Blightborn (50 page)

The visidex chimes.

Incoming Packet.

“Holy gods,” he says.

It’s the code.

He hurries over to the console.

Pulls up the codes. He scans for the Saranyu’s code—

The three letters,
OSS
, are buried in the middle—Ormond Stirling Saranyu. Followed by a sixteen-digit code of numbers and symbols.

With shaking fingers he begins to hunt-and-peck the code on the keyboard.
Tap, tap, tap.
Mistype. “Damnit.” Delete.
Tap, tap, tap.

Four more digits.

Then two.

Then just one.

His hand is shaking.

His daughter. He doesn’t really know if she made it off okay.

He has to believe she did. By now. Has to have
faith
.

Kathunk!

Cables. Firing from the ships. Suctioning to the outside of the tower.

Here they come,
he thinks.

“I love you, Retta,” he says. The name of his wife. The true name of his daughter.
I have faith
.

He taps the final number into the code.

And everything begins to flash.

THE IMPROBABLE DYAD

THE SKIFF CUTS THE AIR
. Boyland pilots. Cael sits back in the seat, cold air rushing over the windshield and rifling through his hair. He closes his eyes once more and reaches out—

At first Cael couldn’t do it. They got the skiff flying again, but out there in the great expanse he found nothing. Worry plagued him. Would Wanda be okay with the Maize Witch? He had to believe that she would. She loved him. Did he love her? He didn’t know. Would Gwennie be okay? Lane? Rigo? Were Pop and Mom dead? He couldn’t do it. Couldn’t focus. No sense of where Esther’s son was. He pushed and tensed and bit the inside of his cheek so hard he drew blood, but then—in the moment just as he relaxed, started to give up—there it was.

The Maize Witch’s son. Balastair. A tiny seed buried not in the earth but among the clouds. He pointed the way, and Boyland aimed them toward a distant flotilla. A flotilla now closer and
closer, a dark shape starting to take form—from a shapeless blob to a thing with towers and bridges and the craggy bottom of hover-panels and burning engines.

The Ormond Stirling Saranyu.

“There she is,” Boyland says.

“Don’t personify her,” Cael says. “It’s not a woman. It’s just a thing.”

“Jeezum, so touchy.” Boyland looks rough. They tore a strip off the bottom of his pants and tied it around his collarbone. Cael did the same for his hand. Each looks like an old leather belt swallowed by a goat and squeezed out the other end. “You didn’t kill my father, then.”

“No. My father did.”

“And mine really had a thing for your mom, didn’t he?”

“Ayup.”

“That’s twisted. I kinda knew it. When he’d get drunk once in a while, he’d call my mama by your mama’s name.”

“Pretty twisted, yeah.”

“He was a sonofabitch.”

“He was your father.”

A grim nod shared between them.

“Gwennie’s mine,” Boyland says. “I need you to know that.”

“I know she’s yours by right.”

“Good.”

“But soon enough rights might not matter like you think. And when the day comes, the choice is going to fall to the person it should’ve fallen to the whole damn time—Gwennie. She’ll get to make her choice. And we both have to be ready for
whatever choice she makes, whether that’s you, me, or some fancy Empyrean lad she met up here on the flotilla. This is on her.”

“She’ll choose me.” But Cael can’t help but hear the doubt in Boyland’s voice. “She
will
, McAvoy.”

“If you say so, buckethead.”

The shape looms ahead. Up here they can see lights—lights of a thousand tiny windows, winking ships orbiting the city, running lights along the side. The lights shine like spears from the city in the dark. Cael could never have imagined what it would look like from up here.

No Heartlander was meant to be this high.

Suddenly, the city shudders.

“Did you—”

But Boyland doesn’t have to finish the question. No mistaking the way the silhouettes of the buildings now lean toward and away from each other, pieces breaking off. The red glow of the engines is gone, and the blue glow of the massive hover-panels beneath the city flickers and goes dark.

Which means they’re too late.

“It’s happening,” Cael says.

Gwennie
.

But then he hears a series of bangs, like distant cannonfire. Massive balloons begin to inflate, dark shapes against the wine-spilled sky. Some parts of the city remain buoyed by these huge inflatables, but other portions of the flotilla are offered no such protection.

And those pieces begin to drop out of the sky.

It seems slow at this distance—as if they don’t so much fall
as
drift gently downward
, pieces of bridges and pipes and mortar crumbling to the earth below. Trees. Balconies.

People.

They can see people falling.

“Jeezum Crow,” Boyland says.

Cael growls, “Faster.
Go faster
.”

Balastair is still there, still up in the sky.

Cael can only hope that Gwennie is, too.

MY FAIR LADY

THAT
, HE THINKS,
WAS FOR ERASMUS.

Balastair leans back. Contented. This,
this
feels great. Watching from the camera buried in the steel Pegasus’s eyes as the peregrine fires his little cannon—
plink, plink, plink
. As they rush him inside. As the metal beast plunges into the deck of the
Osprey
, as his fertilizer bomb—made before his visit to Planck, created from his own forgotten supply in his now-derelict greenhouses—goes off in a great, gulping fireball.

He looks over to Eldon Planck, who sits bound up with Cleo. Their mouths taped shut. Balastair chuckles. He feels raw. Abraded.
Alive
.

“You idiots,” Balastair says, popping his knuckles. “So proud of your little accomplishment there, eh? ‘Oh! I created a flying metal horse!’ Well, I
stole
your flying metal horse and turned it into a torpedo. Hah! And now that damnable Peregrine is gone. Dead. Likely burned to a foul-smelling cinder.”

He stands. Pulls a small nail file from Cleo’s makeup table. “Curious, though, that you had the control station right here in your own home. You truly are a narcissist. And it suggests to me that you work too hard. Cleo didn’t like that
I
worked too hard, and yet here she is, falling in with a man all too similar. She would have left you before too long.” He spies a guilty look cross Eldon’s face. “Oh ho ho, she was already on her way out, wasn’t she? You caught wind of it. Yes. Well.”

He steps over to Eldon.

He uses the nail file to pop the tape and rag in the man’s mouth.

“Tell me something,” Balastair says.

“I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“And yet you will because, as previously discussed, you’re a classless narcissist who will jump at the chance to talk about himself the way a cat jumps at a sprig of nip. Was the Pegasus part of it? Part of the Initiative?”

Eldon chuffs a humorless laugh. “That was no part of the Initiative.”

“What is it, then? What did they hire you to do?”

“You really want to know?”

“I do.”

Eldon grins. It’s almost feral, so pleased is he with himself. “We’re planning on . . . changing how we deal with the Heartlanders.”

“Oh? Because they’re not obedient enough? Not worked enough?”

“Not hardly. Not by a
long
shot. It’s already begun. Tuttle’s Church, and next up, Boxelder. Take the people captive. House
them inside auto-mate bodies. Turn them into mechanicals to do the work. Tireless workers. Utterly obedient. A hundred times more productive. Smarter, too, because it uses their brains—no longer the dumb programs of any old auto-mate.”

Balastair’s blood goes cold.

“You’re not serious.”

“Oh, but I am, Harrington. And you missed out on that contract. They did consider talking to you about a
variant
approach. Genetically modifying the Heartlanders. Dulling them. Cutting out their free will but making them physically more capable. It would have been interesting, but flesh, as it turns out, remains so very weak.”

Balastair backhands Eldon.

“You’re right,” Balastair says, noting a line of blood now snaking down from the man’s split bottom lip. He smears it with a thumb, and Eldon flinches. “Flesh
is
weak. But why? Why merge them with machines? Just make your damn metal men and be done with it.”

“Because the brain is still the most powerful computer we have. Plug into it, and it can power the machines, give them capacities and problem-solving algorithms like we’d never before seen. The personality is largely gone. But the brain is active. And the flesh remains, too, feeding the robot. Each cell destroyed is a small boost of battery life.”

“You’re sick.”

“I’m ambitious.” Eldon smirks. “That’s why your lady left you for me. You weren’t
ambitious
enough, Harrington. You were—”

Balastair backhands him again.

And with the hit, the entire room shakes.

That’s not right.

He’s about to say that very phrase—
that’s not right
—but suddenly, what was once a small tremor becomes a massive one as the entire room,
the entire building
, dips downward, leaning left. Furniture moving. Lamps shattering. Balastair falls—

And then, above their heads:
boom
.

The building drops farther. The floor splits in half—the makeup table disgorging its contents and lipstick tubes and mascara tins rolling toward the fissure, dropping into the rooms below—

It stops.

Everything seems still. Though the room has a . . .
sway
to it. Back and forth. A gentle pendulum.

“Oh gods,” Eldon bleats. “We’re under attack.”

Balastair suddenly realizes what’s happened. The engines stopped. The hover-panels, too. The city is on the verge of collapse. Outside he hears the crash of buildings, screams drifting downward from above.

Because parts of it are still falling.

THE FALLEN CITY

THE CITY FALLS DOWN
around them. Buildings tilt. Break apart. People tumble out of windows. Cael tries not to look. He likes flying. Likes going fast. But he doesn’t like this. This is a hell-ride through the mouth of Old Scratch himself. Broken teeth. Lashing tongue. Purgatory.

All this time,
he thinks,
I never gave Boyland enough credit
. Because while the buckethead may not be able to spell his own name, shit if he can’t fly like a sparrow. Ducking, dipping, sharp cuts to the left, the right. He flies like a man possessed—who is one with the skiff he pilots.

“There!” Cael points—ahead, a massive columnar building, square and severe, its windows arched, the lights within flickering and sparking. Inside he can feel Balastair Harrington, Esther’s son, the Maize Witch’s
seed
. His vine twinges and tightens. “Take her down. Down! He’s toward the bottom—”