Charlie Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

THE LAST TIME Patricia had dreamed of the forest, there was a hailstorm, so sharp it nicked your face, and every hailstone was a frozen fish with a look of terror on its face. The razor-sharp fish sliced at Patricia’s skin and tore her clothes until she staggered through the icy woods wearing just her underwear and some cowboy boots. Her blood froze as it came off her. She skittered on the frosty ground, as the hail grew heavier and heavier and fish piled up around her bare ankles. At last she came to the great magic Tree, which was no kind of tree she could identify, and she threw herself on its base, crying for protection as the rain of tiny fish came thicker. She looked out from the shelter of the Tree and saw nothing but skeletons in all directions, not just dead trees but dead creatures of all kinds, animal skeletons and human skulls and leafless petrified trees as far as she could see, the only signs of life herself and the great shape she huddled under.

PATRICIA’S INCREASINGLY UNRELIABLE phone seemed to have lost signal for good once they’d set off on the road, but she could still pull up the cryptic e-mail she’d gotten from Laurence right after Superstorm Allegra, saying only that he had to go off the grid for a while and not to worry about him.

All along the roadside, people stood holding signs that begged for a ride or a job or some food. They passed a mall that looked like it had been burnt and torn apart, and then burnt a second time. Near Vacaville, there was a blocked-off exit where the sign said, “TOWN CLOSED. QUARANTINE.” Patricia glimpsed plumes of smoke off in the distance, coming from a distant hillside where the trees or someone’s fields were on fire. There should not be this many fires so close to Christmas.

The sheer volume of bad news had gotten beyond anybody’s ability to process into a narrative. Everybody knew people back east who had died in the flood or succumbed to diseases in the refugee camps, and a ton of people couldn’t get at the money they’d deposited in one of the banks that had gone belly-up. Almost everybody knew people who were living through the Arab Winter or the Irish famine. Patricia had spent days trying to reach her ex-boyfriend Sameer, to make sure he hadn’t gotten caught up in the violence in Paris.

After a while in the car, Patricia suffocated, but she couldn’t crack a window or Ernesto would grow weeds again. Taylor had fallen asleep with headphones on, behind the driver’s seat. Dorothea was telling a story about a woman who built a house in the middle of a never-ending landslide, and her story made their car go 300 miles per hour. Kawashima was busy driving. The only one Patricia could talk to was Ernesto, who kept almost touching her, in between pointing out all the things that had changed in the forty years since he’d been outside.

“… and most days the house rocked like a boat,” Dorothea said to Kawashima from the front seat. “You don’t need a porch swing if you live on a bottomless landslide.”

Maybe all of this suffering was Patricia’s fault. Two years after Diantha had led that assault in Siberia, the Pipe and Passage had suffered an accident. The borehole had started gushing methane into the atmosphere, a near-invisible geyser, and the satellite images were everywhere on the internet for a few years. Global temperatures had spiked soon after. Maybe if they’d succeeded in stopping the project, none of this would have happened. Or maybe Patricia’s EMP had dealt the people in Siberia just enough of a setback that they’d cut some corners to get back on schedule — and there would have been no accident if Patricia hadn’t disrupted things. Maybe Patricia killed her parents.

If she could explain that theory to Laurence, he would laugh at her. He’d have some reasonable explanation for how she could not possibly blame herself, at least not any more than everyone else on Earth. Laurence would spout facts about methane clathrates and the inevitability of those planetary farts getting released. He would point out the fault lay with Lamar Tucker and his crew, who decided to drill for methane in the first place. He would say something random and weird, to snap her out of it.

Whereas if she shared her theory with Ernesto or the others, they would just tell her blaming herself for the world’s problems was pure Aggrandizement. But her actions in Siberia had been pure Aggrandizement, too. She tried talking to Ernesto about her sense that we had broken nature — nature was a delicate balance, and we, people generally, had messed it up.

Ernesto’s response: “We could not ‘break’ nature if we spent a million years trying. This planet is a speck, and we are specks on a speck. But our little habitat is fragile, and we cannot live without it.”

Laurence telling Patricia that he loved her and then vanishing — it felt way too much like those birds telling Patricia she was a witch and then giving her the silent treatment, when she was a child. Except she couldn’t have any faith that this declaration would come true the same way the first one had. Magic was always bound to claim her in the end, in retrospect, but love was the most susceptible to random failure of all human enterprises. Laurence had always been preoccupied with his mysterious weird experiments, that he’d kept working on even after that accident, and any relationship was probably always going to come second for him. In her darkest moments, she imagined Laurence shuddering and rolling his eyes, in that way that he sometimes did, as he recollected how he’d almost dated his loony friend.

“Do you know why the Tricksters and the Healers went to war, two hundred years ago?” Ernesto asked Patricia, just as she was starting to spiral into obsession in spite of herself.

“Um,” she said. “Because they had different approaches to magic.”

“They witnessed the Industrial Revolution,” Ernesto said. “They saw the sky turn black. The dark Satanic mills, the great factories. The Healers feared the world would be choked to death, so they set out to break all the machines. The Tricksters opposed them, because they believed none of us had the right to impose our will on everyone else. Their conflict almost destroyed everything.”

“So what happened?” Patricia whispered. Taylor had woken up and was listening, too, fascinated.

“After Hortense Walker made a peace between them, they reached a compromise. That is where our rule of Aggrandizement comes from, that none of us will try to shape the world too much. But also, they started working on a fail-safe. Which I hope we never have to use. And now, perhaps you understand why we were so concerned about you, these past months.”

Patricia nodded. It made sense now. If she made any of this about her, she would only screw up again. Ernesto was right: She should just try to be a speck on a speck. So instead, she held on tight to her anger, even as she choked on the recycled air in the car. Patricia had no time for grief, blame, or a broken heart, but anger, there was endless time for. Stay angry. Hold on to it. Anger is your tightrope over the abyss. She repeated in her head what she said right after the storm hit: Some fucker had to pay.

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.

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.