All the Birds in the Sky

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “I have something very important to tell all of you.” Diantha sounded breathless, and not just because there were ten teenagers packed inside a dirty little chimney at midnight. Ten pairs of hands clutched, ten pelvises twitched with anticipation, as if they all collectively had to pee. Diantha held the pause as long as she could, then dropped the bomb: “I have spoken with the Tree.”

  “What?” Patricia said before she could stop herself. “I mean, that’s great. How did you manage to do that?” Everybody was staring at Patricia, like she’d had a jealous outburst or something, instead of just being surprised. It wasn’t that Patricia had a monopoly on “talking to the Tree” or anything—she had only done it once herself, and that was years ago. Patricia stammered something else about how happy she was that Diantha had done it, because this was great news, really great.

  Diantha made things a hundred times worse, patting Patricia on the knee and saying, “Don’t worry, dearest. We still value your contribution most of all.”

  But screw Patricia’s wounded pride, everybody wanted to know: What had the Tree said? What was the message? They were so ready. They were beyond ready.

  “The Tree said,” Diantha said, “to prepare ourselves. The test is coming soon. And not all of us will pass it. But those who do will be heroes. Forever and ever.” Everybody was so happy, they were whimpering.

  That didn’t sound like the way the Tree had talked to Patricia. At all. But she’d only had one conversation, a few years ago, and she had a dim recall of the details, especially now that she’d retold them so many times. Patricia told herself to feel glad that she’d been vindicated and she hadn’t just hallucinated the whole thing after all, instead of asking Diantha a bunch of questions, which would just be a sign of jealousy. And Aggrandizement. Now the Tree was talking to Diantha instead of Patricia. Big whoop.

  “I was up all night studying for a Healing Tonics exam,” said Diantha, “and I ate a great quantity of spicy papadum crisps. The next thing I knew, I was soaring out of my body, out the window, into the night. It was the most exhilarating sensation.”

  For a fortnight, the Tree was not forthcoming with any more information, although it spoke to Diantha a few more times. Sameer held hands with Patricia as they listened to the hints that this was something ancient, from before any of the lore they studied, from before words. Sameer’s hand felt dry and callused and his index finger touched Patricia’s pinky in a way that made her feel funny inside. They were both fixated on Diantha, whose exquisite nostrils flared as she talked about her out-of-body experience. On Patricia’s other side, Taylor shivered.

  Everybody who met in that chimney had a secret wink, where you put your thumb in the middle of your collarbone while you winked with one eye, then the other. And they wrote sigils inside their clothes.

  When the Tree did give Diantha actual instructions, they were cryptic. “It said, ‘Stop the Pipe and Passage.’” Her eyes widened and she looked supercharged with adrenaline. “It repeated every word twice.”

  “The Pipe and Passage?” said Sameer. “That sounds like a gentlemen’s club. Full of tobacco smoke and secret entrances.”

  “It sounds obscene, yeah,” said Toby the ginger. He made a motion to show how “pipe and passage” could be construed smuttily. Diantha gave him a glance that made him fold inward.

  They spent days debating and Googling and whispering the words “Pipe and Passage” to one another, with no idea what they could mean. Diantha seemed impatient, as though she was waiting for someone else to figure out the meaning, so she wasn’t forced to be messenger and interpreter both. At last, on Friday after lights-out, Diantha took a drag on a clove cigarette and announced she had the answer.

  “Pipe,” it turned out, referred to the Great Siberian Natural Gas Pipeline. And “Passage” referred to the Great Northern Shipping Passage. They were both the brainchildren of Lamar Tucker (a Texan who had helped pioneer slickwater fracking) in partnership with a Russian conglomerate called Vilkitskiy Shipping. The Russians wanted a new shipping route to replace the Northwest Passage, one that avoided Canada altogether, going through the heart of the Arctic ice. There was just one catch: Their route went straight through a massive deposit of ancient methane clathrate in the Chukchi Sea that had been trapped under the ice for millions of years. Scientists warned that releasing all that methane at once could supercharge the effects of climate change overnight. Hence the pipeline—Tucker believed you could drill down by inches, release the pressure slowly, and trap the still-frozen methane by bonding it with silicates. Then you could pipe the energy-rich methane sludge to a facility in Yakutsk. You’d generate enough electricity to power half of eastern Russia, and maybe sell surplus power to Mongolia, China, or even Japan.

  “But it’s going to go wrong, I know it,” said Diantha. “They have no idea what they’re tampering with. They must be stopped.”

  “Yes,” said Patricia. “But what are we supposed to do?”

  “Do?” said Diantha. “Look around. We are the best students at Eltisley Maze. Between all of us, we have mastered so many skills. Toby, I have seen you unmelt the last snows of spring, and reverse three days’ decay. Sameer, you once tricked a bank manager into giving you five hundred pounds and the power of invisibility. Patricia, I have heard the teachers whisper that you have a connection to nature that even they don’t fully understand. We can do this. The Tree depends on us.”

  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, supporte
d 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 b
racing 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.”