All the Birds in the Sky(96)

She offered the ring again. Laurence still didn’t take it. “It wasn’t a doomsday machine,” he said.

“It wasn’t? Then what was it?”

“It’s a long story. Listen, I can’t be around people right now. It’s nothing personal.” He made a move to close the door, but her outstretched hand and his family heirloom were in the way.

“Why not? Are you having a weird feeling? Like that you’re coated with garbage that makes your skin crawl and you can’t recognize other people as belonging to the same species?”

“No. No! Why would you ask something like that?”

“Oh, uh. Nothing. It’s just, lately, whenever I hear someone say they can’t be around people, I start to worry that … it doesn’t matter.”

“It’s just that all my friends are on Seadonia, and I’m here on my own. And I’m still pretty broken up about what you did in Denver.”

“What are they all doing in Seadonia?”

“Mostly? Figuring out ways to kill you and your friends. Probably using ultrasonics, or some kind of antigravity beam, similar to what happened to Priya only more directional and portable. That’s my guess, anyway.”

“Oh. Thanks. That was easy.”

“What was easy?”

“They asked me to come here and see if I could find out what was going on at Seadonia. They figured you would know.”

“And you got it out of me.”

“Yep.”

“Because you’re so good at being a ‘Trickster.’”

Patricia looked down. She seemed less tough than she had a few minutes earlier. Then she looked up and it was Laurence who had a hard time looking at her. He remembered all of a sudden how she had described the Pathway to Infinity as a “doomsday machine.”

Neither of them could face the other without shame. Laurence had a feeling most adults he knew had gotten used to this feeling of mutual abashment. But it was new to him.

“But actually,” Patricia said, “I’m glad we got that stuff out of the way. About Seadonia. Because that wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No. It was what they wanted me to talk to you about. But it wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“So what did you want to talk to me about?”

“I don’t know.” She just stood there and he could hear both their breathing and someone running, a few streets away. “I don’t know. Nothing. Nothing, I guess.” She pushed the black box at him. “So do you want your ring back or not?”

“I can’t, I just can’t. I can’t take anything from you, even if it used to belong to me.”

She put the ring back in her pocket. She looked more beautiful than ever. His heart was in tatters. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what? What do you think you have to be sorry for?”

“Ernesto says I betrayed my lover—meaning you—and I have to come to terms with that. Even if you were building a doomsday machine, it doesn’t change that fact.”

“It wasn’t a doomsday machine,” Laurence said again.

He looked at the Caddy nestled in her hand and forearm, providing meager illumination to the dark world as it woke up. The Caddy was purring, probably syncing with the one in Laurence’s bedroom, and checking for real-time updates from the nearest server. How much of Peregrine was in the Caddies and how much was in some secure facilities hidden around the world where the Caddies drew their updates from? Why had Peregrine warned him obliquely that Patricia was on her way? With not enough time to make a break for it, but enough time to freak out?

They just stood there, neither of them talking at all, until the streetlights came back on. The sudden lurch from pitch darkness to yellow brightness felt like the sun had popped up all at once—except the light was weaker and there was no warmth. They were both jolted out of their mutual reverie.

“Okay,” Patricia said. “Take care of yourself. Hard times are coming. Harder times, I mean. I’ll see you around.”

“No,” Laurence said. “You won’t.”





32

THE SUN STILL hadn’t risen. Maybe it never would. Maybe the sky was sick of these endless costume changes: Casting off cloak after cloak, but never revealing what it wore under all those cloaks. Patricia climbed the tall staircase to the top of the hill, stumbling on the cement steps. Nearby, a hawk swung past, making its last hunt of the night, and it glanced at Patricia and said, “Too late, too late!” Which was what birds kept saying to her these days. She clomped to the top of the staircase and staggered across Portola to reach the brink of Market, looking out over the whole city and the bay, all the way to Oakland. She dug in her satchel for a tiny bag of Corn Nuts, crushed to greasy powder, and the dregs of a 5-hour ENERGY drink. She hoped the sun wouldn’t come up. When it did, she was going to report in to Carmen and tell her that they had pissed off some people with nearly limitless wealth, arcane superscience, and nothing to lose. That conversation would lead to Carmen making some decisions, some of which Patricia would have to implement personally. Those, in turn, would lead to more consequences, and more decisions.

Oakland glowed pink. Patricia could glimpse a panic attack coming out of her blind spot, but as long as she didn’t look at it directly, it would never arrive. Except that just as she hatched that notion, her bag made a loud klaxon blast, like she was in a submarine that was venting water. She jumped up and nearly took a spill over the railing. The alarm was her Caddy, which was displaying a “New Voicemail” message at the center of its swirl of spokes. The voicemail was not new, it was one that Laurence had left her right before the attack on Denver, which she had later found and deleted without listening to it. He had left it on her phone, not her Caddy, so her Caddy shouldn’t even have it. She put the Caddy back in her bag and watched the red blanket creep toward the AT-AT shipyard, while an orange thumbprint grazed the horizon. The alarm sounded again: “New Voicemail.” Once again, not a new voicemail. She deleted it a second time and turned her Caddy off for good measure.