The Harvest (33 page)

Somewhere, people started screaming. He registered that, but couldn’t quite pull any meaning out of the mire, nor any concern.

Then four versions of one girl stalked up to him.

Took a second to pull his gaze back together, and by the time he did—uttering something that sounded like,
Wuzza, who you?
—she started moving her arm in a figure-eight motion like she was trying to hit him all fancy-like, except he realized all too late that her hand wasn’t empty and, in fact, held a very sharp knife. A knife that, even now, is slicing his arms up like they’re lamb sausage.

His heel suddenly catches on something—a crumbled bit of rubble, a tent peg, a stubborn shuck rat—he has no idea what and never finds out. All he knows is first he’s vertical and then he’s horizontal.

The girl, this knife-wielding psycho, stands over him. She’s not smiling. No sign of her being happy about this at all. Her face is just a scarred-up mask of grotesque indifference. His father, the Boxelder mayor, used to look
happy
when he laid into him with a belt or a book. (
Only thing a book is good for,
the elder Barnes said,
is beating the donkey I call a son
.)

Gods, just thinking about that, thinking about his father—thinking about how right now his arms are slick with blood and maybe he’ll never use them again, thinking about how Gwennie is lost and gone and how all his life has broken apart like turds out of a goat’s ass—

He starts bawling.

His head flops back and he sobs so hard it’s like the grief is being pulled up all the way from his toes to his heart and then to his eyes, a journey that hurts. A strange thought goes through him:

Grief is poison
.

Then for a half second, the tears clear and the hitching sobs stop, because the girl is just . . . standing there. Struck dumb by his display.

A look crosses her face.

He knows that look. His own mother’s worn it in the past.

He mumbles, words so slurred he’s not even sure they’re words:

“Don’t you feel bad for me.”

And then something slams into the side of her head and knocks her over like a scarecrow. Takes a little bit for Boyland’s brain to catch up to what he’s seeing, but he licks his lips and wipes a ropy strand of snot away from his face with a blood-slick arm, then asks: “Cozido?”

Rigo stands there, holding his leg like a bludgeon. Same way he held it earlier that day when he almost brought it down on Boyland’s head.

He hobbles a bit, then stoops and refits the prosthetic to his stump.

He offers a hand. “We have to go,” Rigo says. “We’re under attack.”

The girl with the golden scars screams as she leaps for Cael—her shriek is a wildcat’s cry, a sound that contains multitudes. Cael’s there on his knees, and a thought flashes crystalline in his mind—
I have to stay alive.
His daughter needs him. She’s just this little thing without any protection of her own. A tiny un-person who needs him and who needs Wanda, too.

Wanda
.

He’s going to have to kill this girl.

The Blight-vine’s flopping uselessly by his side.

The rifle’s back in his room.

But he’s got the old standby.

He reaches back, feels the slingshot tucked in his back pocket and draws it, scrambling with his other hand to find a piece of stone or shattered brick, and he scoots backward as the girl rushes him—

His hand finds a stone, but then fumbles it—

The stone drops away—

At her feet, fast movement.

Lane.

The mayor of Pegasus City slashes out with the broken bottle—

The girl howls as the glass cuts across the back of her ankle—

She drops. Lands hard on her shoulder. The knife flicks away.

Part of Cael thinks:
Grab her, throttle her, ask her who she is.

But there’s no time. Because Lane is bleeding out. His guts are shining under the electric lights. If he’s going to save his friend, he has to move fast. Cael gets under Lane, lifts him up carefully as he can, and begins to move.

The Harpy was once named Bellique Killane. She was a child of great privilege—her mother, an engineer on the Saranyu who ran a team of programmers (a team that also contained her father) responsible for crafting the network by which visidexes communicate with one another. Twenty years ago, that was not a possibility between flotillas. Today, it is.

Because of her mother.

Because of her father.

Both of whom lived on the Saranyu.

Both of whom are now dead.

Bellique was not on the Saranyu at the time—some who were on the flotilla escaped with their lives, hurrying to yachts or skiffs as it fell. She was with her sister, Chantal, on the Oshadagea, learning how to be a vintner. That was her dream, and her parents supported it. Because that is the glory of the Empyrean. See what you want to be. Be what you want to be. All of life infinite in its potential. Until the attack on the Saranyu changed that.

It robbed her of her family.

It robbed her of her name.

No. That’s not correct. She
gave up
her name.

There are some days she cannot even remember it, but she remembers it now as she creeps into the room to kill an Empyrean man. A traitor to the Seventh Heaven, as much a traitor as the Saintangel Cipher was to the Lord and Lady (Cipher thought he could fly higher than they could, build a house so far into the sky that it was a manse not in the clouds but in the stars, but he learned that wings made of wax melted under the heat of the sun).

Here, this man: Balastair Harrington.

Sitting by a window in his chamber, separate from the rest of the celebration. Already she knows her sisters are down there, doing what they must under the directive of the Dirae. This is their calling. The Harpies have died along with the Saranyu. They are now waking ghosts. Angels of vengeance. More monster than man.

He sits in shadow. Lights off. Just a silhouette.

Bellique—no.
No!
She has to stop thinking of herself as somebody. As a
person
with a
name
. The Harpy—that’s it, yes, just the Harpy—creeps forward, drawing the knife, a knife whetted with an electron-sharpener, a knife so sharp it’ll cut through bone if allowed the chance.

Her feet are silent on the floor. Silent even in the rubble.

They are silent because she has been trained to be silent.

Trained for over a year now. To stalk. To creep. To kill.

Deep breath.

She slices out with the knife.

The blade meets little resistance.

The man’s head comes off at the shoulders and rolls to the ground.

Everything seems to go slow. It’s chaos now. They’ve stepped over bodies. Hurried past them. Squirrel is with her. Scooter, too. She’s holding both of their hands, pulling them through the crowds, Wanda following close behind. More screams, somewhere. Sonic trills. She can’t find her mother. Doesn’t want to lose her. A little voice says,
You’ve already lost her, you pushed her away after what happened up there, you’ve left her alone
—but she can’t go down that path, not now, not with everything going on—

The power goes out. The electric lights go dark one by one in quick succession. More gasps. More screams. Raiders yelling,
We’re under attack!

Then the lights come back on, flashing, strobing. Electric buzz-snaps—crackling, popping, hissing above their heads like locusts in a burn barrel. For a moment, the crowd parts—

And there stands Rigo and Boyland.

Boyland looks like the walking dead. Gray-faced. His arms dark with blood. Face, too. All of him, soaked and sodden. Red lines, darker and deeper, mark his forearms, his biceps. Cuts. It runs off his fingertips like runoff from rain-gutters. He’s looking in her direction in horror, and so is Rigo, and then both of them are calling out—

But they’re not looking at her. They’re looking past her.

Gwennie turns, sees Wanda standing there.

Clutching an opened throat, her eyes bulging. Fingers grasping at the wound, coming away wet with red.

One of the girls stands there, teeth bared, knife out.

The girl raises the weapon again—

Gwennie’s wrist flicks before she even realizes it.

A small throwing knife embeds in the scarred girl’s temple.

The attacker lists sideways and hits the ground, dead.

Wanda. Throat slit. The child inside her—Gwennie hurries over, crying out, everything going slower and slower. She rushes to Wanda, catches her by the arms, holds her up. The girl’s eyes are unfocused, going empty, her tongue lolling out over her lips. There’s this moment, and Gwennie recognizes it because it’s
right there on Wanda’s face
, when Wanda realizes what’s happening, and this look of utter sadness crosses her face—everything crinkled up like she wants to cry but can’t, and she makes a sound in the back of her throat, a terrible animal sound.

Gwennie hears herself saying, “Wanda, Wanda, Wanda, no—no! You can’t, you have to, oh gods, no, please—”

Wanda’s eyes snap to focus.

They look at Gwennie.

Clarity. Awareness. Fear and sorrow wiped away.

It doesn’t even register at first—Gwennie thinks it’s just more blood, or some strange effect of having one’s throat opened, but what she sees there in the hissing, blood-bubble gap isn’t human. Little tiny tendrils—small vines like searching threads, like inchworms venturing off a leaf’s edge. They rise from the bottom of the wound and reach down from the top of it, too.

They meet in the middle. Little stems and shoots curling around one another, tying in knots—

Pulling taut.

She’s fixing herself.

Or maybe: the Blight is fixing her.

The wound suddenly closes up. A scar, ragged and green as moss, marks the space where her throat had just been opened.

Wanda blinks.

Then clutches at her middle.

“The baby,” Gwennie says.

“She’s fine,” Wanda says. “I’m fine.”

She pushes past Gwennie, moving toward the others—but all Gwennie can think is:
None of this is fine, and none of us are ever going to be fine again
.

The Harpy turns away from the Empyrean man’s corpse.

The air is suddenly filled with this sound—she recognizes it as the rustle of bird wings followed swiftly by panicked squeaking—just before something hits her in the face and begins to peck and claw at it.

She swats at it, but the little bird is far faster than she expects. It flies up, around, left, then right, then back to her face again, pecking, scratching.

Another whistle from beyond the bird.

And then the little creature is gone.

When the Harpy regains her vision once more, she sees him standing there. The Empyrean man. Balastair Harrington.

The thing she thought was his severed head—really just a hollow container—rolls at her feet.

“Who are you?” he asks her.

“Vengeance,” she says, but the word suddenly rings hollow.

“What have you done?”

“Blood feeds the corn.”

She sees the sonic shooter in his hand.

He fires.

Kill her,
Balastair thinks. She’s just a girl, though, her face cut up like a patchwork quilt. Hard to be too angry—she’s kneeling there, gagging and spitting and crying. The sonic blast did its number on her, but he set it to stun, and even now he looks at the weapon and thinks maybe he should turn up the dial, set it to kill, and put her out of her misery.

“You came to kill me,” he says. Then he leans down. “But I won’t kill you. I can’t. Don’t make me regret this decision.”

Then he extends his finger into the air.

“Come, Cicero.”

The bird lands on his finger.

It’s time to find the others.

Cael thinks:
There’s a doctor here somewhere. Nika something.
She treated Lane’s mother. And he tells Lane that, too—he says, “I’m gonna find that doc you were talking about. She’s gotta be here, man. Gotta be here somewhere. Then we’re gonna get all of you stitched up and put back together—I just—” His words, drowned out by someone yelling. Ahead, a group of raiders fire sonic weapons into the air at another girl somersaulting above them, a pistol in her hand, too—by the time she lands atop the peak of a nearby tent, the raiders who fired at her are all dead or dying on the ground.

Not that way, then.

Cael pulls Lane sharply right, behind the now-overturned Sully’s Kitchen food wagon. His friend’s feet drag limply, and as Cael pulls Lane down he says, “The doc. Where do you think she is?” But Lane doesn’t answer.

Lane’s head rocks back, mouth open, eyes wide.

No.
No, no, no.

Cael’s heart catches in his throat like a frog in a cat’s mouth, and he pats Lane’s cheek and feels under his friend’s throat—there’s nothing there, no pulse, no feeling at all but the cold and clammy skin. Lane’s chest isn’t rising or falling. What was once there is now gone. Some presence, fled. Cael knows that but can’t admit it, can’t believe it. He grits his teeth and cries out, screams Lane’s name, holds his friend close. He rocks him back and forth. He begs for him not to be dead.
Come back to me, brother. Don’t be gone. Don’t leave me alone. We were just figuring all this shit out
.

He doesn’t know how long he sits there like that, blubbering and keening and holding Lane’s body close. Cael doesn’t care. Can’t care. He barely recognizes Balastair’s voice at his ear—“We have to go. Come on, Cael. We will mourn him later, but please, we have to go
now
.”