Blightborn (44 page)

They push Gwennie’s mother out onto the gangplank.

Gwennie struggles, tries to strike Adriana, but the woman counters with a hard sucker-punch. The air goes out of Gwennie. She doubles over.

Adriana’s laugh is lost to her brother’s panicked wails.

She sees his face. Scooter’s. It’s a mask of horror. Eyes unblinking. Mouth wide. The sound coming out of him is barely human. One of the guardsmen backhands him. Splits the boy’s lip—blood drips, and the child falls silent, still weeping.

This is it,
Gwennie thinks as rough hands grab her hair and start to lift her head.
This is my only chance
.

She drives a knee up into Adriana’s crotch.

She
oof
s. Then coughs.

But it’s not enough.

She hauls Gwennie and meets her face-to-face, wearing a feral sneer. Adriana rears back and slams her head into Gwennie’s. Gwennie sees stars. The world explodes. Her nose pops. She tastes blood.

The peregrine watches. Smiling just a little.

Adriana spins Gwennie around. Turns her face toward the execution about to unfold. Her mother, now pushed the very end of the plank.

One guardsman at the plank controls. About to turn the wheel and tilt it—just like they did to her father.

But then—

The guardsman’s head jerks.

A knife sticks out the side of his neck.

A knife that suddenly looks a whole lot like a key.

The peregrine shouts, and Gwennie seizes the moment of distraction. She cracks her head backward, earning revenge on her own bloodied nose by smashing her skull into Adriana’s—

Then she sprints. The guardsman wobbles on a heel, pawing at the knife in the side of his neck, moaning.

Gwennie grabs it. Unsticks it. A jet of blood squirts. She shoves the man aside. He lands like sacks of cornmeal.

I’m going to save my family
.

That thought, as clear as rain on glass.

Adriana has her sonic pistol out and up—

But Gwennie was trained well. Her wrist twists. The knife is gone—and then it reappears, stuck in the center of Adriana’s chest. The sonic shot goes wide, and the Frumentarii guard joins her brother in the afterlife, tumbling over the edge, crying out for her twin.

Then: Scooter screams. Her mother cries out—

The last guardsman gives her mother a shove.

Right off the edge of the gangplank.

Gwennie cries for her mother and runs.

What felt inevitable no longer feels so certain.

Chaos ensues, and Merelda watches, dumbstruck.

One guardsman, suddenly dead. Gwennie, free, rescuing the knife, then burying it in the heart of the woman holding her. Percy, staring in horror, backing up, shouting, the realization
that he’s lost control shining in his eyes. And then Gwennie is crying out, and the last guardsman is shoving her mother off the edge of the gangplank and—

Gwennie’s mother reaches out, catching the man’s wrist. Hanging there as he tries to shake her free.

The older woman claws uselessly at his face guard—

He raises his free hand to strike her—

Gwennie grabs him from behind. Her forearm around his neck. Peeling off his helmet with one hand. Hitting him with it as he spins away, off the edge of the plank—

Mother and daughter crash together in a hug.

“No, no,
no
,” Percy says, raising the revolver.

Merelda screams at him.

The pipe above her suddenly shudders. A girl perches on the pipe—the little raider girl. The tiny psychopath. The girl slashes downward with a knife—

Merelda’s hands are free.

She leaps for Percy. Thinking she has the advantage. She doesn’t. He’s trained. Capable. He backhands her with the heavy revolver, and her world is lost in a flash of white, and before she knows it, she’s staggering backward, blood in her eyes, back pressed against the flotilla bulk.

When her eyes clear and she blinks away blood, she sees him. Standing there, only ten feet away. The gun pointed at her. His face contorted in a mask of rage.

“What have you done?” he asks. “You’ve ruined me! The cameras are watching.
Everyone is watching!
”

He pulls the trigger. The gun roars.

Choom!

The gun kicks like a horse.

It kicks him right in the face.

He’s not ready for it. Merelda knows he’s used to his sonic pistol. A Rossmoyne, he always said, was an elegant weapon for men of empire—but the gun in his hand is different. He staggers back, the recoil hammering the gun into his chin as the shot goes wide—
spang!
—ricocheting off the metal near her head.

The little girl, Squirrel, flings a knife—he holds up his arm, and it catches him in the meat of his bicep. Percy cries out and then bolts as more knives just barely miss his heels.

He ducks his way through the elevator hatch, slamming it shut behind him.
Good riddance,
Merelda thinks.

And like that, it’s over.

Merelda watches as Gwennie pulls her mother off the gangplank. She and Scooter—and the raider girl she knows only as Squirrel—collapse into a hug. They hold one another. Crying. Rocking back and forth. Merelda feels empty. She wants to be there. Hugging her brother. Her father. Her poor mother.

She can’t. They’re not here. She left them all behind.

This is all her fault. She sees that now.

When she looks up again, there’s Gwennie.

“Are you going to kill me?” Merelda asks.

Gwennie’s face twists into a grimace, as if what Merelda said was absurd. “What? No.”

“Oh. I’d understand. I . . . I deserve whatever I have coming.”

“Shut up, Mer. We have to go. We have to hide. This isn’t over.”

“He’ll come for us,” Merelda says. “He won’t just let us go.”

“I know.”

Squirrel chimes in: “I know the way!”

Davies watches from inside the vent as the way is cleared.

All but a pair of horse-head guards leave their posts, opening the long, bowed bridge to the control tower. He waits until he knows the ones who left are really and truly gone—no false alarm, no temporary abandonment, no quick pop-out for a snack or a piss.

They’re gone.

The bridge is open.

The tower guarded only by two men.

Which means his daughter did her job.

Still, the task ahead: not easy.

Once he drops to the ground from the vent, he’ll be exposed. They have sonic rifles. And thrum-whips. And the talent to use them. He’s a nobody. Just some old field shepherd from down in the dirt.

He’s going to storm the control tower and get killed doing it.

You need to get in there. You need to be ready.

He has no plan, no means to accomplish this.

But his daughter did her job. Which means it’s time to do his.

He thinks of his wife, Retta, dead in his arms. He thinks of that corn, curling and writhing and hungry for blood.

The dead earth. The empty sky. The gods in their chariots above the peasants’ heads.

Davies dials up the intensity on his sonic shooter. Then he opens the vent and drops to the ground.

He tucks the pistol in the back of his pants.

He takes a deep breath. Time to improvise.

He runs, full tilt, across the arch of the white bridge. Toward the brass gate at the base of the massive tower, the tower in which all the flotilla’s movements are controlled—they’re automated, as he understands it, for no one truly needs to pilot the ship. It receives orders and translates those orders to the hover-panels and to the Engine Layer. It requires very little human intervention. One of the first mechanical choices the Empyrean made: a pilot would necessitate tireless hours sitting at a console, but automating the process—mechanizing everything—was elegance and simplicity.

And it would be their godsdamn downfall.

So Davies runs.

Arms waving.

He starts screaming.

“Raiders!” he shouts. “Raiders are coming! Terrorists! They’re killing folks!” He continues to scream and wail, half his words not even coherent—just a steady stream of raider-borne panic.

The two guardsmen in their horse-head helmets turn to each other and then put out their hands and catch him as he skids to a halt.

The taller of the two grabs a fistful of his shirt in a hard glove.

“Calm yourself,” the guardsman says. “You’ve got three seconds—”

Hell with three seconds.
Davies turns his head over his shoulder, makes a wretched face. “Here they come!” he says.

They each jerk their heads to look behind him.

It’s a moment.

A small moment.

It’ll have to be enough.

He grabs the pistol from the back of his pants, shoves it into the helmet of the taller guardsman. He pulls the trigger. The man’s face is erased. The entire helmet fills with blood and hair.

The other guard shouts, steps back, reaches for his thrum-whip—he’s fast, impossibly so—the whip out and lancing a crackling arc toward Davies.

Davies shoves the dead guardsman forward—

The whip catches the dead man’s neck.

Davies gives the corpse one last shove. The body crashes into the other guardsman, and they both fall over the edge of the bridge.

Hundreds of feet. To the fog-shrouded mechanics beneath them.

Davies gasps. Pants. Tries not to puke. Moments later he hears their bodies bang into the next layer down. A sickening couple of thuds.

He wrenches open the brass gate and steps into the elevator.

SCREAMS AND STEEL

I’M DYING
. That’s what Lane thinks. He can’t breathe, can’t punch or kick, can barely move at all. The world went ass over teakettle, and now he’s dying. He can’t even see anything.

But then the grave shroud is pulled from his head, and he realizes,
It’s the sail. I’m trapped under the crow’s nest
, and lickety-split there’s Rigo, dragging him out from under it.

All around lay the pieces of the splintered mast. Lane doesn’t see the raider who was last up there—but the edge of the crow’s nest sits rimmed in sticky red.
If Cael had been up there . . .

If Cael had been up there, he’d have done his damn job.

Rigo snaps his fingers. “We have to go!”

Lane realizes suddenly that the air is filled with the shrieks of sonic blasts. The trawler shudders and rocks. Men scream, fire back their own weapons. A pinnace off to the right takes a hail of fire—the front end breaks apart like a little girl’s dollhouse smashed with the swing of a sledgehammer.

The two of them duck behind a heap of metal drums secured by netting. Rigo yells, “This is our shot. Come on!”

Lane nods. But he’s not sure. These people—
my people,
he once thought—are getting torn apart. He looks around—no sign of Killian Kelly at all. Where’s their captain? Where’s their
leader
?

Who’s attacking them?

He doesn’t even realize he asked the question out loud until Rigo answers, “Metal men! They’re like . . . motorvators, but they look like people!”

Jeezum Crow
. He’d always heard that the Empyrean had mechanical men doing menial tasks for them—but as soldiers?

This is
not
life in the Heartland. Not as he knows it or imagined it.

“What happened to the people who lived here?” Lane asks.

This time Rigo just gives Lane a sad look. Neither knows the answer, but both can make a pretty troubling guess.

“You need to man one of the cannons,” Lane says.

“What?”

“I’ve got something to do.”

Lane jumps up and runs.

Rigo is left for a moment, mouth agape.

You need to man one of the cannons
.

Oh no. Oh no no no no. That’s a fool’s parade, the worst idea since that time Rigo bragged he could jump onto that one rogue Thresher-Bot without anybody’s help—and as a result he ended up falling into the slashing, cutting corn. After that he knew
to leave those jobs for Cael or Lane because he wasn’t cut out for that kind of thing. He was a thinker. Planner. Diplomat. He liked maps and figures.

But it is what it is. His friend gave him a task, and he can protest to no one but his own—Well, he was going to say
two
feet, but that’s not going to happen. A pang of grief hits him again.
I miss having two feet
. It’s a strange and silly thought in the middle of a firefight with metal men, but there it is.

Rigo draws a deep breath. Tries not to piss himself. Then pulls himself to a wobbly stance by using his crutch as an impromptu ladder.

Man the cannon,
he thinks.
Shit shit shit
.

Lane has a plan, and he tells anybody he can scream it to. He barks orders to every raider he encounters.

Billy Cross is dead, so the first one he tells is the helmsman, Robin Worley—she’s a young woman, only a few years older than Lane, with a pair of flinty tenpenny eyes and copper hair cropped short like a boy’s.

She tells
him
they need to retreat.

He tells
her
they need to swing this boat starboard so that the broadside faces the town of Tuttle’s Church. Then the other, smaller boats need to get behind the trawler. Stand protected. Let the trawler take the brunt of it, use the cannons to fend off the attack as best as they can.