Sequel to The City We Became, N. K. Jemisin's 2022 novel The World We Make follows the avatars of New York City (one per borough, plus a primary avatar for the city as a whole, plus a bonus borough) as they join the wider community of city avatars and face the next phase of the Woman in White's evil plans.
The World We Make contains examples of:
- Atlantis: A living city, like the rest, but the first victim of the Enemy's subtle new tactics of undoing rather than outright killing.
- Bearer of Bad News: New York knows it can't defeat the Enemy alone. They need to make the other cities listen and help... but that's not a message the older cities want to hear.
- Cassandra Truth: Padmini comes to the council armed with math and proof. It doesn't help.
- Chekhov's Skill: It was established in the first book that one of the things that can seriously injure or kill an avatar is to visit another avatar's city and be forcibly evicted. At the climax of this book, the avatar of the dead city of Atlantis manifests itself as a blob of light and ejects R'yleh from Atlantis.
- The Ghost: Atlantis died centuries ago, and died even more completely than most cities—it died so thoroughly it was reduced to stories and never existed in reality—but the avatar of Atlantis has just enough reality left to be their city's avatar one last time.
- Man of the City: All avatars are Men and Women Of The City for their respective cities, fighting the enemy's villainous gentrification tactics with the unique strengths of their cities.
- The Multiverse: Saving their multiverse from the Enemy's attempts to reset it is the cities' major goal.
- Not-So-Omniscient Council of Bickering: City avatars have a great deal of autonomy with no oversight, don't seem to need to work together outside of special cases, and can get eccentric and very set in their ways—especially as they age. As might be expected, this isn't an environment that breeds diplomats... and the first meeting in centuries of these wise ancient post-human multidimensional entities devolves into lots of shouting before it really goes off the rails.
- Pocket Dimension: The remains of Atlantis are kept in one.
- Predatory Business: Cities thrive on distinctness and uniqueness, so one of the Woman in White's tools is to use predatory businesses to make everything homogenous and bland—which will weaken the city. This was seen in the first book with the eldritch Starbucks, but is explored much more thoroughly here as the Woman takes over Staten Island.
- Psychic Radar: Avatars can pretty much instantly recognize other avatars. Manny and his mom both identify the future avatar of Washington DC, because "cities know their own, even before they're cities".
- Resolved Noodle Incident: Hanging over the borough avatars in the second half of The City We Became is the very real possibility that they will need to sacrifice their lives for the city's primary avatar, because that's what happened to London... then the epilogue simply states that they all lived with no sacrifice necessary. Neek finds London in this novel and she explains that her boroughs' former avatars weren't literally sacrificed: London's thirty-four avatars were perpetually gridlocked and unable to function as a group, so London Prime agreed to take their avatar-ness into herself and become the sole London.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Enough cities participate in the final battle against the Woman to be able to defeat her.
- Villainous Gentrification: One of the Woman in White's primary tactics. We see her use it at the macro level (weakening whole cities to the point that they either never emerge or don't survive the avatar's rebirth) and at the micro level (stealing Brooklyn's family's brownstones to distract and hurt her).
