All the Birds in the Sky - Charlie Jane Anders Page 0,87

face. Everything felt wonky. She tried to imagine what it would feel like to unleash the forces of nature—what did that even mean? She couldn’t even stay upright, how was she going to command any natural forces? The magnetic flux here was giving her the worst headache of her life, just when she was trying to think. What if she reached out somehow and connected to nature? Except that nature wasn’t just one process, it was a whole host of processes that cascaded together in ways that nobody could predict. And if she remembered anything from her one and only conversation with that stupid Tree, it was that she would be serving nature, not commanding nature, and she couldn’t believe that she hadn’t made that one crucial distinction clear in all her stupid conversations about her experience, and now it was too late, and they were going to die as colossal fuckups. She couldn’t control nature, she couldn’t even control herself, and this magnetic field was crushing her like a huge steely hand, she was being smushed by magnetism. A massive dog ran right at her, barking loud enough to be heard over the guns and chaos, and she was startled to realize she understood what it was saying. Mostly, “I’m going to bite your throat! You’re dead!” And this seemed a particularly pointless moment for her to regain the ability to understand animals, when there was no reasoning with them, and this just reminded her of the fact that she was powerless to shape or even influence the so-called forces of nature, and she really wished this magnetic flux wasn’t giving her the worst migraine in the history of skulls, and then it hit her, and she knew what to do. She raised her hands to the skies and hoped for the best, before there was a blinding crack, and—

Patricia woke up on board an airship, not the same one they’d stolen. She lay on a bench, and Kanot was staring down at her, with a look she could only describe as “wrathful” on his hairless albino face. “You’ve disappointed me,” Kanot said in a flat voice.

Patricia wanted to say it was all Diantha’s idea, but she couldn’t make herself go there. “What happened?”

“Toby’s dead. So are half a dozen guards at that installation you decided to attack on your own initiative. I hope you can live with that. Diantha and Sameer are injured, but they’ll both live. It appears you somehow tapped into the increased magnetic field at the Polar region and unleashed a kind of EMP that fried not only everything electronic for a dozen miles but also everyone’s brains, including your own. You should not have been able to do that, and we’re not sure how you did.”

“There was a dog that wanted to bite me.” Her head was pounding, and she kept seeing weird shapes. Then something occurred to her: “Toby was wearing an Eltisley scarf. And we brought the airship, it had an insignia on the side.”

“Already dealt with. There won’t be any traces to link back to the school.” Kanot let out a snort from deep in the pit of his stomach. “Your life is going to be very different from here on out.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Not as sorry as you’re going to be.”

He looked like he was going to say something else—like, maybe offer to let her off the hook in exchange for her firstborn. But instead he just shrugged and walked away, leaving Patricia with a throbbing head and a sense of wrongs that could never be set right. She raised her head enough to see out one of the big portholes. They flew over the ocean, and the sun was falling, through clouds that were a heavy, ugly purple.

23

THE PARROTS WERE eating cherry blossoms on top of a big tree on the crest of a steep hill, not far from Grace Cathedral—a half-dozen bright green birds with red splotches on their heads, just tearing the shit out of these white flowers. Petals scattered across the sidewalk and the grass as the birds squawked and worked their crooked beaks, while Laurence and Patricia watched from the steep bank of the parklet across the street.

San Francisco never stopped astonishing Laurence—wild raccoons and possums wandered the streets, especially at night, and their shiny fur and long tails looked just like stray cats, unless you looked twice. Skunks nested under people’s houses. These parrots were native to somewhere in South America where cherry trees never