Charlie Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

“This better work.” Patricia tilted the bottle so the words “WARNING RED-HOT” were upside down. The thick liquid singed her throat. She started to gag, but she made herself drink the whole thing. Once the bottle was empty she pulled herself into a shivering ball. Her head ached. She wanted to weep, for everything she’d lost and all she’d failed to gain.

An hour later, she raised her head and threw up. Once she started, she could not stop. Her eyes burned and her nose ran, and the oil was twice as horrible coming up as going down. Her stomach spasmed, not amused by her idea of a meal after days of starvation. She coughed acid.

The good news: Patricia had an idea how to heal the angry old woman now.

Patricia crept across the slate rooftops of the town until she reached the sloping roof of the cantina, where she could see the woman through a small skylight. The skylight was open, and she slipped inside, tiptoeing across a loft where bags of flour and cans of supplies were stored. She hesitated before taking some bread and stuffing it in her mouth. Then she reached the edge of the loft, still on the other side of the glorified barn from where the woman sat at her rickety table. Patricia shinnied up a support pillar, and then onto a ceiling beam. She inched her way across the beam, until she was hanging by her arms and legs over the old woman, and leaned as far as she could without losing her grip.

Patricia spat in the old woman’s soup. The old woman was hectoring someone else in the room, probably about kids these days, and did not notice. Once Patricia’s saliva was inside the woman, she had a direct link and could take stock of the late-stage emphysema, the barely-in-remission cancer that had already cost the old woman a lung, and the gout. It took an hour of concentration, and some unseemly muttering, for Patricia to get in there and make the woman’s insides as good as new. She stopped just short of giving the crone a lung to replace the one she’d lost.

The night sky looked overcrowded to Patricia, as she lay in the uneven grass of the field where she’d fallen out of the airship. Too many stars, trying too hard. She lay there for an hour before the airship descended far enough to lower a ladder for her. She climbed slowly, her limbs sore and feeble. Kanot handed her a sandwich and a can of ginger ale and tried to sell her some shares in a Zumba studio. This time, Kanot was a young German with a shaved head.

After that, Patricia started figuring out how to use the things she learned at Eltisley at The Maze and how to use The Maze’s craftiness at Eltisley. A few kids had dropped out after the “random Eastern European town” assignment, so space opened up for Patricia to become an honorary member of a few cliques.

One night, she was smoking clove cigarettes with the cool “Goth” kids after curfew, inside the cavernous and never-used chimney of Eltisley’s Lesser Building. There was Diantha, the plump swanlike leader of the group, who was rumored to be the daughter of an earl or something. Next to Patricia sat Taylor, who’d gone full-on Goth with the hair-dye and eyeliner, and a leather jacket after hours. On Patricia’s other side was Sameer, who wore black starched-collar shirts that made his shy, slightly horsey face look grown-up and sophisticated. Plus Toby, a Scottish kid with wiry red hair and jug ears. And a few other kids who showed up sometimes. The red-brick chimney walls had streaks of ancient soot on them.

Patricia and Taylor rested, arms around each other, and the clove smoke fumigated Patricia’s insides. They were trading weird stories about their lives before Eltisley Maze, all the flukey experiences that made them realize they had a connection to some unidentified power. And Patricia found herself talking about what she remembered of the Parliament and Dirrpidirrpiwheepalong and the Tree, before she even knew what she was doing.

“That is bizarre,” Taylor said.

“It is quite amazing,” said Diantha, leaning forward and encompassing Patricia with her dark, enthralling eyes. “Do tell us more.”

Patricia told the whole story again, from the beginning, adding more details this time.

The next day, she wondered if she should have kept the “Tree” thing to herself. Was she going to get in trouble? She kept glancing at Carmen Edelstein during Literature class — they were reading Troilus and Criseyde —but Carmen showed no sign of knowing anything.

That night, as Patricia was getting ready for bed, Taylor knocked on her door. “Come on, we’re all at the chimney,” Taylor said with a grin. The group in the disused chimney was twice as big as before, so there was barely room for Patricia. But everybody wanted to hear about the Tree.

The more times Patricia told the story, the more like a story it became: with dramatic touches and a better ending. She threw in more details, like the way the wind felt as it passed through her disembodied spirit form, and the way the trees shimmered as she soared on the wind into the heart of the forest. And by the third night, when Patricia was telling the story to a third group of kids, the Tree had gotten a lot more eloquent.

“It said you were the protector of nature?” said a younger kid from Côte d’Ivoire named Jean-Jacques.

“It said we all were,” Patricia said. “The defenders of nature. Against, like, anyone who wanted to harm it. We all are. We have a special purpose. That’s what the Tree said, anyway. It was like the perfect Tree at the heart of the forest that you can only find if someone shows it to you. A bird took me, when I was very small.”

“Can you take us to it?” asked Jean-Jacques, so excited he couldn’t breathe.

Soon they had a proper club. They got together at night, a dozen kids, and talked about how they were going to find the heart of the forest, the way Patricia had. And how they were going to protect nature from anyone who wanted to harm her. Like the Na’vi. Patricia was the one with the knowledge, but Diantha was the one who could say, “We are all of one accord,” and everybody would cheer.

“We are all counting on you,” Diantha said to Patricia in low, confiding tones, touching her shoulder. Patricia felt a thrill all the way down to her tailbone.

“And the Tree was huge, like forty or fifty feet tall, and it wasn’t an oak or a maple or any kind I’d seen before. It had branches like big wings, and the moonlight came through the thickest part of the branches in two places, so it looked like two glowing eyes looking at me. The voice was like this friendly earthquake.”

The tenth time that Patricia told the story about the night she left her body and went to the Tree, the tale had gotten embroidered to the point where it bore little resemblance to the version Patricia had told that first night. And yet, everybody was bored with it. They wanted to know what happened next. “What do we do?” Sameer asked. “What’s our next move?”

“I honestly do not know,” Patricia said. She told them, for the first time, about when she was in Bogtown and she guzzled chili oil and nothing happened. They traded theories, like it wasn’t the right time, or she wasn’t in the right headspace, or you couldn’t reach the Tree from Eastern Europe because of ley lines.

Opinions among Diantha’s secret club were divided over the crucial question: Did the adults at Eltisley Maze know about the Tree? Either: (A) It was something all the adults knew about, and they were just keeping it secret from the kids because they weren’t ready to know about it yet, or (B) they didn’t know about it, and this was something you had to be a kid to understand.

A few days later, Patricia had lunch with Diantha. Alone. They had a blanket on the East Lawn of Eltisley Hall, where every blade of grass was perfect. Patricia still couldn’t quite believe that Diantha was hanging out with her. Diantha had this way of widening her eyes just before saying something to you, so you found yourself looking into her gaze and you felt sure that whatever she said next would be the most important thing you’d ever heard. She wore her Eltisley scarf so elegantly, you’d think she had picked it out of a thousand scarf options. Her brown hair caught the light.