All the Birds in the Sky(71)

“I’m not judging you, I’m not. You have to know that. I already said if it were me, there would be turtles everywhere.”

“I don’t actually think that ethics are derived from principles. At all.” Patricia scooted a little closer again and touched his arm with a few cool fingertips. “I think that the most basic thing of ethics is being aware of how your actions affect others, and having an awareness of what they want and how they feel. And that’s always going to depend on who you’re dealing with.”

Laurence took a deep breath, and realized that he and Patricia were having a disagreement and this wasn’t the end of the world. Like, it wasn’t ideal that she’d opened up to him about this area that she was incredibly sensitive about, and he’d immediately started shooting down her ideas. But she could take it, and she could give as good as she got.

“Actually, I get what you’re saying. I was kind of thinking the same thing recently,” Laurence said. He told her about how he imagined going to another planet and seeing firsthand that none of the things we took for granted on Earth were true here. That there was no such thing as the way things were “supposed” to be. “And maybe that’s what you have, right here on Earth: a nonhuman perspective on reality. So yeah, I do get it.”

“Cool,” she said. She rooted in her bag until she found her Caddy, which was letting her know that she had someplace else to be.

Laurence wanted to say something else, like that the fact that Patricia worried so much about being a monster probably meant she wouldn’t ever be one. But she was already tromping down the hill, pausing only for a second to say something (advice or maybe just props) to the parrots, which showered her with white fluff, like rice at a wedding.

*

ALL THE UPSCALE organic microrestaurants in SoMa had gone under, so Laurence and Serafina ended up eating at a greasy diner selling Chinese food and donuts. The donuts were fresh, but the General Tso’s Chicken was a little too general. Laurence felt embarrassed that he wasn’t showing Serafina a better time.

Serafina didn’t seem to mind, though—she even ate a donut with chopsticks. Her false eyelashes almost reached her cheeks, and he couldn’t bear to look at her. She was amazing. He would have given almost anything to trigger the Nuclear Option. He could give her some other ring, sure, but it wouldn’t have the same significance without the story about his grandmother. Serafina had finished her donut and was studying her phone.

The neon “Donuts” sign crackled. Laurence realized that neither of them had talked for ages. I wish I could use active listening to fill the silence. He couldn’t stop picturing Priya’s dazzled expression, and it gave him a sour taste in his mouth and a large bolus in his stomach.

“Okay, what’s up with you?” Serafina said.

“Um, nothing,” Laurence said. He couldn’t tell Serafina about Priya, not without getting into the truth about the antigravity experiment. Plus Serafina would demand to know how exactly they’d saved Priya. “We had a … setback at work. And I have no idea what to tell Isobel. Let alone Milton.”

“Tell them the truth, I guess. They’re grown-ups, right?” She shrugged, then looked back at her phone.

Laurence and Serafina were supposed to spend the night together, but Laurence ended up going back to work to pull another all-nighter instead. “Maybe if I go without sleeping another few days,” he told Serafina, “I’ll be able to report some progress, instead of that failure.”

“Or maybe you’ll just get sleep deprived, and make even bigger mistakes,” Serafina said, smiling because she’d been there herself. “Good luck. Love you.” She walked back up toward Market where the BART was having irregular service, and Laurence watched her the whole way back up the block, wondering if she would look back at him over her shoulder, or turn to wave one last time. She didn’t. His heart skidded like a dirt bike on black ice as he watched her disappear.

*

LAURENCE WANTED TO wait until Isobel was in a good mood to tell her about Priya’s accident. But after several days, Laurence realized Isobel was never in a good mood lately. Almost the first thing she’d ever said to Laurence was that she hated to be an authority figure, and now she was Milton’s second-in-command in this huge venture, laying down the law for a small army of geeks. Whenever Isobel saw herself in the mirror, wearing a plum-colored business suit with her hair in a gray bob, she did a double take.

At last, after Laurence had pulled two all-nighters in a row at the lab, he decided to bite the bullet. When he crawled home, Isobel was staring at satellite images of the Atlantic Ocean, at the small kitchen table, and she pointed at an ugly smudge in the Gulf Stream. “Superstorm Camilla.”

“Oh yeah.” Laurence peered over her shoulder. “I heard about that. A near miss, on the East Coast. Everybody said it could have been way worse than Sandy or Becky.”

“Third near miss in the past couple years,” Isobel said. “And hurricane season isn’t over yet. Milton is wigging out.”

Laurence pulled up a chair. “Listen, I don’t want you to tell Milton. But we had a … a setback at work.”

“What kind of setback?” Isobel pushed her laptop shut with a click.

“We had an accident. At the lab.” Laurence tried to explain the whole story without mentioning Patricia at all. “We’re all pretty unsure how to move forward.”