Charlie Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

And then she was gone, without saying goodbye or anything.

Laurence heard the front door slamming and Isobel trying to say something to Patricia as she ran past. And now he could hear the terrible chatter of the cable news people trying to make sense of the greatest natural disaster in America’s history. The storm’s supermassive fetch, hurling the already-swollen ocean onto land. High winds and twenty inches of rain shredding Capitol Hill and Foggy Bottom. The President in a secure location. Manhattan dead in the storm’s path, with all the bridges clogged with people who’d waited too long to evacuate after so many false alarms in the past.

Someone knocked on Laurence’s bedroom door. He leapt off the bed, hoping it was Patricia coming back for him. Instead, he opened the door to see Isobel. She didn’t seem to care that he was naked.

“Pack a bag,” Isobel said. “Just one.”

“What? Why?”

“This is it,” she said. “We’ve put this off as long as we could. I’ve moved Heaven and Earth to give you a normal life here. But this, what happened just now, means it’s over. We can’t wait any longer. We can’t afford to. Milton will say we waited too long as it is. We need the project up and running.”

“I promise you I haven’t been dragging my feet since that setback.” Laurence was freezing, in shock. “But still, we’re no closer than we were to figuring it out. There are huge theoretical problems.”

“I know,” Isobel said, handing Laurence an empty khaki duffel bag. “That’s the point. From this moment on, you’re working on the wormhole thing 24/7. We are going to need a new planet.”

Laurence tried to explain that he couldn’t leave, that there was no way, he had a life here, he’d finally found real love and it was everything to him, but he already knew this argument was lost. He took the duffel bag and started stuffing clothes and crap into it.

Patricia made it to Danger in record time, ignoring all the people on the bus who wanted to talk to her about the terrible-can-you-believe-it-this-is-going-to-change-everything. She jumped up the stairs three or four at a time and ran into the bookstore so fast she was breathless and yet still crying, but the moment she got there she knew it was too late. Everybody just sat there, looking horrified. And helpless. And like they’d been expecting her. Ernesto looked her in the eyes. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “For your loss. For all of us.”

“Who did this?” Patricia said. “We need to find them. We need to turn them into ash and then blow them into space. We need to make them fucking pay. Tell me who did this. ”

“Nobody,” Ernesto said. “Nobody and everybody. We all did this.”

“No, no.” Patricia started weeping harder and louder than ever. She was hyperventilating. She saw spots. “No, this was somebody, there’s a fucking bastard witch behind this, I can tell.”

“It’s a superstorm,” said Kawashima. “It’s been building for days, remember? It hit Cuba a few days ago, and then it converged with a cyclone. It ran into a high-pressure front in the North Atlantic that pushed it ashore.”

“There’s no spell big enough to move the ocean and the air currents,” said Taylor, coming up and touching Patricia’s arm. “You’d have to fool the Moon.”

“You could heal those storms. You could heal them until they got out of control, like weeds, someone did this with a healing spell. I know they did. It might have taken months, but they’ve had months. Someone did this.”

“Not this time.” Ernesto came and stood so close to Patricia, he was in danger of touching her and making her body a bacterial and fungal playground. He looked into her eyes, sad but not surprised. “I tried to warn you that bad times were coming, and we would be asking more of you. And now they are here. You will need to do terrible things. But we will be sharing the responsibility, it will not be on you alone. There will be no Aggrandizement if we face this together.”

“What do you mean?” Patricia was still shaking, but her breathing was slowing. She could smell the pure life energy coming off Ernesto, like nutrient-rich soil or a summer rainstorm.

“This is the beginning of something, not the end of it,” said Kawashima, coming closer as well and actually hugging her. He never hugged anybody. “Or rather, it’s the end of one thing and the beginning of something else. This country will be destabilized, with New York and D.C. gone, and other cities damaged. There will be refugees, in camps. Which means more disease. The chaos and starvation will worsen. There will be more wars, and worse wars. Wars like nobody has ever seen. God forbid we have to resort to the Unraveling.”

“When the whole world turns chaotic, we must be the better part of chaos,” said Ernesto. Patricia couldn’t find it in herself to cry anymore.

LAURENCE WISHED PATRICIA could be here, by his side, to see this. He imagined explaining to her what she was seeing, and why it was even more amazing than it looked.

Laurence stood on a gantry, hundreds of feet above ground level, with Denver spread in a fetal position to his left. Six steel-and-fiberglass praying mantises perched over an empty space in the gantry’s center — the space that could, one day, burst open and reveal the Pathway to Infinity. Normally Laurence would be paralyzed with vertigo, standing on top of a skyscraper with no railing, but he was too overwhelmed with the magnificence before him to worry about heights. Each of the huge red mantises had a power coil in its “tail” section, and then a midsection supported by two pairs of legs, with a collection of equipment that included the antigravity generators that Laurence’s team had been working on for two years. The “heads” of the insects consisted of focusing devices, which would stabilize the opening that the antigrav beams helped to create. This insane structure seemed to dwarf the mountains in the distance. Even in the face of unthinkable horror, even with what had happened to Patricia’s mom and dad and so many other people Laurence had known, there was still brilliance in the world. Saving wonder. He only wished he could show Patricia, so she could either feel comforted or laugh at his hubris; he almost didn’t care which, as long as it lifted her misery a little.

Just like every moment since Patricia ran out on Laurence months ago, he tried to guess what she would be saying if she were here. And where she actually was, and what she was doing. Whether she was okay. He felt as though he were having an argument with her in his head, his optimism against her despair. Next to him here on this platform, Anya, Sougata, and Tanaa were freaking out over every detail of the engineering, but Laurence barely even heard what they were saying.

“Let’s hope it works,” Anya said.

“We could be months away from preliminary tests,” said Sougata. “But it’s still a beautiful thing, man.”

By the time they took the elevator back down to ground level, Laurence was obsessing about Patricia again, to the point where the fantastic wormhole generator — the coolest device in the history of the planet — was shoved to the back of his mind. He felt like he was trapped in a moment of time, where he’d just told her he loved her, and hadn’t been able to move forward to whatever happened after that. The further away he got from that moment, the thinner he stretched. He was temporally dislocated, and the time differential was only growing more severe.

Back at ground floor, Laurence wandered the old industrial park that Milton Dirth had refurbished. People in dark uniforms guarded the perimeter. Nobody was allowed in or out without Milton’s verbal permission — and nobody had seen Milton in weeks. All phones, personal computers, and Caddies were confiscated on arrival at this campus, and none of the computers were connected to the internet. There was an intranet, plus someone had created internal mirrors of a number of scientific and technical websites. They did have a TV with CNN, so they’d been able to keep track of the slow-motion emergency: Chinese saber-rattling in the South China Sea, Russian troops massing, the water wars. People, people they knew personally, in refugee camps full of disease back east. But there was no way Laurence could get a message to Patricia, or find out how she was doing.