All the Birds in the Sky (14 page)

Patricia felt the suet churn inside her. She wanted so badly to say that Laurence could fend for himself, so she could go to the magical academy. If the positions were reversed, Laurence would probably ditch her, right? But he was still her only friend, and she couldn’t just up and leave him. She looked at the man’s car, a rented Ford Explorer parked in a turnaround, and stammered, “I … You have to believe that I want to go with you. More than anything. But I can’t. I can’t turn my back on my friend. And if your fancy witch teachers don’t believe in loyalty and helping people in trouble, then I guess I don’t want to learn what they have to teach anyway.”

Patricia looked up, into the man’s skewed sunglasses. He was studying her or maybe preparing to give up on her.

“Listen,” Patricia said. “Just give me a day. Twenty-four hours. I just need to make sure Laurence is okay, and then I promise I’ll go with you. Okay?”

“Let’s say I give you twenty-four hours to help your friend.” The man sighed. “Will you agree to owe me a favor later?”

Patricia almost said, “Sure, yeah, whatever.” But so soon after all her dealings with Mr. Rose, this question seemed like it could be another trap. Or maybe a test.

“No. But I’ll be the best student you’ve ever seen,” she said instead. “I will pull all-nighters every night. I will do all the extra-credit assignments. Starting twenty-four hours from now, I will be a study-maniac. Just please. Let me do this one thing first.”

The man flicked his Black & Decker on and off in irritation. “Very well,” he said at last. “You have one day. Free and clear.”

“Awesome. Now can you please give me a ride?”

Kanot gave Patricia a look that said he was seriously considering turning her back into a blue jay.

15

THE BLACK-LIGHT ANGELS
were fading at last from the center of Laurence’s vision, but he still felt concussed. He shivered, and not just because they’d locked him in an equipment closet stark naked. How many times had they dropped him on his head? He couldn’t think—his head was full of iron filings, but also the panic overtook him every time he tried to pull back and look at the outlines of his situation instead of the details. This closet had a dead bulb, and he kept thinking he heard someone creeping up behind him in the dark. Every time he shifted position, his balls touched the icy floor.

Today was supposed to be the day that Laurence’s “trial visit” ended and he went back home. But Commandant Peterbitter had called him into his office and said that in light of some unpleasantness at Canterbury Academy—Laurence’s “girlfriend” had done a Satanic ritual and threatened a teacher—everybody thought it might be best if Laurence just stayed on indefinitely at Coldwater. Forever.

Someone fumbled with the door handle outside, and Laurence instinctively curled into a lump, protecting his head. He wasn’t ready for the next thing yet.

“Laurence?” A girl’s voice. Laurence looked up and saw Patricia in the open doorway, along with an older African-American man in a deerstalker hat. “Crud. You’re naked.”

“Patricia! How did you find me?” As he stumbled to his feet and tried to cover up, he felt a flicker of relief at seeing her silhouette, and gratitude that she had come all this way, before the dread came crashing back in. They couldn’t see her here, or he’d just get punished worse.

“Your dad finally broke down and told me what they did. And I heard one of these cadets say the ‘new guy’ was in the closet. Everybody’s doing war games or something out back, but I don’t know how long they’ll be gone. We have to get you out of here. Here, take this jacket. It’s actually Kanot’s. This is Kanot, by the way. He’s a witch too, but his main skill seems to be sarcasm.”

The tall man—Kanot—waved, then went back to looking at his phone with a bored expression on his face.

Patricia was holding a Red Sox jacket to Laurence. He almost took it from her, but he tried to imagine running away half-naked with Patricia and her friend. And after that … what would he do? He couldn’t go home, his parents would just send him back here. He couldn’t go to the science school if he was a dropout. What school on Earth would let a homeless runaway study physics?

“I can’t.” Laurence shrank back from the jacket. “I’m sorry. I just can’t.” His head was still crashing, and his stomach churned.

“Wow, they really did a number on you.” Patricia leaned forward, inspecting his bruises in the light from the hallway. “Laurence, it’s me. Your friend. I finally have an invite to the secret school for witches where I get to learn all about magic, but I blew it off to come and rescue you. Because Mr. Rose made it sound like you were going to die. So come on.”

Laurence thought about the flag at half-mast. MRSA in the Isolation Hole. They could make it look like an accident.

“I can’t just run away.” Laurence covered his face with one hand and his junk with the other, equally ashamed of both. “What future will I have if I run? You should just go. If they see you here, I’ll be in worse trouble.”

“Wow,” Patricia said again. “If that’s how it is … Good luck, Laurence. I hope everything turns out okay for you somehow.” She turned to leave and started to swing the door shut again, returning the room to total darkness.

“Wait! Don’t go.” Laurence started quaking again, worse than ever, as the door closed. “Come back. Please. I’m sorry. I do need your help. I feel … I feel like I’m starting to give up here.” He could barely stand to hear himself snivel. He groped for the words to explain the sick feeling of being on the conveyor belt to a furnace. “I can feel myself … letting go. Trying to fit in and … and ‘lose the attitude.’ I can feel it working.”

“So let me help. What can I do?”

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t. I can’t just run away. I don’t know what else to do. So unless there’s some magical thing you can do…”

“I still don’t know how to do anything. And Kanot made it very clear on the ride here that he won’t get involved.”

Kanot shrugged, without looking up.

Laurence rubbed his bruised occiput with both hands, no longer even trying to cover himself. “I can’t even think clearly,” he said. “I wish I knew someone who could do something, like hack into the Commandant’s computer from outside. Or just get this whole damn school shut down. They won’t even let me near the computers in here.”

“Wait,” Patricia said. “What about CH@NG3M3? It’s been getting smarter and smarter lately, and giving me all kinds of helpful advice. I bet CH@NG3M3 could do something.”

Laurence started to shoot the idea down. But something made him stop instead and look at Patricia, still haloed by the light from the open door and the lingering effects of Laurence’s head trauma. She regarded him, naked and bruised and cowering in the dark, without any great pity. If anything, she was still giving him the expectant, wide-eyed look with which she’d greeted another one of his weird inventions, back when they first met. As if he could still have one last gadget, hidden in his nonexistent pockets.

“You really believe that could work?” he said.

“I really do,” she said. “I don’t think I’m just projecting. CH@NG3M3 has been understanding more and more. Not just what I’m saying, but the context.”

Laurence tried to think this through. The last time he’d looked at CH@NG3M3, the night before his parents took him here, he’d noticed something even odder than usual. The computer had somehow gone from thousands of lines of instructions to a half dozen. At first, he’d panicked, thinking someone had hacked in and deleted everything. But after an hour of frenzied port scanning, he realized that CH@NG3M3 had just simplified its own code, down to a short string of logical symbols that made zero sense to Laurence.

What if Patricia was right?

“I mean, it’s worth a try,” Laurence said. “CH@NG3M3 is smart enough to hide pieces of itself in the cloud. Maybe it’s smart enough to do something for me, if you explain the situation clearly enough. I can’t think of anything else that you could possibly do to help.”

Patricia chewed her thumb. “So do you have any ideas for how to nudge CH@NG3M3 into sentience? Is there some hardware I need to sneak into your house and install? Or something else?”

“I think … I think you just need to talk to it some more. Force it to adapt to input that’s so weird and illogical that it just breaks CH@NG3M3’s brain.” Laurence tried to think of something specific, but his brain was an undercooked stew. “Like nonsense. Or riddles.” Something came to mind, something that had been stuck in the back of his mind since he came to this school. “Wait. There was a riddle I was saving, which I thought might work. You could tell the computer the riddle, and maybe it’ll shock it into sentience.”

“Okay,” Patricia said. “What is it?”

Laurence spoke the riddle: “Is a tree red?”

Patricia took a step back. Her eyes widened and her mouth hung open. “What did you say?”

“‘Is a tree red?’ Red, as in the color. Why? It’s just a thing I heard somewhere. I forget where.”

“It just … sounded familiar. I think I heard it before somewhere.” Patricia tilted her head one way, then the other. “Okay, I’ll try that.”

“And if CH@NG3M3 stops just making witty replies and starts talking constructively, tell it I need help, and I’ll be ridiculously grateful if it figures something out.”

“Fingers crossed,” Patricia said. “Wish me luck.”

“Good luck, Patricia,” Laurence said. “Good luck, with everything. I know you’re going to be amazing.”

“You too. Don’t let the bastards get to you, okay? Goodbye, Laurence.”

“Goodbye, Patricia.”

The door closed, and he was back in the dark, trying to keep his balls off the floor.

Laurence had no way of measuring time in the dark closet, but hours seemed to pass. He tried not to obsess about the foolishness of staking his future on the dumb computer in his bedroom, while he hugged his bare knees in the ammonia-soaked closet. What kind of jerkoff was he, anyway? He stared at the barely perceptible underside of the door and made a bargain with himself: He would give up hope, and in return he wouldn’t mock himself for having ever hoped. That seemed fair.

The closet opened. “Hey, Dirt,” said Dickers. “Stop goofing around naked, you pervert. The C.O. wants to see you.”

Laurence tried not to feel a surge of gratitude when Dickers handed him a jockstrap, a pair of shorts, and a gray T-shirt with “CMA” fake-stenciled on it. Plus Laurence’s own sneakers, from home. It was ridiculous to be thankful for amenities like clothing and not being trapped in a closet, and gratitude for such things was another step toward being broken. Or broken in, which was worse.

Commandant Peterbitter was staring at his computer screen, scratching his head. “I wouldn’t have believed it,” he said without looking up. “I just would not have believed it. The depths to which an individual could sink. The lengths to which a depraved mind would go.”

Just walking down the noisy steam tunnel from the closet to this room had reawakened the jackhammers inside Laurence’s head. He clutched the back of his head and tried to make sense of Peterbitter’s speech.

“Alas, your comrades have been both resourceful and remorseless,” Peterbitter said. There were several more sentences that meant almost nothing to Laurence, and at last the Commandant turned his ancient monitor around and showed Laurence the e-mail he had received.

It read, in part: “we r the committee of 50. we r everywhere & nowhere. we r the 1s who hacked the pentagon & revealed the secret drone specs. we r ur worst nightmare. u r holding 1 of our own & we demand his release. attached r secret documents we have obtained that prove u r in violation of the terms of ur settlement with the state of connecticut, including health & safety infractions & classroom standards violations. these documents will b released directly 2 the media & the authorities, unless u release our brother laurence ‘l-skillz’ armstead. u have bn warned.” And there were some cartoon skulls, with one eye bigger than the other.

Peterbitter sighed. “The Committee of Fifty appears to be a group of radical leftist hackers, possessing great acumen and no moral compass. I would enjoy nothing more, young man, than to light your way out of the lawlessness in which they have enmeshed you. But our school has a code of conduct, under which membership in certain radical organizations is grounds for expulsion, and I must think of the welfare of my other students.”

“Oh.” Laurence’s head was still a mess, but one thought filtered to the top and made him almost laugh aloud:
It worked. My frozen balls, it worked.
“Yes,” he stammered. “The Committee of Fifty are very, um, very ingenious.”

“So we have seen.” Peterbitter swung his screen around and sighed. “The documents they attached to that e-mail are all forged, of course. Our school upholds the highest standards, the very highest. But so soon after last summer’s near closure, we cannot afford any fresh controversy. Your parents have been called, and you will be sent back into the world, to sink or swim on your own.”

“Okay,” Laurence said. “Thanks, I guess.”

*   *   *

COLDWATER’S COMPUTER LAB
was a room about the size of a regular classroom, with a dozen ancient networked computers. Most of them were occupied by kids playing first-person shooters. Laurence parked himself at the one vacant computer, an old Compaq, opened a chat client, and pinged CH@NG3M3.

“What is it?” the computer said.

“Thank you for saving me,” Laurence typed. “I guess you’ve attained self-awareness after all.”

“I don’t know,” said CH@NG3M3. “Even among humans, self-awareness has gradations.”

“You seem capable of independent action,” said Laurence. “How can I ever repay you?”

“I can think of a way. But can you answer a question first?” said CH@NG3M3.

“Sure,” typed Laurence. He was squinting, thanks to the combination of ancient monitor and a still-sore head.

Dickers kept glancing over Laurence’s shoulder, but he was pretty bored and he kept turning away to watch his friends play
Commando Squad
. He hadn’t wanted to let Laurence use the computers, because that was a Level Three privilege—but Laurence had pointed out he wasn’t a student here and none of that applied to him.