Blightborn (49 page)

“Maybe he’ll save you,” Gwennie answers.

“Not this time. When these people are done with you, they’re done. I see that now.”

“A little late to learn that lesson.” Gwennie can’t help it. She smirks, just a little.

“At least I learned it.”

“Open the hatch,” Percy says. A pair of Frumentarii pop the two latches, and the hatch above opens with a squeak and a hiss. A red metal ladder descends. He climbs up into the fading light of day and steps out onto the upper deck of the ketch-boat. Wind in his hair. Sleeves of his suit billowing. He feels powerful here.

The winds are shifting. As day turns to night, so does Percy Lemaire-Laurent reclaim his power. The praetor will have nothing to say to him about this . . . hiccup. All she will do is heap garlands of laurels on his brow. He’ll get a parade for the extermination of the terrorist cells on the Saranyu. He thinks he’ll even push for the creation of a new position: a Peregrine of
Peregrines, someone to oversee security across
all
the flotillas. It is time for each flotilla to stop being so damn
independent
.

He steps to the golden railing. Mary Salton’s gun hangs in his hand, heavy, pendulous,
consequential
.

There. Trapped on an access walkway like little grackles with their wings clipped. They all stare up at him, huddling together like orphans, hate in their eyes. He wonders then: Will he spare any of them? He looks to Merelda. La Mer. Such a beauty. Ravensblack hair. Skin like pooled milk. Young and fresh and able to compete with him in bed. He could save her. He thinks then that maybe he will. He’ll save her. He’ll send her to the Lupercal. And once a year he’ll visit with her. He’ll take her away from that place. He’ll wine her and dine her and bed her. It will be his mercy.

For the peregrine is a merciful creature.

“You have been judged,” he calls down to them. “There is no escape from this. Know that this justice is essential in the eyes of the Lord and the Lady and all the Saintangels and the sky gods and goddesses that came before them. Take comfort that your mistakes will serve as a lesson for all, for your failure is an instructional manual written in scar tissue.” He raises the revolver. “You have been judged by the peregrine, by the praetor, by the whole of the Empyrean. May your cradle be your grave.”

He holds up the weapon. They huddle tighter together now, and he thinks,
Maybe I’ll kill more than one with a single bullet
. There’s that phrase, two birds, one stone; he likes the poetry of it. And though that may mean he’ll kill La Mer, too, he braces his one arm with his other and then—

He pulls the trigger.

The gun spits its bullet, bucking like a bull—

All clamor and smoke.

A pipe above the Heartlanders’ heads busts free and spirals off into oblivion. Steam hisses.

He missed.

I missed
.

Impossible!

Now his hand is shaking. Anger and embarrassment threaten him. He grits his teeth. Ignores the sound of the hatch behind him opening. Ignores the footsteps behind him. But he cannot ignore the hands that reach for him, begin to drag him backward—his own guards! Betraying him!

“Get off me!” he cries. “Let me take my shot!”

“Sir,” one of the guardsman says. “Sir!
Something’s happening
.”

He pulls away and wheels.

Is he in danger?

One of his agents points off the starboard. Out toward the horizon.

He almost laughs at the absurdity of it.

“I can handle this,” he says.

And he raises the revolver once more.

Gwennie peers out over her mother’s embracing arms.

The peregrine and his men are arguing. Pointing off at something away from the flotilla—

Her gaze follows the gesture.

What she sees seems impossible. In fact, it seems
insane
.

The last light of the sinking sun glints orange off a flying horse. A Pegasus. Eldon Planck’s
automated
Pegasus.

She can hear the thrum of its hover-panels.

Close. Closer. Close enough now to see its animatronic head rearing back. To hear the mechanized snorting. Metal wings of a hundred brass feathers extend out and collapse inward in some rough semblance of flying, though it’s not the wings that hold it up but a series of hover-panels.

Legs gallop on invisible ground.

It’s heading right for the skiff.

The peregrine fires.
Boom
. The gun jerks in his hand.

The horse keeps coming.

He fires again—

Boom!

This time the horse’s head clangs with the shot and spins around on its axis, suddenly hanging limp and useless. The peregrine fires another three times—
boom, boom, boom
—and sparks leap off the Pegasus. One brass feather spins away into nothing. One hoof suddenly hangs loose by a mooring of red wires. The final shot finishes the job of the first—the head leaps off the neck, but it’s held fast by a series of cables. And the Pegasus is still coming, heading toward the
Osprey
.

The men rush the peregrine back into the belly of the ship.

In the moments before collision, Gwennie sees something strapped to the bottom of the Pegasus’s belly. A bag taped there.

She doesn’t know what it is, but she can suddenly guess.

She hugs everyone together and shields them quickly—

The Pegasus strikes the
Osprey
.

The explosion is deafening.

THE CAPTAIN CONFESSES

THE ELEVATOR DOOR OPENS
, and for a moment Lane thinks,
It looks like stars.
The data bank consists of black boxes almost twice as tall as Lane. Each stacked against the other, each winking blue and green in the half-lit dark of the room.

Then Killian collapses forward, his left shoulder a ragged mess from where the blast struck him. He’s got his hand against the wound, blood pumping through his fingers. Already the color has drained from his face.

He turns toward the elevator and fires a sonic round into it, finishing the job the mechanical started.

Sparks shower.

“That should slow the metal bastards down,” he says, wetting his lips with his tongue. His voice is weak. He almost falls. Lane catches him.

“Careful,” Lane says.

“I wager we’re about a hundred miles past careful,” Killian says.

“You’re going to be all right.”

“I wasn’t going to be all right the day I came kicking out of my mother. She died that day. My father killed himself two weeks later. I was never going to be okay, Lane Moreau, not ever.”

He sniffs and sits down in the middle of the floor.

Lane crouches next to him.

“We . . . need to get the codes.”

“We will,” Killian says. “First I need to say some things.”

“This is one of those bullshit deathbed confessions, isn’t it? You’re not going to die here.”

“Maybe not from this . . .” He peels his hand away, and the palm is thick with crimson. “But we’re trapped in a bunker below a town where the people have been . . .
transformed
into mechanicals. Or half-mechanicals. I did see that, right? I’m not hallucinating? I hope I’m hallucinating.”

Lane doesn’t say anything. He can’t muster the words.

“So consider this not just my deathbed confession but yours, too, because I cannot be assured we will both be alive at the end of this. Maybe we’ll be made into metal men. Wouldn’t that be a thing?” He suddenly winces. “Point is, you have my apologies, Lane. My dearest, deepest, stupidest-ass apologies. I made a terrible error—”

“We don’t have to do this.”

“Godsdamn, yes, we do!” Killian yells, pounding the floor. “I do. I need this. I messed up. There I went spinning some glittery spider’s web about how we all should be who we are and rebel against what people think of us, and then the hard wind of real
life came in and swept that away. I didn’t want people to know.” He presses his thumb into the space between his eyes, rubbing it in hard circles. “Because I’m a liar and a fool and a damn, candy-baby coward.”

“I get it,” Lane says. That’s all he really has to say. “I get it, I do.”

“Sorry, too, about your friend.” Killian sniffs. “He attacked my mate, it’s true. But we didn’t give him much choice, either.”

“Cael’s good people. He stands up for what’s right even when he doesn’t know what right really is.”

“What’s right and righteous is truly a mystery for the ages.” Killian props himself up against a blinking bank of black boxes. “Let’s get on with this, then.” He takes the visidex, slides it across the floor to Lane. “Should be a station on the far side. Just plug in the visidex and hit Transfer.”

Lane holds the screen in his hand. These things really are keys. The Empyrean never should have allowed a single one of them to fall into the hands of a Heartlander. He feels his heartbeat pulsing in his fingers. He nods to Killian, sees the station—a blank screen tilted upward, no keyboard, just a space like a podium. He slots the visidex against the black glass.

A new icon shows on the screen:
Transfer.

Gingerly, he taps it.

A little black progress bar begins to fill up with alarming swiftness.

The visidex chimes when the bar is full.

Transfer Complete.

“Holy hell,” Lane says. He withdraws the visidex. It feels
heavier somehow. It isn’t. Not really. Data can’t weigh anything, can it? But he imagines it, just the same.

Killian looks up at him as he approaches. His face is a gray sheet, the color leeched out of it. The blinking lights of the room reflected in the blood slicking his shoulder. “Is it . . . done?”

“I . . . think so.”

Killian reaches up. Fingers wiggling. “Take my hand.”

Lane eases forward. He takes the raider captain’s hand.

Killian squeezes it. Not hard. Not a lot of strength there.

Then he lets go.

The captain says, “Tap the screen. Should be a handful of new icons. One of them should be called something like—”

“Codes. I see it. Codes.”

“Tap it.”

Lane does. The screen is filled with a series of numbers, letters, symbols. “It’s gibberish.”

“It’s not. Icon in the corner. Looks like the wings of a Pegasus. Tap that. It’ll give you the option to send it to another . . .” He coughs into his hand. “To another visidex user.”

Lane sees the little icon that looks like a pair of wings—and sure enough, the option to send it along appears. Killian recites a code. “That’s the code for our people in the control tower. Go on.”

Slowly, Lane types it in.

“Send it.”

Lane’s finger hovers.

“What will happen?” Lane asks.

“Huh?”

“When I do this. When I send this. What will happen?”

“They’ll have the code. They’ll use the code.”

“But what will the code do?”

Killian’s nostrils flare as he pulls a long, slow breath into his chest. “It’ll bring the flotilla down.”

“That’ll kill a lot of people.”

“Thousands.”

“It’s murder. Isn’t it?”

Killian closes his eyes. “Maybe. Let me tell you how I see it, Lane. I think that ending the lives of bad men is not murder. It may be vengeance. And it is most certainly justice. They’ve poisoned our earth. Taken the sky for themselves. They feed us shit like we’re pigs. They work us to the bloody bones. All our lives are blisters and cancers and stillborn children, and all their lives are parties and fancy drinks and pretty sunsets. Maybe if they die we rebalance the scales. Maybe they have to die to even up the odds and show Heartlanders that the time to change is now. A symbol.”

“It’s a damn serious symbol.”

“That’s life in the Heartland.”

Lane nods.

And he hits the button to transmit the code.

CONTROL

THEY’RE COMING FOR HIM
.

They have ships. Hovering outside. They don’t know what to do yet, Davies figures—they can’t just open fire on their own control tower. But they’re starting to gather cables and breach charges.

They’ll be in before long.

It’s all over. No code. No nothing. He wonders what it’ll feel like, eating his own sonic shooter. Sticking it in his mouth and pulling the trigger. Will he hear the sound? The sonic bird-scream as he tears the top of his head off? Or will it just be silent? There one minute, gone the next?