All the Birds in the Sky

Racheline had always been the mom of the apartment, being the master tenant and years older. But post-flood, Patricia had usurped her. Because Racheline couldn’t cope, even more than most people couldn’t cope, and Patricia had seemed to be made of coping. Some people just rise to a crisis, Deedee and Racheline had kept saying to each other in wonder. Thank goodness Patricia is here. Patricia had floated, effortless, and after a while they hadn’t even needed to ask for her to solve everything for them. They couldn’t believe this was the same girl who’d thrown hot bread at them.

After they were done singing, Deedee and her chorus hung around the café, accepting tips or presents. She found herself talking to an older gay man named Reginald, whose arms were covered with beautiful insect tattoos. “I suppose I identify with the Silver Swan, who waits to sing until it’s too late,” said Reginald.

“It’s never too late,” Deedee said. “Come on. We’re going to the next place, and I bet we’ll find you another swan there.”

“I should go home,” Reginald said. But then he paused halfway out the door, as if contemplating a return to an empty flat.

Patricia had done something weird, a few days before she had moved out. Deedee was washing her hands over and over, cursing into the steam cloud, and she’d looked up and seen Patricia’s face behind her in the slicked mirror. Patricia had stared, the way Deedee imagined that a lover would watch you after sex, with a kind of ownership. Or the way you would survey a pet that you had just gotten done domesticating. Something about Patricia’s look made Deedee’s scalp itch. “What are you—” Deedee had spun around, hands bright red, but Patricia had vanished.

* * *

THERE WERE SHORTAGES of HIV meds along with everything else, and normally Reginald would have been in a silent panic. But Patricia had done something, and now Reginald was cured. At least, that’s the word Patricia had used. “Cured.”

“You can’t tell anyone.” He’d woken up in the middle of the night to see her leaning over his bed. Two hands and one knee on the mattress, one foot on the ground. She wore a big black hoodie that only exposed a pointy white chin and a few strands of dark hair. “I have to leave town, maybe forever,” she said. “And I don’t want to leave you in the lurch.”

Patricia wouldn’t explain why she had to leave town, much less how she had “cured” him. She just did something elaborate and noninvasive, kneeling at the foot of his bed, and Reginald smelled burnt radish for a moment. “It’s complicated,” was all she would say, in a much older woman’s voice. Raspy. Bitter. “I’ve been called up to the front.” Reginald kept asking, the front of what? And then she was gone. Reginald had suspected the whole thing was a weird dream, but she’d left a long black hair on his floor and, yes, his viral load had tested at absolute zero afterward.

And now Reginald wasn’t sure what to say to anyone he might have sex with.

Deedee dragged Reginald to the Dovre Club and introduced him to Percival, who was some kind of architect or something, with tousled gray hair and a doughy face like a British movie star from the 1970s. He even had the houndstooth vest.

Percival was a “madrigal groupie,” who followed the groups around using a Caddy app and hung on every quaver. “My biggest fear about the apocalypse isn’t being eaten by cannibals — it’s the fact that in every other postapocalyptic movie you see someone with an acoustic guitar by the campfire,” said Percival, who had pale meaty hands with calluses on the sides of the fingers. “I can’t stand acoustic guitar music. I’d rather listen to dubthrash.”

“There’s no apocalypse,” Reginald snorted. “There’s just … a period of adjustment. People are being drama queens.” But even as he spoke, he had a vivid image of Patricia, looming over his bed at four in the morning, with an urgency in her hoarse voice that was indistinguishable from fear. Again, he wondered: The front of what?

* * *

EVERY STONE, EVERY leaf of ivy, every iridescent windowpane at Eltisley Hall rejected Diantha’s presence. The grass at the center of the Hex bristled at her. The chunky marble columns of the Greater Building drew themselves up, like magistrates taking umbrage. The narrow gates of the Lesser Building seemed to squint, to deny her entrance. The Chapel clenched granite and stained-glass fists, their knuckles spiked with gargoyles. Across the Hex, the big white slab of the Residential Wing turned opaque with mist. All six sides of the Hex puffed with hostility. Healers had built this place, centuries ago, and nobody does scorn like a pure Healer. Diantha hadn’t come back to Eltisley since she’d been allowed to graduate without distinction, and this was worse than she’d dreaded.