Blightborn (45 page)

She says, “That might actually work.”

He nods, and she goes.

Then he runs, spreading the plan to anybody listening.
Ducking a rain of splinters. Stepping over a pair of raider bodies—one of them Sully, the cook. Face a bruised mask. Body a red mess.
Can’t stop. Can’t grieve. Just go
.

Then he sees—

Killian. Throwing a line over the back of the boat. Standing there with Striker Mayhew, Bosun Shiree, and the craggy scarecrow of pitted, pocked flesh that is Tammar Conley, the ship’s quartermaster.

They don their wolf-head helmets. Then they rappel down the back of the boat, into the corn.

The sonofabitch is leaving them behind.

He’s not leading. Not telling anybody anything. He’s content to let them die as he makes his getaway. The damn coward!

The trawler shifts beneath his feet, doing a counterclockwise turn—

He laughs.
They’re doing it. They’re using my plan!

He hears it shouted from raider to raider, yelled over to the other boats between sonic blasts. Already those other boats begin to move, pulling away from the massacre ahead of them.

They’re on point. Which means he’s free for a whole other task.

Lane takes a deep breath, grabs a machete sitting on a nearby crate-top, and runs for the ropes at the back of the boat. He’s gonna drag Killian’s ass back to this boat and hold that sum-bitch accountable for all he’s done.

A dead man sits in the gunner’s chair.

Rigo doesn’t recognize him. That’s how badly the sonic blast
has ruined the raider’s flesh. Another pang for his lost leg but also gratitude that he still has the other one.
If I man this cannon, I may not
—

The boat starts to turn. Sonic blasts pepper the side of the trawler, punching holes in the wood—
kachunk, kachunk, kachunk
.

If he mans this cannon, he may lose more than just another leg.

He reaches for it. Then hesitates.

I don’t want to die.

I don’t want to lose any more of myself.

I don’t want to be here anymore
.

He hears a bleat of fear come from his own mouth.

He withdraws from the cannon. Let someone else man it.

Rigo just can’t do it.

Into the corn. Leaves search and slice the air, looking for a taste. But Lane doesn’t have time for that. He clutches the machete—he’s going to bring Kelly back to captain that ship or pay for the crime of abandoning his crew just when they need his leadership most.

A small voice tells him,
You’re angry and you want to punish him. Angry and jealous and confused. Don’t get it twisted, Lane.

He tells himself to shut the hell up—

Then he makes a run for Tuttle’s Church.

It’s only once he’s out in the open that he realizes what he’s done.

A patch of dirt a hundred feet long separates him from the town.

A town with a main street now home to a dozen or more metal men and women with sonic arm-cannons lancing screeching blasts toward the raider fleet. This is the closest he’s seen them, the mechanicals. They’re crass facsimiles of people, their metal flesh caked with pollen, human clothes rippling in the wind. He realizes he’s running, staring, not looking ahead—

His foot catches on a cracked lip of hardened clay, and the hard ground rushes up to meet him. The machete drops, his hands go out, his palms catch the earth, stung.

He cries out.

He doesn’t mean to, but Lord and Lady, he cries out.

And when he looks up, one of the metal men is coming for him.

The mechanical is dressed in too-tight overalls. Clean except for a fine rime of pollen. The metal man comes running—a hitching step, torso rocking with each heavy footfall. Its automated features turn inward, giving the metal man a grave and sinister countenance.

The arm raises. Sonic cannon up.

Lane scrambles to get his feet under him—

The cannon fires. Lane leaps forward as the ground beneath him explodes in a cough of dust and broken clod, and again he’s falling forward, slamming his knee on the ground, twisting it hard—

The mechanical man again aims his cannon-arm—

Lane closes his eyes.

The air fills with the raptor shriek of a sonic cannon.

And Lane feels his body dissolve under the blast.

Or that’s how he imagines it. When he pats himself, he’s still there. All there. No pain. Just a tingling wave of fear and relief.

He looks up and sees that the metal man has been knocked to the ground. Head spun the other way. Sparks hissing from its chest.

Lane sees the high wall of the trawler floating there in the distance. Rigo waves from the cannon. Lane gives him a salute—

Just as rough hands drag him forcefully away.

Rigo sits by the cannon. Finger on the trigger.

He laughs. Half mad. All scared.

“I can do it,” he says. “I can do it!”

Then he cranks the cannon, levels the gun, and begins firing.

“What in all the Heartland do you think you’re doing?” Killian asks. He and the others—Mayhew, Shiree, Tammar Conley—have weapons drawn and leveled at Lane’s face from above. Mayhew with his bow and arrow. The other two with old, dinged-up sonic pistols. They dragged him behind the back of a general store and now here they are.

“I’m coming to bring you back to the ship,” Lane snarls. “Deserter.”

“Deserter?” Killian laughs, but there’s no humor there. “This is the task at hand, Lane Moreau. This was always the task at hand, complicated as it has become. You seem to have forgotten that we’ve come to Tuttle’s Church with a purpose, and that
purpose is to hurt the Empyrean. Has that been lost on you? Do you now feel pity for them?”

Lane thrusts out his chin. “I feel pity for those who thought you were their leader. These are people. Flesh-and-blood people who you’ve
abandoned
.”

Killian kneels down. Puts a hand on Lane’s shoulder. Lane bats it away. “You listen. I don’t cherish losing any of my raiders in this. My men and women are not meant to be pawns in a greater game. But we all put our names on the same list. We all die in service to a single cause: bringing the Empyrean low. Bringing the whip to our masters. Delivering a little
equity
to an
inequitable
world. You like that, you come along. You don’t? Then piss off and run back to the boat and die there. Or go find your Blighted friend. Or do anything but be a godsdamn
anchor
around my godsdamn
ankle
.”

The Heartland. The Empyrean. Tuttle’s Church. A battle between metal men and raiders of flesh just on the other side of these buildings. In the main street of a town that must have once been home to people, to
human beings
, who are now just . . . gone.

“You weren’t abandoning us?”

“I’m trying to
save
us,” Killian says.

Fine.

“I’m coming with you,” Lane says.
If only to watch your ass, make sure you don’t sell us all upriver, you shifty prick.

Killian smiles. “Now, there we go.”

The others put their weapons away. Mayhew reaches out with a massive hand and helps Lane stand.

As he pulls him up, Mayhew says, “I am sorry to hear about your friend.”

Before Lane can respond, Killian starts talking. “We’re not talking about McAvoy, so shut it. Now. Plan is as simple as it gets—the fleet distracts the mechanicals. Our job is to take precious advantage of that distraction and duck along these buildings. Because at the far end of the town, I am assured there is a portal, a trapdoor into the ground, into an old mine, and there we will find the data bank we seek. We get to the data bank, we get the codes, and . . .” His mouth twists into a grim smile. “We show the Empyrean that we will not be worms ground into the dirt. We good?”

The raiders all nod. Lane nods, too, though it occurs to him he barely heard what Killian said. Too many thoughts are going through his head. His heartbeat is too loud in his chest. But he nods. Because he’s ready to fight.

FLYTRAP

IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE
. That they found him all the way out here. In the house of the Maize Witch. Cael stands in the middle of the parlor as her Blightborn drag Boyland Barnes Jr. and Wanda Mecklin through the front doorway. Wanda calls to him, her cry cut short as vines snake out from the ceiling, curling under both their armpits and around their throats and hoisting them high toward the ceiling. Legs dangle like the limbs of a doll held in the hand of a careless child.

Cael reaches for Wanda, looks to Esther. “Please. No. She’s not gonna hurt anybody.” But then a wave of perfumed breath sweeps over him, and his knees start to buckle. For the tiniest moment he can’t even remember Wanda’s name. . . .

“You have no idea how many will want to hurt you,” Esther tells him. But then her gaze softens and she gently nods. The vines around Wanda’s neck loosen, and the ones beneath her arms gently drop her to the ground. She gasps, clutching her
throat. No tears fall, but the sound she makes is one of a gulping sob. Cael looks to Esther—a gesture he recognizes as seeking permission, a gesture he’s not used to making, and part of him bucks against it, pulling on whatever leash and collar she’s looped around his neck. And yet there it is.

She grants him permission: he can hear it in his mind: an acquiescence, an
approval
.

He runs to Wanda. He throws his arms around her, helps her to stand.

“What are you doing? I told you to go home,” he says.

“I . . .” She looks around, shock-struck by the room, the woman, the vines that were just around her and remain around Boyland. “I told you; we were coming to bring you . . . home. But then the raiders fired on us. . . .”

“I’m glad you’re okay. I was worried.”

“You should’ve come,” she says, tears gathering in her eyes. “I’m your Obligated. You should’ve come to see if I was okay.”

“I’m sorry, I . . .” His words die in his mouth as she regards him with some fear. She’s watching the Blight-vine coiled around his arm, curling now in the space between his fingers—almost like another hand clutching his own. An inhuman hand. Yet one that also belongs to him.

“Does it hurt?” she asks.

“No.”

“I’m sorry this happened to you,” she says.

“I’m sorry you have to see it. You deserve better than me.” It’s not a pity-play. At least not
just
a pity-play. He means it. She does deserve better.

She kisses his cheek.

The Blight-vine twists and stirs.

Next to them, Boyland kicks and struggles. He’s trying to say words but can’t—they’re coming out as angry gurgles. The tendons in his neck are like rigging ropes pulled taut. His face is as red as an apple.

Cael pulls away from Wanda and stands before Boyland.

The zombie-eyed Blightborn stand by the door, shuffling from foot to foot. Thorn-teeth clicking like fingers running along the tines of a comb.

“You should’ve stayed in Boxelder,” Cael says. “Probably could’ve taken up your father’s job. Lived a pretty cushy life. But you didn’t. You couldn’t quit fiddling, and now here you are, following after me like a wasp all pissed off ’cause I threw a rock at your nest. Caught up in a trap. You made a mistake, Boyland.”

“. . . killed . . . my . . . father . . .”

“I didn’t kill him. My father killed him. Because
your
father was in love with my mother. I don’t know why. I don’t know the history there, nor do I much care at this point. But your father didn’t love your mother. And I’m not sure he loved you very much, either. Your father was a sonofabitch who deserved what he got. You keep pushing, same will happen to you.”

He feels a hand on his shoulder. A warm ripple shudders over his skin.

Esther. Her fingertip tendrils trace lines up his neck.

“This boy is your enemy,” she says.

Cael nods. “I reckon so.”

“And this girl is your Obligated.”

He looks to her. He doesn’t answer.

Then Esther says, “Do you love her?”

“I . . . ,” Cael starts to say. He can’t look at Wanda. So he looks away. And shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

Wanda makes a sound: another airless, desperate sob. He turns to her, sees her visibly swallow and retreat within herself.

Damnit, Cael, you’re such an asshole
.

Esther says, “What shall we do with them? We can do whatever we want. They’re fragile people. Frail like the wing of a moth. What of your enemy? This fat-necked thug, as base and inelegant as the tire on a harvester. We could kill him. You could exert your will against him, and we could pull him apart like a poppet at the seams. All his stuffing and straw pouring out.”

Cael blanches at the thought. He almost says,
Whatever it is you want to do with him,
but he bites his tongue. “Wanda, I want her safe. As for Boyland, I . . . say to just let him go.”

Esther’s eyebrows raise. “Truly?”

“Yeah. Let him take his boat and go home.”

“An act of mercy, then.”

“If you care to call it that.” Cael’s head is filled with the vision of Boyland returning home, tail between his legs.