All the Birds in the Sky - Charlie Jane Anders Page 0,43

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 CHNG3M3? It’s been getting smarter and smarter lately, and giving me all kinds of helpful advice. I bet CHNG3M3 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. CHNG3M3 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 CHNG3M3, 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