All the Birds in the Sky

by Charlie Jane Anders

  Kawashima had been vague about their destination, but now that they were zipping through Utah at 300 MPH, he opened up. “We’re going to be proactive. We’re going to stage an intervention. For the planet.” He paused and Patricia was on tenterhooks. Then Kawashima explained at last: “There are some maniacs outside Denver building a doomsday device, which will tear a hole in the planet, and we’re going to deal with it.”

  Patricia was ready. Let it come.

  27

  LAURENCE HAD LUNCH with Milton. Just the two of them. No Isobel, no other members of Laurence’s team. “I remember when I first saw you, when you were a little boy,” Milton said. “Youngest person ever to build a two-second time machine.” He smiled and reached for another piece of fried chicken from the bucket on the floor between them.

  They were sitting on the carpet of the main office on the top floor. The chicken was perfectly crispy and gushed with juice inside its bread shell, and Laurence’s fingers still felt pristine after two pieces. The bucket had the name of some local fry shop on it. How did Milton keep conjuring up fast food? Even for a billionaire, this was a coup. Laurence sensed Milton was making some late-in-the-game effort to bond. They were listening to Robert Johnson, the only music Milton liked.

  “The two-second time machine.” Laurence wiped his fingers even though there was no need. “Classic example of a useless device.”

  “Well, yes and no.” Dirth shrugged with his whole torso. “It was a badge of membership in a select group, right? But also, an object lesson. Imagine if you could build a device that goes backward two seconds, instead of forward two seconds. But you couldn’t stop yourself from pressing it over and over.”

  “You’d be stuck in a loop,” Laurence said. “The same two seconds, forever.”

  From where Laurence sat on the floor he could just see the treetops of the forest on the other side of the feeder road from the industrial park. They shook like pom-poms.

  “We could be stuck in a two-second time loop right now, and never know it,” said Dirth. “Except that it’s already been two seconds since I said that. But yeah, think about it, man. The same device, harmless if you go one direction, but potentially disastrous if you go the other way. Sometimes things have a grain, that you have to go with. You can’t swim against a tidal wave.”

  “And history,” said Laurence, maybe seeing where Milton was going with all this. “History is a tidal wave.”

  Laurence glanced out the window again, and this time he could see not just the tops of those trees, but the branches and some of the trunks. They were waving at him. He thought maybe if he did a good job of bonding with Milton, he would let Laurence out to take a walk in the woods. It would make Laurence feel closer to Patricia.

  “History is just the flow of time writ large, man,” Milton said.

  Laurence reached for another piece of chicken, then glanced up to see the trees from across the road. He could see way more of their trunks now.

  “Get down!” Laurence threw himself on top of Milton on the floor, just as a branch, as wide as his rib cage, shot through the window and into the far wall. In seconds the room was crammed with leaves and branches. Laurence couldn’t see the walls or any of the desks, just dense, heavy, spiky green.

  Laurence crawled on his belly toward the open doorway. From behind him, Milton said, “What the hell is…,” and Laurence just shrugged, since he couldn’t say anything without losing his voice forever. He had enough presence of mind to bite his tongue.

  From downstairs, Laurence heard the firecracker laugh of a machine gun. Someone screamed in pain and fear. The guards were shouting for backup, and more and bigger weapons.

  Laurence reached the door that led from the main office and got to his feet. He had fried chicken skin stuck to his knee. He ran to the other side of the building, where there was still clear space and he could see out the window. Standing in the disabled parking spot was Patricia’s friend Dorothea, wearing a floor-length floral skirt and Birkenstocks. He could just hear her chatting about a grandmother who left one of her grandchildren at the seaside, another at the edge of the desert, and a third at the foot of the mountains, and the grandmother couldn’t remember which child she had left where. Laurence guessed that Ernesto, the guy whose touch supercharged anything organic, was somewhere in the middle of the assault of trees.

  “Mr. Dirth. Sir.” A couple of guys in all-black outfits, with big guns slung over one shoulder, came running into the big office. “There’s been some kind of attack. We need to get you out of here.”

  “Screw me,” Dirth said. “Protect the machine. That’s what they’re here for.”

  Laurence was still staring down at Dorothea. A man sprinted toward Dorothea, shooting his semiautomatic to no effect. When the man reached Dorothea, his head separated from his neck, as if she had a razor-sharp whip. The man fell one way, his head rolled the other. Laurence looked down at the dead body and hesitated one second longer. Then he turned toward Milton.

  “You’re going to want a white noise machine,” Laurence said. “Something so she can’t hear herself speak.” Laurence waited to be struck dumb, but apparently he hadn’t broken his promise.

  “What do you—” the man with the gun said.

  “The fabrication machine,” Milton said. “It’s near where she is. Turn on the goddamn fabricator.”

  Laurence took off running. He ignored Milton yelling after him and the men with the guns shouting for him to stop. Once in the stairwell, he took the stairs three at a time. He made for the bright exit, shouting, “Patricia!”

  Dorothea recognized Laurence as he came out into the parking lot. She nodded at him, but didn’t stop talking about the grandmother and the lost children. Laurence waved at her and kept running, around the side of the building. Around Dorothea’s feet lay the headless bodies of four men.

  The fabricator turned on just as Laurence was ten yards away, near the tiny window to his own lab. It was a deafening clatter, and for the first time Dorothea looked flustered. She kept trying to talk, but she stumbled over a word. And then another.

  Laurence didn’t hear the gunshot over the noise of the fabricator, but he saw the back of Dorothea’s head go out. She fell, so she was almost touching the bodies of her own kills.

  Nobody thought to turn off the fabrication machine, so the air was still filled with churn. Laurence stared at the dead body in the long flowy skirt for a moment, remembering when he’d eaten tacos with her. Then he thought about the fact that Patricia had to be here someplace, and took off running again.

  Patricia was rising off the ground. Laurence had thought she couldn’t fly, but there she was. She floated on the wind, like a balloon that some kid had lost hold of at the fairground. Patricia was so close to Laurence, closer than she’d been in months, but he had no way to get to her. He called out, but she couldn’t hear him over the white noise. He screamed her name until his voice was shot.

  Patricia looked peaceful, her arms spread a little, like a snow angel. Her feet pointed down. She wore no shoes. Her socks had pom-poms over the heels. Her shadow fell right over Laurence’s eyes, and her path converged with the gantry that had the precious wormhole machine on it. He tried to get her attention, but she was too far away now. By the time Patricia reached the top, she was a dot. But what happened next was easy to see from the ground: Lightning poured out of the sky, from a cloud that hadn’t been there a moment earlier. Slash after slash, until smoke floated down. The light blinded him, but he couldn’t look away, and he screamed Patricia’s name with his hoarse, smoke-singed throat. Laurence could barely stand because he felt like his center of gravity was being crushed by seeing her dear shadow against the hideous white glare. Cinders and twisted pieces of the wormhole machine rained down and nearly hit Laurence’s hot wet face.

  BOOK FOUR

  28

  EVERYBODY WAS SINGING madrigals. Tight staggered harmonies that rang with a lightness that had sharp pieces of melancholy embedded in it. Quartet
s, quintets, and bigger groups went door-to-door in residential areas or barged into bare-bones eateries, holding sheet music and wearing modest black linen-cotton outfits. A pitch pipe sounding a single note was your only warning that your heart was about to be wrecked. “Now Is the Month of Maying,” “O Morte,” even crazy Carlo Gesualdo. People would stop whatever they were doing and listen to madrigals, until they were tear-soaked. Something about the way the trebles and altos would introduce a soaring melodic line, and then the tenors or basses would come in to fuck it up, was like the musical knife-twist you never saw coming. After the flood, everyone agreed that madrigals were the soundtrack of our lives.

  Deedee dropped out of her ska-punk band and joined an eight-person madrigal chorus. She had a clot somewhere deep inside her that was connected to the people she had lost in the flood, or might lose in the aftermath, and the endless conversations where everybody compared notes on their respective tragedies only made her feel shittier. Just saying the words “My brother is still missing” made Deedee want to throw up and then head-butt whoever had asked. She needed an alternative to the dull repetition of facts, a way to share her uncut heartbreak without any particulars, and to her amazement she found it in these strange old songs about doomed lovers.

  She was heading for the door, after putting on her white blouse and black skirt (from an old waitress gig) plus black high-tops, and she found herself staring at Patricia’s empty bedroom. A matter-of-fact off-white rectangle, it looked smaller without furniture. Scars in the wall and floor, where a bed had dug in.

  Patricia had reappeared, after being gone for a few weeks, taking care of some business in Denver. And she’d seemed really content, as if whatever demons had sent her out until near dawn every night had been cleansed at last. Sitting with Deedee and Racheline for hours on that old sofa, Patricia had craned her long neck and listened to all their stories and fears, and somehow always said the exact right thing.

  Deedee’s chorus rang the doorbell, and she rushed down to join them as they took to the rave-dark streets. The electricity kept turning off, and the people who still had jobs were going over to a four-day workweek, because PG&E only for-sure guaranteed power Monday thru Thursday. Worse yet, the Hetch Hetchy water kept getting diverted, and you never knew if the taps would turn on or not. Half the shops on Valencia were boarded. Deedee’s tights and skirt itched. Her throat felt dry. She did vocal exercises under her breath, and her fellow mezzo, Julianne, laughed in sympathy. The group walked past a house that was on fire, and the neighbors were putting it out with buckets. The smoke got in Deedee’s throat. But then they got to a café crammed with people holding hands and drinking simple coffee from a tureen and started to sing, and Deedee found the music carrying her, same as always.

  Racheline had always been the mom of the apartment, being the master tenant and years older. But post-flood, Patricia had usurped her. Because Racheline couldn’t cope, even more than most people couldn’t cope, and Patricia had seemed to be made of coping. Some people just rise to a crisis, Deedee and Racheline had kept saying to each other in wonder. Thank goodness Patricia is here. Patricia had floated, effortless, and after a while they hadn’t even needed to ask for her to solve everything for them. They couldn’t believe this was the same girl who’d thrown hot bread at them.

  After they were done singing, Deedee and her chorus hung around the café, accepting tips or presents. She found herself talking to an older gay man named Reginald, whose arms were covered with beautiful insect tattoos. “I suppose I identify with the Silver Swan, who waits to sing until it’s too late,” said Reginald.

  “It’s never too late,” Deedee said. “Come on. We’re going to the next place, and I bet we’ll find you another swan there.”

  “I should go home,” Reginald said. But then he paused halfway out the door, as if contemplating a return to an empty flat.

  Patricia had done something weird, a few days before she had moved out. Deedee was washing her hands over and over, cursing into the steam cloud, and she’d looked up and seen Patricia’s face behind her in the slicked mirror. Patricia had stared, the way Deedee imagined that a lover would watch you after sex, with a kind of ownership. Or the way you would survey a pet that you had just gotten done domesticating. Something about Patricia’s look made Deedee’s scalp itch. “What are you—” Deedee had spun around, hands bright red, but Patricia had vanished.

  * * *

  THERE WERE SHORTAGES of HIV meds along with everything else, and normally Reginald would have been in a silent panic. But Patricia had done something, and now Reginald was cured. At least, that’s the word Patricia had used. “Cured.”

  “You can’t tell anyone.” He’d woken up in the middle of the night to see her leaning over his bed. Two hands and one knee on the mattress, one foot on the ground. She wore a big black hoodie that only exposed a pointy white chin and a few strands of dark hair. “I have to leave town, maybe forever,” she said. “And I don’t want to leave you in the lurch.”

  Patricia wouldn’t explain why she had to leave town, much less how she had “cured” him. She just did something elaborate and noninvasive, kneeling at the foot of his bed, and Reginald smelled burnt radish for a moment. “It’s complicated,” was all she would say, in a much older woman’s voice. Raspy. Bitter. “I’ve been called up to the front.” Reginald kept asking, the front of what? And then she was gone. Reginald had suspected the whole thing was a weird dream, but she’d left a long black hair on his floor and, yes, his viral load had tested at absolute zero afterward.

  And now Reginald wasn’t sure what to say to anyone he might have sex with.

  Deedee dragged Reginald to the Dovre Club and introduced him to Percival, who was some kind of architect or something, with tousled gray hair and a doughy face like a British movie star from the 1970s. He even had the houndstooth vest.

  Percival was a “madrigal groupie,” who followed the groups around using a Caddy app and hung on every quaver. “My biggest fear about the apocalypse isn’t being eaten by cannibals—it’s the fact that in every other postapocalyptic movie you see someone with an acoustic guitar by the campfire,” said Percival, who had pale meaty hands with calluses on the sides of the fingers. “I can’t stand acoustic guitar music. I’d rather listen to dubthrash.”

  “There’s no apocalypse,” Reginald snorted. “There’s just … a period of adjustment. People are being drama queens.” But even as he spoke, he had a vivid image of Patricia, looming over his bed at four in the morning, with an urgency in her hoarse voice that was indistinguishable from fear. Again, he wondered: The front of what?

  * * *

  EVERY STONE, EVERY leaf of ivy, every iridescent windowpane at Eltisley Hall rejected Diantha’s presence. The grass at the center of the Hex bristled at her. The chunky marble columns of the Greater Building drew themselves up, like magistrates taking umbrage. The narrow gates of the Lesser Building seemed to squint, to deny her entrance. The Chapel clenched granite and stained-glass fists, their knuckles spiked with gargoyles. Across the Hex, the big white slab of the Residential Wing turned opaque with mist. All six sides of the Hex puffed with hostility. Healers had built this place, centuries ago, and nobody does scorn like a pure Healer. Diantha hadn’t come back to Eltisley since she’d been allowed to graduate without distinction, and this was worse than she’d dreaded.

  She almost turned and ran, but she would only have gotten lost in the Brambles and possibly eaten by something before she could have reached any kind of road. So instead, she made herself walk up the sharp steps to the Greater Building, where they were waiting for her in Formal Hall. She drew her thin black gown, with its yellow trim and ermine collar, tighter around herself against the sudden chill. Why had they demanded her presence when she was finally starting to build a life without magic?

  Diantha found an empty seat in Formal Hall, in the back corner, as far as possible from High Table. Portraits of dead witches scowled from the dark walls, and chandeliers shudder
ed overhead. They were serving some kind of fish course, but the fish and the potatoes were the same mushy consistency. Someone tried to make small talk, but Diantha just kept her head down and pretended she was eating.

  Just when Diantha thought the whole ordeal couldn’t get more miserable, she heard an inhuman chatter from the corridor outside, and the group burst in. A dozen of them, in their little suits and starchy dresses, singing madrigals. Fucking madrigals. Was there a more repulsive trend, in the entire universe? Trust hipsters to make even the collapse of civilization unbearably twee. These were the advertising jingles of the Renaissance, written by wife killers and creepy stalkers. Diantha wanted to scream, to drown them out with obscenities, to fling her fishtatoes at them.

  Someone slipped an envelope onto the table, instructing Diantha to come to the Upper Common Room for after-dinner sherry.

  The UCR was not the nest of luxury Diantha and the other students had always imagined. Just a mahogany box with seven leather armchairs and a crimson-and-jasmine carpet. The ceiling was a wooden grid, as were the walls. Everything tidy and regular, because this was Eltisley Hall.

  Another hand reached for the sherry at the same time as Diantha, and she recognized the slim white wrist even before she looked up into the face of Patricia Delfine. Patricia still looked the same, like an eager baby. She hadn’t grown prematurely old the way Diantha had. Patricia smiled, she actually smiled, at Diantha.

  The half-full sherry glass slipped from Diantha’s grasp as Patricia poured for her, almost ruining the immaculate carpet. Patricia helped steady Diantha’s hand. She resisted the urge to throw her drink in Patricia’s face. Instead, she looked at her own feet.