All the Birds in the Sky (38 page)

“Hi, Laurence,” Patricia said, her posture straight and her body poised, as if she could fight an army of ninjas at any moment. She seemed way more grown-up and self-assured than the last time he had seen her. “It’s good to see you.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to give you your grandmother’s ring back.” She reached into her hoodie pocket and came out with a tiny black cube.

Laurence didn’t take it from her palm.

“I thought you had to keep that,” Laurence said. “Or else Priya would be pulled back into the nightmarish dimension where gravity is a strong force.”

“Yeah. That. Well, I decided I don’t like Priya that much,” Patricia said. At Laurence’s stony look, she added: “That was a joke. Joking here. Nobody is going to be pulled into any kind of void if I give you this ring back.” She held it up to him.

He looked at the nugget of felt. “Why not?”

“I realized that enough time has passed and it’s probably safe.” That sounded like total garbage, and Laurence just stared. She added: “Okay, not really. I guess I’ve gotten much better at Trickster magic since then. And…” She paused because whatever came next was difficult to say, especially when fidgeting on someone’s doorstep in total darkness.

Laurence waited it out. Patricia searched for the right words. He didn’t let her off the hook by filling the silence.

“I mean…” Patricia looked unbearably sad for a second, then she pushed ahead. “I guess I wound up playing a much bigger trick on you than just tricking you into giving up your ring, didn’t I? Even if I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I became your lover and part of your life, and then I … well, you know what I did. And the antigravity machine that sent Priya away, the one that this ring was offered to save her from, became part of the doomsday machine that I wrecked. So I don’t need it anymore, because I wound up building a much bigger wheel around the smaller wheel. And I guess, in a way, this ring is tainted for me.”

She offered the ring again. Laurence still didn’t take it. “It wasn’t a doomsday machine,” he said.

“It wasn’t? Then what was it?”

“It’s a long story. Listen, I can’t be around people right now. It’s nothing personal.” He made a move to close the door, but her outstretched hand and his family heirloom were in the way.

“Why not? Are you having a weird feeling? Like that you’re coated with garbage that makes your skin crawl and you can’t recognize other people as belonging to the same species?”

“No. No! Why would you ask something like that?”

“Oh, uh. Nothing. It’s just, lately, whenever I hear someone say they can’t be around people, I start to worry that … it doesn’t matter.”

“It’s just that all my friends are on Seadonia, and I’m here on my own. And I’m still pretty broken up about what you did in Denver.”

“What are they all doing in Seadonia?”

“Mostly? Figuring out ways to kill you and your friends. Probably using ultrasonics, or some kind of antigravity beam, similar to what happened to Priya only more directional and portable. That’s my guess, anyway.”

“Oh. Thanks. That was easy.”

“What was easy?”

“They asked me to come here and see if I could find out what was going on at Seadonia. They figured you would know.”

“And you got it out of me.”

“Yep.”

“Because you’re so good at being a ‘Trickster.’”

Patricia looked down. She seemed less tough than she had a few minutes earlier. Then she looked up and it was Laurence who had a hard time looking at her. He remembered all of a sudden how she had described the Pathway to Infinity as a “doomsday machine.”

Neither of them could face the other without shame. Laurence had a feeling most adults he knew had gotten used to this feeling of mutual abashment. But it was new to him.

“But actually,” Patricia said, “I’m glad we got that stuff out of the way. About Seadonia. Because that wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No. It was what they wanted me to talk to you about. But it wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“So what did you want to talk to me about?”

“I don’t know.” She just stood there and he could hear both their breathing and someone running, a few streets away. “I don’t know. Nothing. Nothing, I guess.” She pushed the black box at him. “So do you want your ring back or not?”

“I can’t, I just can’t. I can’t take anything from you, even if it used to belong to me.”

She put the ring back in her pocket. She looked more beautiful than ever. His heart was in tatters. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what? What do you think you have to be sorry for?”

“Ernesto says I betrayed my lover—meaning you—and I have to come to terms with that. Even if you were building a doomsday machine, it doesn’t change that fact.”

“It wasn’t a doomsday machine,” Laurence said again.

He looked at the Caddy nestled in her hand and forearm, providing meager illumination to the dark world as it woke up. The Caddy was purring, probably syncing with the one in Laurence’s bedroom, and checking for real-time updates from the nearest server. How much of Peregrine was in the Caddies and how much was in some secure facilities hidden around the world where the Caddies drew their updates from? Why had Peregrine warned him obliquely that Patricia was on her way? With not enough time to make a break for it, but enough time to freak out?

They just stood there, neither of them talking at all, until the streetlights came back on. The sudden lurch from pitch darkness to yellow brightness felt like the sun had popped up all at once—except the light was weaker and there was no warmth. They were both jolted out of their mutual reverie.

“Okay,” Patricia said. “Take care of yourself. Hard times are coming. Harder times, I mean. I’ll see you around.”

“No,” Laurence said. “You won’t.”

32

THE SUN STILL
hadn’t risen. Maybe it never would. Maybe the sky was sick of these endless costume changes: Casting off cloak after cloak, but never revealing what it wore under all those cloaks. Patricia climbed the tall staircase to the top of the hill, stumbling on the cement steps. Nearby, a hawk swung past, making its last hunt of the night, and it glanced at Patricia and said, “Too late, too late!” Which was what birds kept saying to her these days. She clomped to the top of the staircase and staggered across Portola to reach the brink of Market, looking out over the whole city and the bay, all the way to Oakland. She dug in her satchel for a tiny bag of Corn Nuts, crushed to greasy powder, and the dregs of a 5-hour ENERGY drink. She hoped the sun wouldn’t come up. When it did, she was going to report in to Carmen and tell her that they had pissed off some people with nearly limitless wealth, arcane superscience, and nothing to lose. That conversation would lead to Carmen making some decisions, some of which Patricia would have to implement personally. Those, in turn, would lead to more consequences, and more decisions.

Oakland glowed pink. Patricia could glimpse a panic attack coming out of her blind spot, but as long as she didn’t look at it directly, it would never arrive. Except that just as she hatched that notion, her bag made a loud klaxon blast, like she was in a submarine that was venting water. She jumped up and nearly took a spill over the railing. The alarm was her Caddy, which was displaying a “New Voicemail” message at the center of its swirl of spokes. The voicemail was not new, it was one that Laurence had left her right before the attack on Denver, which she had later found and deleted without listening to it. He had left it on her phone, not her Caddy, so her Caddy shouldn’t even have it. She put the Caddy back in her bag and watched the red blanket creep toward the AT-AT shipyard, while an orange thumbprint grazed the horizon. The alarm sounded again: “New Voicemail.” Once again, not a new voicemail. She deleted it a second time and turned her Caddy off for good measure.

Color returned to the world, cone time replaced rod time. Patricia thought about what it would be like to suffer Priya’s fate forever. She tried not to feel sorry for Theodolphus. She thought about Dorothea, getting her brains blown out. Her mouth tasted foul.

Her bag vibrated, then rattled and shrilled. The Caddy had turned back on somehow and was, you guessed it, trying to get her to listen to an old dead message.

“What is up with you?” she said to the device.

“You’re going to want to listen to this,” it said aloud, in its directions-to-the-airport voice.

She deleted the message again.

It came back again, with the same obnoxious noise.

She’d saved some childhood pictures on this Caddy, or else she would have lobbed it off the hillside. And anyway, whatever, it was a voicemail, how bad could it be? She pressed
“
listen.”

At first, she just felt disconcerted, listening to the Laurence of another time line talking about a future that had been erased. Poor dumb alternate Laurence. But then he talked about her dead parents, as if they’d only just died—whereas Patricia had been thinking of her parents as having died many, many years ago. First there had been no time to grieve for her parents, and then she had decided that she’d already grieved enough. In fact, her parents had died recently, not years ago, and she had given them short shrift except for a pang here and there, and one messed-up dream talk with Roberta. She’d buried the grief, the way she buried everything. Now her head was full of decapitated sandwiches and sandpaper shirts, and her father’s kisses on the bridge of her nose, and the canary-yellow frosting on the seventh-birthday cake her mom had baked her, and the way the “o” in “disown” became a diphthong under severe strain, and her mother’s broken arm.…

She was never going to see her parents again, or tell them she loved them, or tell them they ruined her childhood. They were gone, and she had never even known them, and Roberta had insisted they’d really loved her best in spite of all their cruelty, and Patricia would never, ever understand. The not-understanding was worse than anything else, it was like a mystery and a wound that couldn’t heal and an unforgivable failure.

Patricia broke down. She fell on her hands and knees in the dirt at the road shoulder, facing the blinding sunrise, and she started shaking and scrabbling in the ground and her eyes blurred from the overflow. She wiped her eyes clear as her vision fell on a single yellow flower beyond the metal fence, and just as Ghost Laurence said the words “emotional phototropism” the sunlight hit the flower and it actually raised its motherfucking head to greet the sun, and Patricia lost her shit all over again, the tears just cascading out of her as she clawed at the ground she was salting.

The message ended and vanished forever and Patricia kept weeping and digging the stony dirt with both hands, until the sun was upon her.

When she could see again, still dry-heaving and bawling a little, she looked at the Caddy, which was perched in the grass looking innocent, and she had a pretty shrewd idea who this was but that was the least of her worries. “Fuck,” she said, “you.”

“I thought you needed to hear that,” the Caddy said.

“The trap that cannot be ignored,” she said, “is fucking bullshit.”

She sat, head on dirty knees, looking out at the city. She felt like there was nobody in the world she could talk to about how she was feeling, as sure as if a plague had killed every other human. This thought led her back to the Unraveling, the way every thought eventually did.

She banged on Laurence’s door, not knocking and pausing and then knocking again, but rather a steady pummeling that says “I’m going to break this door down.” Her hand bruised up and she kept going.

This time, Laurence had probably been asleep. He looked even more disheveled than before, and way more disoriented. He had one sock on and an arm through one T-shirt sleeve. “Hey.” He squinted.

“You promised you would never run away from me again,” she said.

“I did promise that,” he said. “And I don’t remember you promising not to destroy my life’s work. So you have me there.”

Patricia almost turned away, because she could not deal with any more blame. But she still had dirt under her fingernails.

“I’m sorry,” she said. And then she couldn’t get any more words out. She couldn’t find words, any more than she could feel her extremities. “I’m sorry,” she said again, because she needed to make this totally unconditional. “I feel like I owed you more trust than I gave you. I shouldn’t have destroyed what I didn’t understand, and I shouldn’t have done that to you.”

Laurence kept looking at her with a dull expression, like he was just waiting for her to shut up and go away so he could go back to sleep. She probably looked like a mess, sweating and covered with dirt and tears.

Patricia made herself keep talking, because this was another situation where there was no way but forward: “I think part of me knew all along that you were working on something that could be dangerous, and I thought that being a good friend meant not judging or asking too many questions. And that was messed up, and I should have tried to find out sooner, and when I saw the machine in Denver and realized that it was yours I should have found a way to talk to you about it instead of just finishing the mission. I screwed up. I’m sorry.”

“Shit.” Laurence looked as if she had kicked him in the junk instead of apologizing. “I … I never actually thought I would hear that from you.”

“I mean it. I was a colossal dick.”

“You weren’t a colossal dick. Just kind of a regular dick. We were playing with fire in Denver. No question. But yeah, I wish you had talked to me.”

“I listened to your voicemail from before,” Patricia said. “Just now. CH@NG3M3 forced me. He wouldn’t let me delete it without listening.”

“It’s a pushy bastard. It goes by Peregrine now.”

“Listen, I have to tell you about something really important. And it’s not something I can discuss out in the open.”

“I guess you ought to come in, then.” He stepped back and held the door open.

They sat on the same sofa where they’d shared the elf-shaped bong, facing the wide-screen TV where they’d watched
Red Dwarf
with Isobel. The apartment was a lot more cluttered,
Hoarders
-esque even, and there was a millimeter-deep layer of gunge on everything.