Charlie Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

HERE’S WHAT ISOBEL said to Laurence, just before the earthquake hit: “This isn’t about revenge. You know that. Our people haven’t spent the past few months cooped up in Seadonia, dealing with scabies and bedbugs in close quarters, obsessing about mere payback. But we needed to find a way to move forward, after Denver. Because rebuilding the wormhole machine from scratch would take years, and we can’t risk having those people come back and destroy it again. We could try and set up better defenses, but we didn’t see them coming last time and we can’t guarantee we’ll see them next time. So we have no choice but to take preemptive action.”

“What have you done?” Laurence pressed the phone against the hinge of his jaw until it throbbed. “Isobel, what have you done?”

“We built the ultimate machine,” she was saying. “Tanaa, you know what a miracle worker she is, she did most of the hard part. It’s called the Total Destruction Solution, and it’s amazing.”

Isobel geeked out about the design challenges of creating the T.D.S.: They needed to cram as much armament as possible into the main chassis, without creating something too top-heavy. They wanted something amphibious and all-terrain, with omnidirectional movement and the ability to take out multiple targets at once. Like every designer of cool hardware, Tanaa wound up reaching for shapes from nature: the segmented bodies of the major arthropods, the shock-absorbing properties of a hedgehog’s quills, the stabilizing tail, the six insectoid legs, the multi-sectioned carapace, and so on. The cockpit was spacious enough for two people, with manual controls that were redundant so long as you had someone connected to the brain/computer interface. (Milton had gotten the laparoscopic operation not long earlier.) The result was perhaps a bit busy, but it moved with a sleekness, and when it came time to open up with the five SAMs, the seven industrial lasers, the front and rear napalm launchers — and the crown jewel, the antigravity cannon — the T.D.S. would dance .

“But you don’t even know who you’re dealing with.” Laurence looked into the foamy grounds in the French press on Isobel’s kitchen counter.

“We know more than you think,” Isobel said, with great heaviness. “We know they have a network, with a number of clandestine facilities around the world, including a hostel in Portland, a ballroom-dancing school in Minneapolis, and a bookstore and absinthe bar here in San Francisco. Plus a training facility which they call The Maze, which has a hidden entrance in the Pyrenees. That one, The Maze, appears to be too heavily protected for a conventional assault — but then, that’s why they make bunker busters. It’s today. It’s now. We’re hitting all of the targets simultaneously, before they know what’s happening.”

“Isobel, don’t. Don’t do this. Call it off, please. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“I’m in the cockpit of the Total Destruction Solution right now, with Milton,” Isobel said. “On Mission Street, a block away from that bookstore place. I waited until the last minute to call you, because I didn’t want you to interfere.”

In the background, Laurence could hear Milton saying something to Isobel, plus the unmistakable sound of “Terraplane Blues,” blasting over the speakers in the T.D.S. cockpit.

“You can’t do this,” Laurence said. “You’ll just—”

“We’re aware that you were dating one of the Denver Five,” Isobel said. “We identified your girlfriend in surveillance footage from a gas station in Utah, where they stopped to refuel. I tried to keep you out of this, but by now everybody knows you’ve been compromised. So please, stay away. If you show up here, I can’t guarantee you won’t be treated like an enemy combatant.”

“Isobel, please listen.” But she had already hung up.

LAURENCE LAY ON the floor groaning, blood gushing from his forehead where he’d thwacked it on Isobel’s coffee table. Patricia squatted over him and licked his wound in one quick motion, apologizing for doing this the quick way rather than the classy way.

The bleeding stopped. Laurence’s head felt better. He had an erection. Patricia leaned back so Laurence could sit up, and for a moment they were face to face, Patricia blushing and doe-eyed, perched above his upper thighs. He had a sense that this was a moment when all sorts of pathways might be open between them, and he was about to slam all of them shut with what he had to tell her. He only wondered for a moment if he should keep Isobel’s news to himself, because telling Patricia would mean betraying Isobel and Milton. But not telling Patricia would be, marginally, the bigger betrayal, and the one he was less likely to forgive himself for. Even though he’d just been tooth-grinding mad at Patricia and her friends, he couldn’t look her in the face and not tell her about this. He recognized this was a major life decision he was making, and then he made it.

Patricia was on her feet by the time Laurence finished his third sentence. A flurry of black rags, elbows pushing out and neck full of tendons, she was moving too fast to go anywhere. For a moment he thought she was going to shake herself to pieces with rage, and then he realized it was a second earthquake, much worse than the first. If Laurence hadn’t already been prone he would have fallen again, and this time everything that wasn’t bolted down went flying. The quake stopped, then started again, even worse. Like being inside a power drill. The ceiling was opening fissures, the floor slanted.

Of course. Focused antigravity beam. Seismic hazard zone. What else. Would you expect.

Isobel was going to need new stuff, and a new house. The quake seemed to have been good for Patricia, though. She was the only still point, as everything else went in the blender, and when the quake finally stopped she looked serene. “I spent eight years training for this day,” she said to Laurence. “I’m all over this. You should stay here. I’m glad I got to talk to you, one last time. Goodbye, Laurence.” And then she was heading out the front door.

Like hell. Laurence ran after her, huffing a little. “I’m going with you,” he said. “You’ll need me to help talk them down. How are you even going to get to the Mission, in the immediate aftermath of two massive earthquakes? Can you fly right now? I didn’t think so. I know where there’s a motorcycle we can borrow. Look, I’m really sorry my friends did this, I know how mad they were, but this wasn’t the answer, and the longer this goes on, the more stuff like this is going to heap up on both sides until we get to the point of the Undoing.”

“The Unraveling,” Patricia said. “Where’s the motorcycle?”

The juniper tree near Isobel’s caved-in house was full of birds, all shouting full tilt. Laurence had heard this a few times before, sometimes just randomly and sometimes after a big disturbance. A few dozen birds get together and just yell it out. This time, though, it seemed to spook Patricia out of her newfound calm. He asked her what the birds were saying, and she said it was the same thing they always said these days: That it was too late. Man, even to Laurence those birds sounded pissed. They should be grateful to have a tree still standing.

The BMW bike was still where Isobel’s neighbor Gavin had left it, in the shed with the shed key and spare ignition key both hidden in the same stone faun. Patricia drove, with Laurence riding bitch wearing the only helmet, and he mostly kept his eyes closed, because she rode like Evel Knievel over the steep roads, filled with cracks and the fallen gables of Craftsman-style houses and crashed vehicles and human bodies and one baby carriage pitched on its side. Laurence could smell the smoke, the sourness of gas leaks, and the meaty garbagey odor of death. They leapt over a steep hilltop and landed in a smoking ditch with an impact that crashed Laurence’s pelvis into his rib cage.