Blightborn (51 page)

Boyland pulls up on the stick, and the skiff plunges.

Cael’s guts feel about thirty feet above his head right now. But it’s then he understands. Boyland isn’t possessed by any demons or devils. He isn’t one with the skiff.

He just wants to save Gwennie.

Cael admires him for that. And hates him all the more.

Balastair makes the mistake of looking out the window.

Fires bloom in the coming night. Gas catching fire. The city collapses against itself. Some buildings and districts remain buoyed by giant plastic balloons; other parts are left unprotected and unsaved, plunging out of the sky—black blurs, lights smearing, people screaming.

Oh gods, people are dying. So many people
.

Clouds of dust and ash begin to roll in.

And then—a skiff! It drops out of the sky like a stone, dips past the window, and then floats back up. He can’t make out who they are, but he sees two people in the boat, young men both—

The one in the passenger side clambers over and reaches out with his arm.

A vine extends outward, shattering the window. Balastair shields himself, staggering backward as the young man pulls himself through the open space.

Balastair falls on his ass. He points a finger and seethes.

“Mother sent you, didn’t she? Did she do this? Is this
her
doing?”

“She did,” the young man says. “But first, you need to help us find some people. Because if you don’t, I’m throwing you to the birds.”

“I can’t . . . I can’t help you. Who are you looking for?”

“Gwendolyn Shawcatch. And my sister, Merelda.”

Gwennie?

“Her? I . . . who are you? Are you . . . Cael?”

“My name’s—Wait, yeah, I’m Cael. How the hell did you know?”

Balastair almost laughs. “Cael . . . I know your sister, and I damn sure know Gwendolyn Shawcatch.” He stands, dusts himself off. “You’re fortunate, because I even know where she is in the midst of all this. Let’s just hope she’s alive.”

“We need to go now.”

“Wait. If you want my help, I’m bringing somebody.”

Balastair doesn’t wait for an answer. He storms over to the bed and cuts Cleo free. He pulls her gag off.

“Thank you,” she says.

“Don’t” is all he can say in response.

But she leans forward and gives Eldon a chaste kiss on the cheek.

Then she heads to the shattered window.

Eldon screams. Red cheeked. Froth lipped.

Balastair gives him a wave. “Toodles, Planck. Hope your Pegasus comes to save you.”

Through the window and to the skiff beyond they go.

The parts of the flotilla that have collapsed are now gone, leaving great rents and fissures in the city. What once seemed like a whole piece is now broken into sticks and crumbs, pieces floating away from one another—and into one another, too. They see
people stranded on balconies. They see Empyrean vessels fleeing in the distance—few, if any, seem to be bent on rescuing their own people.

Balastair comments from the back. “We’re a self-interested people. Isn’t that right, Cleo?”

The woman he saved says nothing. She stares ahead, lips pursed.

Cael can’t care. He bites at his nails as Balastair directs them. The Empyrean man—only a few years older than Cael, really—tells him he last saw Gwennie and Merelda in the Fabrication District—they had been pinned down by someone called the peregrine, but with some pride he says he “took care of that.”

“The Fabrication District should be protected by the emergency inflatables,” Balastair says.

“Better be right about that.”

“How long?” Balastair asks.

“How the hell should I know?” Cael snaps. “You know this place better than I do—”

“No, I mean”—and here the man lays a gentle hand on Cael’s shoulder—“how long have you been afflicted?”

Boyland gives Cael a dark, sidelong look.

“Not . . . not long. Couple-few weeks. Maybe longer and I didn’t know it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Well.”

“If my mother sent you, she can truly help you.”

He thinks but does not say,
I damn well hope so
.

Balastair says, “Ahead, there—up over this ridge of warehouses.” The skiff flies low along gleaming corrugated rooftops—now
buckling and breaking apart. Shattered solar panels catch puddles of moonlight as they pass overhead.

Then, suddenly, up over the rise is the shipping bay—a scalloped, cutout harbor of open air. It lays cracked, shattered, but it’s still here—two balloons, not one, hold it up, each moored by massive braided cables as thick as a man’s leg.

“Here, here, here!” Balastair cries, reaching up and pulling the wheel of the skiff. Boyland protests, but the skiff swings around and—

Cael sees the look of horror on the man’s face.

They’re staring down at nothing. This is where a part of the flotilla must have sheared off. It’s now just a jagged wall of torn ducts, shredded pipes, sparking bundles of colorful wire.

“They . . . they were right here,” Balastair says. “They were there on a platform. A walkway . . . and then . . .”

Boyland roars. He slams his fist against the side of the skiff. Cael can see tears in his eyes.

He doesn’t have tears. Not yet.

They have to be alive.

Have to be
.

He scans the horizon. Looks toward the shipping docks with its collapsed cranes and scattered heaps of fallen crates. A few scowbarges sit anchored, bobbing there, moored by long lengths of chain and buoyed by their own hover mechanisms.

Nothing. Nobody living or dead.

Except—

Cael squints.

“There!” he says.

He sees Merelda! And then Gwennie. They’re coming out
from behind one of the scowbarges.
They’re trying to find a way off the city. Thank the gods. Thank the Lord and the Lady and all the Saintangels—

But then—

One of the still-standing cranes groans as the ground shifts.

The metal buckles. They can hear it from here.

It begins to fall.

Right toward them.

They’re going to steal this scowbarge. It’s their only chance, Gwennie thinks. When the peregrine’s ketch-boat exploded, they figured that was it—everything was light and fire and metal raining down around them.

But they lived. The ship fell. The other ships, certain an attack was imminent, began to retreat.

And that gave them the chance. Squirrel led the way. Up over the warehouse rooftops. Down into the shipping bay outside the Fabrication District.
Home is beneath our feet,
Gwennie thought at the time. And she thinks it now, too, even after the entire flotilla begins to break apart, even after what must
surely
be the raiders’ attack.

Is this what they were planning all along?

She can’t think about that now.

All she can think about is home
. The Heartland. Sea of corn and shit-biscuits and the growl of motorvators and the stink of Queenie’s Quietdown, and all that better than anything up here in the sky.

Just get on a ship and go.

Their option is a scowbarge.

They have three barges, but only one is operable—the others are damaged beyond repair. One has a cockpit smashed by a massive crate. The other slammed into the side of the dock, tearing it open and spilling its goods like the guts of a knife-struck deer.

So, from three barges to one.

They stand there in its shadow, trying to figure out how to get
in
the damn thing. Gwennie’s piloted corn-boats before, but these are
sky
-ships. They fly; they don’t just float.

But then, just as she’s about to climb over and try to find her way in—a shadow falls on her. Squirrel shrieks, grabs her elbow, pulls her sharply backward—

Just as a crane smashes down on the scowbarge.

When Gwennie looks up, the massive yellow crane-arm has crushed the barge right down the middle. The hover-panels beneath it spark.

Then they go dark.

The barge drops like a stone, taking the crane with it.

Gwennie’s heart pounds like a hundred horses in her chest.

But it’s nothing compared to the heart attack she feels when a skiff drops down out of the sky and lands across the shattered concrete of the shipping dock, skidding and sparking.

This is the moment Cael has wanted.

This is it. Since the day he’d found out about the Lottery, since he’d seen them take her away in that ship, since he’d left home on this journey,
this
is the moment he’s been waiting for.

To be reunited with Gwendolyn Shawcatch.

Boyland skips the skiff across the docking bay ground like a
stone across choppy water. Even before the skiff stops skidding Cael is up and out of the boat, nearly falling as he runs toward his sister and Gwennie. They see him, and their faces light up—genuine happiness, excitement—and an absurd thought crosses his mind.
I get to save them; I get to be here and save them and now Gwennie will love me forever
.

They crash into him.

Arms wrapped around him.

He pulls Gwendolyn toward him.

He kisses her. It’s so fast and so strange he barely registers what it feels like, but everything inside him flutters just the same—

And then it goes cold. Because Gwennie bats at something on the back of her neck, and suddenly she pulls away. And Merelda does, too. They’re both staring at him. And at first he doesn’t even realize—

“The Blight,” Merelda says.

“Cael,” Gwennie says, shocked. “Cael, no. What’s—Oh no.”

He holds out his arm. The vine—already growing where Eben Henry had sliced it—is squirming and twisting into and out of a corkscrew. Leaves tickling the air. It touched her. He realizes that now. The Blight-vine touched her. Climbed up her neck. Oh gods.

“Gwennie, it’s okay,” he says, “I’m going to be . . .”

But his voice trails off.

At the edge of the docking platform stands Scooter Shawcatch. Staring out over the horizon, not watching them at all, just looking. Shell-shocked. And the platform he’s on is a kind of peninsula jutting out over open air—and then the entire ground shudders
and one last piece of the crane comes down, a yellow hunk of bent metal preceded by a shower of orange embers—

It lands ten feet away from the boy.

And it breaks the platform as if it’s nothing more than hard toffee.

Cael runs.

The platform falls and, with it, the boy.

He hears screams behind him. Gwennie. Merelda.

He leaps to the edge of the shattered concrete—

Skids forward on his belly. Half his body hangs over the edge, looking down across the darkened Heartland—

His arm shoots out—

The Blight-vine lashes.

There
.

He knows he has the boy. He can
feel
it through the vine—the feel of human flesh against plant matter, the texture of the boy’s wrist against the soft leaves of the Blight—and for a moment he doesn’t know what to do. The concrete beneath him starts to crack and crumble. Those little tectonic shifts in his gut—

He does the only thing he can do. He pulls the Blight-vine toward him, wrenching his arm, rolling his body back and to the side—

The boy is dragged through the air. Scooter’s arm snaps with a gut-churning crunch, the bone broken, the child crying out—

But he lands—and Cael exerts every last bit of will and energy he has to make the landing a soft one. The boy rolls over. Cries, sobbing. Gwennie scoops him up. Cael starts to stand, starts to move, already apologizing for the boy’s arm—

The ground shifts again beneath him.

What once was there is there no more.

He falls. Catches the edge with his chest. The air again punched out of his lungs. His arms grab smooth concrete. He tries to drag himself forward. He can see other cracks forming along the concrete.
This place is coming apart
. Merelda is screaming. Gwennie’s mother is screaming for her daughter as Gwennie hard-charges toward him. Boyland catches her, big arms around her middle, dragging her backward. She struggles. Strikes him. Gets free again, sprinting toward Cael—

Someone is yelling,
We have to go; it’s all falling down
—

His vine lashes uselessly against the concrete.

Gwennie dives. Grabs for the Blight-vine.

Their eyes meet. She’s saying something—but the noises of the crumbling city swallow her words.

His body sings with panic.

Then he realizes what she’s saying—

“I can save you.”

But I was supposed to save you,
he thinks.

A dark shadow swoops over them. The skiff. Boyland piloting. He tilts the skiff—one of his big arms reaches out, catches Gwennie around the midsection, hauls her up—

She’s still got the vine in her hand, but it begins sliding through her grip—Cael calls for help
. No, no, don’t leave me
—

The skiff lifts higher and higher.

Gwennie screams for him again and again.

The vine slides all the way through her hands.

The skiff takes off.

The platform breaks.

Cael falls.