All the Birds in the Sky (27 page)

They set off that very night, with only what they could carry. Diantha insisted: There could be no dallying (and no chance for anybody to have a change of heart and tell the teachers). They all went back to their rooms at Eltisley Hall and stuffed random objects into duffel bags.

“Where are we even going?” Toby said. “I have a practical in two days. At Eltisley, where they expect you to show up.”

“We’re going AWOL,” said Taylor with a very quiet whoop. “No more tests, no more tutorials, no more Math class, no more lectures—and no more puzzles at The Maze—until we finish our mission.”

Patricia stuffed a toothbrush and three pairs of underwear, plus a tattered copy of
Tales of the City,
into her satchel. She was going on an adventure—she was going to make a difference. She almost danced down the mahogany staircase in the North Residential Wing of Eltisley Hall, except that Sameer kept shushing her. She squirmed with adrenaline as they broke into the magic airship and spoofed their way past the security questions.

“Hell to the yeah,” Patricia said as they spiraled up off the ground. “Let’s do this.” She and Taylor high-fived, and then Patricia and Sameer hugged while Diantha laughed from the cockpit, whose controls were wooden grapevines and figs.

The expedition didn’t feel real until they were over the Arctic and the moonlight had given way to two sheets of sunlight—sky and ice, both painful to behold. Patricia’s joy went sour. She looked out at the vastness below and couldn’t tell one bright streak from another.

“We have to hit them before they know we’re here,” Diantha said from the cockpit. “I hope everybody is prepared for any eventuality.” Patricia, Toby, Sameer, and Taylor all said yes.

“We’re doing the right thing,” Taylor said as they set down. “We’ve studied long enough.”

Patricia was wishing she’d brought another three layers of clothing: She could do a spell to keep herself warm, but it would be a distraction. She wound her scarf around her neck and lower face, as many times as it would go.

“Toby, you’re on transmutation of metals, because you’re our best Healer. If it’s steel, you turn it to tin,” Diantha said as they stepped out of the ship. “Sameer and Taylor, you will confuse and confound any opposition we may encounter. I will attempt to seal any borehole in a spectacularly irreparable fashion. And Patricia? You will bring the full fury of nature down on them. Be creative.”

They all high-fived and set off across the tundra toward the drilling installation, which looked like a lighthouse on the ice, with a single rusty structure on top of a platform, supported by four squat legs connected by the lower half of a pentagram. On one side of the drill was some kind of pumping station with a bulging metal sleeve. On the other side, Patricia saw a huge diesel tank that had probably been airlifted there and a number of snowmobiles and retrofitted trucks. Looking at a massive tank marked “WARNING: HIGHLY FLAMMABLE,” sitting on top of the world’s largest reservoir of methane, Patricia shivered. Her apprehension shaded into terror.

“Guys,” Patricia said. “I think we ought to stop and—”

Someone yelled in Russian, and dogs were barking. Guys wearing parkas and goggles drove toward them in a couple snowmobiles, waving what looked like machine guns. Sameer and Taylor nodded and ran into their path. A moment later, the guards opened fire—but wildly, in random directions, because Sameer had done something to confuse them.

“Watch out!” Patricia shouted. “Don’t make them shoot their own fuel t—” But she couldn’t make herself heard over the gunfire, the engines, the yelling, and the dog pack.

Toby was already running toward the massive drill, crafting a transmutation-of-metals spell. Meanwhile, Diantha was marching toward the drill as well, a look of total determination on her beautiful sun-drenched face. A bullet caught her in the side, and she keeled over.

Patricia ran and crouched next to Diantha, who was bleeding like a fountain and panting. “Hang on,” Patricia said. “Looks like the bullet went clean through. But I’m afraid it hit an artery. Hold tight.”

“Don’t waste time on me,” Diantha said. “The mission. Focus on the mission.”

Patricia kissed Diantha on the mouth, while her hands groped for the hole that was gushing blood. She found the artery and painstakingly, clumsily, repaired it. A bullet sliced past her face. She broke the kiss and said, “Tell me the truth. Did the Tree talk to you, at all?”

Diantha said, “That’s a terribly rude question, especially at this juncture.”

A shout. Sounded like Toby. “It’s all down to you now,” Diantha said. “Make them feel the fury.” Diantha passed out.

Patricia looked up, keeping Diantha’s head cradled in her lap. Sameer and Taylor had done such a good job creating confusion, she couldn’t see what was going on. Snow churned through the air, in big tidal waves, and a huge dog, like a Husky, sprinted in front of Patricia and then tumbled head over heels. The sound of gunfire was near continuous, like the loudest white noise ever.

The wall of snow cleared a little, and Patricia saw a body facedown in the snow, wearing an Eltisley scarf.

“No, no, no,” Patricia muttered. She stood up. She could still fix this, she had to.

The attack on the Pipeline had lasted maybe ninety seconds. The longer this went on, the more bullets flying in wild directions, the greater the chance of a disaster that would be visible from space.

The cold tore into her, and she wished she had goggles like the people trying to kill her. She could barely stand her ground, because her center of gravity kept corkscrewing downwards. It was more than just the wind and the snow in her face. Everything felt wonky. She tried to imagine what it would feel like to unleash the forces of nature—what did that even mean? She couldn’t even stay upright, how was she going to command any natural forces? The magnetic flux here was giving her the worst headache of her life, just when she was trying to think. What if she reached out somehow and connected to nature? Except that nature wasn’t just one process, it was a whole host of processes that cascaded together in ways that nobody could predict. And if she remembered anything from her one and only conversation with that stupid Tree, it was that she would be serving nature, not commanding nature, and she couldn’t believe that she hadn’t made that one crucial distinction clear in all her stupid conversations about her experience, and now it was too late, and they were going to die as colossal fuckups. She couldn’t control nature, she couldn’t even control herself, and this magnetic field was crushing her like a huge steely hand, she was being smushed by magnetism. A massive dog ran right at her, barking loud enough to be heard over the guns and chaos, and she was startled to realize she understood what it was saying. Mostly, “I’m going to bite your throat! You’re dead!” And this seemed a particularly pointless moment for her to regain the ability to understand animals, when there was no reasoning with them, and this just reminded her of the fact that she was powerless to shape or even influence the so-called forces of nature, and she really wished this magnetic flux wasn’t giving her the worst migraine in the history of skulls, and then it hit her, and she knew what to do. She raised her hands to the skies and hoped for the best, before there was a blinding crack, and—

Patricia woke up on board an airship, not the same one they’d stolen. She lay on a bench, and Kanot was staring down at her, with a look she could only describe as “wrathful” on his hairless albino face. “You’ve disappointed me,” Kanot said in a flat voice.

Patricia wanted to say it was all Diantha’s idea, but she couldn’t make herself go there. “What happened?”

“Toby’s dead. So are half a dozen guards at that installation you decided to attack on your own initiative. I hope you can live with that. Diantha and Sameer are injured, but they’ll both live. It appears you somehow tapped into the increased magnetic field at the Polar region and unleashed a kind of EMP that fried not only everything electronic for a dozen miles but also everyone’s brains, including your own. You should not have been able to do that, and we’re not sure how you did.”

“There was a dog that wanted to bite me.” Her head was pounding, and she kept seeing weird shapes. Then something occurred to her: “Toby was wearing an Eltisley scarf. And we brought the airship, it had an insignia on the side.”

“Already dealt with. There won’t be any traces to link back to the school.” Kanot let out a snort from deep in the pit of his stomach. “Your life is going to be very different from here on out.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Not as sorry as you’re going to be.”

He looked like he was going to say something else—like, maybe offer to let her off the hook in exchange for her firstborn. But instead he just shrugged and walked away, leaving Patricia with a throbbing head and a sense of wrongs that could never be set right. She raised her head enough to see out one of the big portholes. They flew over the ocean, and the sun was falling, through clouds that were a heavy, ugly purple.

23

THE PARROTS WERE
eating cherry blossoms on top of a big tree on the crest of a steep hill, not far from Grace Cathedral—a half-dozen bright green birds with red splotches on their heads, just tearing the shit out of these white flowers. Petals scattered across the sidewalk and the grass as the birds squawked and worked their crooked beaks, while Laurence and Patricia watched from the steep bank of the parklet across the street.

San Francisco never stopped astonishing Laurence—wild raccoons and possums wandered the streets, especially at night, and their shiny fur and long tails looked just like stray cats, unless you looked twice. Skunks nested under people’s houses. These parrots were native to somewhere in South America where cherry trees never grew, but they’d developed a taste for cherry blossoms somehow. Most of the people Laurence knew spent every minute obsessing about what Computron Newsly was saying about them and their friends, or who was still getting funding in spite of the crunch. The only reason Laurence ever saw these urban twists of nature was because he hung out with Patricia. She saw a whole different city than he did.

Truth was, Laurence only half paid attention to the amazing sight of these bright tropical birds devouring flowers, because he kept trying to wrap his mind around the fact that he had
nearly erased a human being from existence
. Laurence had barely slept in the past couple weeks, because he’d been spending twenty hours a day trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Plus when he tried to sleep, his heart did a circus drumroll as he remembered Priya’s mouth opening and closing.

Even now, sitting with Patricia on a rough horse blanket on the grass, Laurence kept bracing himself for her to say something—she knew full well what had happened to Priya, maybe even better than Laurence did, and she hadn’t said one judgmental word about it yet. She was probably just waiting for the right moment.

Patricia broke the silence. “Okay,” she said. “What’s wrong?” Her pale knee had faint grassy indentations.

“Nothing.” Laurence put on a smile. “I’m watching the birds. They’re awesome.”

“Jesus. Now you have to tell me what’s wrong. I’ve known you long enough to know when you’re stewing.”

So Laurence admitted: “I’m just waiting for you to tell me what an asshole I was, to do that experiment with Priya without any proper safeguards, so you had to save our asses. I figured you would want to let me have it.”

Patricia squirmed, as if he was putting her in an uncomfortable position. “I didn’t really think that was my place,” she said at last. “Don’t you have bosses who will tell you off? I figured you guys were all doing a lot of soul-searching.”

“Yeah, of course. Of course.”

Actually, none of Laurence’s teammates had wanted to talk about the incident afterward. Once or twice, someone had mentioned “Priya’s accident,” and this had triggered an awkward, protracted silence that made Laurence feel like he’d swallowed an ice cube whole. Anya was still annoyed that Laurence wouldn’t explain how Patricia had rescued Priya, since they couldn’t establish protocols without knowing what had worked last time. Sougata and Priya were trying to put this nightmare behind them. Meanwhile, Laurence never quite found the right time to mention it to Isobel, who was technically supervising him.

“Laurence, listen.” Patricia was looking at him instead of the birds. Her eyes opened wide and she chewed her lower lip. “It really meant a lot to me when you said that you weren’t going to help tear me down, the way Kawashima asked you to. But you shouldn’t build me up, either, or it’s going to drive me nuts. I’ve done things I will never be able to put behind me. You couldn’t stand to be near me, if you knew everything I’ve done.”

Laurence had that “hitting an air pocket on an airplane” feeling, hearing Patricia talk this way. Like Patricia was about to open up to him, and that was exciting, for reasons he couldn’t divulge to himself. But then he was terrified that she was right, and maybe there really were things that would give him no choice but to recoil from her—what if she was about to say that she recharged her witch powers by drinking the blood of babies? Plus every single time he learned more about Patricia and magic, he lost something.

None of this, though, overrode the adrenaline buzz of
holy fuck, I feel close to this person right now
. In his skin, in his scalp even. In his chest.

“Whatever,” Laurence said aloud. “You already helped clean up after my biggest fuckup. I don’t see how your shit can be worse than that.”

On the sidewalk downhill from where they sat, a woman with a stroller was yelling at her toddler, a lank-haired kid in overalls who kept running up to the cherry tree and trying to harass the parrots. Who just laughed at him. The mother threatened to count to five.

“When I was a teenager, some of us went off half-cocked and attacked this drilling project in Siberia, and people died. Including my friend. And these days…” Patricia took a heavy breath, almost shaking. “I curse people. Like, one guy who had raped and killed a bunch of girls I turned into a cloud. There was a lobbyist who helped to block environmental regulations—they called him the Picasso of the Paperwork Reduction Act—and I conned him into becoming a sea turtle. Sea turtles live a long time, longer than most humans, so it wasn’t murder. These bureaucrats were trying to kick my friend Reginald out of Section Eight housing, and I gave one of them a rash. And so on.” She couldn’t look straight at Laurence.