Blightborn (41 page)

The visidex Salton gave him for this mission chimes, signaling an incoming message. One hastily typed, it seems.

Been comrpomsed peregrin here killing us cotrol towr is on u do not fail repeat do not fail

He staggers backward as if gut-kicked.

The men and women he knows here . . .

The peregrine . . .

He closes his eyes and imagines bodies and blood.

The control tower is on
him
?

He’s just one man. One man and one little girl.

He
had
another soldier—

But, godsdamnit, I just gave her to the enemy!

He doesn’t want to do it. He just wants to get off this city. Go home. There are still a few raiders on the flotilla guarding escape boats and also a few sympathizers among the Empyrean. He could go to them. He could take his little girl and escape. But then he hears the applause of those people again. He hears the phantom sonic shots that likely took down his friends and cohorts only ten minutes ago.

Davies gets angry.

He has a shot here. To make it all count.

He could do as intended. He could save the Shawcatch girl.
Gods, he
wants
to. But he does that, he draws attention to himself. Attention that will damage his other mission.
His other goal
.

Unless . . .

No. It’s absurd. Horrible. He wouldn’t dare.

“Papa, what’s wrong?” Squirrel asks.

“Having a bit of a dilemma, Squirrel. Just big-people problems, is all.”

“Wanna talk about it?” She beams her smile. Got a tooth missing now in the back of her mouth, and with that big, wide grin he can see the gap. It only makes her more adorable. “You said I’m old enough now to understand big-people problems.”

He has said that. And he’s trained her.
Trained her to kill,
a grim voice reminds him. But then he thinks, this might be the way to save those he can save. Because if he goes into that control tower, there’s no guarantee he’s coming back out.

“Squirrel, I think Gwennie—”

“Ballcutter!”

“I think Ballcutter needs your help.”

“Okay, Papa.”

“Okay? That’s it? Just okay?” He barks a hollow laugh. “You’re a piece of work, little girl.”

“I can do it! What are you going to do?”

Everything else
. “A job for Mary Salton. One last job.”

“You’re such a good papa,” Squirrel says, and hugs his legs. He crouches and hugs her back. He holds her close for a while. He tries not to think about what happens next: letting go.

She’s the one who lets go. She says, “Papa, your stubble tickles.” He smiles and nods and kisses her forehead.

“Save the girl,” he says. “Don’t kill anybody. And then you get out of here. You find a ship and you leave this city.” He shows her the visidex, points out the places where the ships dock, tells her to find a scowbarge or a small cutter, something nobody will think to check. Finally, he lies, “I’ll find you. Don’t worry about that. I’ll find you wherever you go.”

“Oh. Okay, Papa.”

“Okay.”

He kisses her cheek one last time.

And then like that she’s gone.

TUTTLE’S CHURCH

THE SUN CRAWLS UP
over the corn. Real corn, living corn—the Dead Zone is now behind them. Not far off in the distance, Lane sees the light glinting off tin rooftops and glass panes—and through the day’s pollen haze a town begins to emerge. A town thrice the size of Boxelder. More like Martha’s Bend. Maybe even bigger, because to the north and south he sees barns and silos and farmhouses scattered about.

But then other shapes emerge beyond the town—

Massive shapes. Shapes as big as anything he’s ever seen.

“They’re mountains,” Rigo says, staring, mouth agape. Lane startles; he didn’t even know Rigo was coming up. And it’s not as if Rigo’s quiet, with the shuffle-drag-
thump
he does after losing that leg.

The peaks are faded—a bleached-out purple held off by the curtain of pollen smog. Like stains from a grape that never quite wash out.

“I’ve heard of mountains but I never knew . . .”

“They’re pretty,” Rigo says. He’s right. They are.

But it isn’t enough to hold off the reality of his situation.

Lane thumps his head against the mast post around which his hands are shackled. He sighs. “You bring breakfast?”

“Oh.” Rigo pulls his stare away from the mountains. “Yeah.” He hands over a corn muffin so hard it could be used to pulverize more corn into masa for more corn muffins, an endless carousel of muffins begetting muffins begetting muffins. The absurd thought entertains Lane for a half second before he reminds himself just how bad everything has become.

He palms the corn muffin. Uses his teeth to shave off bits into his mouth. It’s bland. Crunchy. Basically a hardtack biscuit.

“Remind me why I’m locked up and you’re not,” Lane says.

“I dunno. One of them said I’m too gimpy to do damage.” Rigo chews his lip and looks down at his missing foot. “Actually, lot of them are calling me ‘Gimp’ now.”

“Screw them,” Lane says with a scowl.

The town in the distance grows closer. Now he can see light pooling on plasto-sheen and signs hanging outside of stores.

He just doesn’t see any people.

Which makes him wonder if this town really
is
like Martha’s Bend. Another town gutted by the Empyrean. Which makes him pissed off all over again. Lane’s all piss and lightning now. He’s still pissed at the raiders, too—though he wonders if it’s the whole fleet he’s mad at or just the one man. The one who wooed him, then threw him away like a handkerchief used only once. The one who’s telling stories about Cael and his Blight. Those are just stories, right? Cael’s Blight wasn’t anything to
look at—just a little thumb-curl of plant matter. Cael wasn’t Earl Poltroon. Not yet.

Not ever.

Still. Billy Cross is dead somehow.

Lane thunks his head against the mast post again.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk
.

“Anyway,” Rigo says. “I gotta go. I got work.”

“Dumping shit-buckets, I bet.”

Rigo doesn’t say anything, which is acknowledgment enough.

Rigo turns and hobbles away on his wobbly crutch.

Soon, the trawler and the fleet come up on the edge of the town. The broad front of the ship blocks most of it from view, but Lane can see buildings, the street, a few abandoned food carts. All empty. Windows staring back like the glassy eyes of corpses.

Raiders gather toward the fore of the boat to look. He hears murmurs that echo his own thoughts:
Where are all the people?

Footsteps behind him.

A whiff of whiskey breath as Killian Kelly rests his chin on Lane’s shoulder. “Hello, Lane Moreau.”

Lane jerks his shoulder away. “Get offa me.”

“Sorry. Was I flirting?”

“Maybe you were.”

“I wasn’t.” Then, loud enough for any nearby to hear, “I do not endorse your proclivities, boy.”

“Listen to you.
Boy
. You’ve got a few years on me, and that’s it.”

Killian steps around to the front. That smile is stuck to his face as if it’s been nailed there—but the glimmer of puckish glee he once had has been spackled over. “Those years have provided
me with a multiplicity of wisdom. My life has been spent doing important things, while yours has been playing the role of a thieving magpie snatching scrap.”

“What did you do to Cael?”

“It disappoints me that your response is that instead of
What did Cael do to you?
Seems to me you didn’t seem particularly shocked by the revelation that he had the Blight. Which means it wasn’t a revelation at all, was it?”

“Sorry your first mate is dead,” Lane says. But then he clenches his teeth and sticks out his chin. “But I figure he must’ve deserved it.”

There. The smile wavers. Tremble-twitch.

“I like that fire in your belly. I think we could still be allies out of all this. But you have to admit, Lane, you don’t yet know rat shit from your own self-righteousness. It’s all anger and spite. Bitter spunk and churning spurn.”

“You talk too much.”

“I may, at that. Doesn’t change what I’m saying. Look around you. See that town? Something’s wrong with that town, and we’ve known it for a while. You see any people?” His eyes flash like light caught in steel. “Me neither. Which means the Empyrean did something to them. They’re doing something to all of us. They’re desecrating our ground. They changed the clouds. The Blight—
Cael’s
Blight—is a poison delivered unto us by the hands of our masters.” He waves his arms overhead as if to say,
Behold the spectacle of the sky above
. “And yet, knowing all this, you still want to be mad at me for petty things. This is the fight, Lane. This is the time. This is when you test the heft and weight of your convictions and determine whether or not they
are as hollow as the bones of a bird, or if they are as heavy as the blade of a sword, if they—”

A shrill whistle cuts the air, and the mast above Lane’s head suddenly shatters.

Rigo’s at the bow of the ship. Nobody looks at him. Raiders work. Before he’d at least earn a sympathetic nod—a silent
Sorry kid, tough break
. But now he’s marked. He’s Cael’s friend. The gimp.

So he hobbles up, a sour feeling in his chest and belly about Cael, about Lane, about all this. And he stares out over the approaching town of Tuttle’s Church and the ghost-shadow of the mountains behind. Mountains they call the Workman’s Spine.

Rigo thought that the Heartland went on forever and ever.

But it ends. Here. At these mountains.

What waits in other directions? What happens if he goes south? North? What’s on the other side of these mountains?

He’d heard tales of the coast, of course. Beyond them, a whole part of the world covered in water. But that always seemed a joke. It didn’t even rain. How could there be that much water out there?

Now here he is, looking at mountains he’d heard about in a pile of old, ratty picture books he’d once bought from the Mercado with an ace note.

And then a curious thing happens.

Out in the middle of the street, he sees somebody.

This person walks all herky-jerky out from under a ratty awning into the middle of the street. It appears to be a woman,
her white-and-pink dress catching a little wind. Each step she takes seems heavy, plodding.

Sun catches and reflects brightly off the woman’s face.

Which is strange.

He realizes,
That’s not a person
.

Her head turns, and even from this far away he can see—the face is an artifice. Big circle eyes like mirrors. Mouth big,
too
big, one big jaw.

The head cocks with a faint whirr.

Then she raises an arm.

The hand spins, whizzing in a circle. As if unscrewing.

Rigo yells to someone nearby: a stocky raider, Olga, who stands ten feet to his left, and he points. She follows his gaze, lifts a spyglass to her eye. She grunts.

“I don’t think that bitch is human,” she says.

Other raiders start to gather.

Hezzie sways up and scowls. “She’s doing something with her—Shit! The hand just . . . came off. Landed in the street like a—”

The handless arm flashes.

A sonic blast screams overhead. Rigo ducks. Cries out.

The ship’s mast explodes.

The woman in the street, she’s not alone, not anymore. Others are walking out with the same hitching, inevitable step. Metal automatons made to look like people. A man in a seersucker suit. A little child in a straw hat. A woman in overalls. None of them real. The day’s light caught in metal flesh. Their hands begin spinning. Dropping off.

And they begin firing.

THE WITCH’S GARDEN

CAEL WALKS
.

He walks along the path formed for him.

His Blight-vine twitches, leaves licking at the air.

The other Blighted do not follow him. But the memory of them does. He remains dogged by the fear:
That is what I will become
. He imagines a time when his teeth will fall out into his hands, when thorns will grow from the puckered gums. Fingernails of bark, skin like corn silk. His humanity, falling away like rotten fruit. Replaced by Blight. The thought terrifies him.