New York City, home of tragedy, asylum state, dumping ground for all of America's insane and indescribable, claims to be a city of men. Men own its businesses and wealth; men rule it on all levels; men patrol its streets, stalking along as if they were indeed in charge. The city's toughness and attitude, its in-your-face nature, the way it breaks you if you're not ready for it- all of these would seem to point to New York belonging to its menfolk.

But it's the women who really protect the city, women as strong as steel and stone and spider-silk. The women are the ones with the strength to resist the power and keep this stubbornly independent city proud and free. They have power both seen and unseen; they fight with physical and spiritual forces both. Most importantly, their example causes others to take up the fight, because so many men think a woman needs help.

The most famous of these ladies would have fallen over laughing once upon a time if anyone had ever called her a lady to her face. But now she, or at least her likeness, is New York's most famous lady of all. She's a woman of steel, and she was even before her death caused one Lady Liberty to die and a new one to be born with her face. She's the ultimate symbol of what New York has always stood for, freedom and diversity and a strange rough sort of grace. She sacrificed her life to protect her people and the city she loved; her reward now is to stand at its border for eternity as sentry and guardian. There are stories about her, both as devil-may-care woman and as the statue in the harbor. Some say and believe that in times of dire need she comes to life in human form again, taking to the streets with lilies in her golden hair and rainbows in her eyes. Some say that she smites government forces from the sky with one furious hand; it would certainly explain why observing the city is almost impossible.

She never wanted to be a hero; more importantly, she never wanted to need to be a hero. She dreamed of equality, but never of taking such drastic steps to ensure it. She feared a day like this one, but only in her worst nightmares, because no one ever thought things would get this bad unless they yearned for it. It's Lady Liberty's very humanity, her imperfect nature, that makes her such a legendary figure. She's someone just like any New Yorker; she gives people the strength to think that if they had to do something as drastic as crashing an airplane into a city landmark, they would do it with as little hesitation as she did. No one wants her sacrifice to be in vain, even if most people don't know who she was. She's one of the major reasons why few New Yorkers go Channel 1, even though they might be able to. She watches over them, and even though people know rationally that there's nothing she can do, her eternal gaze is enough to make people think twice before shifting their allegiance.

Lady Liberty in the harbor has symbolized New York as long as they can remember, and that includes the destruction of the copper beauty and her replacement. New York is a harder city now, less forgiving, less prone to covering up its less attractive features. Lady Liberty reborn in World Trade Center steel echoes that change and reminds all who see her of why it happened.

There's a woman who stalks the streets of the city in the darkness of the night, and she's only called a lady behind her back. She deals death in silence only broken by the sound of her guns and the scream of her victims. Even when she's seen, no one thinks they've really seen her because she's such a contradictory myth. People never believe what they see if they don't think it makes sense, and no one ever figures out that the absolutely still figure on a ledge isn't a statue of exceptional craftsmanship. Only the truly mad know who she is and what she does.

She is the Gray Lady, nocturnal murderess, silent assassin. She's not really a statue, though some of the more fanciful stories about her say that she's stone during the day and only comes to life at night. She's flesh-and-blood, though there are those who think she's a ghost seeking revenge for her death. She can speak, though it's rare and she's widely believed to be incapable of such.

Her name is buried in memories, interred with her lookalike lover. No one ever refers to her as anything but the Gray Lady when they speak of her at all. Some days she wonders who she is, which blonde she used to be, who really died; she has dim memories of her past, but for the most part they're locked away so that she can function- not for her sanity, because that would be a lost cause. She lives only for the hunt and the kill, passes the days waiting for the night to fall so that she can mask her pain with others' deaths. She doesn't much care that her fair skin is caked with city dirt that leaves any exposed part of her dark gray and filthy; it doesn't concern her that the clothes she wears when she goes out hunting are disgustingly dirty and faded.

Once upon a time she would have cared, but that was when she could still feel. Now she's numb to anything but the need to protect the people of her city and the matching need to kill anyone who could be an agent of the enemy; since the enemy can order any of its people to do almost anything, anyone who isn't a New Yorker is fair game for her weaponry. She will show them no mercy unless someone she trusts can give her a good reason to stay her hand. That doesn't happen very often. She's beyond love or hate, grief or joy, anger or happiness. The greatest mass murderer in American history, this tiny, delicately built woman with almost four thousand deaths to her name over the course of ten years, gets no charge out of what she does. It's a job to her, a chore even, removing the trash from city streets. With a heart of stone and a frozen face, she does her nightly work, and her power over the city is the most obvious.

But sometimes power is unseen, unheard, intangible. Sometimes no one knows what kind of power lies in a name or in a symbol, and so it is with Our Lady of Peace. New Yorkers believe a lot of strange things. They've formed many of their own religions as they reject the Christian mythos forced on them by a fundamentalist government. The heroes of their rebellion have become cult figures, martyrs, saints.

The woman known to current generations as Our Lady of Peace is one of these, though she never meant to be. She never wanted to be worshipped or followed. She was as ordinary as Lady Liberty before the terror descended on her life. She and others were kidnapped as test fodder for some of the more advanced conversion techniques, and she watched as her friends fell prey one by one. She resisted, somehow. She never understood how she managed to avoid losing her mind, but in the end her resistance cost her her life, and at the hands of her former best friend, no less.

For her perserverance in being herself, she is honored and praised, and there are those who use her life and death as an example for themselves and others. Never submit, her priests and priestesses say. Whatever happens, whatever they threaten you with, whatever they do to you, always stick fast to the truest part of yourself, the one that they can't get at as hard as they try. It's better to die free than to live in chains, as hard as freedom might be and as gentle and light the chains. A better place awaits those who don't give up on themselves. And always forgive them, that's another key creed to this faith. Her last words were of absolution, and those who would follow her example must follow it to the fullest. No matter what they do, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

And that's where Our Lady of Peace differs from so many of the other figures in New York. She's still tied to the Christian faith, something that most of New York's belief systems immediately distance themselves from. In some ways that makes her a more potent figure because she can slip easily into people's minds, slot in neatly next to the rest of the things they believed in even before Britney and her creators took and warped an entire faith for their own purposes. To many she's just another saint to be addressed in prayers to the Almighty, someone else who can intercede on their behalf when they need or want something. Others take it a level further, considering her words and deeds to be the perfect example for how they should live their lives. They put words in her mouth, then take them back out to spread to others. Her presence in the city is kept quiet, because the government cracks down on heresy harder than even the Spanish Inquisition and adding someone whose death came from resisting the government to a religious festival is seen as unnecessarily trying to anger the government. Her influence, though, is everywhere, stretching through the home of the mad like a spiderweb, silken and soft but durable and sticky.

In the proud, strong, stubborn, determined people of New York, these different figures exert different influences, pushing and pulling, balancing, confusing. The Thornlady, as people have taken to calling the pretty redheaded owner of the Thornrest Garden, is one of those. There is steel in her, the strength that allows her to fight back instead of just being content to have a place where she can live without dying. Without the hardness and staying power of steel, she wouldn't be nearly as valuable to the resistance of New York. There is stone in her, the strength that allows her not to think about the friends and colleagues who've fallen in the fight. Without the coldness and indifference of stone, she wouldn't even be able to function, much less fight back. And there is silken spiderweb in her, the veiled strength that makes her so good at reclaiming people from the abyss known as Channel 1. Without the softness and durability of spider-silk, she would be too angry to make a difference, because while anger is key to independence it isn't the only thing that keeps New York free.

But she is all these things, steel and stone and spider-silk, and she is a true lady of New York, strong enough to protect her home, strong enough to fight without mercy, strong enough to make plans and wait. In the end, this is what marks New York and its people- the traits of its women that translate into its strength and its liberty.