Blightborn (17 page)

THE WIDE-OPEN NOWHERE

GWENNIE DANGLES
.

She feels like a ladybug on the underside of a cat-maran, clinging there with the whole world far beneath her.

Green corn and blue sky and dry, dark earth. Little cold wisps of clouds sliding underneath her feet. The air feels thin. Panic is thick. She thinks again about Cael’s dream. About falling through the sky, toward the corn below . . .

Don’t think about falling right now
.

Doesn’t help that she almost lost it climbing out here. The wind hit her in the face, a cold and uncaring
smack
, and though she reached out and grabbed hold of a loose pipe as if it were the rung of an upside-down ladder, it jarred her just enough that she didn’t ease outside so much as her body slipped through the hatch, and suddenly she was hanging there by one arm—an arm that already felt as if it were coming out of its socket, burning like a fistful of matches right at the joint.

She was able to get her other hand around a bundle of cables and pull herself up, using the crook of her left arm to brace herself. After that she took the harness straps and loose reins and strapped herself to the underside of the flotilla, allowing her arms some freedom.

Time for a break. She’s already tired.
And I haven’t done anything yet.
Then,
No,
she tells herself,
don’t do that. You just climbed out of a hatch and nearly fell to your death, but instead you saved yourself.

It’s early still. Time for breakfast.

She wrestles the bag to her front and dips her hand in, comes back out with the only fruit in the bunch she recognizes: an apple.

A round, luscious apple. Big, too—so big it barely nestles in the curve of her palm. To be safe, she uses two hands to eat it.

The
pop
of the skin beneath her teeth. The sweet tang of the apple’s flesh on her tongue. Juices run sloppy in a pair of lines down her chin.

That’s a good apple.

No, that’s the
best
damn apple she’s ever had.

The orchards at home are all dead, blackened things now—but even when some of the trees were still healthy, back when she was a kid, the apples never tasted like this. Those apples were small and knotty, more sour than sweet. But this,
this
is like eating honey. She can’t help but smile.

But her bliss is flagging. She has to remember the purpose here.

As she eats, she gazes all around her—the underside of the flotilla is nothing like the topside of the city. Down here it’s dirty, rusty, some parts dripping dark water, other parts pissing little jets of water. To her it almost looks like someone dumped
a crate of old tools and pipes and wires; arranged them on a big board; and fixed them there with screws, wire, and nails before flipping it upside down.

And the farther you look, the more you can see that the flotilla is not just one single entity but rather a fractured one, like a dinner plate broken in ten places—each fragment, each shard, distinct from the other, connected only by cables. Some hang slack, others taut, depending on how the flotilla moves; even now she can see some pieces pushing together, other pieces pulling apart. When they drift away, the cables pop and hold them. When they drift together, the cables stiffen—they don’t act like any wires or cables she’s ever seen.

What’s easy to see are the engines.

They circumnavigate the whole flotilla—a massive ring of hover-panels and turbines strung together. She can’t tell how far away they are. Gwennie’s close to the epicenter of the flotilla down here, which means those engines are miles away on the other side of this floating island. Which means—

Which means this isn’t going to work.

To get to the Engine Layer—where she will supposedly find her father—is a journey too long and too dangerous. Her plan of slowly and steadily making her way along the underside of the Ormond Stirling Saranyu, looping the reins and stabilizing the harness a few feet at a time, will take her forever. When night creeps up, it’ll swallow her whole—she won’t be able to see what she’s doing, and the air will grow cold. Maybe even freezing. She’s already away from the sun and feels the chill crawling along her skin; once it slithers into her bones, it’s all over.

Which means that she needs a new plan.

She thinks,
I’ll just crawl back inside. I’ll go to the Elevator Man and have him take me . . . somewhere, anywhere
. But then what? They’ll catch her eventually. The peregrine lives up there. It’s his roost, and she gets the distinct feeling he can see everything.

But down here she feels . . . free. Separate. As if this is hers and nobody else’s. This ugly, upside-down place suddenly feels more like home than any part of the flotilla has yet.

Think. Look. Pretend you have Cael’s eagle eye
.

Hell, she
does
have Cael’s eagle eye. He saw a lot, but he missed some things, too. And who was the one to see them when he did? Gwennie.

She squints and scans the underside of the flotilla. She could maybe—
no, that won’t work
. Or maybe it would work if—
too dangerous, too dangerous. Wait. What’s that?

Ducts. Everywhere. She spies a vent a ways off, the vent tilted outward toward the sky. No hissing steam. No dripping water. It’s about a hundred yards away—which is a long way given how she’s going to have to get there, but it’s a helluva lot closer than those engines are. If she can crawl up in there and use the duct system, she can go anywhere without having to rely on the elevators. Nobody will be looking for her there.

She begins to undo one strap of her harness.

And as she does, she hears the voice coming down from the hatch just behind her. “Gwennie? Gwendolyn?”

It’s Balastair.

Down in the stables he finds a few harnesses gone and the hatch open. Whistling wind keening through. At first he thinks,
She jumped
.
She couldn’t take it anymore, and she threw open the hatch to end it
.

But that doesn’t make sense, does it? She wouldn’t steal tack—or his visidex—and then jump to her demise.

Which means . . .

No. Could it be?

Could she have really climbed out there?

He feels his knees buckle just thinking about it. He’s not used to the sensation—vertigo is not a common problem for those who live on the flotillas or on outlying vessels. But thinking about Gwennie alone, with nothing separating her from the wide-open nowhere, is . . .

He shudders.

He kneels by the open hatch.

Balastair cups his hands around his mouth and calls to her: “Gwennie? Gwendolyn?”

His words, snatched by the wind. Taken to her? Or thrown to the void? He doesn’t know.

Erasmus reiterates the call: “Gwen-do-lyn! Gwen-do-lyn!”

“I can help you,” Balastair calls. “You don’t have to do this alone. I’ll help you find your family. I’m already . . .”
I’m already trying.
He’s been working to find out where her family has been located all this time. He also thinks to tell her that he’s already a young man in trouble, a man whose mistakes may yet hang him, but he’s not sure it matters. Does she hear him? Is she even alive? She may not have jumped, but who’s to say she didn’t fall?
Clinging to the underside of the flotilla like a flea on a cat’s belly is not the safest of plans.

He waits for a while, and then he gets up to go.

Words on the wind reach her.

Balastair’s words.

I can help you.

You don’t have to do this alone
.

She wants to trust him.

But she can’t.

He knew. All this time, he
knew
. Those papers of his showed the locations of her father, her mother, her brother—and he kept that from her.

Gwennie wants to trust him, but she can’t. What’s to say he won’t snatch her up out of the hatch and drop her right in the peregrine’s lap? Or worse, march her out to the end of a gangplank himself? The decision is made.

She stays. And slowly begins to cross the space between her and the vent—one agonizing foot at a time.

THE ATTACK

PIECES OF THE SCOWBARGE
rain down on him, and Cael rolls to his side and covers his head with his arms. Massive metal shrapnel crashes down against a stack of drums. The drums tumble and roll, a hell-born clamor. Crates smash. The bulk of the barge catapults to the earth soon after, the air growing hot as fire belches from the wreckage.

Hands grab under Cael’s armpits and drag him backward: back up onto the loading bay platform, onto the concrete, and into the depot. He looks up, sees Lane’s face there, gazing out in shock at the flaming hunk of barge sitting in the middle of the storage yard.

“Lord and Lady,” Cael says, coughing into the crook of his arm. Lane helps him stand. “I don’t . . . I don’t understand—”

“I think we’re under attack,” Lane says.

“The Empyrean?”

But Lane doesn’t have time to tell him what he already
knows—that the Empyrean wouldn’t attack its own—because out in the yard, a rusty canister hits the ground and rolls a few feet. Followed by another. A third clatters to the concrete behind them, tossed through the door-gate from which they’d originally entered.

The canisters click and
hiss
, one after the other.

Red smoke—blood colored like what might belch from King Hell’s sulfurous chimneys—begins geysering out.

Behind them, Peterson drops to the ground and hides his head. Eggbaum and Swiggins both hightail it through a door marked
DEPOT EMPLOYEES ONLY
. The door slams. Cael and Lane hurry over and try to open it—but the door won’t budge.

“Locked,” Cael says.

Lane utters a frustrated grunt. “We gotta get out of here.”

The red smoke begins to fill the depot. Drifting toward the rafters. Visibility goes south as the smoke swallows the doors, the crates, even Peterson kneeling over there as if he’s praying for rain. It’s like standing in the middle of a piss-blizzard.

The smoke burns Cael’s eyes—he takes a breath of it, and suddenly he starts coughing as if he just inhaled a lungful of sawdust. Lane’s feeling it, too, covering his mouth and squinting.

Then Cael hears the sounds of boots falling heavy on cement.

At the front and the back.

Man-sized shapes begin to emerge through whorls of red smoke—Cael’s eyes are watering, and already it’s hard to make out who it is, but he sees one, then another, then a half-dozen coming in from both sides, striding as if they already own the place.

Dark cloaks part the smoke.

It’s then Cael thinks:
These aren’t men.

They’re monsters
.

They have long, lean faces—impossibly inhuman skulls, muzzles like wolves, eyes like black pits. Long braids that are less like hair and more like manes. Hooves at the ends of their legs. Claws at the end of their arms.

He hears Lane gasp next to him. He sees it, too.

The monsters begin to close in.

Lane turns toward Cael and stares with smoke-stung eyes.

Lane whispers, “Run.”

Cael needs no further encouragement.

He runs.

“Gods
damnit
,” Boyland growls, looking through his long, brass spyglass toward the depot. “Who are these sons-a-bitches?”

Boyland had them set down the yacht in the corn. Eben wanted them just to charge right in and “step on those little mice,” and it was then that Wanda saw the hate flashing like fire in his eyes and decided that this man was not entirely together—or as her mother used to say,
His quilt is comin’ apart at the squares
.

Wanda felt a kind of impatience, too—the thought of Cael being
right there
, only a hundred yards off in this Empyrean bunker in the middle of nowhere—made her feel giggly and sad and mad and twitchy all in equal measure.

Together they stood and watched as a scowbarge came and settled in low over the corn, south of the depot, drifting in like a brick thrown in the slow motion of a strange dream, and Boyland started saying how the plan was for them to wait
until they came out, but Eben argued that the boys were likely planning on hitching a ride on that barge and—

That’s when the scowbarge exploded.

Something streaked through the air like a rogue firework on Saint Independent’s Day and struck the side of the barge. There came a big burst of fire from the other side, and the whole thing went crashing down, a flaming skeleton of metal and melting plastic.

Then—

From the far side of the depot came a series of ships borne on a cloud of dust: a fleet of cat-marans and pinnace-racers moving fast, and behind them a bigger, slower trawler that Wanda’s never seen before—its bow carved into the long face and lean neck of a wolf, its sides lined with sweeping steel blades that catch the bright white of the noon-day sun.

“Raiders,” Eben says.

Boyland curses.

One of the monsters swings for Cael—a swipe of claws swishing through the air, cleaving the red smoke and pulling it with them. Cael ducks and pumps a knee up into the creature’s gut—but what he finds there isn’t the soft paunch of a human stomach but a hard and dull plate.
A thick hide?
he thinks.
Or armor?