All the Birds in the Sky

Someone yelled in Russian, and dogs were barking. Guys wearing parkas and goggles drove toward them in a couple snowmobiles, waving what looked like machine guns. Sameer and Taylor nodded and ran into their path. A moment later, the guards opened fire — but wildly, in random directions, because Sameer had done something to confuse them.

“Watch out!” Patricia shouted. “Don’t make them shoot their own fuel t—” But she couldn’t make herself heard over the gunfire, the engines, the yelling, and the dog pack.

Toby was already running toward the massive drill, crafting a transmutation-of-metals spell. Meanwhile, Diantha was marching toward the drill as well, a look of total determination on her beautiful sun-drenched face. A bullet caught her in the side, and she keeled over.

Patricia ran and crouched next to Diantha, who was bleeding like a fountain and panting. “Hang on,” Patricia said. “Looks like the bullet went clean through. But I’m afraid it hit an artery. Hold tight.”

“Don’t waste time on me,” Diantha said. “The mission. Focus on the mission.”

Patricia kissed Diantha on the mouth, while her hands groped for the hole that was gushing blood. She found the artery and painstakingly, clumsily, repaired it. A bullet sliced past her face. She broke the kiss and said, “Tell me the truth. Did the Tree talk to you, at all?”

Diantha said, “That’s a terribly rude question, especially at this juncture.”

A shout. Sounded like Toby. “It’s all down to you now,” Diantha said. “Make them feel the fury.” Diantha passed out.

Patricia looked up, keeping Diantha’s head cradled in her lap. Sameer and Taylor had done such a good job creating confusion, she couldn’t see what was going on. Snow churned through the air, in big tidal waves, and a huge dog, like a Husky, sprinted in front of Patricia and then tumbled head over heels. The sound of gunfire was near continuous, like the loudest white noise ever.

The wall of snow cleared a little, and Patricia saw a body facedown in the snow, wearing an Eltisley scarf.

“No, no, no,” Patricia muttered. She stood up. She could still fix this, she had to.

The attack on the Pipeline had lasted maybe ninety seconds. The longer this went on, the more bullets flying in wild directions, the greater the chance of a disaster that would be visible from space.

The cold tore into her, and she wished she had goggles like the people trying to kill her. She could barely stand her ground, because her center of gravity kept corkscrewing downwards. It was more than just the wind and the snow in her 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?”