The Harvest (21 page)

“Sorry,” Rigo says. He thrusts the flowers at her. “Here.”

She raises her eyebrow and takes the flowers. “Aw. Thanks, Rigo.”

“They’re called King of the Flowers. I dunno why, but they’re pretty.”

Gwennie leans forward, kisses him on the temple. As she pulls away, her eyes meet Cael’s. She smiles at him. The smile is sad.

“Oooh, hey!” Rigo says suddenly. “You guys want food? I can scare up something, probably. Dang, I should’ve thought of that.”

“I’m starving,” Gwennie says.

Cael says, “I could eat.”

And like that, Rigo gives them a pair of thumbs-up and he’s off like a shot. It’s painful watching him hobble. Cael may never get used to that.

“Surprised to see you at my door,” she says. “You never were much of a morning person.”

“Things change, I guess.”

“You don’t like change.”

“I like it about as much as I like blisters on the bottom of my feet.”

She laughs. “You haven’t changed much, then.”

He doesn’t say anything, but gives himself away by looking down at the vine coiled tight around his arm. Her own gaze follows his.

“You wanna come in?” she says.

Her room is about the same as his, but cockeyed in a different way. The floor bulges up and the ceiling bows. The cracks on the walls look like birds.

She sits on what passes for a fainting couch. He leans up against the wall.

“I thought you were dead,” she says finally.

“I maybe was. Or close enough to it.”

“But here you are.”

“In the flesh.”

He wants to tell her how sorry he is about her father, but he’s afraid to say it. He doesn’t want to take them down that path, but he wants her to know he’s here for her. So he keeps it bottled up. Makes him feel like a fool and a coward.
Godsdamn you, Cael McAvoy
.

“I missed you,” she says.

“I missed you. Seeing you up on that flotilla . . .” He laughs to cover up his embarrassment. “I thought I’d never see you again, after your family left. They whisked you away up into the sky and everything went to King Hell down in Boxelder.”

“It went to King Hell up there, too. The Sleeping Dogs. The Pegasus Project.” She sighs. “They put me on display, like I was some kinda . . . freak show.
See the Heartlander girl with dirt under her nails.
Bastards.”

He chews at a fingernail. “Lemme ask you. There any good people up there? Or is it just a skyful of monsters?”

“Hmm.” She thinks about it. “There are. Good people, I mean. I met a few of them. Balastair is one of them. Some of them aren’t good but aren’t awful, either. Just . . . confused. Ignorant, I guess you’d say. They’ve been fed a line of cow-shit about us Heartlanders, too. We think they’re monsters and they think we’re savages. . . . I had one woman ask me if we killed each other for food. Saw another dress like some kinda corn princess, as if that’s how we all dress. That was some party. That’s where I found your sister.”

“Mer was at that party? Jeezum. What’d they do to her?”

Gwennie rolls her eyes. “Nothing, ’cause they didn’t know she was one of us. She had a whole scam going. Hooked up with this nasty length of rope called the peregrine. Guess she was kinda his . . . mistress.”

Cael flinches. “Really?”

“She lost her way up there, I think. But I guess she found it again. We came back down to the Heartland and . . . the bunch of us set up outside a small town. But after a month she decided she didn’t want to stay. I don’t blame her. Our little farmstead was tense. She didn’t have a place there.”

“Merelda was always like the pollen. Went where the wind took her.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Wanda.”

His mouth goes dry. “That doesn’t seem like a question.”

“I guess it isn’t. I know how she found you.”

“You do?”

“Yup. Boyland told me about the posse Agrasanto threw together.”

“Oh, right.”
Boyland Barnes Jr., you sonofabitch
.

“I just wanna ask . . . you and her a thing?”

He wants to lie. That’s the thing to do. Tell her,
Nope, no way
, and then fall into Gwennie’s arms and go tell Wanda,
Sorry, that other thing you thought was a thing wasn’t a thing at all. That’s life in the Heartland, Wanda.

But he doesn’t. Which means maybe he’s changed a bit, too.

“I think so. I don’t know if it’s a thing as deep as an Obligation or if it’s a thing that’ll last, but . . . she stayed by my side for a year. I almost died and she left home and left her whole life behind. And she became like me to be closer to me, you know? That worries me a little, but it doesn’t change what she did for me. So, for now, I guess we’re something.”

Gwennie smiles and nods, but he can see that she looks like she just got slapped. “You love her?”

“I don’t know. Honestly.”

“You love me?”

He’s about to tell her
yes, yes, I do
, but she quickly stands up, shaking her head. “No, don’t answer that. This isn’t important. Lot of things going on, and the last thing we need to be worrying about is pawing at each other like we’re kittens looking for milk. This can wait.”

Can it?
Life feels awfully short all of a sudden.

But instead he just nods and says, “Yeah, yeah, of course.”

Of course I love you
.

“I’ll help you get what you need from this place.” She offers her hand, like she wants to shake over a deal. “I still get to be first mate on your crew, right?”

He takes her hand. Holds it there for a while. She doesn’t flinch at the Blight-vine that shifts and squirms.

“Damn right,” he says.

The held hands linger a little longer, and then finally she pulls away. “Jeez, you hungry? I’m hungry. Where’s Rigo?”

Cael swallows, finds it hard to push words up out of his throat, but somehow he manages.

“I’ll go find him,” he says.

He winds his way through the shattered halls of the old apartment building. Cael knows he’s finding his way toward the exit because he can hear the industrious sounds of Pegasus City rising in volume. Hammers hammering. Machines grinding and grumbling. A woman yelling something muffled, but Cael can tell it’s some kind of command, a call to action, to work.

Rounding a corner, he sees the doorway out—it’s like something from a warped dream, a portal with no right angles. He heads toward it, his own hunger now pecking at him like an insistent bird.

Suddenly, a hand falls on his shoulder. A heavy, meaty paw.

Even as he’s whirling around, he knows to whom it belongs.

The fist connects with his face. His skull snaps back on its mooring, and for a moment all he sees is a rain of starlight—and then vertigo hits him as he’s falling from the Saranyu all over again. When his vision clears a half second later, there’s Boyland Barnes Jr. standing there, fist cocked again.

“You mother-loving freak,” Boyland slurs, then throws another punch.

Cael catches the incoming fist. The vine coils fast around Boyland’s wrist and twists upward. The big teen cries out like a wounded rabbit, and the tension goes out of his one knee as he winces and whimpers.

“I’ll let you have that one hit,” Cael says, tasting blood. “Just that one. Because we got a lot of complicated history, and I figure I’m probably owed a punch. But the second one ain’t allowed. I could break this arm. The Blight
wants
me to. I can feel it. It’d be giddy as anything to snap your limb like a mouse’s neck in a snap-trap. But I’m not gonna let that happen, long as you don’t see fit to pitch another one. We square?”

Boyland growls.

Cael increases the pressure. Boyland yelps—his whole body goes slack, and suddenly the Blight-vine is the only thing keeping him standing.

“I said—
are we square?
”

“Yeah,
yeah
, Jeezum Crow on a salty cracker, just
let go
.”

The vine unspools.

Boyland staggers backward, manages to catch himself before falling.

“The hell’s this about?” Cael asks. “I was just minding my own business, staying out of yours.”

“You just came from Gwennie’s room.”

“So?”

“You’re back with her. I can smell it on you. She’s . . . my wife. Or was gonna be. You sonofabastard.” Way he says it, his voice is sludgy, muddy. That’s when Cael realizes.

“You’re drunk, you buckethead.”

“What? I’m not d—I’m not drunk,
you’re
drunk, McAvoy.” Cael gives him a look and Boyland shrugs. “Oh, whatever, Mister Holier Than Thou. Always so dang cocky, like the world owes you a favor, like you got it all figgered out. Asshole. So what if I managed to swipe a bottle of Micky Finn’s?”

Boyland slumps against the wall.

“Go on back to your room, Boyland. Sleep it off.”

“You love her, dontcha?”

“Her who?” Though he damn well knows who.

“I love her. I do. Not just an Obligation thing, either—because, you know, I really think she’s like, a, a . . . shoot, I dunno, like a flower or something, a pretty, pretty flower.” He
urps
into a closed fist. “I can’t even put my words straight to how I feel about her, but how I feel about her is that I love her.”

“Lemme ask you something.”

The buckethead gives him the side-eye. “Go on.”

“You let me die up there. On the Saranyu.”

“And yet, here you are, Miracle Man.” Cael can feel the anger there.

“But you didn’t know that. You had to figure on me taking the dirt nap after a fall like that. Gwennie almost had me. But you came along, pulled her away, which meant I fell.” He licks his bottom lip, tastes blood from where Boyland popped him. “You did it for her, I get that. But I wanna know: you do it because you were afraid she was gonna fall, or did you do it because if I survived, then you were afraid she was gonna fall
for me—
?”

Boyland grinds his teeth. “Honest answer?”

“Honest as the day is long.”

“Both. It was both. Not like I had a lot of time to think about it up there, but I had enough time to see the ways of it. I knew if we kept trying to save you she might go over the edge with you. And I knew if we
did
save you, well, I knew I probably was out of that picture. As I am now.”

Cael grunts. He wants to be mad. But it’s like hunting rats and only kicking up dust—he’s just not feeling it. “Forget it. Go get some sleep.”

“We square?”

“I reckon we’re pretty godsdamn far from square, and seems to me that however all this shakes out, someone’s gonna be unhappy, whether it’s you or me or both of us at the same time. We ain’t square, and we may never be square, but it is what it is and we’ll go on pretending it isn’t.”

With that, Cael turns around and heads to the door.

By now, his head’s spinning. His heart, too, and both of them seem to be whirling about in opposite directions. He can’t seem to find his balance here—Lane going against him, Rigo working for Pop, Gwennie wanting to be with him just as he’s with Wanda, Boyland being all slobbery sad and talking to him like they’re buddies or something.

He heads out of the building, his lip still smarting, his mouth still tasting the tang of his own blood. The city is awake and working—sparks rain down as someone welds beams together up above his head. Couple young kids nearby—one of them with a face blackened by some kind of tumor mask—doing mortar-work to assemble a wall, the tool scraping loudly as it presses the sloppy goop against the crooked bricks.

Someone calls his name, someone off to the side.

He keeps going. Whoever it is, he doesn’t wanna talk.

But the voice is louder and more persistent, coming at him.

Well, crap.

He stops, turns, throws up his hands, and says, irritated, “What?”

It’s Balastair. He almost doesn’t recognize the man at first—he’s not gone full-on Heartlander yet, but his hair’s shaggier, pulled back in a ragged warrior’s tail, and his face is scruffy with growth. Still, though, the rest of him—even guised in the clothing of a Heartlander—is crisp and well put together. He lifts a finger and calls after Cael:

“Mister McAvoy—a moment?”

“Sure, fine, yeah.” Cael rolls two fingers together: a gesture of impatience. “And seriously, just call me Cael, okay?”

“Cael. Yes. Of course.”

Up close now, Cael can see the man looks like he’s been rubbing poison ivy in his eyes. Puffy. Bloodshot. Red nose, too.

“You don’t look so hot,” Cael says.

Seemingly taken off balance, Balastair looks embarrassed as he dabs at his eyes. “I . . . lost somebody. I’m grieving. In the sky we are usually afforded a long period of mourning. Days-long funeral processions. Weeks away from work, when one is allowed to grieve in isolation or with a chosen few.”

“Down here, we aren’t usually afforded the time for that. I’ve seen men die in the field, taken down by a motorvator, and still the work goes on.” Suddenly he feels stupid and insensitive. “I’m sorry for your loss. I heard it was your ex-wife?” He remembers meeting her up there on the Saranyu. She didn’t seem particularly friendly.

“Killed by our own. She ran to them thinking they would help her and . . .” He shakes his head. “Cleo and I were a mismatch, perhaps from the start. I had a lot of anger for her, but still, she was once my wife and . . .” His voice cracks. “I didn’t come to talk about this, so I should adopt a Heartlander’s toughness. I came to talk. And offer my help.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I . . . knew your father. A little bit anyway.”

Cael blinks. “How’s that? You’re not that much older than I am.”

“He . . . knew my mother. I don’t know all the details, not exactly. I know that your father as a young man was on one of the flotillas—though I don’t know how or why that was. It was there he met my mother, and later on they reconnected here, in the Heartland. When she left the flotilla, she reached out to him and . . . again, a lot of this is hearsay, but she seemed to think he had lost some of his, ahh, rebellious edge. He wanted to settle down, and she wanted to do the opposite. But she contacted me—back when we were still talking. Had me help him a little.”