She began walking faster, then even faster, and soon she was jogging, then loping, then running, then sprinting, ignoring each clutch in her sides and never slowing down, sweat pouring across her forehead as she almost suffocated while choking down the thick summer mist—running past burned-out factories and chemical swamps, past rail yards and landfills, past garbage dumps and abandoned buildings, past rotting two-family houses and downed power lines, past unused smokestacks and giant water towers, past empty streets, empty buildings, empty houses, where not a single glowing window illuminated the dark night. Leora kept running and running under the orange highway lights, looking up as the lights raced by in rhythm over her head, like when she was a child and would lie in the backseat of her parents’ car, her head banging on the door as she looked up through the side window at the dark heavens, protected from the night’s demons by the steady, thumping rhythm of electric streetlights.

And then, during a sudden pause in the lights’ rhythm, she stepped off the highway and ran to her destination, not stopping until she had crossed the little park by the water’s edge, racing across the pathetic littered meadow until she reached the newly reconstructed promenade. Beyond its railing lay New York Harbor. From the railing, there unfolded before her eyes the southern end of Manhattan, its shining new buildings glowing unearthly colors of orange and green and blue, towering over the harbor’s dark unearthly water. Leora had the distinct impression, on that dark summer night, that the city was not anchored to the land, but rather floating, hovering over the face of the waters. Or, more accurately, that the city was only, so to speak, the tip of the iceberg—that something beneath the water’s surface, something far larger and weightier and mightier, was supporting it. In front of her, beckoning with a giant torch like a flare at a crime scene, stood the Statue of Liberty.

Leora climbed up on the walkway’s railing, balancing for a moment as she looked out at the shining, burning city. As her eyes passed under the Statue of Liberty, she threw herself overboard—diving down, down, down into the waters below, until she reached the very bottom of the sea.

LEORA IS the only person in the world who knows this: There is a city underneath the city of New York.