Blightborn (10 page)

Damnit
.

Gwennie can see the raised balcony and the persecuting glares of those truly elite members of the flotilla: the praetor, the peregrine, the architect, and yes, Merelda McAvoy.
La Mer.

Eldon Planck grabs her wrist and twists.

“You little bitch,” he says. “Throwing a drink in the face of my wife—just because you get on your knees for this fool—” He lifts his chin to indicate Balastair, but before he can say anything else, Balastair throws a wonky punch into his chops. Eldon staggers back, looking shocked more than anything else. Erasmus cackles.

“Be nice to her!” Balastair roars, and by now they’ve
truly
drawn the attention of everyone. Even the trumpeting
oompah
s of the strange brass instrument have stopped short.

“Your end comes soon,” Eldon hisses, leaning in and waggling a finger. “I’ve almost completed my Pegasus. And the Initiative will begin soon, and with it you’ll be marginalized into
a corner where you can drink and sob and stick it to your earth girl all the livelong day.”

Balastair grabs Gwennie’s arm and begins pulling her away, hurrying toward the exit. As they flee, she hears Eldon calling after them: “Your end is soon, Balastair Harrington!
Soon!
”

THIRSTY STALKS

THE THREE BOYS
hunker down toward the bracer roots of the tall stalks, Rigo lying flat on his belly, the other two hunched over and shoulder to shoulder. Down this far it’s hard for the corn to seek out their injuries, though the stalks creak and strain, leaves licking the air, looking for a taste of their blood.

They’ve been hiding here in the corn for the better part of the night.

And now the sun’s coming up. Fingers of light push away the night’s stubborn darkness. As the light finds them, they can finally see the extent of their injures.

The side of Lane’s head is scraped up—red and raw with flecks of rust from the barrel stuck in the skin. Cael apologizes in advance and starts picking metal out. Lane winces, sucking in air.

Cael’s own chin-cut has crusted over; every time he talks or frowns, it tugs at the scab, and he feels it run fresh and wet.

But it’s Rigo they’re worried about.

The jaw trap did a number on his ankle.

“Maybe it looks worse than it is,” Cael says. “Like with Lane.” But they all know that can’t be true. The ankle is bloody—the skin and what little meat the ankle has to offer is torn up. His socks are soaked through. Blood has pooled sticky in his boot.

Sometimes when Rigo moves, Cael thinks he spies bone.

“I can’t really feel it,” Rigo says. “That’s a good thing, right?”

Cael and Lane look at each other. Together they lie.

“A real good thing,” Lane says.

“That’s how you know you’re healing,” Cael adds.

“That guy was crazy,” Rigo says, his face still a pot of ash. “I thought he was Empyrean, you know?”

“Shitfire,” Cael says, “I don’t think he was Empyrean. I think he was a . . . crazy coot hobo who had some made-up ideas in his head.”

“He seemed to know Pop,” Lane says.

“Maybe he did. Maybe he worked for Pop at Martha’s Bend with the other tramps.”

“That doesn’t explain why he was so cranked up about it.”

“Damn, he sure was. Something about his son—he said his son was named Arthur but then . . . Rigo, you said in the crib . . .”

“That wasn’t a baby in there. That was a dead dog.”

“Godsdamn,” Lane says.

“Gods
damn
is right.” Cael shakes his head. “I hope that fire did a number on him, and he’s not out here hunting us. Because we gotta get back on those tracks and keep moving.”

Lane begins rolling a cigarette, tucking a little bindle of ditchweed into the paper and licking the edge to seal it. “Those
tracks are gonna be the first place he comes looking, Cael. If he finds us—”

“He finds us, I put a dang bullet in his heart and in his head, and we move on. We owe him that much anyway since he tried to, oh, you know,
kill us
and all.” Cael can hear the angry bravado coming out of his mouth. The others are nodding along as if they believe it. But right now he doesn’t want to think about killing anybody. The hobo’s scream as his face caught fire is still echoing around in the dark of his mind. Goose pimples rise up on his arms along with the hairs on his neck. Not the good kind, the kind where Gwennie is running her fingers along his arm or back, but the kind where you get a sense of how death dogs your every step out here.

“You think I can walk?” Rigo asks.

“We’ll help you along,” Cael says.

Lane cocks an eyebrow. “Though if I’d have known we’d be helping to carry you, I woulda said to lose some weight before we went on this little vacation. Even after a week of being hungry all the time, you’re still shaped like an overstuffed tamale.”

“Hey, shut up! I’ve got big bones.”

“Sure, and I’m not tall—there’s just two of me stacked one on top of the other.” Lane strikes a match, lights the cigarette, and as Cael gives him a look, he shrugs and whispers, “Just trying to make everything feel like usual.” Then he says to Rigo, “C’mon, tamale.”

They both help Rigo stand.

Rigo cries out, and they hush him.

Then, underneath Rigo’s belly, they see something:

It’s a visidex.

“What the—” Lane asks. “That what I think it is?”

Rigo looks down. “Oh, Jeezum, yeah. Eben had it, and I took it. When we ran, I stuffed it down my pants, and with my leg and all I kinda stopped thinking about it.”

“We have a visidex,” Cael says, laughing. “A real one, a working one. We can use this. I’m sure of it.”

“How do you think he got it?” Rigo asks. “The hobo.”

“Same way he got the lighter,” Lane says, blowing smoke. “He killed someone. Took it from them. You see that knife? He’s a killer; that’s what he does.”

Cael takes the visidex, sees the screen light up as soon as he brushes it, almost as if he woke it up. On the screen is Pop’s face. And Mom’s. And an issued warrant for their arrest or assassination. A few seconds later the image flips, and he sees
his
face. And his friends’. Nobody’s calling for their assassination. Not yet anyway.

Pop, Mom, please be okay
.

He sighs. “We better hit the tracks.” He puts the visidex in his bag for now. “C’mon. Tracks gotta be just north of here.”

They begin moving through the stalks.

The corn leaves swipe at them. Thirsty, desperate, mindless.

Cael bats them away as they continue forward, but he can’t help feeling as if there are eyes, watching. Eyes in the corn. The eyes
of
the corn, maybe, though that’s about as absurd a thought as a fellow can have out here.

His chest itches, and he reaches up and scratches it.

Probably just a rash,
he thinks.

THE MANY WORDS FOR DRUNK

THEY GOT BACK TO
Harrington’s house hours ago, Gwennie helping him across the skybridge and desperately praying that her vertigo wouldn’t kick in and send them both over the railing to their deaths—but somehow they’d made it inside. And it hadn’t been a half minute after he’d gone to put Erasmus back in the bird’s cage that he returned and unlocked a little cabinet, its doors marked by the phases of the moon. He’d withdrawn a fat-bellied, lean-necked bottle.

He’d uncorked it with his teeth.
Ploonk
.

On the label, a flower made see-through—like a blue specter against a black background. “Ghost Orchid,” Balastair had said at the time, adding, “the finest orchid brandy,” and then he’d begun to gulp and guzzle and laugh and mumble and even cry a little as the night deepened and morning crept closer. He’d tried to get her to drink some, but she’d still been feeling as if her guts were tied up in nervous, too-tight knots. For a long time he just
rambled: about Cleo, about how once he was doing good work. Even as a young man, he’d said. A teenager under the tutelage of his mother. Doing good work with a girl he loved and now . . .

Sometimes he made sense, other times, not so much.

A little while ago, someone had come pounding at the door, and he’d screamed at them to
go away, go away,
almost pitching the half-empty brandy bottle at the wall before Gwennie caught his wrist and took the bottle.

And now the two of them sit. She on the floor against the red chaise on which he is sprawled.

“This must all be quite interesting for you,” he slurs. “What you must think of me. Of
us
. There we are, these enormous city-ships above your tiny little heads. You Heartlanders thinking we’ve got it all together. But we don’t—
we don’t
! Incestuous, backbiting, treacherous people, we Empyrean, we wind-dancers, we
keepers of the seventh heaven
, blessed are we, the true children of the Lord and Lady—”

“Wait, is that true? You think you’re their children?” she asks.
Huh.
She didn’t know that. The story as she knows it from the catechism is that the Lord and Lady had a child who ran away from their manse in the sky, and that child went to the earth to hide from his parents. Once there he was tempted by an old devil—often depicted as a rag-swaddled hobo—who arose from the land beneath the land, a plane called King Hell, and that temptation lured the son into wooing one of the children of the earth: a woman named Mary Mags. Having his own child of the earth forced the son of the Lord and the Lady to remain—and he took the name Jeezum Crow, a name the earthers gave him. The name of a fool. A jester.

But if the Empyrean think they’re the direct descendants of the Lord and Lady, well . . . “That’s pretty cocky,” she says.

Balastair laughs. “It is!
It really is
. We think we’re as good as them. Better, even. We have the power of machines and genes; we command the wind and fly high above the earth and the sea. We feel that puts us on the same plane as the gods. Or above them.”

“Sounds pretty stupid to me.”

His face twists up like a wrung-out rag. “We’ve screwed you, you know. The whole Heartland. And we just keep screwing you deeper into the dirt. We never saw you as equals, not really, but we had a partnership of sorts. We taught you. We let you grow what you wanted. We gave you resources to learn and ways for you to study here on our flotillas, and then one day . . . the Praetorial Council up and decided, Hell with you dogs and cats down below. All we needed from you was corn. Corn for our fuel. Corn for our bio-plastics.
Pssh
, once upon a time we used your corn for food—syrups and cornmeal and blah blah blah, but then it became too poisonous for us, and the corn became aware. Not long after that came the Blight, and now all the Heartland is Hiram’s Golden Prolific. Our gift to ourselves. Our curse upon you.” He thumps his head back on the chaise once, twice, a third time, moaning and rolling his shoulders and neck.

“You’re drunk,” she says. And smiles.

“I am not merely
drunk
,” he proclaims, and reaches out to hold her hand. “I am toggled, zozzled, canned, corked, tanked, owled, ossified,
pleasantly embalmed
.” He slaps his cheeks hard, too hard, eyes bugging as he laughs. “I’m dancing with Old
Scratch, I’m out on the roof, I’m seeing two moons, I’m three sails to the wind, I’m falling through air, I’m a flock of falling stars, I’m . . .”

He sighs. His head leans back one more time and stays that way.

Ten seconds later he’s snoring.

“Oooookay,” Gwennie says.

She drums her hands on her knees.

What to do, what to do? She has a bed, and it’s somewhere else. And the elevator probably won’t take her anyway. Which means she’s here for what little is left of the night—she can already see the fireglow of sunrise creeping in through the teardrop-shaped windows of Harrington’s home.

First things first: time to get this awful dress off.

As soon as the dress is off, she misses having it on. It’s not that she likes it. Oh no, not at all—at least, that’s what she tells herself. But then she has to step back into her old clothing—clothes she brought with her, clothes that now smell of hay and horse and horse piss.