“Toby’s dead. So are half a dozen guards at that installation you decided to attack on your own initiative. I hope you can live with that. Diantha and Sameer are injured, but they’ll both live. It appears you somehow tapped into the increased magnetic field at the Polar region and unleashed a kind of EMP that fried not only everything electronic for a dozen miles but also everyone’s brains, including your own. You should not have been able to do that, and we’re not sure how you did.”

“There was a dog that wanted to bite me.” Her head was pounding, and she kept seeing weird shapes. Then something occurred to her: “Toby was wearing an Eltisley scarf. And we brought the airship, it had an insignia on the side.”

“Already dealt with. There won’t be any traces to link back to the school.” Kanot let out a snort from deep in the pit of his stomach. “Your life is going to be very different from here on out.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Not as sorry as you’re going to be.”

He looked like he was going to say something else—like, maybe offer to let her off the hook in exchange for her firstborn. But instead he just shrugged and walked away, leaving Patricia with a throbbing head and a sense of wrongs that could never be set right. She raised her head enough to see out one of the big portholes. They flew over the ocean, and the sun was falling, through clouds that were a heavy, ugly purple.

Chapter 23

23

THE PARROTS WERE eating cherry blossoms on top of a big tree on the crest of a steep hill, not far from Grace Cathedral—a half-dozen bright green birds with red splotches on their heads, just tearing the shit out of these white flowers. Petals scattered across the sidewalk and the grass as the birds squawked and worked their crooked beaks, while Laurence and Patricia watched from the steep bank of the parklet across the street.

San Francisco never stopped astonishing Laurence—wild raccoons and possums wandered the streets, especially at night, and their shiny fur and long tails looked just like stray cats, unless you looked twice. Skunks nested under people’s houses. These parrots were native to somewhere in South America where cherry trees never grew, but they’d developed a taste for cherry blossoms somehow. Most of the people Laurence knew spent every minute obsessing about what Computron Newsly was saying about them and their friends, or who was still getting funding in spite of the crunch. The only reason Laurence ever saw these urban twists of nature was because he hung out with Patricia. She saw a whole different city than he did.