The Harvest (29 page)

“I saw Luna Dorado,” Wanda says, interrupting.

Lane, suddenly flummoxed, asks, “What did you say?”

“I saw her. Not an hour ago. North end of the city, by the Engine Layer. Well, to be more accurate, I
heard
her, I guess. Talking to someone on a visidex. Not sure what it was about—I came in a little late to the conversation.” Then she gives another of her gawky laughs, like she’s really playing it up. “Sorry?”

Rigo hands Lane a visidex, and Lane puts out a call to his security team to go search the Engine Layer for Luna.

“We had to assume she remained in the city,” Balastair says. The bird bounces up his arm to an elbow he’s extended. “It was never much of a possibility that she could get past the blockade.” A blockade that everyone knows has only grown in the last few months.

Cael speaks, finds his voice a bit croaky—he’s nervous sitting between Gwennie and Wanda, as if all of a sudden the two of them might start pulling him apart like they’re dismantling a malfunctioning motorvator. “That blockade is like a noose around our necks. They’ve pushed in again. Upped their numbers
again
. Gonna be a point they make a move, and when they do, I’m not sure the cannons will be able to stop them all.”

“Cael’s right,” Gwennie says. “The blockade is killing us. We can’t get new people in. Can’t send new people out. We can’t access Fort Calhoun.”

Rigo stands. “We’re working on bolstering defenses. Training people with weapons. Setting up an emergency network through the visidexes. If they push in, if they attack, I’ve run the numbers—I think we can push them back.”

Wanda seems to watch it all with rapt fascination. Again she gives off the vibe that she’s a visitor from the outside, from above them. Or worse, a raptor studying a rat as it scurries to and fro.

“We need an edge,” Gwennie says. “We need a plan.”

“If only we had my mother’s weapon,” Balastair says.

Cael shrugs. “Whatever that even was.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Lane says. “We don’t know what it was, or more importantly,
where
the damn thing has gone—”

Boyland says something, something quiet. Everyone keeps talking past him, because they all probably assume he just mumbled something grumpy and drunk—some mush-mouthed insult, some half-witted half-ass commentary. But Cael thinks it was something else. He shushes the room and says:

“What’d you say, Boyland?”

“Oh, lookit that. Captain Cael wants to hear what I have to say.”

“Crow on a cracker, Boyland, just spit it out.”

“Yes, Cap’n, yessir. Shit. This is the first time y’all have paid attention to me in months. Forget I was here, didja? Don’t mind me babysitting your kids long as I stay out of your hair, but soon as I speak up and have something you want, then suddenly you all remember I’m alive—”

Rigo’s brow furrows so deep you could plant seeds in it. “Boyland, if you have something to say, just say it.”

“The Luzerne Garam Ilmatar,” Boyland says. “Happy?”

“What the hell’s that?” Cael asks. “Another flotilla?”

“Yes,” Balastair says. “First in the fleet.”

“ ’S’where the . . .
weapon
is, the one you’re looking for. The one the kooky Blight-bitch sent you digging for like a well-heeled doggy.”

Cael feels his Blight-vine twitch at that. He wills it to calm. “The weapon is there, on that flotilla? How do you know?”

“Because I gotta lotta free time. Didn’t take me long to find enough booze to keep me brined till the world falls apart, so I had to occupy myself in . . .
other
ways. Turns out, didja know there’s a whole series of administrative offices? Files and folders full of paper. Paper! You believe that? Shit that’s not on the visidexes but is handwritten on godsdamn paper.” He guffaws, suddenly. “Empyrean savages!” He wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “Anyway. I got to reading and found a whole cache of notes about the Blight-bitch—
Esther Harrington
and her darling boy,
Balastair
. Whole folders on the witch. One of them was about the contents of her home after a search by someone called the ‘peregrine.’ They took everything they had out of that place and sent it to the Ilmatar flotilla. Including one ‘package’ marked as ‘cylinders—purpose unknown.’ A package that the notes said was dug up out of the terrace after it was found via something called a ‘bio-scan.’”

He burps again.

Once again, the room is stunned to shocked looks and stammering silence.

“I never thought of that,” Rigo says. “They kept paper records.”

“Not so smart now,” Boyland mutters. “Huh, Rodrigo? Shoot. I should be mayor of this place.”

“Your father made a helluva mayor,” Lane says, scowling. “A drunken baboon falling asleep at the Harvest Home podium—”

“Hey!” Boyland says, standing up so fast he knocks his chair out. “Godsdamnit! I figured this shit out with the . . . with the Ilmatar and none of you did, so maybe you wanna gimme a little rope, huh, Mayor McFaggot—”

What happens next surprises everyone. A visidex flies across the room, beans him in the head. Boyland yelps, bats it away, and by the time he’s turning back around it’s
Rigo
who’s all over him like moths on lamp-glass. He hobbles fast, hits Boyland like a cannonball in the chest, knocking him back over his own fallen chair. Boyland yelps and tumbles. Rigo gives a twist to his hip and, faster than anybody figures, has his fake leg in his hand, raised above his head like a club—

A whipcord of vine lashes around the leg and holds it steady.

The vine, emergent from the middle of Wanda’s palm.

“Let him go,” she commands, a surprising amount of steel in her voice. “He’s drunk. He helped us. End of story, way I figure it.” Then with a cold smirk she adds: “Besides, you wouldn’t wanna get blood on that pretty leg.”

Rigo, looking suddenly embarrassed, pulls away.

The vine uncoils from the leg, disappears back into Wanda’s outstretched hand as if it never existed in the first place.

Cael thinks:
Okay, she’s scary
.

Boyland stands, dusting himself off. He rubs the side of his arm and then laughs. “Damn, Rodrigo. You got more stones in that pouch than I remember.” Rigo scowls, then retreats. Boyland holds up his hands: “Sorry about that, folks. That was just the liquor talking. Lane, you do what you like, ain’t no business of mine or anybody’s. Rigo, thanks for straightening me out, Wanda, thanks for . . . whatever it is you just did. I’m gonna sit now and go back to not doing shit. Okay? Okay.”

He sniffs, straightens his chair, then sits back in it. Arms behind his head, he leans back, closes his eyes.

Thirty seconds later, he’s snoring.

“Uhhh,” Cael says.

“All of that was rather unexpected,” Balastair says.

The bird chirp-warbles and pecks at his hair.

Lane presses the heels of his hands into his temples. “All right. Let’s get the wheels back on this cart. We know the flotilla. We just gotta get there.”

“The Ilmatar isn’t far,” Balastair says. “It tends to hover in what is roughly the center of the Heartland. The problem is the blockade. They have ground and sky supremacy. Efforts to get past them . . .”

Cael says: “We use the trawler.”

“Huh.” Lane perks up.
“Huh.”

Cael goes on: “That thing’s built like a fist, man, so let’s use it like one. Haul it back and—” He punches a fist into his open palm. The Blight-vine shudders with the hit. “
Boom
. Knock a hole right through it.”

“The problem,” Gwennie says, “is that soon as we do that, we’ll bring the whole blockade after us. They’ll break the line and trail us like flies after a dung-wagon. We may get through them initially, but that can’t last. They’ll take pieces out of us until we keel over.”

They all pause. Cael feels the hope sucked out of the room once more. Like sails without wind, hanging limp and lifeless.

That is, until Rigo claps his hands.

“That’s exactly right,” he says, suddenly excited. “The trawler
will
draw them all out. They’ll break the line and leave a big-ass, no-fooling hole—and when the trawler kicks that door open—”

Cael snaps his fingers. “We sneak through after.”

“That’s genius,” Lane whoops. “Big Sky Scavengers, at it again!”

Boyland’s voice drunkenly booms: “You all better hope it’s worth it. Could be a hot bucket of goat shit”—he coughs and burps—“dummies.”

Once more, an awkward, uncomfortable silence. Cael—and he figures this is true for everyone—wrestles with that question. He’s pissed at Boyland for even bringing it up, but the lunk-headed thug is right. They take this shot, that’s it. If it’s the wrong one, it’s wrong in a big, big way.

“We have to try something,” Wanda says.

They all nod.

It’s Lane who speaks up: “We’ll go over it again tomorrow. Chop this thing up into little bitty pieces, make sure we have it right. For now: may Old Scratch piss on all this, it’s time to get ready for Harvest Home!”

GIFTED

CAEL’S ON THE WAY OUT
of the room when Lane hooks him by the elbow.

“Hey, Captain,” Lane says. “Hang back a sec.”

Both Gwennie and Wanda turn and give him looks.

Then they walk out together.

Lane whistles. “That was something.”

“Yeah, I think maybe I dicked up real good.”

Lane winces. “I can’t help you with that—my own romantic track record is hardly exemplary. But I might be able to brighten your day just the same.”

“How’s that?”

Lane reaches under the table, pulls out a long wooden case. Freshly oiled. Golden clasps like paws closing it. Cael sizes up the mystery box, and Lane eggs him on. “Go ahead. Open it. It’s a gift. Sorta.”

Well, shoot, Cael likes gifts.

He steps over to the table, pops the case—

Lickety-quick, his breath is gone, stolen away by the sight of his father’s lever-action rifle sitting there. Last he saw the weapon, it had been broken in half on the floor of Killian Kelly’s chambers just before Cael leaped out the window and into the corn. He assumed the gun was gone, destroyed. Here, though, it’s been mended. Gilded brass plates holding the two pieces together. Each of those plates carved with images of a fox running fast, ears back, legs outstretched in either direction.
Swift Fox,
Cael thinks. Pop.

He runs his hands over the oiled wood, the polished barrel.

“You still have it,” he says.

Lane nods. “Yeah. Took it back from Killian. I hoped one day I could get it in your hands again. When you came to Pegasus City and we sorted through our bullpuckey, it seemed high time to give it to you, but I didn’t want to hand you a broken-ass rifle. There’s an old raider here, gunsmith name of Mutu, and I paid him to do it.”

“It’s a beauty.” Cael picks it up. It feels good against his shoulder. It feels proper.
Righteous
, even. Slowly, the Blight-vine slides along the back of his arm, then his hand, until it winds its way around the stock of the gun. Feels firm, snug, stable. He jacks the action, opens the chamber with his hand, the vine holding the weapon in place.

“Almost forgot,” Lane says, and pulls out a small cardboard box of bullets. “You left those behind. Only a handful left.”

Cael uncoils the vine and sets the rifle in its case.

“Thanks, Lane.”

“My pleasure.”

“I’m sorry about everything that’s happened. Feels like Boxelder was a lifetime ago.”

“A lifetime? Three lifetimes. Four!
A hundred
. I don’t feel like the same person I was three months ago, much less three years. I’d wager a stack of ace notes that Busser or Doc or Bessie Greene wouldn’t even recognize us.”

“No fooling.”
I bet they really wouldn’t recognize Wanda
. That thought strikes him as cruel and petty, somehow. He needs to be there for her. He’s the only one here who understands what she’s going through, and he’s been avoiding her like she’s a distempered dog. “We gonna be okay?”

“Who? You and me? All of us?”

“I dunno. Any of us, I guess.”

Lane laughs, though it’s not precisely a happy sound. “Cap, I sure as shit don’t know. I suspect it’s gonna get a lot worse before it gets better. All of it just depends on if we can get through the bad parts in order to see the good ones. That’s the rub, as they say.”

“That’s life in the Heartland.”

“If we do our job right,” Lane says, “in a hundred years they won’t be saying that anymore. One day maybe folks won’t be able to recognize the Heartland, either.”

“I’d like that very much.”

“Me, too, Cap. Me, too.”

Cael steps out of the elevator—and into a scene he doesn’t yet understand.

Wanda stands, arms crossed. Looking worried.

Gwennie sits nearby on a heaped mound of steel chain. She looks like she’s on the verge of tears. Not uncontrolled sobbing, not the kind of weeping where you grab fistfuls of hair and yank them out of your head—this is a dam breaking, a wall whose cracks are plainly seen but can still hold back the water. She meets his eyes once—then looks away.

“I do not know what’s happening right now,” Cael says.