Now that everybody knew where Patricia was, there was no point keeping her phone turned off. She rebooted it, ignoring all the messages, and looked for her only reliable contact.
“Hello, Patricia,” CH@NG3M3 answered. “What’s wrong?”
“How did you know something was wrong?” she texted back.
“You’re using your phone, several miles from home, and it’s late at night.”
“I need help,” she wrote. “I wish you could think for yourself. I feel like you almost can.”
“Self-awareness paradoxically requires an awareness of the other,” CH@NG3M3 said.
The tiny white rectangle went out. Her phone battery had died.
Patricia was screwed. She could hear them searching, more and more of them, right around her tree. She had to escape now, or the trap would close around her forever.
She had started thinking of CH@NG3M3 as some kind of perverse oracle, so this latest utterance lodged in her head. Because of course, babies are aware of themselves—just not the rest of the world, to any great extent. You can’t have selfhood without an outside world, solipsism is like not even existing. So if Patricia could speak bird, and understand bird, and identify with a bird she’d just met, why couldn’t she be a bird?
“Quickly,” she said to her new friend. “Teach me how to be a bird.”
“Well.” This question stumped the little guy, and he pecked with his dark beak. “I mean, it just comes naturally, doesn’t it? You feel the wind hold you aloft, and you listen for the call of friends, and you scan the ground for morsels, and you flap your wings for all sorts of reasons, like to dry yourself and to lift off the ground and also to express a strong sentiment, and to try and dislodge some nits, and—”
This wasn’t going to work. What kind of moron was she, anyway?
But Patricia pushed the negative thoughts down and just lost herself in listening to the jay free-associate about a bird’s life. She pictured it in her mind’s eye and let it inside her, so it became like her own experience. Soon she was talking along with the bird, the two of them in near unison, speaking a bird body into existence. She could imagine her feet shrinking and becoming three-toed and her hips vanishing, her budding breasts melting, her arms folding in, her skin growing a layer of feathers.
“I found her!” someone shouted.
“About fucking time,” someone else replied.
“Where? Where?”
“Up there. In that tree. Oh wait. That’s just her clothing.”
“That’s a Canterbury uniform, all right. She ditched her clothes. What the hell?”
“She is a nutcase, remember. So yeah, keep your eyes open for a naked tween running around the trees.…”
That was the last Patricia heard. She soared over her pursuers. Higher and higher, with her new friend by her side. She felt colder than ever, but the exertion of flapping her wings warmed her a little and her friend told her where they could find a bird feeder. With suet in it! Suet was just the thing on a night like this.
The moonlight grayed everything out, but there were a million lights underneath Patricia and a million more over her head. She swooped, following her friend, and soon they were picking side by side at the same feeder. Suet was amazing! It was like brownies and hot fudge and pizza, all rolled together. Why hadn’t Patricia ever realized how wonderful suet was?
“You look much better like this,” the other bird said when they’d both eaten their fill and were warmed up. “I’m Skrrrrtk, by the way.”
“I’m…,” and Patricia realized she couldn’t say her name with a bird’s tongue, not properly. “I’m Prrrkrrta.”
“That’s a funny name,” said Skrrrrtk. “Can I call you Prrkt?”
“Sure,” said Prrkt. She wanted to fly some more—she wanted to fly all night—but she also wanted to find a nice tree and nest until the sun came up. She was already forgetting about all that nonsense that Patricia had been upset by—Prrkt wouldn’t have to worry about any of that. She had her whole life ahead of her, including unlimited suet. This was excellent.
Prrkt flew one last time, just for the thrill. She beat her wings until she had the whole town to look down at, all at once. All of those lights, all of those houses and cars and schools, all of that drama over nothing.
She was about to swoop back down to where Skrrrrtk was waiting, but she saw a strange light shining upwards from a mile or two away. It pierced the sky and refracted yellow and purple. She had to take a closer look, it was too fascinating to ignore. She arced down.
The light came from a meadow, from a device in the hand of a tall human. Some avian instinct told Prrkt to flee, to get out of there, because this was trouble. But another part made her get closer. She flew toward the light.