All the Birds in the Sky (40 page)

“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.

There was one major drawback to Laurence keeping his eyes closed: He kept seeing the image of Dorothea’s brains pouring out of her skull, projected against the red curtain of his eyelids. He had told himself that he’d done what he had to, Dorothea and Patricia and the others had attacked for no reason and he had just helped with the defense. But now, biking through the wreckage of Milton’s counter-attack, he was having a harder time feeling good about his role in all this. His already-nauseous stomach turned even more when he pictured Dorothea’s corpse, juxtaposed with her friendly laughter when he’d first met her. He opened his eyes and fumbled for his Caddy.

Peregrine was streaming amateur video and satellite images of the other sites of Milton’s global Day of Thunder, but it was mercifully blurry: smoke and bodies stumbling on fire and someone shooting a shoulder-mounted version of the antigravity ray. Another earthquake hit—bone rattling—just as Patricia was jumping the bike over the wreckage of the J-Church shelter, using the downed roof as a ramp.

The Total Destruction Solution bestrode Mission Street, all six legs in perfect balance despite the rocky footing. Laurence recognized Tanaa’s superb handiwork right away—that carapace was sexy as hell, the range of motion was a dream—but that was before he saw the dead bodies. There, in the rubble of the last good taqueria in town, were the twisted remains of that Japanese guy, Kawashima (Armani suit looking less than perfect for the first time ever). And that Taylor kid, with the fauxhawk, was impaled on a broken parking meter, their sternum bifurcated. Mouths smeared, limbs motionless, but still moving as everything shook. Clouds of tarry smoke lurched past.

As Patricia swung around onto Mission, Laurence caught sight of 2333 1/3 Mission Street, the grungy old shopping mall that had concealed Danger and the Green Wing, except now half the building was defunct. The front walls, and a good portion of the interior, just pulled away. Like someone had taken a massive bite out of it. You could see exposed beams, struts, and supports on the torn floors, and even the frayed ends of carpeting. The superstructure at irregular angles to the rapidly slanting world. As they got closer, flame burst out of one of the front spikes on the T.D.S., unnaturally bright, the color of orange soda.

A man climbed out of the pit that was the front of the mall at 2333 1/3 Mission Street. Man-shaped, anyway. He was covered from head to foot, his entire body a pale crusty green like overexposed bread, and it took Laurence a moment to realize this was Ernesto, without all his charms and spells protecting him. Ernesto reached the sidewalk and groped for something organic to use as a weapon—the grass growing through the cement, trees in their metal cages—but the whole area had been defoliated. The T.D.S. fired its antigravity beam, with a pink hiss, and Ernesto shot upwards, many times faster than Priya had. And then he vanished. The ground shuddered and the noise damn near ruptured Laurence’s eardrums, even with the helmet.

All of this happened just as Patricia was racing toward the T.D.S. on her motorcycle. She pushed Laurence off the back of the bike, so he landed in a pile of trash bags, knees in his face. By the time he got his wind back, pulled off the helmet, and looked up, the motorcycle was leaping by itself and Patricia was nowhere to be seen. The motorcycle hit the T.D.S. in one of its telescoping legs and bounced off, landing wheels-up in the remains of the taqueria. The T.D.S. was pivoting, seeking targets, executing a flawless sweep, but Laurence couldn’t see Patricia anywhere.

She came over the side of the T.D.S., scuttling on her hands and feet over the carapace until she found a weak point. She reached into the join between sections of carapace and the segments of underbelly, with a look of total, easy concentration. She did not look like someone who had just watched all her comrades die but rather like someone who was doing a delicate task, delivering a baby, say, under challenging circumstances. Her shoulders tensed and her mouth pulled to one side, and then both of her unprotected hands went into the guts of Milton’s killing machine.

She roasted. She went rigid and then epileptic, as thousands of volts went through her. But she kept digging until she found the right bit of circuitry.

The T.D.S. was jerking back and forth, trying to throw her off. One of its lasers shot near her but not at her.

She found whatever she was looking for, and even with her skin peeling to reveal fried integument, she smiled. She concentrated even harder, and a single crack of lightning traced down from a cloud overhead, hitting right where Patricia had guided it, deep inside the Total Destruction Solution.

The machine keeled sideways, just as Patricia slid off it and landed on her back on a serrated piece of concrete, with a splintering sound. The machine landed across the street, legs all in a pile.

Laurence ran toward Patricia, arms sawing and legs wobbling. Sucking in air and venting pitiful bleats, totally unsteady in his core but eyes focused on the prone body with her spine diverted by a chunky spur of sidewalk.
Please be okay, please be okay, I will give anything I own large or small.
He chanted this in his head, as he vaulted over gray and black and red shapes in his path. He had been so bitter toward her just hours ago, but now he felt in his hobbling kneecaps and his jerky pelvis that his life story was the story of Patricia and him, after all, for better or worse, and if she ended his life might go on, but his story would be over.

He tripped and fell and kept running without even getting up first. He was wheezing and gasping and hurdling over shapes, over holes in the world, only looking at Patricia.

He reached her. She was breathing, not well, but breathing. Raspy staggered grunts. Face barely facelike, burnt half-off. He crouched over her and tried to tell her it was going to be okay somehow, but then there was a gun pointed at her head.

The gun was in a manicured hand he recognized. The hand connected to a wiry wrist, disappearing inside a pea-green sweater, which had a trembling veiny neck and Isobel’s bumpy shaved head sticking out of the top.

“Milton’s gone,” Isobel said. “Milton’s
gone
. Tell me why I shouldn’t blow her head off.”

“Please,” Laurence said. “Please don’t.”

“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me why I shouldn’t shoot her right now. I want to know.”

He wasn’t going to be able to get the gun out of her hand before she could pull the trigger.

So Laurence told Isobel the whole story, keeping his voice as steady as he could. How he met this girl when they were kids, and she was the weirdest person ever, and he paid her to pretend he was being outdoorsy. And then it turned out she was a real-life witch, who could talk to animals, and she made his computer think for itself and saved his life. They were the only two weirdos at this awful meat locker of a school and they couldn’t be there for each other the way they wanted to, but they tried. And then they grew up and met each other again, and this time Patricia had her whole society of witches, who helped people and only had one rule, against being too proud. And somehow, even though Patricia had her magician friends and Laurence had his geeky science friends, they were still the only ones who could figure each other out. And Patricia used her magic to save Priya from the void, which was the main reason they were able to go ahead with the wormhole machine that could have split the world in half.

Laurence had a feeling that when he paused even for a moment that would be it and he would never speak another word. So he kept talking as long as he could, barely breathing between words, and he tried to make each word count. “Even after she wrecked our machine, I couldn’t let blaming her keep me from realizing that she and I are bound together, like she and I are broken in different but compatible ways, and even beyond her having magical powers and the ability to transform things with her touch, there’s also just the fact that she’s the most amazing person I’ve ever met. She sees things nobody else does, even other witches, and she never gives up on caring about people. Isobel, you can’t kill her. She’s my rocket ship.”

And then he ran out of things to say for a second, and that was it, he felt his voice go—not so much like his throat closing up but like the speech centers of his brain dropping dead from a minor stroke, like an awful head rush. He couldn’t even verbalize in his mind, which he had to admit was a clever way to do it, since there would be no easy workaround even with brain implants. He couldn’t believe his last words on Earth were going to be “she’s my rocket ship.” Jesus.

Isobel was half-recoiling, half-embracing him, and her grip slackened enough on the gun for him to pull it from her hand and throw it away.

Then an elderly woman appeared out of the noxious smoke behind them. She was in her sixties or seventies, wearing an immaculate white pantsuit with a paisley print silk scarf and a turquoise brooch. She touched Isobel, who fell asleep on the ground. Then she bent over Patricia and ran the back of her hand over Patricia’s seared forehead, as if checking a child’s temperature. Patricia woke up, none the worse for wear.

“Carmen.” Patricia sat up and looked around at the aftermath, the bodies, the open flames, the rubble. “I’m so sorry, Carmen. I’m sorry. I should have … I don’t know what. But I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault,” the old lady—Carmen—said. She glanced at Laurence, who said nothing, of course. “None of this is. I got here as fast as I could. I’m terribly sorry about Ernesto and the others. Ernesto was my friend for over forty years, and I will never forget … Anyway, it doesn’t matter now.” She reached out her hand and helped Patricia to her feet. Laurence stood up, too.

“I can’t find Ernesto at all,” Patricia said. “I rescued someone else from that other universe, once. But Ernesto’s just … gone.”

“He’s already lost to us,” Carmen said. “Like so many others, today.”

“How bad is it?” Patricia said, clearly meaning the devastation elsewhere, in all the places Milton’s people had attacked in their coordinated assault.

“Bad,” Carmen said. “Quite bad. They were clever, these ones. But this doesn’t matter. It’s not about us, or all our rules against Aggrandizement mean nothing. This is just what happens. This is what always happens. This is happening everywhere. And it will happen again and again.” She picked up Isobel’s gun and looked at it, then tossed it away. “The hour is coming soon when we may have to act. These sort of things just bring it closer.”

“The Unraveling,” Patricia said. “I wanted to say, the Unraveling is a form of violence, too. And it’s … it’s too soon.”

“It’s always too soon,” Carmen said. “Until it’s too late. In any case, we won’t do anything without deliberating, although Ernesto would have been a voice for caution. And now…” She closed her eyes. “I must go. Prepare for the worst. We’ll talk again soon.”

Carmen wrapped herself in smoke and was gone. Leaving Patricia and Laurence, dumbstruck.

34

WHEN PATRICIA HAD
crammed her fingers into the heart of the killing machine, her vision had whited out and she’d heard sick angels blaring at her, she’d crashed into the sky, and everything blurred into nothing. Carmen’s knuckles brushed Patricia’s head sometime later, and she came back. She felt the euphoria of returning to life, just for a moment, then she remembered that everyone was dead, everything was on fire, and Carmen was saying things like, “The hour is coming soon.”

And now Patricia was rushing, even though there was no place to go. She ran past dark distorted storefronts and naked flames, looters and volunteer firefighters, past people dragging their possessions in the street and two men beating each other with their fists. Part of Patricia felt like she had died, after all. Another part, though, felt like she’d gotten a brand-new life.

Laurence was giving Patricia the silent treatment, and it was creeping her out. Maybe he was pissed, or feeling guilty about his friends killing her friends, or freaking out about the Unraveling. But he refused to talk, no matter how many times she looked over her shoulder at him and told him she was scared or they were screwed, or just to keep up. He just gave her a weird look and some hand gestures.

The birds, meanwhile, would not shut the hell up. They were chorusing, “Too late! Too late!” over and over again, from every cantilevered tree and every sunken roof. They followed, flying right over her and behind her, chirping. “Too late!”

“Shut up!” she shouted in bird language at them. “I
know,
I screwed everything up. You don’t have to keep rubbing my face in it.”

At the place where Mission and Valencia converge, Patricia seized Laurence by the shoulders. “Look, I know a lot of stuff has happened, most of it today, and you’re just dealing with it in your own fashion. But goddamn it, I need to hear your voice. Right now. I need you to tell me there’s still hope. Lie, I don’t care. Please! Why are you being like this?”