Just as Patricia was rallying to pull her butt out of the dirt and go home, someone sat on the low stone wall and blocked her view of the street. A man. She almost hid, but decided not to bother.
It was Laurence, and he was crying into a napkin with a picture of a woman inside a cocktail glass. Patricia almost walked away — Laurence would never even know she’d been there — until her Healer instinct kicked in.
Patricia made as much noise as possible coming up behind Laurence, so as not to sneak up on him. But he still jumped off the wall so hard, he fell and skinned one knee. Patricia helped him up and braced him, then steered him back to the wall where he’d been sitting.
“Oh hey,” Laurence said, making sense of her features. “It’s you.” This was the first time she’d seen the grown-up Laurence act anything but cocky. Hunched over, flushed, he looked more like the Laurence she remembered.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. I just went for drinks with my coworkers, and I’m kind of a maudlin drunk.” He paused. “But also … I feel like I’m screwing up everything. I’m losing my girlfriend. Serafina. You met her, she’s amazing. And meanwhile, I have all these people expecting me to work miracles, and I can only accomplish so much with asinine stunts like the one you witnessed. My boss — Milton — is counting on me, my supersmart team is counting on me, but most of all, I made a promise to myself. I always thought that if I just had the chance, I could change everything — and it turns out that maybe, I’m just not good enough. So I resort to trying to trick people into thinking I’m a ‘wunderkind,’ to make up for the fact that I can’t actually figure out anything. Jesus.”
Patricia climbed up the slope and over the wall Laurence was sitting on. She had a flashback of the teenaged Laurence telling her that the power to make everyone see an illusory version of yourself would royally suck.
Laurence scooted over, to give Patricia more room on his chunk of wall. “And I was just thinking about my parents. I looked down on them for so long, for being failures. I was kind of horrible to them. And I was just thinking that maybe one day I would understand why they chose to fail, but it would be too late. Or a realization I’d rather not have.”
“My life plan involves never understanding my parents,” Patricia said. “That’s like the cornerstone. You met them, you saw what they were like. I’m dedicated to not being the person they wanted to make me.”
“Yes.” Laurence laughed: a queasy drunk laugh, but still a laugh. “You know … no matter what you do, people are going to expect you to be someone you’re not. But if you’re clever and lucky and work your butt off, then you get to be surrounded by people who expect you to be the person you wish you were.”
“Huh. I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
“How about you?” Laurence stood up and got oriented, only swaying a tad. “What are you doing out on your own at this hour on a school night?”
“Working.” Patricia stood up too. She was going to get Laurence home in one piece and then crash. “I work long hours.”
“You work alone?” Laurence said.
They straggled down the hill toward the Haight, where there would be taxis cruising for kids leaving the latest Seoul relief fund-raiser.
“I do everything alone,” Patricia said. “I went to this small, claustrophobic school called Eltisley Maze. So I’m still kind of enjoying going solo in a big city where nobody knows who I am. You know? I feel like that’s what being a grown-up ought to be like.”
She got them a cab, which dropped Laurence off first. Laurence shoved a twenty at Patricia on his way out the car door and tripped over his seat belt. She watched him attack his front steps with his shins and felt something like protectiveness. She made the cab wait until he got inside his house.
THE WHOLE DRIVE to Sacramento, the other witches found ways to lecture Patricia about Aggrandizement. She sat in the back of Kawashima’s Lexus, watching the highway whip past, as Kawashima hectored her about making herself too important and using her power too recklessly. Dorothea chimed in every now and then with one of her jarring untruths, like, “You threw pebbles at my window, but they turned into grenades in midair.” (Dorothea was an old Catholic lady with white-streaked black hair, chunky glasses, and long calico skirts who never, ever told the truth, except maybe in Confessional.)
By the time they arrived, Patricia felt like a monster, and she kept picturing Toby’s frostbitten body, lying in the airship.
The others were doing important witch business in Sacramento, so Patricia had time to wander around in the scorching midday sun and read on her phone about the French blight, the chaos on the Korean peninsula, the new, deadlier Atlantic superstorms. All things she could do nothing about. Then her peripheral vision landed on a homeless man on the sidewalk. He was staring at her, empty Big Gulp cup in one hand. She turned and looked him over: his torn muddy coat and soiled track pants, his disease and malnourishment. His cardboard sign was so tattered and faded, nobody could decipher it. He was covered with a layer of grime, but also cobwebs and even moss. Normally, if she was out on her own, at night in the city, she would heal someone in this condition without a second thought. But Kawashima and Dorothea were nearby, and she never knew what they would consider Aggrandizement. They never gave her clear-cut guidelines. She edged a little closer, struggling with herself. This man needed her help, it couldn’t be wrong to take the initiative. Could it? She looked into his narrow dark eyes, and she could see his damaged pride, and she reached out—
She realized she was looking at the bony, ravaged face of her junior-high-school guidance counselor, Mr. Rose. She was boiling in her own skin. She nearly threw up.
“Don’t worry,” Mr. Rose croaked. “I will not try to kill you. I couldn’t if I tried. You’ve grown much too powerful, and the years have ruined me. But you must know, I was doing the right thing. I saw a vision of things to come. Patricia, you will be at the center of so much pain. You will betray and you will destroy. If you had even any conscience, you would end your own life right now.”
For so long, she’d imagined this moment. When she was out until dawn night after night, she’d been rehearsing for this. Facing this bloody sadist, showing him she could not be terrorized. But she hadn’t expected him to be so helpless, literally showing his belly. She couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. She didn’t take in what he was saying at first, about how she should kill herself — and then she had to spit on the pavement.
“Nice try,” she said. But her arms and face burned like the worst poison ivy. “Everything you ever said to me was a lie,” she told the huddled old man on the sidewalk. “That’s all you do.”
“I had assumed a witch with your power levels could tell if I was lying. Please. Please listen.” He looked up, and Patricia was startled to see tears all over his filthy cheeks. “I killed so many people, but I still couldn’t stand to look upon what you and your friends are going to bring about. Have they told you about the Unraveling yet?”
“The what?” Patricia pulled back. “Forget it. I’m not listening to you anymore.”
“You have to listen! Patricia Delfine, I know you better than anyone.” She backed up until she was up against the parking meters, and he rose from his cardboard mat, waving a bandaged finger. He breathed foulness at her. “I spied on you for months when you were a child. I parked outside your house. I listened to all your conversations, night and day. I know everything. I even know about the Tree!”
“What tree?” Patricia swallowed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”