Charlie Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

“We’re going to do so many great things together, you and I. I just know it,” Diantha told Patricia. “You should have some fizzy lemonade. They don’t have fizzy lemonade where you’re from, and it’s really quite good.” Patricia did what she was told. The lemonade was like a more lemony Sprite, and it was the coolest thing. The bubbles popped on her tongue.

Patricia wondered if Diantha was going to kiss her. Diantha was leaning in close, and they were gazing into each other’s eyes. Patricia had never thought of herself as lesbian, but Diantha smelled so good and had such a powerful presence, it wasn’t even like paltry sexual attraction. Somewhere off in the distance a bird sang, and Patricia almost understood.

Even the kids who didn’t hang out in the disused chimney gave Patricia a look of envy or appreciation when she walked into the Eltisley dining hall, or when she foraged in the self-service canteen at The Maze, where you never knew if there would be pizza or black pudding. People in The Maze told Patricia they liked her jeans. Nobody had ever liked her jeans before.

“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.