would be abandoned at birth. On the other hand, there would be no more war, and no pollution.”
“That is evil. I mean, that might be the most evil thing I’ve ever heard.” Laurence rubbed his eyes with all ten knuckles, brushing away the last crumbs of sleep but also like he was trying to wipe away the images Patricia had put in his head. “How long … how long have you known about this?”
“A day, maybe three,” Patricia said. “I heard people mention it in hushed voices once or twice, but it’s not something we discuss. I think it’s been cooking for over a hundred years. But they’re still refining it. My old high-school classmate is adding some finishing touches.” She shuddered, thinking about Diantha, with all her self-loathing, and how Patricia had strong-armed her into this.
“I can’t even imagine,” Laurence said. “Why are you telling me about this?”
He went to make coffee, because when you’ve just heard about the possible transformation of the human race into feral monsters, you need to be doing something with your hands and creating something hot and comforting for another person. He ground the beans, scooped them out, and poured boiling water into the French press, waiting to push the plunger until the liquid reached the right sour mash consistency. He moved like a sleepwalker, like Patricia hadn’t really woken him up.
“I’m sorry I laid that on you,” Patricia said. “Neither of us can do anything about it. I just needed to talk to someone, and I realized you were the only one I could talk to. Plus I felt like I owed it to you, in some way.”
“Why not talk to Taylor? Or one of the other magical people?”
“I don’t even know which of them know about this, and I don’t want to be responsible for spreading this around the community. Plus if I said I was having doubts about any of this, it would be like ultimate bonus Aggrandizement. And I guess … you’ve always been the only one who could get me, when it counted.”
“Remember when we were kids?” He handed her a hot mug. “And we used to wonder how grown-ups got to be such assholes?”
“Yeah.”
“Now we know.”
“Yeah.”
They drank coffee for a long time. Neither of them put their mugs down between sips, they just held them to their faces like rebreathers. They both looked into their cups instead of at each other. Until Laurence lashed out with one hand and grabbed Patricia’s free hand, in a sudden desperate motion. He held on to her hand and looked at her, eyes swollen with desolation. She didn’t pull away or squeeze his hand back.
Patricia broke the silence. “All those years, I did magic on my own, no other people around except for you that one time. In the woods, or the attic. Then I come to find out that proper magic is all about interacting with people, one way or the other—either healing them or tricking them. But the really great magicians can’t be around people at all. They’re like Ernesto, who can’t leave his two rooms. Or poor Dorothea, who couldn’t carry on a simple conversation. Or my old teacher Kanot, whose face changes every day. Set apart. Like they can do things to people, but not with people.”
“And those are the people,” Laurence said, “who cooked up the Unraveling.” She noticed he flinched when she mentioned Dorothea.
“They want to protect the world,” Patricia said. “They think the dolphins and elephants have as much right to live as we do. But yeah, they have a skewed perspective.”
Laurence started to describe a meeting he had been in, at that compound in Denver, where his friends had talked about the possibility that their big machine could do to the world what the little machine had done to Priya. The image of the nerds crammed into a server room made Patricia think of being scrunched into a chimney at Eltisley Hall, and her reverie threatened to spiral endlessly, until Peregrine interrupted.
“You might want to turn on the television,” Peregrine said.
The same thing was on every channel. The Bandung Summit had failed. China was seizing the Diaoyu Islands and pressing its claims in the South China Sea, and meanwhile the Chinese government had promised to support Pakistan in the Kashmir conflict. And Russian troops were marching west. The screen showed troops massing, naval destroyers moving into position, missiles and drones being primed. It looked for all the world like the History Channel, except this