Blightborn (11 page)

She thinks of the dress, and all those pretty people, and how ugly she found them. And then she thinks of her fellow Heartlander—

Merelda.

Merelda
.

“La Mer,” she says. “It means ‘the sea.’ ” Bleh. It means, “my foot in your boot-hole,” you dumb, twaddling girl.

The peregrine called her his “house-mistress.” She hopes that just means she’s there to wash dishes and change nappies and occasionally hang on his arm like a piece of pretty jewelry.

But Gwennie suspects it means something . . . more.

What that must be like for her.

How much Merelda must’ve hated the Heartland.

As her mind wanders, Gwennie’s body wanders, too. Out of the room. Down a hallway with lights—frosted glass chevrons—that glow only as she approaches and dim as she passes. Past bronze swans with wings that look like knife blades, past lamps that resemble the skyscraper buildings here on the flotilla, past a small marble side table piled high with ornate books (
The Catechism of Manners
,
The Epistles of the Lord to His Lady
,
The Illuminated Artisan
).

First she stops by Erasmus’s room—and there it’s hard not to hate the Empyrean extravagance, for here a little bird gets his own room. Most Heartland children end up stuffed together in a single room, two to a bed.

She goes to the gilded cage, lifts the sheet.

“Hello!” Erasmus says.

“Hi, bird,” she answers.

She waggles a digit, and the grackle hops beneath it, letting her fingertip pet the top of his wine-dark head.

“Gwennie!” Erasmus says.

She laughs and shushes the bird, then withdraws her finger and re-covers the cage.

Then she leaves, goes up steps that curve and swoop like a corn sickle. Her toes plunge into carpets so plush she feels as if she’d sink deep and be gone if she were to pause for but a
moment. She traipses down a hallway, the walls of which are papered with designs reminiscent of bird feathers—the dark purple of spilled wine fringed with gold leaf. Gwennie lets her fingertips drift along the walls, and she finds that the wallpaper is textured: bumps and ridges, the eyes of the feathers each a slight depression.

For just a moment she understands the allure; she sees what Merelda sees. A laughable vision plays out where she seduces Balastair Harrington, and he takes her in and makes her his own, and this becomes as much her place as his. There is something about him, isn’t there?

Truth is, Gwennie couldn’t seduce the leaves off a tree in autumn (not that she’s ever seen the leaves fall off a tree for any reason other than it was dying). It’s not her way. She takes what she wants. Like she took Cael. She wanted him. He wanted her. That kind of relationship is easy because there you both are, reaching for each other with selfish hands and hungry mouths. It’s as if you fall
into
each other.

Boyland Barnes Jr., well, he’s a whole other wasp’s nest. Thuggish brute. What was it Cael always called him? Buckethead. And yet Boyland really liked her; no two ways about that. He stood up for her. Tried to protect some semblance of her honor. He was different to her when they were alone those times on his yacht. Cael was like jumping fire, like hungry lightning—all hands and knees and wicked grins, and she was the same. But while Boyland had all the grace and aplomb of a bludgeoning club, when they lay together, he was slow and gentle and—if she had to guess, she’d say he was nervous.

Bah! Why think about any of this? What does it matter?

I’m never going to see either one of them again
.

She has more pressing concerns.

Like finding her family and making sure they’re all right.

At the end of the hall, a red door. Open just slightly—an invitation. She nudges it open. Finds a bedroom inside: a bed with a dark-wood footboard and headboard carved with reliefs of moths and butterflies in symmetry. The room is a mess. Clothes on the floor. An empty bottle of something by the nightstand. The rest of the house is immaculate, but this room is dim and messy.

The bedroom is as big as the whole downstairs of her house back in the Heartland. Larger even.

Beyond, she sees a small antechamber. She ducks inside. A dangling bulb with a pull chain graces her hand—she pulls.
Click-click
.

A desk against the wall. Corkboards to the left and right. Pinned there are charts of spiraling helixes and symbols she doesn’t understand. Against the far wall is a map—a map she thinks at first must be something out of some dream or fantasy but a map, she soon realizes, that is of the world beneath them.

A world that goes well beyond the Heartland.

She feels herself leaning in. Staring. Gaping.

The Heartland. A massive stretch of space in the heart of a singular landmass, the domain marked with symbols of corn and auto-trains and little icons of men in straw hats tilling soil.

But beyond it . . .

To the west, a line of mountains with many names: the Workman’s Spine, the Crowsblood Mountains, the Black Peaks.
Beyond that, a broken and disparate coastline called, aptly, the Shattered Coast, and beyond it the Sea of Angels. To the east, a thin margin of land before the sea: the Moon Coast, the Atlas Ocean. To the south, a morass of dark rivers and lakes with another series of names: Bleakmarsh, the Braided Glades, and along a jutting peninsula are the River Glades. And finally, to the north, a big, arching phrase in bold, ornate text:
The Frozen Nowhere
.

“Oh gods,” she says, gawking at the map.

It’s as if the world has just grown beneath her feet—a dizzying sensation, as if the world is too big, too strange. She knew something had to be beyond the Heartland, but everything she heard was just stories: “Oh, that’s where the Maize Witch keeps her monsters,” or “Beyond the Heartland is a wall, and past the wall is a wasteland of barren rock,” or “a sea so salted you can walk across it.”

Something on the desk goes
bleep
.

A visidex, behind a cover of gold silk and surrounded by scattered papers and book pages.

She flips it.

The screen brightens in her hand.

She doesn’t understand what she’s looking at. A series of boxes connected with lines—boxes with little images and symbols inside them. She touches one, and it drags beneath her finger; the other boxes turn to circles and jostle out of the way. When she withdraws her finger, they snap back like elastic bands.

It bleeps again.

A message appears at the top:

Peregrine:
You made quite the show.

A window pops up beneath it. A blinking, swirling whirlpool beckoning her to—what? Respond?

She doesn’t know how. And is afraid to.

Another message appears with a chime:

Peregrine:
I hope the girl isn’t rubbing off on you
.

A few seconds later another message:

Peregrine:
Though, rub her all you like; I won’t judge. Just keep her controlled, Harrington, or the hell that heaps upon your head will be a thousand times as heavy as what it is now
.

The message winks out of existence.

She lets out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding.

Then her eyes track something else on the desk.

A single name on a piece of paper buried beneath other papers:

Shawcatch
.

She sets the visidex down, reaches for the paper.

The paper is marked
WARD ORDER
.

It seems to be some kind of legal document that outlines the parameters of Balastair’s relationship with her. It’s as if she’s some kind of . . . burden. Property, of sorts.

Then she reads at the bottom:

The mother shall clean homes on Helicon Hill; the father shall work in the Engine Layer; the son will be found suitable placement in a home seeking an adoptive child.

The fire in her belly is stoked with an iron poker.

They’re talking about her family.

Balastair knows where they are, and he didn’t tell me.

And to think, she was growing fond of him, wondering if maybe . . .

No use thinking about it. These people are all the same. They’re not gods. They’re monsters.

She snatches up the visidex.

It’s time to find her family.

NOURISHMENT OF ANGELS

THE PAIN IN RIGO’S LEG
comes and goes—it rises up out of numbness like a monster out of dark, still water. When it breaks the surface it bites hard, sending a twisting braid of misery through his whole body before once more settling back down in the shadows. Then comes the pins and needles. Then comes nothing.

That’s been going on since last night.

They’d helped him hobble along before Cael had the idea to use Lane’s little knife to cut another stalk free for him to use as a crutch. The corn had thrashed and shuddered as it was cut, like an animal in pain. They’d got it up under Rigo’s armpit and it worked—for maybe ten minutes. But then the stalk bowed and eventually splintered.

So they’d gotten another two stalks and robbed themselves of their bootlaces, bounding together all three stalks.

They’d swaddled the top in rags cut from the hems of their shirts and pants, and that’s what they shoved up under his arm.

It’s been working for him.

Now Rigo feels as if he’s going to melt, as if he belongs with the slurry back at that river. He’s dirty. And hot. Not hot from the outside but hot from the inside. His mouth is as dry as a sun-baked hardtack biscuit: all crumbs and flour. Worse, they’re out of water. No rain’s come this way for a long time, so there’s no chance to milk the corn roots of their stored-up moisture.

Lane and Cael are lagging behind him, not because he’s somehow faster than they are but because they’re still fiddling with that visidex, trying to figure out how to use it. He hears
bing
s and
boop
s and other chimes and alarms, and sometimes Cael curses or Lane hoots in what might be triumph, but Rigo doesn’t much care right now.

Really, he just wants to lie down.

Ahead, the corn shudders.

As if something’s moving through the stalks. Toward the tracks.

Rigo mutters, “Fellas.”

He hears his own voice, and it’s quiet and dry like a little lizard fart, and he tries to say something again, but they’re back there, all consumed by the glowing screen passed from hand to hand.

Whatever is in the corn, it’s coming fast.

Rigo stops limping along.

He sees what’s coming.

Warm piss goes down his leg.

It’s the hobo.

Eben Henry steps onto the tracks. Mouth screwed up into a mean grin. That knife of his, the makeshift blade Cael was talking about, glints in the noon-peak sun, and he spins it in his hand.

“Cael,” Rigo says. “Lane.
Guys, please
—”

But they’re too busy; they don’t hear him.

Eben presses a dirty finger to his chapped lips. “Shhh.”

Rigo conjures a yell from deep within his middle, and Cael and Lane come running and see who waits for them only fifty feet ahead on the tracks—

“What is it?” Cael asks.

“Him,” Rigo says, pointing, a low whine rising in the back of his throat. But it’s then he realizes:

Nobody’s there.

“He, he, he was just there,” Rigo says.

“Who?” Lane asks, pitching his cigarette into the corn.

“The hobo. Eben.”

Cael looks forward, panicked. He looks back at Rigo and then at Lane. They share some silent understanding, and Lane presses the back of his hand to Rigo’s head. He pulls it away as if he touched a hot stove.

“You’re on fire,” Lane says, voice quiet.

“I . . . think I pissed myself,” Rigo says. He pats his thighs, but his hands come away dry. He shrugs. “Oh, maybe not.”

“You all right, Rigo?” Cael asks.

Lane stares and adds, “You look like King Hell, kid.”

“I just need to lie down for a while,” Rigo says, and as they start to protest and say something about being almost there,
Rigo feels the warm chair underneath him and lets his jerry-rig crutch fall away so he can fall into the chair’s embrace, but then there’s no chair at all, and the others are reaching for him, but it’s too late because his butt bone is slamming onto the hard wood of a railroad tie. More pain for the boiling-over pot of pain soup that his body is becoming. He leans back. Shoulders and head against the gravel between ties. “Ow.”

The other two quickly hunker down next to him, one of them putting the bag under his head, the other checking him for further injury. A wave of chills sweeps across him as if he just dunked his head in an ice-cold bath.

Cael says to Lane, “He doesn’t look good.”

“Doesn’t look good? He looks like a fell-deer who ran headfirst into a corn thresher.”

Rigo startles as the image of a Blighted Earl Poltroon falling into the thresher jaws replays in his head—the sound of his bones banging against the inside of the motorvator’s bin like so many corncobs.

Cael shushes Lane, and they both look at Rigo.