Charlie Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

After that, Laurence had a new best friend, with only one topic off-limits. He had a million questions for Peregrine, but Laurence wouldn’t talk about her . The Caddy kept trying to bring her up anyway, one way or another, but Laurence would just hit the “off ” button the moment that name was mentioned or even hinted at. This went on for weeks.

Laurence wasn’t sure if he was unable to forgive Patricia or if it was himself that he couldn’t forgive. It was messy. Not messy like a closet piled with electronic components and wires and stuff, that you could possibly untangle and sort out and assemble into a device with some utility, but messy like something dead and rotting.

— DEAD COLD INSIDE even with the sunlight cooking her face and shoulders, and reflecting off the cloud under her feet.

Carmen Edelstein was saying something to Patricia about grave necessity. But Patricia’s mind was on Laurence, and how he had owned her trust. Stupid. She should have known better. She had failed some Trickster lesson somewhere along the way, and now she had some catching up to do. She would smile and flirt and fade. This gray world would never even see her moving through it. She would be the least Aggrandizing witch ever, because she wouldn’t even exist except as a surgical instrument. She needed—

“You’re not listening to a word I’m saying.” Carmen sounded amused, not angry.

Patricia knew better than to lie to Carmen. She shook her head, slowly.

“Look,” Carmen said. “Look down there. What do you see?”

Patricia had to lean over, fighting her fear of falling off this cloud into the ocean, far below. Standing on a cloud felt less buoyant and more crunchy than Patricia would have expected.

A black scorpion shape rose out of the water below: an old converted oil rig and a single luxury liner, that had become the independent nation of Seadonia. “It’s like a fortress.” Patricia watched the dots of humanity run around the old oil rig, which was a massive scaffolding on a platform on stilts in the middle of the gray, oxygen-starved ocean. Seadonia’s flag showed an angry cockroach on a red splotch. At least some of the hundreds of people down there had been part of building Laurence’s doomsday machine.

A seagull swooped past, and Patricia could have sworn it shouted, “Too late! Too late!”

“It is exactly like a fortress, with the world’s biggest moat.” Bathed in sunlight, all the lines on Carmen’s face were gilded. Her thick-rimmed glasses twinkled, and her short white hair buzzed with silver flashes. Patricia was used to seeing Carmen in her dark study full of books, with a tiny lamp and a thin curtain-slice of light coming through.

Patricia wondered if Carmen could tell that she was obsessing about how to be more of a Trickster. Carmen had been trying to convince Patricia that she had more Healer in her than she knew, for as long as Patricia could remember. But all of Patricia’s early defining moments had been tricks, like how she’d become a bird and fooled herself (and others) into thinking she’d spoken to some kind of “Tree Spirit.” Of course, Hortense Walker had always said the greatest trick the Tricksters ever pulled was pretending they could not heal.

“We need to know what they are working on down there.” Carmen gestured at Seadonia.

“Diantha can help,” Patricia said. “I’m pretty sure I won her over at our little reunion.”

“I need Diantha’s help with something else,” Carmen said. “She’s going to work on the Unraveling.”

Patricia didn’t want to overstep. But she decided to risk asking: “What is the Unraveling? Kawashima wouldn’t tell me anything about it, when I asked him.”

Carmen sighed and then pointed at the dark mass of Seadonia under their feet, with the sea foam lapping at it. “These people down there,” she said. “When you talked to them, what did they tell you about this world and the role of humanity in it?”

Patricia thought for a moment (and her mind instinctively shied away from that barbed cluster of memories), until she remembered one particular conversation. “They said that an intelligent tool-using species like ours is rare in the universe, much rarer than just a diverse ecosystem. The most remarkable thing about this planet is that it produced us. And humans ought to be spreading out and colonizing other worlds, no matter what the cost, so that our own fate is no longer tied to that of ‘this rock.’”

“That makes sense. As far as we know, our civilization is alone in the universe. So if you only recognize one type of sentience, and you consider sentience the most important quality of life, then it follows logically.”

Patricia was pretty sure that Laurence had seen her in Denver, and that he knew she’d broken his machine. She thought maybe she’d heard him calling her name. He probably hated her, whereas she couldn’t find the comfort of hating him. She was stuck blaming herself, instead. I will be a slippery shadow. I will fool everyone. Nobody will fuck with me. She smiled at her old teacher, like this was a fun academic discussion they were having.

Abruptly Carmen changed the subject. “Have you gone back to Siberia? Since the attack on the pipeline?”

“Um, no.”

“Might be a good idea.” Carmen’s gaze was going right inside Patricia. “See with your own eyes the aftermath of trying to appoint yourself the defender of nature.”

Patricia cringed. She’d thought they were past that, especially after Denver.

“That lesson is all the more important now that we are all embarking on a similar course,” Carmen said. “You and Diantha were right, in a way. You were just … rash. We don’t want to be soldiers, if we can help it. That’s why the Unraveling is a last resort, and it’s not a strategy. Rather, it’s a therapy.”

Patricia nodded, waiting for Carmen to elaborate.

At last, Carmen said, “Without saying too much, it’s more of a healing work, that might make a great change to the human race. Of course, the Tricksters see it as a great trick, too. Perhaps it is both. Come with me.”

Carmen leaned over, bending at the waist, and opened a trapdoor in the cloud. A staircase led down into a hot, cedar-scented underground space. Patricia had no idea how Carmen was making these trapdoors in and out of the clouds. She recognized the furnace room beneath the Great Lodge in Alaska where she’d spent a few months on a work-study break, looking after the sled dogs and chopping wood to put into the immense boiler — the boiler that occupied roughly the same portion of her field of vision as Seadonia had, so it felt as though she were descending a staircase from the clouds to the oil rig. The illusion dissipated as she neared the floor level and the furnace rose in front of her. On all sides, the walls were big cement blocks, stained by years of smoke. As they came around the wide hips of the steel burner, Patricia was reminded of the house she’d grown up in, with the bones of the spice warehouse around her. And then she came around the other side, and saw what was different about the furnace. It had a great iron face looking into the cinder-block darkness, and it was weeping ashes.

“Don’t touch it,” Carmen said, walking deeper into the cellar without sparing the agonized metal face a second glance.

“Why not?” Patricia rushed to catch up.

“Because it’s hot,” Carmen said. “It’s a furnace.”

The furnace room stretched into the darkness, way beyond the outer wall of the real-life lodge, and soon Patricia was groping her way forward in total pitch blackness, without even the faint glow from the stove to see by. She navigated by the sound of Carmen’s voice.