All the Birds in the Sky

by Charlie Jane Anders

Let’s make a deal: You help me convince my parents I’m already spending plenty of time in nature, so they stop sending me frakking camping all the time. And I’ll give you twenty bucks.” “You want me to lie to your parents?” Patricia wasn’t sure if that was the sort of thing an honorable witch would do. “Yes,” he said. “I want you to lie to my parents. Thirty bucks, okay? That’s pretty much my entire supercomputer fund.” “Let me think about it,” Patricia said. This was a major ethical dilemma. Not just the lying, but also the part where she would be keeping Laurence from an important experience his parents wanted him to have. She couldn’t know what would happen. Maybe Laurence would invent a new windmill that would power whole cities, after observing the wings of dragonflies. She pictured Laurence years from now, accepting a Nobel Prize and saying he owed it all to the Great Outdoors Adventure Weekends. On the other hand, maybe Laurence would go on one of those weekends, fall into a waterfall, and drown, and it would be partly Patricia’s fault. Plus, she could use thirty bucks.