stands, leaning on the railing. In the drift echo, you both feel the sun in the city’s heart as a warmth. He believes he’ll feel it in your palms. He can see something in you that you need to believe in too, a way to belong to the city you’ve remade. Raleigh, again; You, for the first time.
You are a City Administrator, but when people ask, you say that you are in Construction.