And then he ran out of things to say for a second, and that was it, he felt his voice go—not so much like his throat closing up but like the speech centers of his brain dropping dead from a minor stroke, like an awful head rush. He couldn’t even verbalize in his mind, which he had to admit was a clever way to do it, since there would be no easy workaround even with brain implants. He couldn’t believe his last words on Earth were going to be “she’s my rocket ship.” Jesus.
Isobel was half-recoiling, half-embracing him, and her grip slackened enough on the gun for him to pull it from her hand and throw it away.
Then an elderly woman appeared out of the noxious smoke behind them. She was in her sixties or seventies, wearing an immaculate white pantsuit with a paisley print silk scarf and a turquoise brooch. She touched Isobel, who fell asleep on the ground. Then she bent over Patricia and ran the back of her hand over Patricia’s seared forehead, as if checking a child’s temperature. Patricia woke up, none the worse for wear.
“Carmen.” Patricia sat up and looked around at the aftermath, the bodies, the open flames, the rubble. “I’m so sorry, Carmen. I’m sorry. I should have … I don’t know what. But I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault,” the old lady—Carmen—said. She glanced at Laurence, who said nothing, of course. “None of this is. I got here as fast as I could. I’m terribly sorry about Ernesto and the others. Ernesto was my friend for over forty years, and I will never forget … Anyway, it doesn’t matter now.” She reached out her hand and helped Patricia to her feet. Laurence stood up, too.
“I can’t find Ernesto at all,” Patricia said. “I rescued someone else from that other universe, once. But Ernesto’s just … gone.”
“He’s already lost to us,” Carmen said. “Like so many others, today.”
“How bad is it?” Patricia said, clearly meaning the devastation elsewhere, in all the places Milton’s people had attacked in their coordinated assault.
“Bad,” Carmen said. “Quite bad. They were clever, these ones. But this doesn’t matter. It’s not about us, or all our rules against Aggrandizement mean nothing. This is just what happens. This is what always happens. This is happening everywhere. And it will happen again and again.” She picked up Isobel’s gun and looked at it, then tossed it away. “The hour is coming soon when we may have to act. These sort of things just bring it closer.”
“The Unraveling,” Patricia said. “I wanted to say, the Unraveling is a form of violence, too. And it’s … it’s too soon.”
“It’s always too soon,” Carmen said. “Until it’s too late. In any case, we won’t do anything without deliberating, although Ernesto would have been a voice for caution. And now…” She closed her eyes. “I must go. Prepare for the worst. We’ll talk again soon.”
Carmen wrapped herself in smoke and was gone. Leaving Patricia and Laurence, dumbstruck.
34
WHEN PATRICIA HAD crammed her fingers into the heart of the killing machine, her vision had whited out and she’d heard sick angels blaring at her, she’d crashed into the sky, and everything blurred into nothing. Carmen’s knuckles brushed Patricia’s head sometime later, and she came back. She felt the euphoria of returning to life, just for a moment, then she remembered that everyone was dead, everything was on fire, and Carmen was saying things like, “The hour is coming soon.”
And now Patricia was rushing, even though there was no place to go. She ran past dark distorted storefronts and naked flames, looters and volunteer firefighters, past people dragging their possessions in the street and two men beating each other with their fists. Part of Patricia felt like she had died, after all. Another part, though, felt like she’d gotten a brand-new life.
Laurence was giving Patricia the silent treatment, and it was creeping her out. Maybe he was pissed, or feeling guilty about his friends killing her friends, or freaking out about the Unraveling. But he refused to talk, no matter how many times she looked over her shoulder at him and told him she was scared or they were screwed, or just to keep up. He just gave her a weird look and some hand gestures.
The birds, meanwhile, would not shut the hell up. They were chorusing, “Too late! Too late!” over and over again, from every cantilevered tree and every sunken roof. They followed, flying right over her and behind her, chirping. “Too late!”
“Shut up!” she shouted in bird language at them. “I know, I screwed everything up. You don’t have to keep rubbing my face in it.”
At the place where Mission and Valencia converge, Patricia seized Laurence by the shoulders. “Look, I know a lot of stuff has happened, most of it today, and you’re just dealing with it in your own fashion. But goddamn it, I need to hear your voice. Right now. I need you to tell me there’s still hope. Lie, I don’t care. Please! Why are you being like this?”
She saw the look of misery and annoyance on Laurence’s face, and then she realized.
“Oh. You didn’t.”
He nodded.
“You stupid dumbass. What were you thinking? Why would you do that?” She was shaking his whole torso, with all her strength.
He finally slipped out of her grasp, got his Caddy out, and typed. “Saved yr life. Isobel was going to shoot u. She wanted/deserved an explanation.” His face was a different shape without words constantly coming out of it. Like his eyes were bigger and his mouth smaller.
“You…” She started to say “you stupid dumbass” again, but it turned into: “You gave up your voice for me.”
Laurence nodded.
She put her arms around him, tight enough to feel him breathing. Lungs inflating and deflating, no sound but airflow. She couldn’t make herself grasp that he had done this on purpose. For her. Nothing magical had ever confounded her so much.
A pigeon landed on her shoulder. “Too late!” it burbled in her ear.
Fucking interrupting pigeon. “Why is it too late?” she asked.
“Too late,” was all it said in response.
“It can’t be too late,” Patricia said, “or you wouldn’t be talking to me.”
Laurence looked at the pigeon on Patricia’s shoulder, pecking at the air and babbling, and his eyes narrowed like he really wanted to say something snarky.
“Almost too late,” the pigeon said. “Practically too late.”
She tried to ask, again, why it was too late, but the bird flew off—although maybe like it wanted her to follow. In any case, nothing would be worse than standing in front of the shuttered Bench Bar obsessing about everyone who had been silenced, one way or another. “We need to follow that bird,” she told Laurence, who shrugged, like why not? So we’re following a bird now.
She took off up the hill, away from Mission, keeping the pigeon in sight as it kept wheeling and then soaring uphill again. The pigeon led them up a tiny staircase, set in the hillside, and then to a tiny lane that zigzagged through trees. The street got smaller and smaller until it was just a pathway through a terrace clogged with willows and banyans, big low-slung branches putting their leaves in her face as she raced to keep the pigeon’s messy wings in sight.
The pigeon banked and went up another tiny outdoor staircase, rising into darkness. The trees collided over the stairs, their branches packed so tight Patricia kept losing sight of the bird they were chasing. She grabbed Laurence’s hand as the staircase turned into a loose dirt slope going upwards, and the trees became wider and even tighter-packed. Bark thick as tire treads, branches like barbed wire. They masked the sky. She spent all her concentration steering Laurence and herself on a clear path. The slope grew steeper and steeper until it was vertical, and then it flattened. Patricia glanced behind her and couldn’t even see the path they’d come from.
Patricia realized with a jolt that she hadn’t been this deep into a forest since the time she’d become a bird, back before Kanot had taken her away to Eltisley Maze.
“My GPS is having a meltdown,” Peregrine said.
Now that they had deep forest all around them, the pigeon seeme
d chattier. “So I’m not sure if I ought to be bringing your friend along,” it said. “My name is Kooboo, by the way.” At least, that’s what the name sounded like.
“My friends are very respectable,” said Patricia, including Peregrine in that. “And I’m guessing it’s too late to worry about bringing outsiders. Are we going to the Parliament? I’m Patricia, and this is Laurence. And that’s Peregrine that he’s holding.”
The trees thinned out a little, and Patricia had a feeling they were almost at the clearing with the great spread-eagled Tree. She paused and took Laurence’s free hand, the one not holding Peregrine, in both of her hands. “I have no clue what I’m doing here,” she said. “Nothing prepared me for this. But I’m really glad you’re here with me. I feel like I must have done something right sometime, if you’re still in my life after all the stuff that’s happened.”
Laurence typed on the Caddy: “Best friends.” Then he erased the word “Best” and wrote: “Indestructible.”
“Indestructible. Yeah.” Patricia took Laurence’s hand again. “Let’s go see the Tree.”
* * *
PATRICIA HAD FORGOTTEN how massive and terrible the Tree was, how overwhelming the embrace of its two great limbs. How like an echo chamber the space in the shadow of its canopy was. She had expected it to seem smaller now that she was a grown-up, just a tree after all, but instead she looked at its great hanging fronds and its gnarled surface and felt presumptuous for even coming into its presence again.
The Tree did not speak. Instead, the birds sitting on its branches all fluttered and shouted at once. “Order! Order!” said a great osprey in the junction of the two huge branches. “This is highly irregular,” said a fluffy pheasant higher up, with a roll of its wings.
“This is as far as I go,” whispered Kooboo the pigeon. “Good luck. I think they were already in the middle of a No Confidence vote. Bad timing!” The pigeon flew away, leaving Patricia and Laurence standing alone before the Parliament.
“Hello,” Patricia said. “I’m here. You sent for me.”
“No, we didn’t,” the pheasant said.
“We did,” the osprey reminded his esteemed colleague. “However, you are late.”
“Sorry,” Patricia said. “I got here as fast as I could.” She glanced at Laurence, who raised his eyebrows, because none of this chatter was making any sense to him.
“We asked you a question, years ago,” the osprey said. “And you never came back to answer it.”
“Give me a break,” Patricia said. “I was like six years old. I didn’t even remember that I was supposed to answer a question. Anyway, I’m here now. That counts for something, right?”
“Late!” an eagle said from the uppermost fork of the right-hand branch. “Late!” some of the other birds chorused.
“We did not think you would make it here soon enough,” the eagle said. “Your time is ending.”
“Why is that?” Patricia said. “Because of the Unraveling? Or the war?”
“Your time,” said a lean crow on the other side of the Tree with a slow dip of its sharp beak, “is ending.”
“In any case, you are here, yes,” the osprey said. “So we might as well hear your answer. Is a tree red?”
“Is a tree red?” repeated the crow.
The other birds took up the question until their voices blended together into one terrible din. “Is a tree red? Is a tree red? Is? A tree? Red?”
Patricia had been bracing herself for this moment, especially since her talk with Peregrine. She had sort of hoped the answer would just pop into her head from wherever her subconscious must have been gnawing at it for years, but now that she was actually here she felt light-headed and completely blank. She still couldn’t even make sense of it. Like what tree were they even talking about? What if you asked someone who was color-blind? She stared at the Tree, right in front of her, trying to figure out what color it was. One moment, its bark was sort of a muddy gray. Then she looked again, and she saw a deep, rich brown that shaded into red. She couldn’t tell, it was too much, she didn’t have a clue. She looked at Laurence, who gave her an encouraging smile even though he was out of the loop.
“I don’t know,” Patricia said. “Give me a minute.”
“You’ve had years.” The osprey scowled. “It’s a perfectly simple question.”
“I … I…” Patricia closed her eyes.
She thought of all the trees she’d seen in her life, and then weirdly her mind slipped to the fact that she’d glimpsed a whole other universe when she was rescuing Priya. And that other universe had impossible colors, with wavelengths that humans weren’t even supposed to see—and what color would a tree be there? That thought led her to Ernesto, who was lost in that universe forever and who had said that this planet was a speck and we were all just specks on a speck. But maybe our whole universe was just a speck, too. And it was all part of nature, all of it—every universe and all the spaces in between—as much nature as this Tree in front of her. Patricia thought of Reginald saying nature doesn’t “find a way” to do anything, and Carmen saying they had been right but rash in Siberia, and Laurence saying humans were unique in the cosmos. Patricia still didn’t know anything about nature, or anything else. She knew less than when she was six years old, even. She might just as well be color-blind.
“I don’t know,” Patricia said. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I really am.” She felt a deep ache, in her joints and behind her eyes, like she hadn’t really gotten healed from being roasted alive after all.
“You don’t know?” A heron wagged its long scissor beak at her.
“I’m sorry. I ought to know one way or the other by now, but…” Patricia struggled for the words, feeling tears fill her eyes again. “I mean, how am I supposed to know? Even if I knew which tree you’re asking about, I would only know my perceptions of it. I mean, you could look at a tree and see what it looks like, but you wouldn’t be perceiving what it actually is. Let alone how it would look to nonhuman eyes. Right? I just don’t see how you could know. I’m really sorry. I just can’t.”
Then she stopped and felt a jolt of realization. “Wait. Actually, that is my answer: I don’t know.”
“Oh,” said the osprey. “Hmm.”
“Is that the right answer?” Patricia said.
“It’s certainly an answer,” the osprey said.
“Works for me,” said the pheasant, fluttering.
“I deem it acceptable,” said the eagle at the top of the Tree. “Despite the appalling lateness.”
“Phew,” Patricia said. She told Laurence what the answer to the question had been, and she noticed that as she spoke the answer the Caddy in Laurence’s hand displayed a menu that she’d never seen before, as though something had been unlocked. She turned back toward the Parliament. “So what do I get? For answering the question?”
“Get? You get to be proud,” the osprey said, with a sweep of wingtips. “You are free to go. With our congratulations.”
“That’s it?” Patricia said.
“What else did you expect?” said an owl, poking its head out of the far left side of the Tree. “A parade? Actually, we haven’t had a parade in quite a while. That could be fun.”
“I thought, maybe, a boon or something? Like, I don’t know, if I answer the question I get a power-up? This was supposed to be a quest, right?” The birds all started debating among themselves about whether there was something in their own bylaws that they’d ignored, until Patricia interrupted: “I want to talk to the Tree. The Tree that you’re all sitting on right now.”
“Oh, sure,” said the pheasant. “Talk to the Tree. Do you want to talk to some rocks while you’re at it?”
“She wants to talk to the Tree,” a turkey chortled.
“I am,” said the Tree beneath them, in a great rustle of breath, “here.”
“Uh, hi,” Patricia said. “Sorry to disturb you.”
“You have,” the Tree said, “done well.”
The
Parliament was silent for once, as the birds looked down at their own meeting chamber, starting to converse on its own. Some of the birds flew away, while others stood very still, heads tucking into wings.
“We spoke before,” Patricia said. “You told me a witch serves nature. Do you remember?”
“I,” the Tree said, “remember.”
Its voice came from deep inside its trunk and rose up to its branches, causing them to vibrate and shower leaves down. More members of Parliament were fleeing, although a few of them were trying to organize a motion to hold their own Parliamentary chambers in contempt.
“It remembers me,” Patricia told Laurence and Peregrine.
“The Tree is speaking English,” Peregrine informed her.
Peregrine’s screen still showed that weird screen—which looked like the Caddy’s source code or something. Rows of hexadecimal strings, like machine addresses, plus some complicated instructions with lots of parentheses.
“What are you?” Patricia asked the Tree. “Are you the source of magic?”
“Magic is,” said the Tree, “a human idea.”
“But I wasn’t the first person you ever spoke to, was I?”
“I am many quiet places,” the Tree said. “And many loud places.”
“You talked to others before me,” Patricia said. “And you shared some of your power with them. Right? And that’s how we got witches? Before there were Healers, or Tricksters, or anything.”
“It was,” the Tree said, “a long time ago.”
“Listen, we need your help,” Patricia said. “Even the birds knew it, time is running out. We need you to intervene. You have to do something. I answered the question, so you owe me. Right?”
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