Blightborn (35 page)

“Damnit, Mer, I told you—”

Mer’s eyes flick over her shoulder, and Gwennie hears footsteps. She turns to meet Davies. And Salton. Mary’s wearing a dire, dour face. As if the cavernous wrinkles are all the deeper, like the black coals of her eyes are pushed farther back in her head.

“Gwennie,” Davies starts to say, but Salton interrupts him.

“We need you to come with us.”

Great
, Gwennie thinks.
Davies told her what I want, and now she’s going to ream me out for it
.

She looks to Merelda. “We’ll talk more later.”

Salton puts a hand on her back, turns her gently around, and eases her forward. A tiny part of her understands Merelda right there in that moment: the need to be free of someone pushing you
in one direction, the urge to do something different from what everyone says. She feels the desire to rebel against the rebellion.

A silly idea,
she thinks.
Isn’t it?

Gwennie doesn’t get it.

Mer always thought Gwendolyn Shawcatch was tough and all, but how smart was she, really? Getting wrapped up with Cael wasn’t a winning move. Being a girl on a scavenging crew didn’t seem too keen, either.

If Mer keeps relying on her, they’ll never get out of here.

Mer thinks:
I can fix this
.

Not only can she make things right, but she can get them off this flotilla lickety-quick. And back down to home where—

Well, she doesn’t want to think about that, either. The dirt and corn. Scrabbling for ace notes. She starts thinking about the Heartland, and her own heart starts getting other ideas.

She’s going to fix this.

But to do that, she first needs to escape.

And Merelda McAvoy, well, she’s good at escaping.

They don’t say anything. Mary and Davies just lead Gwennie into Salton’s spartan chamber. As they enter, other Sleeping Dogs stand by, watching from down the hall under dark brows—Gwennie suddenly understands. They know she’s about to get her ass chewed out. Maybe they’re worried about her. Or celebrating her comeuppance. Or just plain commiserating, since Mary
Salton seems like a hard-ass who throws her grump around like a slop bucket: everyone gets a little on them.

“I’m not going to apologize—” Gwennie starts to say, but then Davies gives her this look, and she doesn’t know how to read it but it damn sure shuts her trap.

Salton says nothing, just pulls up a Marconi box—dusty, dinged, like the ones you’d see in a Heartland home—and sets it on the plywood table.

Motes of dust swirl in the artificial light.

“This came in over the Marconi about a half hour ago,” Salton says. “They played it here. And on other flotillas. And down below.”

She turns the knob. The screen crackles. Zigzagging black bars unkink to straight lines and then give way to an image.

Three people with red sacks over their heads.

A man. A woman. A young child—a boy maybe.

Gwennie realizes who they are even before the peregrine walks up behind them and snatches the hoods off their heads one by one.

Her family. Mother. Father. Scooter.

Wind whipping past. Wisps of clouds zipping by. The peregrine lets the hoods go on the wind—they flutter away like scarlet birds.

They’re on some kind of metal platform. A catwalk just a grate beneath their feet. With the hoods off, their faces become masks of terror. They huddle together, though their hands are bound behind their backs.

A pair of men appears behind the peregrine, and the camera
pans left to a gleaming silver crank attached to a pair of interlaced gears. The men each grab a side of the crank.

They turn.

The camera focuses on a gangplank extending out. Like the tongue of an auto-mate’s mouth, mocking and cruel.

Gwennie hears herself gasp. She wants to turn it off. Wants to grab the screen and throw it. But she can’t. She has to see. She has to know.

The peregrine hovers behind each member of her family. Flitting from one to the next with the delicate whimsy of a hummingbird choosing which flower to feed from.

His hand falls on the young boy’s head.

Gwennie feels tears wet her cheeks. “No, no, no.”

But then the peregrine smiles and shakes his head.

He steps away from Scooter.

And instead moves behind her father, Richard.

She can barely see through the tears. She can barely speak through her runny nose and closing throat. But still she can see how the peregrine shoves her father forward onto the gangplank. The sound turns on—everything had been silent, but now she can hear her mother telling her brother not to look, can hear her brother wailing in a way she’s never heard before, all of it beyond the rush of blood in her own ears.

Her father tries to turn around, tries to run back.

The gangplank does not retract.

Rather, it begins to tilt downward.

Her father seizes the opportunity. He bolts forward, wobbly, hands behind his back, losing balance, about to fall—

But he doesn’t fall.

The peregrine draws his sleek coward’s pistol.

He fires a sonic round into Richard Shawcatch.

Enough to stun. Not to kill.

Her father drops. Onto his side. Then onto his knees. He’s gagging at the same time he’s trying to crawl forward, all while the gangplank is tilting down, down, down—

And like that, her father slides off the edge.

The camera follows him for a moment—he’s a fetal shape tumbling through sky and cloud and then—

Gone. Nothing.

Gwennie can’t contain it. She loses everything she was holding on to. She screams. Grabs the Marconi box and hurls it off the table. Grabs for Salton, thinks,
This is your fault, you bitch; you kept me from rescuing them, and now they’re all dead
—

And as Davies is behind her, wrestling her arms backward, she hears the peregrine make a proclamation from the sparking Marconi.

“If the Sleeping Dogs give themselves up, then we can stop the senseless killing of this family whose only crime is to have a terrorist for a daughter. Gwendolyn Shawcatch, if you’re listening, heed this offer well. If you and your raider friends turn yourselves in before this time tomorrow, your family will live and live well. If you don’t, then at this time tomorrow, your mother will be next on the plank, and we’ll have this conversation again, when you’ll have only your little brother to save.”

She swings for Salton. Her fist connects. The woman’s head rocks back just as Davies presses something against Gwennie’s mouth.

A cloth. A stink fills her nose. An acrid chemical burn and—

Everything drifts. Her head separate from her body. Her skull a cage, her brain a panicked bird—Erasmus the grackle cackling
dead, dead, dead
again and again until she feels the floor melt beneath her. Darkness rushes up to greet her.

Merelda doesn’t know what all the hullaballoo is about.

A bunch of raiders gather around. Mumbling. Talking.

Watching something on a Marconi box. Or on visidexes.

She doesn’t care what. Probably more bullshit raider propaganda. Pop used to say that propaganda was just a lump of coal wrapped in an apple skin: made you think one thing when it was really another.

Doesn’t matter.

What matters is, they’re distracted.

And that means she has a way out.

Nobody’s guarding one of the side-hatches. She grunts, spins the wheel, and exits into freedom.

It’s time to go see Percy.

LAST RITES

BALASTAIR OPENS HIS ARMS
wide and cackles, “I don’t believe in your gods!” Then he does a mad dance, stomping his feet and spinning around, possessed by the ecstasy not of divine breath but of unadulterated atheism.

The two figures who have come to see him look on. The votary of the Lord and Lady stands by in his black cassock and looks equal parts embarrassed and frustrated. The old man straightens his prodigious white beard and looks away from the spectacle.

The priestess of Saranyu stares, as placid as a cup of water. She with her purple sari and orange sash, with her hair in a pair of dueling braids and her arms inked with the dark filigree of dyed scripture up to her bare shoulders. Her smile is as small and still as a mouse.

“You’re being executed in a matter of days,” the votary says. Votary Rimfin is his name. Balastair knows him—or did, once.
Old, shriveled bastard. Likes the wine. Likes the smoke. Likes all the indulgences he is allowed by the laws of catechism. “We should pray. And not to some old goddess whose presence here is purely cursory.”

The old man’s eyes flit toward the priestess.

For her part, she maintains a hold on serenity and says, “Saranyu only wishes to bless you on this, your journey into the life beyond.”

Balastair grunts. “Life
beyond
. Beyond what? You don’t get a life after a life, old woman! Oh, in the scientific sense one supposes there is something there—my body will decay; bacteria will feast while it can, but then the bacteria will all scream out in a chorus of pain as their world—which is me—burns in an oven. Then they’ll cast the ash out of the ship—unless they choose instead to use the gangplank for me, but I’m told it’ll be a hanging—and I will fall down below. Like the snow that the Heartland will never see because we’ve ruined the clouds and stripped the sky of its moisture just as we’ve done to the dirt and the plants and the men and the beasts. My ash will merge with the hungry, possessive corn.
That’s
my life beyond.”

The priestess nods. “Even in a divine sense that is true. But your mind and soul will be on the wind. In Saranyu’s bosom—”

“Bosoms,” Votary Rimfin harrumphs. “Such profane talk. Now let’s talk truth, young Balastair. Your
mother
was a devotee of the Lord and Lady—”

“My mother made the corn,” Balastair hisses. “Named it Hiram! After her own father. She created the only life I’ll join after death, votary. You think I don’t remember you? I do. You’d come to our house. And you’d drink and eat our food and look
through our bookshelves, and you’d fill my mother’s head with these fool notions of consequence and castigation, of justice meted out by invisible gods and how humanity must know its place beneath the eyes of the Lord and the Lady—”

“Balastair, your mother—”

“Just because you got to her doesn’t mean you’ll get to me! I remember you as a drunk. I’d be surprised if your breath doesn’t stink a little
even now
of brandy or rye. And why wouldn’t you be? Drunk, I mean. The people of the Empyrean have surpassed your gods. The breath of life, the wave of death, the kingdom of the sky with great, floating palaces, the lordship over the earth—these are things that once belonged to the Lord and Lady, but now they belong to us. Because we took them. Because we saw the gods as models and made ourselves after them. And now we are them. We’re
better
than them. And you’re nothing. And when it all falls apart, they’ll send you below. Planted in the soil like another bad seed. More poison for the poor fool Heartlanders.”

“You utter blasphemies.”

“Well,
you
utter bullshit.”

“I’m leaving,” the votary says. Though for a moment he stands there, probably thinking that Balastair will realize his mistake and beg for forgiveness,
pray
for last rites. “I won’t return.”

“So, go! Go on. Scoot. Skedaddle.
Flee
my birdcage, foul crow.”

Rimfin harrumphs again and hurries out, almost tripping on the hem of his dress. The priestess remains. Watching it all with curiosity.

“That was dramatic,” she says finally.

“I don’t believe it. That we’re gods. I don’t believe anything
anymore.” He
hrm
s and rolls his eyes. “Go on, shoo. Your devotion is fine and nice for you, but for the rest of us it’s an excuse to have festivals and put up pretty sculptures and friezes of your fake deity—”

“Balastair, please shut up.”

“What? What did you just say?”

“I have something for you.” She reaches into her sari and pulls her hand back out. Before she opens it, she says, “I see they clipped the wings.”

At first he doesn’t understand, but then he sees she’s looking at the bars of the cage. “Yes. The wings and the leaves. A man came in with tin snips. Cut them all off. Said I wasn’t to be killing myself anytime soon. That the public was owed my demise, and I was not to rob them of it.”

She extends her hand out. Not through the bars. Not yet.

Her fingers open like the petals of a flower.

There, in her palm, a small pink pill. Pink like roses with the red half drained from them.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “but what am I looking at?”

“It’s a pill.”

“I see that.”

“Then you didn’t have to ask and yet you did.”

He frowns. “What does the pill
do
?”

“I’ll say only that this bird’s wings are not yet clipped.”

A suicide pill.

“I won’t take this.”

“Then you’ll die by their hand.”

“I don’t—It’s not—”

Here she eases her hand through the bars. “If you have no
faith in any god or goddess, then granting yourself this mercy has no spiritual ramifications.” He makes no move to take the pill from her hand. She changes the subject. “Your ward. The girl.”