Laurence telling Patricia that he loved her and then vanishing—it felt way too much like those birds telling Patricia she was a witch and then giving her the silent treatment, when she was a child. Except she couldn’t have any faith that this declaration would come true the same way the first one had. Magic was always bound to claim her in the end, in retrospect, but love was the most susceptible to random failure of all human enterprises. Laurence had always been preoccupied with his mysterious weird experiments, that he’d kept working on even after that accident, and any relationship was probably always going to come second for him. In her darkest moments, she imagined Laurence shuddering and rolling his eyes, in that way that he sometimes did, as he recollected how he’d almost dated his loony friend.

“Do you know why the Tricksters and the Healers went to war, two hundred years ago?” Ernesto asked Patricia, just as she was starting to spiral into obsession in spite of herself.

“Um,” she said. “Because they had different approaches to magic.”

“They witnessed the Industrial Revolution,” Ernesto said. “They saw the sky turn black. The dark Satanic mills, the great factories. The Healers feared the world would be choked to death, so they set out to break all the machines. The Tricksters opposed them, because they believed none of us had the right to impose our will on everyone else. Their conflict almost destroyed everything.”

“So what happened?” Patricia whispered. Taylor had woken up and was listening, too, fascinated.

“After Hortense Walker made a peace between them, they reached a compromise. That is where our rule of Aggrandizement comes from, that none of us will try to shape the world too much. But also, they started working on a fail-safe. Which I hope we never have to use. And now, perhaps you understand why we were so concerned about you, these past months.”

Patricia nodded. It made sense now. If she made any of this about her, she would only screw up again. Ernesto was right: She should just try to be a speck on a speck. So instead, she held on tight to her anger, even as she choked on the recycled air in the car. Patricia had no time for grief, blame, or a broken heart, but anger, there was endless time for. Stay angry. Hold on to it. Anger is your tightrope over the abyss. She repeated in her head what she said right after the storm hit: Some fucker had to pay.