All the Birds in the Sky(98)

“Shit.” Laurence looked as if she had kicked him in the junk instead of apologizing. “I … I never actually thought I would hear that from you.”

“I mean it. I was a colossal dick.”

“You weren’t a colossal dick. Just kind of a regular dick. We were playing with fire in Denver. No question. But yeah, I wish you had talked to me.”

“I listened to your voicemail from before,” Patricia said. “Just now. CH@NG3M3 forced me. He wouldn’t let me delete it without listening.”

“It’s a pushy bastard. It goes by Peregrine now.”

“Listen, I have to tell you about something really important. And it’s not something I can discuss out in the open.”

“I guess you ought to come in, then.” He stepped back and held the door open.

They sat on the same sofa where they’d shared the elf-shaped bong, facing the wide-screen TV where they’d watched Red Dwarf with Isobel. The apartment was a lot more cluttered, Hoarders-esque even, and there was a millimeter-deep layer of gunge on everything.

Patricia told him about the Unraveling. And then, because he couldn’t have grasped even some of the enormity of it, she told him again. She found herself lapsing into clinical terms, instead of conveying the full gut-wrenching experience. “The population would drop within one generation, but some people would still manage to breed. Breeding would be highly unpleasant. Most babies would be abandoned at birth. On the other hand, there would be no more war, and no pollution.”

“That is evil. I mean, that might be the most evil thing I’ve ever heard.” Laurence rubbed his eyes with all ten knuckles, brushing away the last crumbs of sleep but also like he was trying to wipe away the images Patricia had put in his head. “How long … how long have you known about this?”

“A day, maybe three,” Patricia said. “I heard people mention it in hushed voices once or twice, but it’s not something we discuss. I think it’s been cooking for over a hundred years. But they’re still refining it. My old high-school classmate is adding some finishing touches.” She shuddered, thinking about Diantha, with all her self-loathing, and how Patricia had strong-armed her into this.

“I can’t even imagine,” Laurence said. “Why are you telling me about this?”

He went to make coffee, because when you’ve just heard about the possible transformation of the human race into feral monsters, you need to be doing something with your hands and creating something hot and comforting for another person. He ground the beans, scooped them out, and poured boiling water into the French press, waiting to push the plunger until the liquid reached the right sour mash consistency. He moved like a sleepwalker, like Patricia hadn’t really woken him up.

“I’m sorry I laid that on you,” Patricia said. “Neither of us can do anything about it. I just needed to talk to someone, and I realized you were the only one I could talk to. Plus I felt like I owed it to you, in some way.”

“Why not talk to Taylor? Or one of the other magical people?”

“I don’t even know which of them know about this, and I don’t want to be responsible for spreading this around the community. Plus if I said I was having doubts about any of this, it would be like ultimate bonus Aggrandizement. And I guess … you’ve always been the only one who could get me, when it counted.”

“Remember when we were kids?” He handed her a hot mug. “And we used to wonder how grown-ups got to be such *s?”

“Yeah.”

“Now we know.”

“Yeah.”

They drank coffee for a long time. Neither of them put their mugs down between sips, they just held them to their faces like rebreathers. They both looked into their cups instead of at each other. Until Laurence lashed out with one hand and grabbed Patricia’s free hand, in a sudden desperate motion. He held on to her hand and looked at her, eyes swollen with desolation. She didn’t pull away or squeeze his hand back.

Patricia broke the silence. “All those years, I did magic on my own, no other people around except for you that one time. In the woods, or the attic. Then I come to find out that proper magic is all about interacting with people, one way or the other—either healing them or tricking them. But the really great magicians can’t be around people at all. They’re like Ernesto, who can’t leave his two rooms. Or poor Dorothea, who couldn’t carry on a simple conversation. Or my old teacher Kanot, whose face changes every day. Set apart. Like they can do things to people, but not with people.”

“And those are the people,” Laurence said, “who cooked up the Unraveling.” She noticed he flinched when she mentioned Dorothea.

“They want to protect the world,” Patricia said. “They think the dolphins and elephants have as much right to live as we do. But yeah, they have a skewed perspective.”

Laurence started to describe a meeting he had been in, at that compound in Denver, where his friends had talked about the possibility that their big machine could do to the world what the little machine had done to Priya. The image of the nerds crammed into a server room made Patricia think of being scrunched into a chimney at Eltisley Hall, and her reverie threatened to spiral endlessly, until Peregrine interrupted.

“You might want to turn on the television,” Peregrine said.