All the Birds in the Sky - Charlie Jane Anders Page 0,82
of the town, behind her. The first few people she found seemed healthy enough, but then she noticed an old woman hunched over a bowl of soup in a small restaurant or bistro. The woman was coughing and her skin looked gray, and Patricia could glimpse an ochre scar poking out of the neck out of her yellow blouse. Perfect. Patricia crept toward the woman, only to get a faceful of soup and what sounded like accusations of thievery in some Slavic language. She ran.
A week later, Patricia was starving and running out of places to hide in this town, with its dingy white plaster walls and muddy roads. She could no longer talk to animals, and she had failed to master the skill of understanding human languages other than English. Plus, she could only heal a sick person with whom she’d built a certain rapport.
“I am so not going to sleep in these same clothes again tonight,” Patricia said aloud, in English. The shopkeeper in the tiny grocery saw her and chased her out, shouting guttural syllables. Patricia ran down the narrow twisting streets, sharp inclines paved with cobblestones, until she had lost the shopkeeper. She squatted behind a stone wall and looked at the only thing she’d been able to steal: a dusty bottle of Chiang Mai brand chili oil.
“This better work.” Patricia tilted the bottle so the words “WARNING RED-HOT” were upside down. The thick liquid singed her throat. She started to gag, but she made herself drink the whole thing. Once the bottle was empty she pulled herself into a shivering ball. Her head ached. She wanted to weep, for everything she’d lost and all she’d failed to gain.
An hour later, she raised her head and threw up. Once she started, she could not stop. Her eyes burned and her nose ran, and the oil was twice as horrible coming up as going down. Her stomach spasmed, not amused by her idea of a meal after days of starvation. She coughed acid.
The good news: Patricia had an idea how to heal the angry old woman now.
Patricia crept across the slate rooftops of the town until she reached the sloping roof of the cantina, where she could see the woman through a small skylight. The skylight was open, and she slipped inside, tiptoeing across a loft where bags of flour and cans of supplies were stored. She hesitated before taking some bread and stuffing it in her mouth. Then she reached the edge of the loft, still on the other side of the glorified barn from where the woman sat at her rickety table. Patricia shinnied up a support pillar, and then onto a ceiling beam. She inched her way across the beam, until she was hanging by her arms and legs over the old woman, and leaned as far as she could without losing her grip.
Patricia spat in the old woman’s soup. The old woman was hectoring someone else in the room, probably about kids these days, and did not notice. Once Patricia’s saliva was inside the woman, she had a direct link and could take stock of the late-stage emphysema, the barely-in-remission cancer that had already cost the old woman a lung, and the gout. It took an hour of concentration, and some unseemly muttering, for Patricia to get in there and make the woman’s insides as good as new. She stopped just short of giving the crone a lung to replace the one she’d lost.
The night sky looked overcrowded to Patricia, as she lay in the uneven grass of the field where she’d fallen out of the airship. Too many stars, trying too hard. She lay there for an hour before the airship descended far enough to lower a ladder for her. She climbed slowly, her limbs sore and feeble. Kanot handed her a sandwich and a can of ginger ale and tried to sell her some shares in a Zumba studio. This time, Kanot was a young German with a shaved head.
After that, Patricia started figuring out how to use the things she learned at Eltisley at The Maze and how to use The Maze’s craftiness at Eltisley. A few kids had dropped out after the “random Eastern European town” assignment, so space opened up for Patricia to become an honorary member of a few cliques.
One night, she was smoking clove cigarettes with the cool “Goth” kids after curfew, inside the cavernous and never-used chimney of Eltisley’s Lesser Building. There was Diantha, the