All the Birds in the Sky

If she could explain that theory to Laurence, he would laugh at her. He’d have some reasonable explanation for how she could not possibly blame herself, at least not any more than everyone else on Earth. Laurence would spout facts about methane clathrates and the inevitability of those planetary farts getting released. He would point out the fault lay with Lamar Tucker and his crew, who decided to drill for methane in the first place. He would say something random and weird, to snap her out of it.

Whereas if she shared her theory with Ernesto or the others, they would just tell her blaming herself for the world’s problems was pure Aggrandizement. But her actions in Siberia had been pure Aggrandizement, too. She tried talking to Ernesto about her sense that we had broken nature — nature was a delicate balance, and we, people generally, had messed it up.

Ernesto’s response: “We could not ‘break’ nature if we spent a million years trying. This planet is a speck, and we are specks on a speck. But our little habitat is fragile, and we cannot live without it.”

Laurence telling Patricia that he loved her and then vanishing — it felt way too much like those birds telling Patricia she was a witch and then giving her the silent treatment, when she was a child. Except she couldn’t have any faith that this declaration would come true the same way the first one had. Magic was always bound to claim her in the end, in retrospect, but love was the most susceptible to random failure of all human enterprises. Laurence had always been preoccupied with his mysterious weird experiments, that he’d kept working on even after that accident, and any relationship was probably always going to come second for him. In her darkest moments, she imagined Laurence shuddering and rolling his eyes, in that way that he sometimes did, as he recollected how he’d almost dated his loony friend.

“Do you know why the Tricksters and the Healers went to war, two hundred years ago?” Ernesto asked Patricia, just as she was starting to spiral into obsession in spite of herself.

“Um,” she said. “Because they had different approaches to magic.”

“They witnessed the Industrial Revolution,” Ernesto said. “They saw the sky turn black. The dark Satanic mills, the great factories. The Healers feared the world would be choked to death, so they set out to break all the machines. The Tricksters opposed them, because they believed none of us had the right to impose our will on everyone else. Their conflict almost destroyed everything.”

“So what happened?” Patricia whispered. Taylor had woken up and was listening, too, fascinated.

“After Hortense Walker made a peace between them, they reached a compromise. That is where our rule of Aggrandizement comes from, that none of us will try to shape the world too much. But also, they started working on a fail-safe. Which I hope we never have to use. And now, perhaps you understand why we were so concerned about you, these past months.”

Patricia nodded. It made sense now. If she made any of this about her, she would only screw up again. Ernesto was right: She should just try to be a speck on a speck. So instead, she held on tight to her anger, even as she choked on the recycled air in the car. Patricia had no time for grief, blame, or a broken heart, but anger, there was endless time for. Stay angry. Hold on to it. Anger is your tightrope over the abyss. She repeated in her head what she said right after the storm hit: Some fucker had to pay.

Kawashima had been vague about their destination, but now that they were zipping through Utah at 300 MPH, he opened up. “We’re going to be proactive. We’re going to stage an intervention. For the planet.” He paused and Patricia was on tenterhooks. Then Kawashima explained at last: “There are some maniacs outside Denver building a doomsday device, which will tear a hole in the planet, and we’re going to deal with it.”

Patricia was ready. Let it come.

27

LAURENCE HAD LUNCH with Milton. Just the two of them. No Isobel, no other members of Laurence’s team. “I remember when I first saw you, when you were a little boy,” Milton said. “Youngest person ever to build a two-second time machine.” He smiled and reached for another piece of fried chicken from the bucket on the floor between them.

They were sitting on the carpet of the main office on the top floor. The chicken was perfectly crispy and gushed with juice inside its bread shell, and Laurence’s fingers still felt pristine after two pieces. The bucket had the name of some local fry shop on it. How did Milton keep conjuring up fast food? Even for a billionaire, this was a coup. Laurence sensed Milton was making some late-in-the-game effort to bond. They were listening to Robert Johnson, the only music Milton liked.

“The two-second time machine.” Laurence wiped his fingers even though there was no need. “Classic example of a useless device.”