Blightborn (30 page)

Boyland fishes around, holds up the visidex. “I’m gonna call it in. Gonna call the proctor. The raiders are getting away, but if she brings her ketch-boats to us now, they’ll pick us up, and maybe we can catch up—”

Eben stands. Growls a hard, fast “No.” They come here, they’ll find out who he is. They’ll throw him in another dark hole somewhere—he can’t go back.
Won’t
go back.

“No other way,” Boyland says, throwing up his hands in a gesture of
That’s it, end of discussion
. But it isn’t the end of the discussion. Eben’s face feels hot under the fresh layer of cloth wrapped round his burned, weeping skin. The knife hangs suddenly heavy inside his coat. It occurs to him then: he’s going to have to kill again.

The girl will fight more than anyone would expect, but in the end she’ll meet the knife just the same.

The big boy will be hard. He’ll fight. He’ll hurt Eben because he’s large and fast and strong. He’s thick, too. That body is layered in muscle and fat. One stick of the knife won’t do.

But the boy, Mole. Eben doesn’t know. Something reminds him of what his own son might’ve been like. Maybe not in the
face but in the child’s demeanor. The kid doesn’t take any shit, and he gives a lot of it.

Eben thinks that’s the right attitude.

So he’s not sure about that one. Maybe Mole—if he survives the break in his arm and the bone poking through—gets to live.

The others, well.

To Eben’s surprise, Wanda speaks up. “No, we can’t call Agrasanto.” She seems suddenly panicked, too. Eben can hear it in her voice. She’s afraid of the Empyrean. Was that fear there before? He didn’t recognize it. Why now? What’s changed? “We do this ourselves. Somewhere along the way we’ll find a town. We’ll mend the sails. We have Annie pills for Mole. We know what direction the raiders are heading.”

“Unless they change direction,” Boyland says.

Eben feels in his coat. Hands tightening around the hilt of the blade.

“They can’t hide forever,” Wanda says. “We’re not the Empyrean. We can ask around. Someone will know where the raiders are. Someone . . . sympathetic to them. The Empyrean will just swoop in. Probably ship us back home. They’ll take this away from us. That’s what they do. Take things.”

Their lives hang in this moment.

The knife, cold in his hand.

The corn rasping against the boat.

A caviling grackle squawking somewhere not so far away.

It’s like watching a building collapse. One moment Boyland is granite faced and resolute. But then the next it all falls away. He rolls over. Gives in. Gives
up
. The big boy nods.

“No calling the proctor. For now.”

And that’s it.

Wanda doesn’t know it, but she just saved their lives.

Of course they still have to die in the end. She, and Boyland, and anyone else who stands in his way.

THE GILDED CAGE

BALASTAIR IS STARVING AGAIN
. They feed him. He’s not dying. But the food is just trays of nutritional paste. A yellow pile here. Green there. Something meat-like that is most certainly not meat. He’s seen the packets. It’s the same faux-food they send down as provisions below. Scraps for the Heartlanders.

And for those who betray the Seventh Heaven, the Empyrean.

The “food” is nutritive enough to keep one from dying. And a little sweet from the corn mash. Most of it is corn, really. The green stuff. The brown stuff. All corn. He knows what goes into it. He helped
design
what goes into it.

Balastair mills about his birdcage, his wispy gray robe—just a gauzy swath of fabric with a hole for his head and two for his arms—dragging on the floor. He tries to roll it up to no avail; the fabric has no tension, no grip, and it just unrolls with the next three steps he takes.

They call these the birdcages because that’s what they look
like: each an ornamental dome—brass and iron. No simple decoration, either, but gilded with leaves and birds and berries made of metal. The leaves are sharp. So too are the beaks of the decorative birds. He thinks sometimes,
I could kill myself. Drag a wrist across the razor-tip of a bronzed leaf, bleed out here in my prison
. It’s happened before and will happen again, and nobody will complain. But suicide is not his way.

Even though every time he runs his fingers across one of the little metal birds he thinks of Erasmus.

It occurs to him that Erasmus was one of his only true friends. A young man whose only companion was a little chatty bird. It makes him sad.

No, that’s not sad. That’s just pathetic.

He’s pathetic. This whole place is pathetic.

He presses his head against the cool bars.

No gawkers today. He hears the sounds outside. Ah. Yes. The Tidings of Saranyu. Cloud cannons going
boom
. Fireworks somewhere crackling, hissing, popping. Distant laughter way down below that sometimes drifts up to his tower like snippets of music far away—the tune familiar but hard to grasp when broken into so many little pieces.

All around him: benches, chairs, a small snack machine by the Elevator Man—a cruel twist of the knife since he knows what treats come out of that machine, and he knows how badly he’d whine and cry and kick and kill for a taste of a Flix Bar, or a Caramel Gobbler, or a trio of Pemberton’s Cloud Crèmes.

As he stares, imagining those little, creamy, vanilla puffs melting in his mouth like sugar-lacquered snowflakes, the elevator dings.

The Elevator Man announces, “
Visitor to Birdcage #17 incoming!
”

More gawkers. Kids lining up to throw stones. Teenagers to mock. Men and women who just want to see what it is to fall so far—and, ironically, be kept up so high. (Some come for the view, after all.)

As if on cue, the wind sweeps through the open air.

A flutter of plump-bellied pigeons gathers above his head. Shitting on his bed, as they are wont to do.

The elevator opens.

The peregrine emerges.

A hot flush of hate courses through Balastair—it burns up his fatigue, makes him feel woefully, painfully alive.

Percy approaches. Slow steps. Shoes clicking on the marble floor, hands clasped behind his back.

“Come to poke me with a stick?” Balastair asks. “Come to gloat? To mock? To behold your prize, to have your precious falcon come and tear the eyes out of my traitorous head? Ugh.” He thunks his head against the bars. The peregrine just stares. “You have to let me out of here eventually. What I did is a crime, yes, but others have done worse and served lesser sentences—the girl got away from me, and I secured her escape. Not exactly treason.”

“You didn’t secure her escape,” the peregrine says.

“You can’t just
say
something and have it be the reality, you know. You actually have to have
evidence
for things. It’s called science.” He snorts, happy with the jab.

“Evidence,” the peregrine says. “Fine.” He tilts his head forward. He pulls back his hair as if he were parting grass to show
the dirt beneath. There, a ragged red scar held fast with gleaming staples. “See that?”

“Someone finally had enough of you,” Balastair says.

“Yes. Gwendolyn Shawcatch. Working in concert with my now former house-mistress, La Mer. Or, rather, Merelda McAvoy.”

Gwennie.

And that name—McAvoy.

A cold wave ripples over Balastair’s flesh. He tells himself it’s the wind, but . . .

“Wait, when was this? She did this before she escaped?”

“This was yesterday. That’s what I’m telling you, Balastair. She never escaped. She’s still here. She killed one of my men. She conspired with my girl. Stole my visidex. The likelihood is high that she’s working with the Sleeping Dogs.”

Given how much of this is truly shocking, it’s not hard to sell what is ultimately
feigned
surprise. “Sleeping Dogs? Here? On the flotilla?”

The peregrine rolls his eyes. “You’re going to be executed, you know.”

Balastair’s hands grip the bars so hard the blood drains from them. “Wh—what? On what grounds?”

“Conspiracy. Treason. Being a pompous ass. While I was at the auto-docs receiving my lovely new
head-staples
, I had some time to do some research—on a new visidex, of course.”

“Research.” Balastair swallows a hard lump.

“On you. Mostly, in the records, you come across exactly as you are. A somewhat high-strung, socially liberal geneticist with a rather famous mother and a legacy you never could quite live
up to—coupled with a small fall from grace as you continued to pursue inadvisable courses of research that led to you being . . . reassigned to the Pegasus Project.”

“That
is
me—”

“Ah, sidenote, you have lost that competition. Eldon Planck did it. He created an automated Pegasus that’s really, truly a work of art. The wings are ornamental, but they apparently help steer the thing—something about hover-panels and a rocket booster bolted into its hindquarters. I don’t particularly care how it works, but I
do
care that it stings you. Lemon juice on a paper cut. Planck stole your project, and then your glory.”

“I didn’t do it for the glory.” It’s true. The glory wasn’t why he committed himself to the project. But then comes the lie: “I did it for the science.”
No, you fool, you did it because of jealousy.

He did it because of Cleo.

“Your reasons are your reasons. Back to the point, which is, in digging beneath the surface of your elegant and seemingly infallible masquerade, I found a curious point of data. Three parcels. Small packages, by the bills of lading. They went down below. To the Heartland. To a town called Boxelder. To a man named—and here is the fascinating part—Arthur McAvoy. McAvoy, McAvoy—now where have I heard that name before?
Oh,
right.”

Balastair listens as the peregrine picks it all apart. Like watching the falcon tear Erasmus into stringy red bits and floating feathers.

“So then I looked at Merelda’s records, and, don’t you know it, the Parcel-Mate system records
her
sending items to Arthur McAvoy, too. Layers and layers, peeled back. Like an onion.
Isn’t that your thing? Fruits and vegetables? The legacy of your mother?”

“My mother’s legacy is none of your business.”

The peregrine snaps, “
Everything
is my business, as you are fast discovering, Harrington. Turns out, Arthor McAvoy has caused quite a bit of trouble down below. Do you know what kind of trouble? He was growing a garden. A forbidden garden of forbidden fruits and vegetables, all of which seemed designed to thrive in the hard, unforgiving soil—”

Balastair begins babbling as the threads pull apart. “We’ve destroyed the ground. The corn, Hiram’s, it’s greedy, a sponge; it drinks up everything; the soil is nutrient-weak, and we’ve made sure it never rains—”

“Certainly none of us believes that a worm-bellied Heartlander like Arthur McAvoy managed to genetically engineer these seeds himself. And yet, who in the Empyrean might be capable of doing such a thing?”

“I . . . it could be . . . There are other scientists, many others—”

“Yes, but I believe it was you. I
know
it was you. I don’t even need the evidence. I don’t need your fingerprints or the genetic code of the seeds. I don’t need to know what was in those packages. Because the conspiracy is laid bare before me, unfurled like an ugly, bloody tapestry.” He holds up a finger and smiles. “Ah. Oh. But here you may yet say,
But that’s not enough for treason
. And it isn’t. You’re quite right about that. Helping some poor, dreck Heartlanders shows weakness—a soft heart but not a cutting treachery. Except—”

Balastair closes his eyes.

“Arthur McAvoy is not just Arthur McAvoy. He’s also one of the Sawtooth Seven. Or so we believe. And the Sawtooth Seven—”

“Helped to originate the Sleeping Dogs. Yes. I’m aware of my history, Peregrine.” Doomed chills dance up his arms, bolstered by a cold breeze. Balastair feels suddenly distant from his body, as if his mind is floating free. He hopes when they execute him, he can replicate that feeling of being separate from the flesh. “How do you know? That McAvoy was one of the Sawtooth Seven? Seems . . . tenuous.”

“It does. They didn’t go by their given names. They went by ciphers. Swift Fox. Black Horse. Corpse Lily. But we have McAvoy’s photo now. I ran it through an image search, and I found an old still from a CCTV capture on one of the early raids—when we still had our own presence down there in the hardscrabble. Fort Blackmoore. It matched. McAvoy now and this blurry, muddy glimpse of one of the Sawtooth Seven.”

“Ah.”

“You don’t sound impressed.”

“Forgive my lack of enthusiasm. We were discussing my execution.”

“Yes. That. Since McAvoy appears not only to be a recent terrorist but also one of the scions of the Sleeping Dogs,
that
means you were aiding a very dangerous, very bad man. And if Gwendolyn Shawcatch becomes a terrorist, too—well. They’ll just cinch the noose tighter. Did the two of you have a thing? No matter, I don’t care.”