All the Birds in the Sky

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “She can help,” Laurence said. “I can’t explain. But she can help.”

  “What’s her area of expertise again?” Anya folded her arms over her unicorn shirt.

  “Dimensional transcendentalism,” said Patricia.

  “You just stole that from Doctor Who. This is not a joke, this is serious,” Anya said.

  “Okay, look,” Patricia said. “Do you guys want your friend back or not?” Everybody nodded slowly. “Then just stand the fuck back and let me work.”

  Everybody kept clustering around Patricia and trying to see what she was doing, and Laurence worried that she was going to put so much energy into obfuscation that she wouldn’t be able to reach into the hole in the universe and pull Priya out. Patricia was wearing a strapless red dress that teased you with the sweep of her pale shoulders and a hint of cleavage. As she turned her back to Laurence and stared into the space over the white circle, he couldn’t help noticing the dimples behind her knees and the perfect curves of her calves and ankles.

  Laurence still wasn’t entirely sure what had happened to Priya. He had no real data. She’d floated, the way Ben and the various objects had. Her sandals had fallen as her feet lifted off, and her bright toenails had wriggled. She’d laughed and clapped her hands and said, “Suck on this, Newton!” Everybody was high-fiving and making upskirting jokes … and then she’d just gone “pop.” It was sort of a balloon-popping, squelching sound, as if something sucked her into an invisible hole. All that remained were her sandals, one of which was upside down. Laurence had felt a compulsion to pick them up and place them neatly beside each other next to the beanbag, as if she’d come back for them in a moment.

  Patricia turned and gestured to Laurence that she needed some space here. He grabbed Sougata’s arm and dragged him toward the exit, beckoning for Anya and Tanaa to follow. “We need to get her some supplies,” Laurence said. “Patricia needs boiling water, dry ice, regular ice, half a dozen jailbroken Caddies, and a few other things. Come on, people, let’s haul ass.” He hustled them out of there.

  “If this doesn’t work—” said Sougata.

  “If you’re just wasting our time while Priya is in danger—” said Anya.

  “We will end you,” Tanaa concluded.

  Laurence looked back at the steel door, which he’d slammed shut behind them, and inhaled loudly through his teeth. He felt as if he, too, were about to be sucked into a completely unknowable other space.

  “Let’s hurry up and get those supplies,” he said. He kept adding more and more items to the list, some of which they’d need to purchase at the grocery store or borrow from people in the hackerspace, a few blocks away.

  “Damn damn damn,” Sougata kept saying under his breath. “Damn, it’s all over, I’m so sorry Priya.” Anya put her hand on Sougata’s shoulder.

  Laurence was putting a lot of energy into pretending that the scavenger hunt he was sending his friends on was vital and time sensitive. And then he looked down at his phone and saw a text from Patricia: “come back pls. alone.” He gestured for the others to go out for supplies, then turned and sprinted back upstairs.

  The loft looked darker than usual, as if all the light were being eaten by something. The movie posters resembled ghost portraits in a haunted mansion. Laurence stepped in a beanbag and almost face-planted. He crept past machines that he worked with every day, which suddenly looked sinister with their sharp edges, metallic protrusions, and sputtering LEDs. There was a rank beautiful scent, akin to burning lavender.

  Patricia glowed at the other end of the long, thin space, with the same pale light as the white circle where Priya had vanished. The only point of brightness in the entire space.

  “How’s it going?” Laurence stage-whispered, as though they were in a crypt.

  “It’s going okay,” Patricia said in a normal voice. “Priya is safe for now. She is going to need a lot of vodka and loud music when she gets out of where she is. She drinks, right? She’s not straight edge?”

  “She drinks,” Laurence said. That Priya’s taste in intoxicants was an issue reassured him a lot. But he was waiting for the bad news. Patricia just stared at him as if she was trying to decide something. She was several inches shorter than him, but in this moment she seemed taller. Her deep-set eyes narrowed as she sized him up.

  “So,” Laurence said after a moment of this. “What can I do?”

  “Remember what I told you not to say to me?” Patricia said. “When you brought me up here.”

  Laurence had another “standing on the edge of the abyss” feeling. Total heedless terror. He shrugged, and it passed. “Sure,” he said. “I remember.”

  “I need you to owe me something,” Patricia said, “or this won’t work. I’m really sorry. I tried to do it every other way, and none of them succeeded. In the end, the most powerful magic is often transactional in some way. I’ll explain more some other time.”

  “Okay, sure,” Laurence said. “Whatever you want. Name it.”

  “If I bring your friend back,” Patricia said. She chewed her lip and seemed to be trying one last time to think of an alternative. “If I bring your friend back, you have to give me the smallest thing you own.”

  “That’s it?” Laurence laughed with relief. “Done.” He grabbed her hand with both hands and shook.

  Laurence couldn’t stop laughing, because he’d gotten himself all worked up and it turned out to be nothing. He owned so many tiny items—the smallest thing he owned was probably some ridiculous gadget he’d paid too much for. He laughed until he croaked, and his eyes clouded, and when he wiped his eyes clear, Patricia and he were no longer alone.

  Priya stood on the white platform for a moment, gaping at the two faces below. She raised her elegant hands to her face, as if astonished to see that she still had hands. She tried to form words and just made a fish mouth instead. She started to wobble off the platform, and Laurence guided her to sit down.

  “She’s seen some things that eyes weren’t built for,” Patricia said. “Like I said. Vodka, and lots of it. And loud music. I recommend Benders. I’ll even come and have a drink or two.”

  Laurence steered Priya onto a beanbag, where she was hugging herself and making low guttural sounds. He texted the others to come back up, then turned back to Patricia.

  “Oh my god, thank you,” Laurence said. “Am I allowed to say thank you? Or is that bad?”

  “You’re allowed to say thank you.” Patricia laughed.

  He ran over and hugged her so tight, he nearly squeezed the life out of her, and he felt her bare shoulders against his chest and her face against his neck. She made a slight protesting “squick” noise and Laurence slackened a tiny bit but kept hugging her.

  “Thank you thank you thank you.” Laurence’s eyes felt splashy. His senses filled with clementines and softness and warmth. He blessed the day his parents decided he should be outdoorsy.

  The others had come back, and Sougata was life-preservering Priya with tears rushing down his face. “I thought I’d lost you forever, I couldn’t have lived with myself, I never want to let go of you,” he said.

  “There were colors outside the visual spectrum,” Priya managed to say. “But I could still see them. I can’t stop seeing them now.”

  “Vodka and loud music,” Patricia called out from Laurence’s death grip. “Stat. It’s an essential part of her recovery process.”

  They rushed Priya to Benders Bar & Grill. There was some talk of going to the ER instead, but Patricia nixed it, and nobody wanted to argue with the person who’d saved all their asses.

  “But how did you do it?” Anya kept asking. “What did you do?”

  “I used my sonic screwdriver.”

  “No, really. What did you do?”

  “I reversed the polarity of the neutron flow.”

  “Stop giving Doctor Who answers! Tell me the truth!”

  “It was sort of a wibbly wobbly,” Patricia said, fully teasing Anya now.

  Booze really wa
s medicinal, after a near-death experience. Holding a drink in both hands and letting it corrode the topmost layer of his mouth and throat, Laurence felt a spiritual relationship with Bushmills.

  Priya, too, seemed to be pretty much back to normal as soon as she had a couple swigs of vodka and heard the sound system blasting “Cum On Feel The Noize.” She started dancing on her stool and making jokes about heavy-metal hair and body shots. Laurence made sure the liquor kept coming, so Priya would get her recommended dosage. Whatever she’d experienced during her time outside of our universe, she seemed to be rinsing it out of her mind, and maybe if they were lucky, the whole evening would feel like a weird blur to her when she woke with a hangover. As a strategy for scrambling someone’s short-term memories, it didn’t seem bad.

  Everybody kept toasting Patricia and buying her drinks and laughing at her dumb jokes, as if they were ultraconscious that she’d pulled their fat out of the fire. When Patricia went to the ladies’, Sougata leaned over and said to Laurence, “Seriously, where did you find her? She is amazing. She’s like the weirdest genius I’ve ever met, and that’s actually saying something.” Tanaa and Anya both chimed in. But at the same time, Laurence noticed that none of his friends would quite look at Patricia, and they kept talking past her rather than to her. These people hated superstition, but they were treating his friend like a bad-luck charm.

  Patricia watched Priya like a freaking hawk and touched her hand every now and then, as if her touch had healing properties. Which it probably did. Patricia paid no attention to the rest of them, even Laurence. Patricia might be an antisocial weirdo who wandered at three in the morning talking to rats, but she had unlimited gentleness for people when they needed it. Patricia’s black hair was swept back, and her face had a beaconlike quality to it that went along with the intentness of her gaze.

  Laurence had a moment of counting up how many of his secrets Patricia knew, and feeling good about it. He felt a weird sense of pride that he had found someone he trusted so much. Like he’d chosen well, even if it was mostly by accident.

  He walked her home, fighting the urge to embrace her randomly. She was laughing and shaking her head. “God, it was iffy for a few moments there,” she said. “Your friend got pretty lost. Plus it’s a miracle she didn’t get squashed by the weird gravitational effects of the space she was in.”

  “I wonder how many other things in our world are just the shadows of things in other places,” Laurence said, forming the thought as he spoke. “I mean, we always suspected that gravity was so weak in our world because most of it was in another dimension. But what else? Light? Time? Some of our emotions? I mean, the longer I live, the more I feel like the stuff I see and feel is like a tracing of the outline of the real stuff that’s beyond our perceptions.”

  “Like Plato’s cave,” Patricia said.

  “Like Plato’s cave,” Laurence agreed.

  “I don’t know,” Patricia said. “I mean, we’re grown-ups now. Allegedly. And we feel things less than we did when we were kids, because we’ve grown so much scar tissue, or our senses have dulled. I think it’s probably healthy. I mean, little kids don’t have to make decisions, unless something’s very wrong. Maybe you can’t make up your mind as easily, if you feel too much. You know?”

  But in fact, Laurence was feeling sensations and emotions more vividly than he had since he was little. The streetlights and car headlights and neon signs were blazing with life, and he felt his heart expand and contract, and he could smell charcoal burning someplace nearby. He turned to look into Patricia’s bright, sad smile.

  “Patricia,” he said. “I really really appreciate your help. And more than that, I am so damn glad to know you. I’m so sorry I ran out on you when you talked to your cat, when we were kids. I will never run out on you again. That’s a promise I’m giving you, free and clear. I’m probably not supposed to make promises to someone like you, either, right? But I don’t care. Thank you for being my friend.”

  “You’re welcome,” Patricia said. They had reached her front door. “Same to you. All of it. I’m super-lucky to have you as a friend too. And I’ll never run out on you, either.”

  They stood at her door. At some point, their hands had started touching. And they just stood there, looking at each other, hands in hands.

  Patricia’s smile turned sadder, as if she knew something that Laurence hadn’t figured out yet. “Don’t forget the thing you owe me,” she said. “Or it’ll be very bad. I’m sorry.” Then she went inside her house and the door slammed shut.

  Laurence was still jangling with a mixture of tipsiness, relief, and emotional gushiness, the whole way home. But he was also feeling a smidge uneasy about the “smallest thing” thing. No big deal, most likely, but Patricia had seemed kind of intense about it. Laurence actually clicked his heels together as he crossed the street in big, hungry strides. He had never done Ecstasy or any kind of mood elevator, but he sort of imagined this is how they would feel.

  When he got home, he crashed. The elation wore off so fast, he had to sit down. He was so drained, he felt like he was going to pass out if he didn’t get to sleep right away. And then he thought about the “smallest thing” that he had to give to Patricia. He could look for it in the morning, or in a couple days, or whatever. She hadn’t specified a time limit, or anything … he probably had a few days to find it.

  But then Laurence started wondering what it could be and how he was supposed to know. Was it the smallest by volume? By weight? Or just overall size? He owned some pieces of lint that were beyond tiny, but he was pretty sure that wouldn’t count. To be fair, he had to pick something he owned, which meant something that had at least a nominal resale value. You don’t own something you couldn’t sell, right?

  So. He had a USB drive that he’d brought home from the Ten Percent Project office, which was the size of two peas—but when he texted Patricia, she said it couldn’t be something he’d borrowed. She needed something he owned himself, free and clear. That ruled out the electronic components and tools littering his desk and shelves, which were all technically on loan from Milton.

  Laurence rummaged through his desk. Pencils, pens … that little figurine of Mega Man was pretty tiny, move that to the top of the list. He started a pile, and rummaged through drawers and boxes and closet shelves, trying not to wake Isobel. And then, all at once, he knew.

  “Oh no,” he said aloud. “Not that. No no no. Fuck. Fuck no.” He couldn’t breathe. Like an asthma attack, or something. All of the joy he’d felt earlier slipped away as if it had never been there, and he felt instead like he’d been kicked in the solar plexus with a sharp steel toe.

  He stayed up most of the rest of the night, searching and searching. But he never found anything that counted as a real possession and was smaller than his grandmother’s ring.

  He brought it to Patricia the next morning, eyes sore from lack of sleep. “This is the only thing I have of my grandmother’s,” he told her. “She gave it to me when she was dying.”

  “I’m sorry,” Patricia said. She stood in the doorway of her apartment building, in a bathrobe. Maybe he’d woken her, but he doubted it.

  “She said it was her mother’s, and she wanted to pass it down to a granddaughter, but I was her only grandchild,” Laurence said. “She wanted me to give it to whoever I married, and then to our daughter, if we had one.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Patricia said.

  “I was going to give it to Serafina,” Laurence said. “As an engagement ring. I promised my grandma I would give it to my bride.”

  Patricia didn’t say anything, just stared in her purple robe. Her hair was a pile of tangles.

  “I really have to give it to you? We can’t just call it quits?”

  “You really have to. Or your friend might get sucked back into that place. Or you might, instead.” When she put it like that, the ring was a pretty small price to pay.

  “You knew it was going to be this.” He handed it to her, still in
its tiny, tiny velvet box. Actually, with the box, it was almost bigger than a toy car he owned. But not quite.

  “I knew it would be something like this.” Patricia put the ring into the pocket of her robe, where it barely made a lump. “Or the spell wouldn’t have worked.”

  “Why couldn’t it just be something like, I have to stand on one foot for an hour? Why does it have to be my most valued possession, and the linchpin of my courting strategy? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Do you want to come in and have some toaster waffles?” Patricia stepped back and held the door open. “I can’t talk about this out here, in the open.”

  The toaster waffles failed to materialize, but instead she had locally made organic Pop-Tarts, which were probably better. They sat on the gray lumpy sofa, where Deedee and the other roommate had been watching Jersey Shore every other time Laurence had been there. Patricia kept glancing over toward the hallway for any signs they were stirring or listening in to this conversation.

  “So I might have mentioned there are two kinds of magic.” Patricia handed Laurence a blueberry pastry and a mug of English Breakfast.

  “Good and bad, I’m guessing,” said Laurence, not quite having his mouth full. Patricia’s bathrobe was splayed out on the sofa next to him, and he wondered if he could grab the ring while she wasn’t looking. But then he remembered the part about someone getting pulled back into the nightmare dimension.

  “No, though that’s a common misconception. There’s Healer magic and Trickster magic. Back in the day, many people believed Healer magic was good and Trickster magic was evil—but Healers can be judgmental control freaks, and Tricksters can be super-compassionate and basically save your life.”

  “Like last night,” Laurence said.

  Patricia nodded. “The Healer and Trickster schools formed over hundreds of years, out of lots of local traditions from all over the world. And there was a time, in the 1830s, when the two groups went to war. The world could have been torn apart. But there was this woman named Hortense Walker, who realized that the two types of magic worked better if you could combine them. You could do amazing things if you mastered both Trickster and Healer magic, way more than you could do with either type alone. Plus you were less likely to go over the edge into becoming a control freak or a lying jerkface.”