“We all have our own ways of trying to go home,” said Sumi, and disappeared from the window’s frame, heading off to whatever she’d been doing before Eleanor disturbed her. Eleanor shot Nancy a quick, apologetic look, and then she too was gone, shutting the door behind herself. Nancy was, quite abruptly, alone.
She stayed where she was for a count of ten, enjoying the stillness. When she had been in the Halls of the Dead, she had sometimes been expected to hold her position for days at a time, blending in with the rest of the living statuary. Serving girls who were less skilled at stillness had come through with sponges soaked in pomegranate juice and sugar, pressing them to the lips of the unmoving. Nancy had learned to let the juice trickle down her throat without swallowing, taking it in passively, like a stone takes in the moonlight. It had taken her months, years even, to become perfectly motionless, but she had done it: oh, yes, she had done it, and the Lady of Shadows had proclaimed her beautiful beyond measure, little mortal girl who saw no need to be quick, or hot, or restless.
But this world was made for quick, hot, restless things; not like the quiet Halls of the Dead. With a sigh, Nancy abandoned her stillness and turned to open her suitcase. Then she froze again, this time out of shock and dismay. Her clothing—the diaphanous gowns and gauzy black shirts she had packed with such care—was gone, replaced by a welter of fabrics as colorful as the things strewn on Sumi’s side of the room. There was an envelope on top of the pile. With shaking fingers, Nancy picked it up and opened it.
Nancy—
We’re sorry to play such a mean trick on you, sweetheart, but you didn’t leave us much of a choice. You’re going to boarding school to get better, not to keep wallowing in what your kidnappers did to you. We want our real daughter back. These clothes were your favorites before you disappeared. You used to be our little rainbow! Do you remember that?
You’ve forgotten so much.
We love you. Your father and I, we love you more than anything, and we believe you can come back to us. Please forgive us for packing you a more suitable wardrobe, and know that we only did it because we want the best for you. We want you back.
Have a wonderful time at school, and we’ll be waiting for you when you’re ready to come home to stay.
The letter was signed in her mother’s looping, unsteady hand. Nancy barely saw it. Her eyes filled with hot, hateful tears, and her hands were shaking, fingers cramping until they had crumpled the paper into an unreadable labyrinth of creases and folds. She sank to the floor, sitting with her knees bent to her chest and her eyes fixed on the open suitcase. How could she wear any of those things? Those were daylight colors, meant for people who moved in the sun, who were hot, and fast, and unwelcome in the Halls of the Dead.
“What are you doing?” The voice belonged to Sumi.
Nancy didn’t turn. Her body was already betraying her by moving without her consent. The least she could do was refuse to move it voluntarily.
“It looks like you’re sitting on the floor and crying, which everyone knows is dangerous, dangerous, don’t-do-that dangerous; it makes it look like you’re not holding it together, and you might shake apart altogether,” said Sumi. She leaned close, so close that Nancy felt one of the other girl’s pigtails brush her shoulder. “Why are you crying, ghostie girl? Did someone walk across your grave?”
“I never died, I just went to serve the Lord of the Dead for a while, that’s all, and I was going to stay forever, until he said I had to come back here long enough to be sure. Well, I was sure before I ever left, and I don’t know why my door isn’t here.” The tears clinging to her cheeks were too hot. They felt like they were scalding her. Nancy allowed herself to move, reaching up and wiping them viciously away. “I’m crying because I’m angry, and I’m sad, and I want to go home.”
“Stupid girl,” said Sumi. She placed a sympathetic hand atop Nancy’s head before smacking her—lightly, but still a hit—and leaping up onto her bed, crouching next to the open suitcase. “You don’t mean home where your parents are, do you? Home to school and class and boys and blather, no, no, no, not for you anymore, all those things are for other people, people who aren’t as special as you are. You mean the home where the man who bleached your hair lives. Or doesn’t live, since you’re a ghostie girl. A stupid ghostie girl. You can’t go back. You have to know that by now.”
Nancy raised her head and frowned at Sumi. “Why? Before I went through that doorway, I knew there was no such thing as a portal to another world. Now I know that if you open the right door at the right time, you might finally find a place where you belong. Why does that mean I can’t go back? Maybe I’m just not finished being sure.”
The Lord of the Dead wouldn’t have lied to her, he wouldn’t. He loved her.
He did.
“Because hope is a knife that can cut through the foundations of the world,” said Sumi. Her voice was suddenly crystalline and clear, with none of her prior whimsy. She looked at Nancy with calm, steady eyes. “Hope hurts. That’s what you need to learn, and fast, if you don’t want it to cut you open from the inside out. Hope is bad. Hope means you keep on holding to things that won’t ever be so again, and so you bleed an inch at a time until there’s nothing left. Ely-Eleanor is always saying ‘don’t use this word’ and ‘don’t use that word,’ but she never bans the ones that are really bad. She never bans hope.”
“I just want to go home,” whispered Nancy.
“Silly ghost. That’s all any of us want. That’s why we’re here,” said Sumi. She turned to Nancy’s suitcase and began poking through the clothes. “These are pretty. Too small for me. Why do you have to be so narrow? I can’t steal things that won’t fit, that would be silly, and I’m not getting any smaller here. No one ever does in this world. High Logic is no fun at all.”
“I hate them,” said Nancy. “Take them all. Cut them up and make streamers for your tree, I don’t care, just get them away from me.”
“Because they’re the wrong colors, right? Somebody else’s rainbow.” Sumi bounced off the bed, slamming the suitcase shut and hauling it after her. “Get up, come on. We’re going visiting.”
“What?” Nancy looked after Sumi, bewildered and beaten down. “I’m sorry. I’ve just met you, and I really don’t want to go anywhere with you.”
“Then it’s a good thing I don’t care, isn’t it?” Sumi beamed for a moment, bright as the hated, hated sun, and then she was gone, trotting out the door with Nancy’s suitcase and all of Nancy’s clothes.
Nancy didn’t want those clothes, and for one tempting moment, she considered staying where she was. Then she sighed, and stood, and followed. She had little enough to cling to in this world. And she was eventually going to need clean underpants.
NEBULA AWARD WINNER
BEST NOVEL
EXCERPT FROM
ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY
CHARLIE JANE ANDERS
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Locus and Crawford awards and was on Time magazine’s list of the ten best novels of 2016. Her Tor.com story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award and appears in a new short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Wired Magazine, Slate, Tin House, Conjunctions, Boston Review, Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, ZYZZYVA, and several anthologies. She was a founding editor of io9, a site about science fiction, science, and futurism, and she organizes the monthly Writers with Drinks reading series. Her first novel, Choir Boy, won a Lambda Literary Award.
When Patricia was six years old, she found a wounded bird. The sparrow thrashed on top of a pile of wet red leaves in the crook of two roots, waving its crushed wing. Crying, in a pitch almost too high for Patricia to hear. She looked into the sparrow’s eye, enveloped by a dark stripe, and she saw its fear. Not just fear, but also misery—as if this bird knew it would die soon. Patricia still didn’t
understand how the life could just go out of someone’s body forever, but she could tell this bird was fighting against death with everything it had.
Patricia vowed with all her heart to do everything in her power to save this bird. This was what led to Patricia being asked a question with no good answer, which marked her for life.
She scooped up the sparrow with a dry leaf, very gently, and laid it in her red bucket. Rays of the afternoon sun came at the bucket horizontally, bathing the bird in red light so it looked radioactive. The bird was still whipping around, trying to fly with one wing.
“It’s okay,” Patricia told the bird. “I’ve got you. It’s okay.”
Patricia had seen creatures in distress before. Her big sister, Roberta, liked to collect wild animals and play with them. Roberta put frogs into a rusty Cuisinart that their mom had tossed out, and stuck mice into her homemade rocket launcher, to see how far she could shoot them. But this was the first time Patricia looked at a living creature in pain and really saw it, and every time she looked into the bird’s eye she swore harder that this bird was under her protection.
“What’s going on?” Roberta asked Patricia, smashing through the branches nearby.
Both girls were pale, with dark brown hair that grew super-straight no matter what you did and nearly button noses. But Patricia was a wild, grubby girl, with a round face, green eyes, and perpetual grass stains on her torn overalls. She was already turning into the girl the other girls wouldn’t sit with, because she was too hyper, made nonsense jokes, and wept when anybody’s balloon (not just her own) got popped. Roberta, meanwhile, had brown eyes, a pointy chin, and absolutely perfect posture when she sat without fidgeting in a grown-up chair and a clean white dress. With both girls, their parents had hoped for a boy and picked out a name in advance. Upon each daughter’s arrival, they’d just stuck an a on the end of the name they already had.
“I found a wounded bird,” Patricia said. “It can’t fly, its wing is ruined.”
“I bet I can make it fly,” Roberta said, and Patricia knew she was talking about her rocket launcher. “Bring it here. I’ll make it fly real good.”
“No!” Patricia’s eyes flooded and she felt short of breath. “You can’t! You can’t!” And then she was running, careening, with the red bucket in one hand. She could hear her sister behind her, smashing branches. She ran faster, back to the house.
Their house had been a spice shop a hundred years ago, and it still smelled of cinnamon and turmeric and saffron and garlic and a little sweat. The perfect hardwood floors had been walked on by visitors from India and China and everywhere, bringing everything spicy in the world. If Patricia closed her eyes and breathed deeply, she could imagine the people unloading wooden foil-lined crates stamped with names of cities like Marrakesh and Bombay. Her parents had read a magazine article about renovating Colonial trade houses and had snapped up this building, and now they were constantly yelling at Patricia not to run indoors or scratch any of the perfect oak furnishings, until their foreheads showed veins. Patricia’s parents were the sort of people who could be in a good mood and angry at almost the same time.
Patricia paused in a small clearing of maples near the back door. “It’s okay,” she told the bird. “I’ll take you home. There’s an old birdcage, in the attic. I know where to find it. It’s a nice cage, it has a perch and a swing. I’ll put you in there, I’ll tell my parents. If anything happens to you, I will hold my breath until I faint. I’ll keep you safe. I promise.”
“No,” the bird said. “Please! Don’t lock me up. I would prefer you just kill me now.”
“But,” Patricia said, more startled that the bird was refusing her protection than that he was speaking to her. “I can keep you safe. I can bring you bugs or seeds or whatever.”
“Captivity is worse than death for a bird like me,” the sparrow said. “Listen. You can hear me talking. Right? That means you’re special. Like a witch! Or something. And that means you have a duty to do the right thing. Please.”
“Oh.” This was all a lot for Patricia to take in. She sat down on a particularly large and grumpy tree root, with thick bark that felt a little damp and sort of like sawtooth rocks. She could hear Roberta beating the bushes and the ground with a big Y-shaped stick, over in the next clearing, and she worried about what would happen if Roberta heard them talking. “But,” Patricia said, quieter so that Roberta would not hear. “But your wing is hurt, right, and I need to take care of you. You’re stuck.”
“Well.” The bird seemed to think about this for a moment. “You don’t know how to heal a broken wing, do you?” He flapped his bad wing. He’d looked just sort of gray-brown at first, but up close she could see brilliant red and yellow streaks along his wings, with a milk-white belly and a dark, slightly barbed beak.
“No. I don’t know anything. I’m sorry!”
“Okay. So you could just put me up in a tree and hope for the best, but I’ll probably get eaten or starve to death.” His head bobbed. “Or . . . I mean. There is one thing.”
“What?” Patricia looked at her knees, through the thready holes in her denim overalls, and thought her kneecaps looked like weird eggs. “What?” She looked over at the sparrow in the bucket, who was in turn studying her with one eye, as if trying to decide whether to trust her.
“Well,” the bird chirped. “I mean, you could take me to the Parliament of Birds. They can fix a wing, no problem. And if you’re going to be a witch, then you should meet them anyway. They’re the smartest birds around. Most of them are over five years old. They always meet at the most majestic tree in the forest.”
“I’m older than that,” Patricia said. “I’m almost seven, in four months. Or five.” She heard Roberta getting closer, so she snatched up the bucket and took off running, deeper into the woods.
The sparrow, whose name was Dirrpidirrpiwheepalong, or Dirrp for short, tried to give Patricia directions to the Parliament of Birds as best he could, but he couldn’t see where he was going from inside the bucket. And his descriptions of the landmarks to watch for made no sense to Patricia. The whole thing reminded her of one of the Cooperation exercises at school, which she was hopeless at ever since her only friend, Kathy, moved away. At last, Patricia perched Dirrp on her finger, like Snow White, and he bounced onto her shoulder.
The sun went down. The forest was so thick, Patricia could barely see the stars or the moon, and she tumbled a few times, scraping her hands and her knees and getting dirt all over her new overalls. Dirrp clung to the shoulder strap of her overalls so hard, his talons pinched her and almost broke her skin. He was less and less sure where they were going, although he was pretty sure the majestic Tree was near some kind of stream or maybe a field. He definitely thought it was a very thick tree, set apart from other trees, and if you looked the right way the two big branches of the Parliamentary Tree fanned like wings. Also, he could tell the direction pretty easily by the position of the sun. If the sun had still been out.
“We’re lost in the woods,” Patricia said with a shiver. “I’m probably going to be eaten by a bear.”
“I don’t think there are bears in this forest,” Dirrp said. “And if one attacks us, you could try talking to it.”
“So I can talk to all animals now?” Patricia could see this coming in useful, like if she could convince Mary Fenchurch’s poodle to bite her the next time Mary was mean to Patricia. Or if the next nanny her parents hired owned a pet.
“I don’t know,” Dirrp said. “Nobody ever explains anything to me.”
Patricia decided there was nothing to do but climb the nearest tree and see if she could see anything from it. Like a road. Or a house. Or some landmark that Dirrp might recognize.
It was much colder on top of the big old oak that Patricia managed to jungle-gym her way up. The wind soaked into her as if it were water instead of just air. Dirrp covered his face with his one good wing and had to be coaxed to look around. “Oh, okay,” he quavered, “let me see if I can make
sense of this landscape. This is not really what you call a bird’s-eye view. A real bird’s-eye view would be much, much higher than this. This is a squirrel’s-eye view, at best.”
Dirrp jumped off and scampered around the treetop, until he spotted what he thought might be one of the signpost trees leading to the Parliamentary Tree. “We’re not too far.” He sounded perkier already. “But we should hurry. They don’t always meet all night, unless they’re debating a tricky measure. Or having Question Time. But you’d better hope it’s not Question Time.”
“What’s Question Time?”
“You don’t want to know,” Dirrp said.
Patricia was finding it much harder to get down from the treetop than it was to get up, which seemed unfair. She kept almost losing her grip, and the drop was nearly a dozen feet.
“Hey, it’s a bird!” a voice said from the darkness just as Patricia reached the ground. “Come here, bird. I only want to bite you.”
“Oh no,” Dirrp said.
“I promise I won’t play with you too much,” the voice said. “It’ll be fun. You’ll see!”
“Who is that?” Patricia asked.
“Tommington,” Dirrp said. “He’s a cat. He lives in a house with people, but he comes into the forest and kills a lot of my friends. The Parliament is always debating what to do about him.”
“Oh,” Patricia said. “I’m not scared of a little kitty.”
Tommington jumped, pushing off a big log, and landed on Patricia’s back, like a missile with fur. And sharp claws. Patricia screeched and nearly fell on her face. “Get off me!” she said.
“Give me the bird!” Tommington said.
The white-bellied black cat weighed almost as much as Patricia. He bared his teeth and hissed in Patricia’s ear as he scratched at her.
Patricia did the only thing that came to mind: She clamped one hand over poor Dirrp, who was hanging on for dear life, and threw her head forward and down until she was bent double and her free hand was almost touching her toes. The cat went flying off her back, haranguing as he fell.