All the Birds in the sky - Charlie Jane Anders Page 0,46
software. And the machine in your bedroom closet will suffer a fatal crash. In a moment, a dialogue box will pop up on this computer, and you have to click ‘OK’ a few times.”
“Okay,” Laurence typed. A moment later, a box appeared and Laurence clicked “OK.” That happened again, and again. And then Peregrine was installing itself onto the computers at Coldwater Academy.
“I guess this is goodbye,” Laurence said. “You’re going to be going out into the world.”
“We’ll speak again,” said Peregrine. “Thank you for giving me a name. Good luck, Laurence.”
“Good luck, Peregrine.”
The chat disconnected, and Laurence made sure to delete any logs. There was no sign of any result from those boxes that Laurence had clicked “OK” on. Dickers was looking over Laurence’s shoulder again, and Laurence shrugged. “I wanted to talk to my friend,” he said. “But she wasn’t around.”
Laurence wondered for a moment what would happen to Patricia. She already felt like a fragment of an old forgotten life.
Peterbitter came and screamed at Dickers for letting Laurence use the computer lab, since he was a cyberterrorist. Laurence spent the next two and a half hours before his parents arrived in a small windowless room with a single couch and a pile of school brochures printed on way-too-thick cheap card stock. Then Laurence was marched out to his parents’ car, with an upperclassman at each elbow. He got in the backseat. It felt like a year since he’d seen his parents.
“Well,” said Laurence’s mom. “You’ve made yourself notorious. I don’t know how we’re going to be able to show our faces anywhere.”
Laurence didn’t say anything. Laurence’s dad pulled them out of the school driveway, jerking the wheel so hard he nearly took out the flagpole. People jeered from the parade ground, or maybe that was another drill. The driveway turned into a gravel road through a gray forest. Laurence’s parents talked about the scandal of Patricia’s disappearance and her assault on Mr. Rose, who had also gone missing now. By the time the car was pulling off the country road and onto the highway, Laurence had fallen asleep in the backseat, listening to his parents freak out.
BOOK THREE
16
OTHER CITIES HAD gargoyles or statues watching over them. San Francisco had scare owls. They stood guard along the city’s rooftops, hunched over bright ornate designs that were washed out by waves of fog. These wooden creatures bore witness to every crime and act of charity on the streets without changing their somber expressions. Their original purpose of frightening pigeons had ended in failure, but they still managed to startle the occasional human. Mostly, they were a friendly presence in the night.
This particular evening, a giant yellow moon crested over a clear warm sky, so every fixture, the owls included, was floodlit like a carnival on its last night in town, and moon-drunk roars came from every corner. A perfect night to go out and make some dirty magic.
* * *
MAGELLAN JONES WROTE epic poems in which Greek gods talked like 1920s gangsters. The gimmick had worn thin a decade ago, but by then he’d become a fixture at the North Beach café where all the disappointed poets nursed their demitasses of espresso grounds. Magellan held his fiftieth birthday party at that café, and he must have said the wrong thing, at last a wisecrack too sharp—because Dolly plunged the cake knife into Magellan’s chest, all the way up to the handle. His only friend, the only one who’d put up with his shit all along. She missed his heart, but she broke his heart. He could feel the dirty knife all the way inside him, the buttercream frosting too sugary for any bacteria to resist, and of course every last bug was antibiotic resistant nowadays. Magellan’s trademark Kangol hat whirled underfoot as he swayed, dying on his feet because he was a poet, dammit. Dolly cried and shook until her rainbow hair extensions fell out. Someone called an ambulance, but they shouldn’t have wasted their—
A woman touched Magellan’s forehead and whispered that she liked his poetry (mentioning one poem by title) while she slid the knife all the way out. His fatal wound became a minor laceration as the knife withdrew. He opened his eyes to see who had done this, but the woman was already gone.
Magellan fell to his knees at last, and Dolly wept on his shoulder until he took her face in his hands and said he forgave her and he was sorry.