Blightborn (32 page)

“Cael,” she says, breathless and bewildered.

“Gwennie!” he says, laughing now, unable to find any other words but her name. And though he knows that these tough, scabbed-over, scarred-up raiders are staring at him as if he’s a lamebrained fool, he just can’t find reason to care. “Gwennie.”

“You two know each other?” Killian asks. “How fortuitous for you. Looks like the Lord and Lady have hitched your stars together and—”

Cael shushes him—earning dark looks from the other raiders, looks he chooses to ignore right now—and reaches across the table to snatch up the visidex. He turns it toward him, and the winking light from the projector suddenly spears him in the eye, and he blinks away hazy white spots.

Killian clears his throat, tells Cael to tap a little button in the corner. The one that looks like a wide-open eye.

He does.

And there, as the spots fade, is Gwennie.

In his hands.

Staring up at him as he stares down.

“I want to talk to her,” Cael says. “Alone.”

The bearded bear of a raider snarls, “Like he’s never seen a woman before. Careful, Killian; you’ll get the screen back sticky.”

Cael’s about to threaten to rebreak the bastard’s nose when Killian offers, “Normally I’d take this as a bit of an insult, what with you interrupting the proceedings of this captains’ council. And yet I am a dyed-in-the-wool romantic, and I can’t help but see the look in your eyes and melt like an ice cube held in a hot hand. So, go, Cael McAvoy, talk to your lady friend. We’ll be here when you’re done.”

Cael sits on his cot, the visidex propped up in his lap. Her hair is bound up behind her in a pair of tails, her cheeks are smudged, her face shows the ghosts of bruises and cuts, but he doesn’t care because she’s the prettiest thing he’s ever seen.

For a while it’s as if the two don’t even know what to say. It hasn’t been that long since they’ve seen each other, not really, but it feels like each day apart has been a year—and now they have to talk to each other across a pair of screens, with her in the sky and him on the ground.

But eventually they tell each other everything. He tells her about what happened after she left, how Pop set him and the other boys to riding the rails. About how they got lost out there, about the vagrant, about the depot. And about how they’re now with the Sleeping Dogs—a fact that still stuns them both into fits of awkward laughing and head shaking.

She tells him about how winning the Lottery was no such thing. About how her family is gone, and about the man who took her in, and about how the Sleeping Dogs saved her, and how—

Here she takes the visidex and turns it—

—how she found Merelda.

And now Cael feels giddy and light, but the happiness doesn’t last long as the balloon pops and fills the vaccum with a hot flash of anger. “Damnit, Mer, you caused us a lot of trouble and Pop’s on the hook now and I’m supposed to be coming up there and finding you and
damnit
, Mer—”

“I’m sorry” is all she says. “I just wanted to get away from all that dirt. From the corn and the work and the . . .” She sighs. It hits him then: she’s not happy to see him. Or maybe she’s sad about something else. Her face is a porcelain mask that’s about to crack, the tears behind it poised to come spilling out. “I’m sorry” is all she says again.

“The Heartland is your home, Mer.”

“I know.”

“So come home.”

But she doesn’t say anything else. She just hands off the screen, and there, once more, is Gwennie.

“I can’t believe you found Merelda,” he says.

“It’s been a strange ride,” she says, and laughs a little.

“I guess we’re both raiders now.”

“I guess maybe we are.”

“Your face—I’m sorry.”

It’s as if she just remembers. She touches it. Winces. “I look like hell.”

“You look pretty as a flower.”
What a stupid thing to say,
he thinks.

“They have flowers up here. Lots of them. They have everything up here, Cael. They have everything where we have
nothing. Whatever we get are just . . . drips from a leaky pipe. They have so much, and I’m not even sure they really appreciate it at all.”

“The Empyrean sucks.”

She echoes it. “The Empyrean
sucks
.”

He thinks,
Tell her. Tell her about the Blight. You have to tell someone. She’ll understand. If anyone will
.

Instead, he says, “I miss you.”

“I miss you, too.”

“I love you.”

Then that moment. Of hesitation. When her mouth opens and no words come out—and a half second later someone’s pulling her away from the screen and she turns and says, “I have to go.”

“Wait—”

“I’ll see you soon, Cael.”

The feed goes dark.

The meeting goes long, and the raiders talk, and eventually Billy Cross pulls out a map and pins it to the wall, and the raiders gather around. Rigo stands in the corner like a broken lamp, looking more than a little confused. Lane knows he should be listening intently to the whole thing given that one of his dreams has been to sit among a cabal of raiders and see what they’re planning, but all he can do is throw moon-eyes toward Killian Kelly as he circles some location toward the edge of the map.

Eventually the meeting ends, and Cael doesn’t return. Killian
heads out into the hall to find him while the rest of the raiders mill about, breaking out bottles of skee and passing around tin cups.

Lane ducks out the door.

He follows after Killian. Catches his elbow, turns him around, plants a hard kiss on the raider captain’s lips.

Killian’s face twists up, and he pushes Lane aside, looks over both their shoulders front and back. “Not here,” the raider says.

“I can’t hold it back. It’s like a spark jumping out of a campfire.”

A small but wicked grin forms on the raider captain’s face. “I know. I feel it, too. But work calls.”

Another quick kiss.

Killian shoves him back. Not hard. Not mean. Playful. That’s what Lane tells himself. Then the raider captain is gone, disappearing into one of the bunk rooms to look for Cael.

“You’ve been gone awhile,” Killian says.

Cael looks up from staring at the now-dark screen of the visidex. “Huh? Oh.”

“Thought you really might be getting the visidex sticky.”

Cael gives him a look.

The raider captain holds up his hands. “My apologies. That was perhaps in low taste.”

“Yeah. Well. Your taste matches my mood, so.”

“Thought you’d be happy after seeing your—Well, she’s your Obligated, I must presume?”

“No. Old crew member. We had a . . .” His voice trails off. “No, my Obligated was in that ship you shot last night.”

The raider captain offers a gloomy whistle. “Oh-ho. I see now why you were . . . agitated about that.”

“I want on that flotilla.”

“Pardon?”

“The flotilla, godsdamnit. With Gwennie and my sister and the other Sleeping Dogs. I want to go up there.”

Killian sits down next to Cael. Puts his hand on Cael’s knee. “Tell you what, Cael. Like I promised Lane, I can make that happen. We’ve got a location. A town way out on the fringes. Near the Hedge, not far from the base of the Workman’s Spine. Out there is a weapon—I’m not obligated to say what yet, and if I’m being honest, we don’t even know exactly what it is. But that’s where we’re headed. Be a couple weeks’ journey. If you’re with us—and I mean truly with us in your head and in your heart, brother—then I do promise that we’ll get you on that ship.”

“I’m in.”

“You’re in?”

“I’m all the way in.”

“See, this time I believe it. Before, I wasn’t sure, but now—now I see it. The lightning in your eyes. Crackling and snapping. That’s good. You’re gonna need that. Because this is a fight we cannot win if we’re not willing to be angry. If we’re not willing to put everything we have and everything we love on the table to pay back those Empyrean monsters for thinking themselves our gods. We’re gonna have to pass through some dark territory to get there, my brother, but once we do, it’ll be a glorious,
cleansing light on the other side. The light of rebellion. The light of freedom.”

He puts out his hand.

Cael takes it, shakes it.

“The heavens will tremble for waking these sleeping dogs,” Killian says, and Cael nods, wondering suddenly what the future holds.

PART FOUR

THROUGH DARK TERRITORY

THUNDERPISSER

THE CROW’S NEST
is not where Cael wants to be. The pollen streams down in great, golden ribbons, hissing against the wood of the bucket that contains him, whispering against the sails, stinging his cheeks and eyes whenever the wind lashes like a herder’s whip.

Thunder cracks. Lightning splits the curtain of pollen—a spear of white light dividing the sky, casting the darkness aside and making everything for a moment eye-blisteringly yellow. And then it’s done, and Cael’s eyes are left seeing the impression of the lightning’s rootlike capillary forks burned as a negative into the backs of his eyes.

The piss-blizzard has been blowing for the last two days. Tonight’s been the worst so far. He wants to climb down and find shelter—but they need him up there. Just in case the Empyrean use the storm as an opportunity to attack, Killian said. Wouldn’t be the first time, he explained. They have jamming technology,
apparently, antennas built into the ship masts that cloak their presence and make them hard to see from above—but should a ship spot them with their eyes, then the signal coming off those so-called “jammer-rods” doesn’t matter one hill of horse apples.

The wind kicks up, vicious—the fangs of a beast, biting hard. Cold, too. Cael’s not allergic to pollen like Rigo is (he’s been staying belowdecks for the duration of this clinging tick of a storm), but even still, Cael’s eyes are puffy and watery; his lips are dry and caked with yellow.

The wind is really howling now—but there’s something else, some other sound, a vibration that hums in the wood of the crow’s nest, that Cael can feel in his teeth and his fingertips. It’s the sound of an auto-train, he realizes, the loud thrum of the hover-panels churning the silver bullet down the tracks. But that’s absurd. No tracks out here, which means no auto-train, which means—

His eyes make a shape out of the darkness:

A twisting, living shape.

Big. Bigger than any of these boats. Bigger than anything Cael’s seen.

No, no, no
.

Thunder:
boom
. Lightning:
crash
.

It lights up everything for one spectacular, horrible moment, revealing:

A twister. A serpentine funnel of muddy yellow pollen writhing out there in the corn, ripping up stalks and turning them to dark shrapnel in the golden coil. Then the light from the lightning is gone, and Cael can only see the impression of the twister out there—

It’s coming right for them.

He reaches up. Grabs the rope under the bell. Screams and rings it,
clang-clang-clang
, already his voice going hoarse as he tries not to choke as pollen fills his mouth—

I have to get down from here, or I’m going to die.

The crow’s nest is just a half barrel banded with black iron and bolted to the cross of the mast. To get down one has to hop over the side, hang the way a corn-beetle dangles from a stalk tassel, then swing one’s legs toward the ladder. Cael’s nimble enough. Though he understands why someone like Mole is far better suited for this job, being so light and limber. Still, Cael can do it. Even in a panicked situation like this one.

So he tells himself.

He hops over the edge, swings down, kicks out a foot—

But it doesn’t catch the rung of a ladder.

It catches a rope along the mast, a rope with a little slack that shouldn’t have any slack, which means that someone (
Lane!
) screwed up—

Cael falls. The rope tightens around his ankle.

He swings, upside down.

A voice, indistinct, over the wind. He can’t make it out.

Pollen cascading. Down below, the sounds of raiders yelling, scrambling, battening down gear and heading belowdecks.

The voice again. This time he can hear what it’s saying.

It’s calling his name.

“
Caaaaeel . . . Caaaaaaaeeeeel . . .
”

Lightning strikes.

The twister. Close now. Right up on them. Big as a house. Tall as a barn silo—no,
taller
. Like the finger of one of the gods
pointing down and pressing into the earth, drawing a cruel and unforgiving line through the corn and right toward the fleet.

Then the light is gone.

Everything is noise. Everything is vibration. It’s in his bones. His stomach. Turning Cael’s bowels to ice water.

The twister is just a brown shape writhing in the black.

And it misses the trawler.

Just.

But it keeps going. Cael sees it push alongside them by a few dozen yards, a wall of wind and pollen and corn that swallows all the boats off to the starboard side, breaking them apart the way a swing of a boot shatters a half-rotten box. Screams are lost in the wind. The twister dismantles the cat-marans and pinnace-racers, turning them to so many splinters—the spectral whirl of sails swallowed by the wind, spinning up and up and up.