All the Birds in the Sky

He reached her. She was breathing, not well, but breathing. Raspy staggered grunts. Face barely facelike, burnt half-off. He crouched over her and tried to tell her it was going to be okay somehow, but then there was a gun pointed at her head.

The gun was in a manicured hand he recognized. The hand connected to a wiry wrist, disappearing inside a pea-green sweater, which had a trembling veiny neck and Isobel’s bumpy shaved head sticking out of the top.

“Milton’s gone,” Isobel said. “Milton’s gone. Tell me why I shouldn’t blow her head off.”

“Please,” Laurence said. “Please don’t.”

“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me why I shouldn’t shoot her right now. I want to know.”

He wasn’t going to be able to get the gun out of her hand before she could pull the trigger.

So Laurence told Isobel the whole story, keeping his voice as steady as he could. How he met this girl when they were kids, and she was the weirdest person ever, and he paid her to pretend he was being outdoorsy. And then it turned out she was a real-life witch, who could talk to animals, and she made his computer think for itself and saved his life. They were the only two weirdos at this awful meat locker of a school and they couldn’t be there for each other the way they wanted to, but they tried. And then they grew up and met each other again, and this time Patricia had her whole society of witches, who helped people and only had one rule, against being too proud. And somehow, even though Patricia had her magician friends and Laurence had his geeky science friends, they were still the only ones who could figure each other out. And Patricia used her magic to save Priya from the void, which was the main reason they were able to go ahead with the wormhole machine that could have split the world in half.

Laurence had a feeling that when he paused even for a moment that would be it and he would never speak another word. So he kept talking as long as he could, barely breathing between words, and he tried to make each word count. “Even after she wrecked our machine, I couldn’t let blaming her keep me from realizing that she and I are bound together, like she and I are broken in different but compatible ways, and even beyond her having magical powers and the ability to transform things with her touch, there’s also just the fact that she’s the most amazing person I’ve ever met. She sees things nobody else does, even other witches, and she never gives up on caring about people. Isobel, you can’t kill her. She’s my rocket ship.”

And then he ran out of things to say for a second, and that was it, he felt his voice go — not so much like his throat closing up but like the speech centers of his brain dropping dead from a minor stroke, like an awful head rush. He couldn’t even verbalize in his mind, which he had to admit was a clever way to do it, since there would be no easy workaround even with brain implants. He couldn’t believe his last words on Earth were going to be “she’s my rocket ship.” Jesus.

Isobel was half-recoiling, half-embracing him, and her grip slackened enough on the gun for him to pull it from her hand and throw it away.

Then an elderly woman appeared out of the noxious smoke behind them. She was in her sixties or seventies, wearing an immaculate white pantsuit with a paisley print silk scarf and a turquoise brooch. She touched Isobel, who fell asleep on the ground. Then she bent over Patricia and ran the back of her hand over Patricia’s seared forehead, as if checking a child’s temperature. Patricia woke up, none the worse for wear.

“Carmen.” Patricia sat up and looked around at the aftermath, the bodies, the open flames, the rubble. “I’m so sorry, Carmen. I’m sorry. I should have … I don’t know what. But I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault,” the old lady — Carmen — said. She glanced at Laurence, who said nothing, of course. “None of this is. I got here as fast as I could. I’m terribly sorry about Ernesto and the others. Ernesto was my friend for over forty years, and I will never forget … Anyway, it doesn’t matter now.” She reached out her hand and helped Patricia to her feet. Laurence stood up, too.

“I can’t find Ernesto at all,” Patricia said. “I rescued someone else from that other universe, once. But Ernesto’s just … gone.”

“He’s already lost to us,” Carmen said. “Like so many others, today.”

“How bad is it?” Patricia said, clearly meaning the devastation elsewhere, in all the places Milton’s people had attacked in their coordinated assault.

“Bad,” Carmen said. “Quite bad. They were clever, these ones. But this doesn’t matter. It’s not about us, or all our rules against Aggrandizement mean nothing. This is just what happens. This is what always happens. This is happening everywhere. And it will happen again and again.” She picked up Isobel’s gun and looked at it, then tossed it away. “The hour is coming soon when we may have to act. These sort of things just bring it closer.”