There had been a bear in the laboratory. Patchy, small, inward-staring, even as it turned to the right to pace along the glass wall of its cage, and kept turning right and right again, for there was nowhere to go. She did not know what had happened to that bear, where it might have fled when the lab began to burn, how it would have survived in the desert. But the Strange Bird knew that this was a different species, a different kind of bear.
For this bear could fly, just like her, and although the Strange Bird saw him only from a distance, and wrong side up, she could not breathe in the moment for the miracle of him. The way the bear infernal was also the bear eternal, a kind of angel or something that was unexpected and wondrous yet terrible, too, and every one of her many senses became overloaded with the information generated by that hovering form so far away across the skyline. Had the beast landed beside her, it would have stood four or five stories tall. Yet it dove and swooped like a swift or swallow catching insects, to what purpose she could not tell.
She did not care that the bear might be death; instead, her spirits soared because the bear flew, and suddenly she could imagine being powerful in her flight, so powerful that others might fear her.
The sight filled the Old Man with terror, and he loosened his grip on her and did not quite regain it, yet still she waited, for it was not enough.
As if the Old Man was ashamed of his fear, he scowled and stared down at her, that eye like a hole in his face through which she ought to be able to see the sky.
“That is Mord, the great bear. Company made. Company bought. Just Mord. No other name. He is seen here and sees you every day here, Isadora. Our curse, but distant. Not coming here now. He may be mighty, but he is also ordinary, no less ordinary than that abandoned sofa over there.” Pointing to something long and soft with wooden legs that had been burned by fire and submerged in scalded brick.
But as he said it, the Old Man shivered and winced and the Strange Bird, even swinging upside down and tied up and held rough in his grip, did not believe him. The Old Man did not understand Mord, any more than he understood the Strange Bird, and that is why he cursed at his Isadora now and gave quicker glances from side to side, even as he must inexorably, almost against his will, check the horizon to make sure Mord stayed distant.
But the real danger was much closer.
An opening yawned from the ground above the Strange Bird’s head. An arm erupted from the ground behind the Old Man, a hand latched onto the Old Man’s ankle, yanked, and he fell, the Strange Bird sent sprawling and squawking. The ties at her talons loosened, there, in the dirt, finally right-side up, and she clawed them off, rolling to free her wings.
A trapdoor, hidden as the Old Man’s tunnel entrance had been hidden.
A little man in dusty clothes and a face like a bat pulled the Old Man toward him, into his lair, as the Old Man cried out and grasped for the Strange Bird’s wing, caught hold, so that as the Old Man was receding into the trap, he was taking the Strange Bird with him.
In a panic, she slashed his hand with her talons, pecked with the point of her beak. The Old Man shrieked but held on and as she pulled her wing away and raked him again, she could feel something in her give, something in the bone not meant to bend in that way.
She fluttered away, hopping, to the middle of the courtyard, turned back on one foot, still tangled in the rope, beak finally unbound, to see the Old Man half-in, half-out of the trapdoor, clawing the ground to stop himself from being pulled in. The little man with the bat face could not be seen but must be tugging at him from the other end.
“Isadora!” the Old Man pleaded. “Isadora!”
He reached out toward her as if they had been friends instead of captor and captive. As if she could somehow rescue him.
There came a great tug from beneath the earth, and the Old Man vanished into the trapdoor maw up to his chest. The look on his face, beard filthy with dust, was no different than that of a frog half-swallowed by a snake. Panic, perhaps, but also a kind of stoic resignation.
“Isadora,” the Old Man said. “Isadora. Isadora.”
Even though they both knew he was already dead.
Hurt wing held at an angle, the Strange Bird tested it with a flap, aware that any creature watching might jump out and grab her, and took to the air, the wing inflamed, painful.
From the air, the Old Man looked as if he had never been anything but a head, a neck, and a chest jutting out of the ground. Waving one hand, staring up at her as she climbed, shouting the name that was not her name. In shock. In horror. While the bat-faced man worked on him from below.
Soon, the Old Man was just a dot below, inconsequential. Human beings had such strange ideas about gratitude. When it should be given. When it should be withheld. Should she be grateful for being imprisoned? What should she feel now? She sang out the question that was its own answer.
As she rose she could feel the name Isadora falling away from her, and she was just and always and forever the Strange Bird, who had no need of a name, not in the way human beings liked to name things.
The Bat-Faced Man
The compass within chided her, told her she must head southeast, leave the city, but as she tried to change direction, circled back around over the courtyard, the pain flared up in her wing and she realized she was injured much worse than she had thought.
The wing failed, would only stay extended, rigid, as it throbbed, and she could not control altitude or maintain speed. Below still lay the courtyard and to all sides unfamiliar territory, and no cover. Flapping her good wing, she made for a clump of trees on the far side of the courtyard. Struggling, drifting like a dead leaf, struggling again, the Strange Bird managed a rough landing—cried out as the injured wing smashed into a knoll, then swung herself right-side up with a tight grip on a blackened branch, hopped without pause into the midst of the dense thicket of branches at the center of the copse.
There, overheated and in stinging agony, the Strange Bird held out her hurt wing and surveyed the courtyard. She could see neither the Old Man nor the man with the bat face who had attacked them. Not even the trapdoor. But she did not trust the silence, the lack of motion. If she could not fly, then she must at some point hop and flap across open ground to other shelter, to a place she could recover and heal. A place with water. A cool, dark place.
What if the bat-faced man still lay within his trap, waiting? What if there were others?
She clung to the branch until dusk, too afraid to move. She would be patient. She would make sure.
* * *
When the moon came out, two large lizards came out with it from opposite sides of the courtyard, looked around with caution, then raced across the debris to the middle, chasing each other, as if the moon had driven them mad. But no predator pounced and when their giddiness had passed, they with a kind of flaunt separated again and headed back to sanctuary.
The one that scuttled past the Strange Bird’s sanctuary suffered no harm. The other passed the edge of the trapdoor—and the little man rose up from hiding and, with an agility that shocked her, plucked the lizard from the ground in mid-run and stuffed it greedily in his mouth, and then knelt there, in the moonlight, looking around almost proudly, crunching down as the tail wriggled frantic in the corner of his mouth.
After that, the Strange Bird remained alert for a long time, but she must have fallen asleep for a time, for she woke with a start to find the moon was still out.
The top half of the Old Man’s body now lay crumpled and discarded against the far wall, his one dead eye staring up at the heavens.
She heard a rustle, looked down, almost lost her grip on the branch.
The bat-faced man stood beneath her tree. His face resembled a gray mask, glistening dark in the moonlight. Perhaps it was just a trick of perspective, the way the light hit his face, but the bat-faced man seemed to be silently crying. This creature that had killed the Old Man. This creature that had gobbled up the lizard.
He stared up at her with huge, sc
ared-looking eyes, expression fixed by the immobility of a face with great flared nostrils and cheekbones cut at alien angles, all of it framed and seeded with gossamer soft fur. She could not stop looking at him, trapped there, even though he was grotesque.
Perhaps he didn’t see her. Perhaps he would return to his underground coffin.
But with a hiss, the bat-faced man leapt onto the trunk of the largest dead tree. With great lunges and deft little motions to navigate around branches, the bat-faced man scuttled up toward her, and she was racing, injured wing on fire, to the next tree and the next, struggling to reach a place where his weight would not support him and where she might safely drop to the wall below, and then out into the city.
She felt the bat-faced man behind her, heard his hissing breath, made it to the wall, fluttered heavy over it and out into the darkness.
While still he sought her in the trees above.
* * *
The Strange Bird muted her feather color to a dusty gray and used the shelter of a drainage ditch to keep low. She could form no impression of the city because the city would not give itself up to her. It was too vast and jumbled and she was too distracted monitoring the heat signatures of life all around her to know what else to avoid. Sight helped her less than seeing the blueprint of the rubble, the hints of water vapor that led her to this oily puddle, to that collection of dew in the bottom of a ripped-open tin can.
Toward dawn, she was still lost in the city, did not think she would ever be free. It was too blank and yet so full of danger that she trembled from the effort of being alert every moment.
She had come to the corner of a bridge collapsed into the dirt and the remains of some failed fortifications, a low wall against which slumped the leathery remains of skeletons and rusted gun parts. Which way should she go next?
The man with the bat face appeared on the bridge, staring down at her. Impassive. Curious. As if she were a lizard to be gobbled up. Or worse.
He could sense her despite the camouflage, would always be able to sense her.
She panicked, took to the air, despite her wing, shrieked in distress as fire burned through the join between wing and body, but rose awkward anyway, doing more damage spinning some small way up into the air.
The bat-faced man scuttled toward her, making his hissing cry, his features writhing and repulsive.
The Strange Bird spread the wing full in a desperate attempt to glide, but fell back down to Earth.
Then he was upon her and there was no safe place, in the air or on the earth. There was no escape. Her talons were not enough.
The Observatory
Worlds spun above the Strange Bird and stars—stars so close, across purpling heavens, streaked with the light of far-distant galaxies and the dark intensity of nebulae, streaked with the gray light of dawn that crept in through cracks in the dome. To the side, the burnt umber rust of the great telescope that had once taken center stage, now tossed aside by a long-lost cataclysm.
A blue fox head glowed from the slanted side wall. Though it must be dead, a trophy, the eyes stared at her and the mouth moved to yip, the sound drowned by the voices of the others in that place, and so for a time, to gather herself, to not be afraid, she ignored all but that ceiling and the fox head, which was luminous even against the iridescent paint used to create the cosmos beyond.
For the Strange Bird lay pinned and splayed out on a stone table beneath that horizon limitless that she would come to know later was the city’s abandoned observatory.
In the backdrop, the blue fox. In the foreground, two faces staring down at her, framed by the cosmos, one batlike and familiar, the other a woman the Strange Bird did not know.
“What have you brought me, Charlie X?” the woman asked.
“Thing. Creature. Beast. Bird.”
Charlie X always sounded like a nervous man in the process of swallowing a lizard, kept his sentences simple so he could be understood. The Strange Bird would become used to him in time. She would understand that the set mask of his features hid a complexity of emotion unconstrained by logic or reason or even, at times, an instinct for self-preservation. That he could be kind, cruel, heroic, and cowardly all in the same instant, and in the instant after that forget all he had done. Perhaps it was best he forgot so easily, given he ate so much he should not eat. He called the woman the Magician.
“Kill them all. Kill them all,” the Strange Bird called out. “Kill them kill them.” She had only words from the lab with which to attack, to defend. She knew it was not enough.
Charlie X flinched, but the Magician did not move, nor did the calm expression on her face change by any degree, no matter how small.
“A made bird,” the Magician said. “A sad, unlucky lab bird that never existed before. That somehow escaped and knows nothing of the world. I can tell.”
“Valuable,” Charlie X said, nostrils flexing. Charlie X’s throat bulged and sobbed with something living housed within.
Around the edges of the stone table now crept a row of faces, the faces of children, until they surrounded every side, pushed up against the Magician, who paid them no mind.
“Soon, we’ll find what you’re made of, and then we’ll have a show, won’t we?”
The children all nodded at once and stared with shining eyes at the Strange Bird.
Something crumpled inside of her. If only she had not encountered the storm. If only she had placated the Old Man and not been brought to the city. If only the Old Man had not been ambushed. If only he had not reached out and caught her wing …
The Magician had pulled a spider out of a pocket and set it to crawl across the Strange Bird. A long-legged crystalline spider, that seemed to glide across her body, to fall into it and then come out again, while she itched, felt intruders within, slipping through locked doors. She could not stop that, either. Her security had been made by Sanji, and others who had a formal training that this eccentric, patchwork magic did not recognize or respect. This thing testing her, crawling over her, was wild, half-feral in intent. It scorned subroutines and extra senses. It was not the spider, she realized, but the will behind it—the Magician. For it was the Magician crawling through her brain while she lay there, defenseless. The Magician who would know everything.
The Strange Bird shut down as much as she could, was scrambling to lock more doors as the spider’s probes approached, inexorable. But there were only so many doors.
More of her was leaving even as the spider encroached, like lifeboats leaving a sinking ship, and the ship itself dissolving, something Sanji must have meant to happen. Dark wings becoming swarm. The bits that floated from her as she flew; now they floated with more vigor, more intensity, more, more, more. Perhaps before the Magician could kill her, most of her would be gone anyway, motes that would float up through the cracks in the dome and out into the city.
“Be brave,” Sanji said to her, a ghost, a firing neuron, a nothing. “And sometimes being brave means doing nothing, means waiting.”
Still the children leered and Charlie X and the Magician peered down from an ever greater height and the spider delicate and deadly continued in its task.
The Third Dream
In the third dream, the Strange Bird is a glowing red apple on a stainless steel laboratory table. Sanji stares down at her in a lab coat and gloves and puts a finger to her mouth.
“Shhh—this is a secret between us. You cannot tell anyone.”
But whom would she tell?
Then Sanji uses a scalpel to cut the apple into fourths. Seeds fall out of the Strange Bird’s core and spin to the edge of the table and then over onto the floor.
As she labors, Sanji says, “You know, we met because of birds, because we both worked with birds. Not this work—I never wanted to work with birds in this way. But I had no choice, and neither did she. You should know that.” The woman who used to work in the lab, the woman Sanji loved.
The Strange Bird feels no pain, no horror, at the incisions, feels instead a kind
of relief, as if some tension inside has been resolved. Seeds should be on the outside. Seeds should fall away from the body and be replenished.
“There,” Sanji says. “It’s done. All you need to do now is go home. Find her because I cannot.”
With that the four pieces of apple take wing and each of them is her and all of them are the Strange Bird. They come together above the table and form a compass.
“The compass is the heart of you. The compass is at the heart of you. I’ve hidden it deep, and whatever else you give up, you must never give this up.”
Except it is not Sanji’s voice that says these last words before the dream ends, but some stranger’s.
Except half the apple lies somewhere hidden.
Then there is laughter, the laughter of two people sharing something clever or true, and the sound is melodic and cheerful yet so very far away.
The Transformation
The Old Man had told the Strange Bird he had lied to her because she was so beautiful. He had lied to her about the prison and his place in it. He had lied to her about the story he typed out on his typewriter.
“I was the jailer in this place. When the world fell apart, when there was no more rule of law, we went into lockdown. I left the prisoners in their cells. They would have killed me. Until they had starved to death. Then I survived by killing the other guards as they tried to kill me—and that is how I lost my eye and how I came to be burned. Until I was the only one here, talking to myself. Because that is the world we live in now, so I was only doing what I had to do, what anyone would do. Isadora.”
What the Old Man had tried to capture, to remember, on his blank typed pages were the lives of the prisoners and the guards, to remember as many details as he could, so that somehow they might not be as dead. Which is how the Strange Bird knew the Old Man was not rational, one of the many reasons, but also how she knew that he could experience guilt, could understand regret, could want absolution.
In the lab, so many of the scientists had said “forgive me” or “I am so sorry” before doing something irrevocable to the animals in their cages. Because they felt they had the right. Because the situation was extreme and the world was dying. So they had gone on doing the same things that had destroyed the world, to save it. Even a Strange Bird perched on a palm tree on an artificial island with a moat full of hungry crocodiles below could understand the problem with that logic.