All the Birds in the Sky

“Hang in there, Dad.” Patricia felt her face soaking. Between the tears and the white flashes, she was blind. “I’ll find a way. I’ll get you out of there.” There had to be. There had to be a spell to get her to Delaware in a hurry, like a way to bend space. She just couldn’t think what it was, or just whom she could trick enough to pull off such a thing. Maybe just telling her father that she could save him was paradoxically a big enough lie that it would give her the power to save him. Maybe there was a magician in Delaware who could help — except anybody on the ground there was probably dead, or had their hands full. She couldn’t think, she couldn’t breathe, she choked.

“It’s okay, PP. I just wanted you to know that even though we were hard on you, and we disowned you after you ran away from home, we always loved you, and I’m … I’m … I’m proud that you became your own person.” Patricia’s heart shattered. She heard Isobel in the living room upstairs, shouting for Laurence to come and see on the news the scope of the destruction, streets become canals, air choked with debris. Like the heel of God’s hand.

“Do you want to talk to your mother?” Patricia’s father asked. “She’s right here. She broke her arm, but I can hold the phone up to her. Hang on.” There was a scuffling noise. The line went dead.

Patricia hit the callback function a dozen times, and nothing. Part of her thought maybe she should just stay hung up in case they were calling her back too and they got her voicemail, but she couldn’t stop hitting redial-redial-redial, she was bawling and shaking and her naked body was freezing and Laurence put his arm around her and she slapped him and then clung to him and the sound that came from inside her was like all the wounded animals she had ever fixed in her life.

Then she pulled herself together. Her parents weren’t dead yet. The destruction was still happening. She could get help. Someone was doing this, someone was making this happen, and she could make them pay. There was some evil witch or most likely witches, and they had found a way to supercharge a storm system, and they were fucking going down.

She was pulling her cargo pants on, her shirt, fuck her bra and panties.

“Where are you going?” Laurence was still naked.

“I have to go.” She put her shoes on. “Find Ernesto. Find the others. We can fix this. We can make them pay. We can save them.”

“I’ll go with you.” Laurence leapt for his pants.

“You can’t,” Patricia said. “I’m sorry, you can’t.”

And then she was gone, without saying goodbye or anything.

Laurence heard the front door slamming and Isobel trying to say something to Patricia as she ran past. And now he could hear the terrible chatter of the cable news people trying to make sense of the greatest natural disaster in America’s history. The storm’s supermassive fetch, hurling the already-swollen ocean onto land. High winds and twenty inches of rain shredding Capitol Hill and Foggy Bottom. The President in a secure location. Manhattan dead in the storm’s path, with all the bridges clogged with people who’d waited too long to evacuate after so many false alarms in the past.

Someone knocked on Laurence’s bedroom door. He leapt off the bed, hoping it was Patricia coming back for him. Instead, he opened the door to see Isobel. She didn’t seem to care that he was naked.

“Pack a bag,” Isobel said. “Just one.”

“What? Why?”

“This is it,” she said. “We’ve put this off as long as we could. I’ve moved Heaven and Earth to give you a normal life here. But this, what happened just now, means it’s over. We can’t wait any longer. We can’t afford to. Milton will say we waited too long as it is. We need the project up and running.”

“I promise you I haven’t been dragging my feet since that setback.” Laurence was freezing, in shock. “But still, we’re no closer than we were to figuring it out. There are huge theoretical problems.”

“I know,” Isobel said, handing Laurence an empty khaki duffel bag. “That’s the point. From this moment on, you’re working on the wormhole thing 24/7. We are going to need a new planet.”

Laurence tried to explain that he couldn’t leave, that there was no way, he had a life here, he’d finally found real love and it was everything to him, but he already knew this argument was lost. He took the duffel bag and started stuffing clothes and crap into it.

Patricia made it to Danger in record time, ignoring all the people on the bus who wanted to talk to her about the terrible-can-you-believe-it-this-is-going-to-change-everything. She jumped up the stairs three or four at a time and ran into the bookstore so fast she was breathless and yet still crying, but the moment she got there she knew it was too late. Everybody just sat there, looking horrified. And helpless. And like they’d been expecting her. Ernesto looked her in the eyes. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “For your loss. For all of us.”