The Harvest (35 page)

“What?”

“I don’t want you to be with me or with anybody. Not now. You’re smarter and stronger than most of these boys who fawn over you. That’s why they—uh,
we
—do that. You ain’t like a lot of the other girls. You pop like a firecracker. You’re strong like an iron bar. You’ve always done your own thing, and being with me—being with anybody—will take that away from you. Nobody should take anything away from you. Least of all me.”

She leans in, kisses him on the forehead.

“Thanks, Boyland, that’s . . .”

His eyes go unfocused. And stare off at a middle distance.

“Oh, gods,” she says, a sob struggling in her chest to be free. “No, no, no, you buckethead, you can’t—”

He jostles back to awareness with a snort. “Huh? What?”

“Jeezum Crow,” she hisses, and swats him on the knee. “I thought you were dead, godsdamnit.”

“Oh. No. Just resting.”

She almost laughs, then slides up next to him. “Asshole.”

He shrugs as if to say,
It is what it is
.

Cael, with a gentle hand, lifts Wanda’s chin. “You gonna tell me what this is about?” He runs a finger across what looks to be a scar—it’s pink along the margins. Skin, except in the middle, where it’s like a braid of tiny roots and shoots.

“One of those . . .
girls
slit my throat.”

“Ho-holy heck.” He feels suddenly dizzy. “Wanda, whaddya mean?”

She lifts her eyebrows like,
Hey, no big thing
, even though this sounds like it’s the biggest damn thing Cael ever heard. “She cut my throat and almost popped my head like a bottle-top. It’s okay.”

“It is
not
okay. Are you all right? Is the baby—?”

Again she grabs his hand, presses it against her belly. His awareness of the child flares inside his mind. Her little hands searching, big eyes staring. An umbilical cord like ivy—a tether gently turning and twisting.

“You can always touch me to see her,” Wanda says.

“I didn’t want to presume. Your body isn’t my property.”

“Your property? Naw. But I’m a part of you and you’re a part of me now.” She lifts her chin. “Literally. You have permission. She’s yours. You wanna check on her, just reach over and check on her. Stop acting like she ain’t yours—because she is. Before, us being Obligated was maybe a little bit of a fantasy, at least for me. But our little girl changes that. This is for real now.”

He nods. “I know.”

“I don’t know if you really love me. And if you do, I suspect you’ll never love me the same way you love her.”
Her
. Gwennie. “But we’re in this together no matter how it shakes out. You hurt me, I might be able to get over that. You hurt our little girl, and I’ll bury you so deep even the corn won’t be able to find you. We square?”

“We’re square. Also, you’re scary.”

Her face softens. She looks suddenly sad. “I know. I don’t mean to be.”

“I know.”

“I’m changing.”

“I know that, too.”
It isn’t just the baby
. Hell, she’s seemed more human since she told him about their daughter. “You can do things I can’t.”

“I’m sorry about Lane.”

Just a mention of his name sends something wriggling up from inside his chest, and suddenly his bottom lip is shaking, and he has to bite it all back. Eyes shut tight, fingernails digging into the flesh of his palms. “Thanks.”

He pulls her hand up and kisses it.

She rests her head on his shoulder.

Boom
. The Engine Layer shakes. Dust and ash drift down. Balastair moves along the line of survivors, offering them water and what little food Wanda already had squirreled away here—a few apples, some pro-bars, a bag of spelt crackers. He can’t help but turn and look at the corpse underneath the quilt. Balastair did not know Lane Moreau very well, but death is death and Lane seemed like a good fellow, and he can’t help but feel dragged down by all of it.

Forward,
he tells himself.
There’s work to be done, Bal
.

He stoops down by Cael and Wanda. “They’re blocking the visidex signal, but I was able to get an encrypted message to your sister.”

Cael nods. “She okay?”

“Sadly, it was not a two-way transmission. Just a single communiqué. Otherwise, I fear the Empyrean would’ve intercepted.”

Cael nods.

Balastair offers them an apple. “Only two left.”

“I can grow more,” Wanda says.

“Oh.”
Oh
.

He suddenly feels strange. Like how he did sometimes when he was speaking to his mother. His mother would wear a warm smile but seemed otherwise alien. He used to joke that he thought she might be a spider in human skin, but that’s not really what it was. She had been losing her humanity for some time and was less a spider and more the human embodiment of a Venus flytrap—a carnivorous plant with a human mind. Or a human with the mind of a carnivorous plant? Did it even matter?

“Thanks, Bal,” Cael says.

All Balastair can do is nod as he moves on, zigzagging among the survivors. Until he gets to Gwennie and Boyland.

He tries not to show what he feels for her. There’s no point in it. Not now. Perhaps not ever. But even in trying to conceal it he can feel the awkwardness, the stiffness, and when he speaks he stammers:

“I, ahh. I’ve got apple—I’ve got
another
apple, one more, umm.”

He holds up the apple and shakes it.

Gwennie takes it. “Thanks, Bal.”

“Of course.”

She takes his hand. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Yes.” He offers a stiff nod. “I’m glad the, ahh, the both of you are okay, too.” He pulls his hand away gently—though maybe not gently enough, given the way she flinches a little. Then it’s on to Rigo.

The poor lad is hunched over, a temporary light hanging above his head. A trembling finger scans a hastily scrawled blueprint of the city.

He doesn’t look up as Balastair approaches, but he speaks:

“You get in touch with the Ilmatar?”

“No—but I did talk to some of my people on the Mader-Atcha. They were able to protect the transmission from their end.” He hesitates. “I think.”

“You think?”

“Well, none of this is very
certain
is it? It’s like playing Checks in the dark.” He hears the irritation rusting the edge of every word, and he tries to scrape some of it off and soften his tone. “This is all quite up in the air, but I think the transmission went undiscovered. My people can meet us on the Ilmatar in a day. If we make it. Can we make it?”

Rigo puffs out his cheeks in an uncertain sigh. He’s about to say something when his eyes flit to the other end of the room. Before Balastair can even turn, he hears a mournful wail rise up.

It’s Killian Kelly. He takes hesitant steps toward the body of Lane Moreau.

The distant booming rocks the room.

Killian pulls his hair back and loops it with a ragged strip of cloth. His face is dusted with ash, the ash streaked with tears.

The raider is like a man with a noose around his neck suddenly kicking the chair out from beneath him. Killian drops to his knees hard, hard enough so that the whole room shudders when he falls. He buries his face in his hands and keens like a river banshee.

Grief, Balastair notes, is a curious thing. It can be uncomfortable to witness when it’s grief you don’t share—it’s awkward and strange, and it’s easy enough to pretend that the grief is inappropriate, or odd, or ill-fitting. That’s how the Empyrean tend to treat it—it’s something you do in private, behind closed doors. But it’s not like that here. Here, the grief is shared. Parceled out among them. These people have seen enough of it to know. They all understand.

And he watches these Heartlanders gather themselves together. They go to Killian—a man who’s been chewed up by an old injury, who ran himself through a gauntlet of addiction (and may still be running that gauntlet even now)—and they gather around him and around Lane. They murmur words that Balastair cannot hear, but he hears the tone: sad, consoling, with a few hard spikes of anger punched through it all like bent nails. Cael hovers back with eyes of steel. Wanda doesn’t watch the raider captain or the corpse, but instead watches Cael.

“You should go over there,” Balastair says to Rigo.

Rigo looks up. “Not now.”

“Your friends—”

“Need to get out of here alive.”

A bit of steel in the boy’s voice. Balastair warms to that. He has trouble finding his own spine sometimes, and it’s nice to see others go through that struggle and come out tougher. “Fair enough.”

“Tell me,” Rigo says. “Why don’t we have your people just go to the Ilmatar and find the weapon?”

“Because I can’t trust them. I can’t trust anybody who’s not here in
this
room
right
now. I’ve no idea what weapon my mother has waiting. I can’t put it in the hands of someone else. It’s ours or it’s nobody’s.”

“So, we not only need to get out of here, we need to get to the Ilmatar.”

He sighs. “That is woefully accurate.”

“Then the plan is still the plan. Just . . . harder.” Rigo frowns so that the skin of his brow furrows like a freshly plowed field. “We still need to get to the trawler. No idea how safe the raider fleet is in the hangars. No idea who will even . . . captain the damn thing. But we send that out, draw their attention, pray to all the gods in the sky and the corn and the dirt that, oh, hey, the giant Doom Flotilla above our heads can’t get a shot in, and soon as we have an opening we . . . sneak away. Except I don’t like that part.
Sneak away.
Too vague. Still missing something.” Rigo
hrrms
.

Balastair’s about to say something, but whatever it is ends up lost to the Grade A freak-out across the room. Suddenly, Killian is storming madly about, bellowing: “I’m going to go out and find her, and I’m going to kill the little Empyrean slag for robbing me of him. And then—
and then!
—I’ll man that one last cannon, and I swear on the grave of every Sleeping Dog that I’ll shoot that flotilla down my own damn self—”

It’s Rigo who cuts him short. “Wait!” he says, standing up.

Killian narrows his gaze. “What do
you
want?”

“You want to pay them back?”

“I very clearly do, boy.”

“Then help us get out of here.” That’s when Rigo tells Killian—and the rest of them—the plan.

Upon hearing it, Killian smiles grimly. Through teeth clenched so tight it looks like they might ground down to powder, he growls:

“Then let’s give my man one
helluva
fucking funeral.”

A GARLAND OF LAURELS

ENYASTASIA
WITNESSES
the city that bears her name get pounded to rubble. Above, the Herfjotur brings screaming hell down upon the city—great night-shrieks that split the sky and hit the Saranyu like invisible boulders dropped by a callow, callous god.

She watches the destruction unfold while nestled into a half-collapsed nook above what was once the Halcyon Balcony. The Dirae knows that at any moment, one of the Herfjotur’s cannons could point this way and end her existence—a blast of that size would vibrate her to scattered molecules. She would be reduced to a red mist.

It’s not suicide,
she tells herself.
Not if they do the job for me
.

Part of her is sad that the city will suffer this fate. Another part of her is glad. This, a child’s reaction:
If I can’t have my toys, neither can they!

Between bombardments, she hears people: the citizens of Pegasus City—some screaming, others crying. At one point she hears a man laughing: a mad, unhinged sound, as if this boisterous cackle is all he has left in the world.

Her ankle aches. And still bleeds.

Her head feels like she was born through a womb of glass.

At some point, she sleeps.

Her dreams are a dead place.

Then: a sharp intake of breath. Light shining on her closed eyes.

Morning
.

She awakens. Drops down out of the nook onto the remnant of the balcony. Enyastasia looks up—the Herfjotur can now be plainly seen, flying lower than any other flotilla would. Shaped as a series of smaller octagons surrounding a larger one—each chained together, each a semi-independent battle station all its own. Should it be attacked or fail to hold together, its pieces can break apart and remain buoyant—mini flotillas, each with its own measure of firepower. A genius design. Her old friend Heron Yong did well.

She salutes him with no small measure of irony and disgust.

Nobody up above is going to want to deal with her anymore. She can already envision what happens next:

The sonic shelling is stopping, and the blockade will close in. The noose tightening around the neck. Until this nest of Heartlanders digs out of its hole and is killed in the unforgiving daylight. And then?

They’ll come for her. They’ll carry her back into the sky. And they will retire her. With a garland of laurels about her head, of course, because this was still all her idea (and because she executed those who might say otherwise). She remains an Ormond and will receive preferential treatment. They’ll give her whatever she wants, and over time, people like Miranda Woodwick will distance themselves from her, and as the Heartland rebels are crushed and turned to metal men and as the flotillas continue to fly, she will feel more and more like she’s in prison. And she will forever be haunted by her failure.