The Harvest (36 page)

But it is then that she is afforded a new opportunity.

Across the field of rubble, one particular pile of crumbled stone and glittering glass shudders, a warbling screech buried behind it. Then it happens again, and again, until the pile blasts forth—bricks bouncing, glass clattering down in a shimmering sun-captured rain.

From the hole, the Sleeping Dogs fleet emerges from its hangar.

Two vessels, then four, then another four beyond that, until finally the big beast lurches free from its prison (losing the very top of its mast in the process given its reduced clearance): the massive trawler.

The ships power up, unfurl their red sails, and catch wind.

Heading toward one of the many breaches in the wall.

She grunts.

I can still complete my mission,
she thinks.

She can still kill those she came to kill.

And with that in mind, she drags her numb, ruined foot behind her. The hunt will commence. It may kill her, this crusade.

It’s a thought she finds eerily comforting.

ONE HELLUVA FUCKING FUNERAL

KILLIAN
SPINS
THE
WHEEL,
then straightens it back out again. The trawler drifts through the ruins of Pegasus City, out over the collapsed wall with the other ships pushing ahead. And then, like that, they’re out above the endless corn once more, pushing on toward the red sun bulging up over the horizon like a blood blister about to pop—

And toward the encroaching Empyrean fleet.

“Well, well, well!” He claps his hands. “They’ve gathered a rather robust welcoming party for us,” he says to Lane. Lane, swaddled behind him in the crimson red of a Sleeping Dogs flag.

Lane, who gave his life for this life.

Lane, Killian’s love.

Lane, who Killian failed. Again and again. “I always thought I was above reproach,” Killian said. “It was me or the door, and even when I wasn’t captain anymore I was still captain, and I knew I could get away with anything—”

The raptor-shriek warble fills the air—

Choom!

A sonic blast hits just behind the trawler, sending up a column of dirt, dust, and broken corn. The trawler rocks, but keeps on keeping on.

Killian war-whoops—a sound far angrier than triumphant. He pounds the wheel with the flat of his hand. “Stupid skybastards. Those cannons are slower than a salted slug—won’t be able to hit us, I’m afraid, my love.”

Another screaming wail in the air. Another blast hits—this one far ahead. Killian tells himself they won’t calibrate a shot until it’s too late. He wonders if that’s a lie to make himself feel better, or an accurate assessment.

He wonders if it even matters.

The Empyrean fleet closes in. The noose is tightening as the blockade shrinks inward. Which means its ships are coming from every direction that he can see, except behind him—and even then, they’re coming from the other side, too, ready to swoop in and take the city. Including whoever is left alive inside the walls of the fallen flotilla.

Chrome glinting in the morning sun. Ships above the corn. Some flying high, too—skiffs, yachts, ships not meant to do combat like those of the raiders—but beneath them, he knows that the mechanicals march forward, too. Metal monstrosities. Tinbodies with people shoved inside.

His side aches when he thinks about them.

“Ah, piss on it,” he growls. “Lane, I love you. And I failed you. But I’ll do my best to right things. And I suspect I’ll join you soon.”

He lifts his boot, stomps hard on the floor underneath him.

That’s the signal.

Whomp whomp whomp
.

Above their heads, three stomps.

Cicero the catbird trills a nervous song.

Balastair shushes the bird.

“That’s our signal,” Cael says, rifle slung over his shoulder. The vine around his arm trembles, burning like someone’s pressing a lit match to it as new tendrils push slowly up from the cut end. He can’t rely on his vine to save him, not out here.

He and Wanda share a look, then reach down and lift the hatch on the floor. A breeze kicks in through the opened space. Corn-tops pass beneath them, firework tassels waving—as if they smell blood. And maybe they do.

Gwennie looks to her mother. “I’ve got them.” She holds up both arms—she’s got a grip on Scooter’s and Squirrel’s hands. Then she looks to each of them: “We ready to do this?”

Scooter nods, afraid.

Squirrel’s eyes are shiny and alive.

Boyland, grim-faced, pale as a grub’s belly, steps up to Cael, then offers a hand. “I got your back if you got mine.”

“That’s a deal.” He shakes Boyland’s hand.

“Time is wasting,” Wanda says. “We gotta move.”

“She’s right,” Rigo says, hobbling toward the opening. “Now or never.”

And then, one by one, they drop out into the hungry corn.

It is in this moment that Wanda is reminded that she is a changed girl.

Once, and not very long ago, she was the flinchiest little thing. High-strung as a housefly—quick to wince, tense up; desperate to be liked; fearful of the world around her. Uncertain of her place in all of it.

What happens now, what unfolds around her and above her . . . it
should
unsettle her. The sounds of sonic cannons going off. The roar of the trawler’s engines kicking up. The thrum of dozens of hover-panels vibrating the ground so hard her teeth rattle. The clanking and stomping of mechanicals.

But it doesn’t.

All the people that she knew from Boxelder, they lie flat against the ground like scared children. Rigo presses his head into the dirt, hands clamped over his ears. Scooter tries not to cry, and Gwennie rolls onto her side, tucking the boy into her chest so that any sounds he does make are muffled (lest the mechanicals sense them and come to find them). Her mother, meanwhile, just weeps, the heels of her hands against her eyes as if that’ll make it all go away.

Boyland looks lost. Like he’s overwhelmed—a motorvator whose circuits have fried and now just sits in one space, engine revving but never going anywhere.

Balastair focuses on the bird, the tiny creature cupped in one hand, his face a mask of heartbreak as he pets the bird’s head, cooing and whispering even though the sounds of the battle just beyond them drown it out.

Even Cael, poor Cael. Rifle held to the dirt, his forehead pressed against the wood of the stock, his back rising and falling with measured breaths.

The only one with Wanda’s unswerving fortitude is the little girl, Squirrel. Squirrel is as her name suggests—she holds still and steady, but everything about her is coiled like a spring. Like she’s about to leap into the fray at any moment. The girl is plainly mad. Broken at a fundamental level. The fact that Wanda relates most of all to this girl now says something about her, too.

I am not Wanda anymore
.

The sounds going on all around her are a fascinating mystery. She finds herself listening, not just with her own ears, but through the vibrations reaching each stalk of corn. Here an unfinished joke crosses her mind, something about how corn has ears; she laughs a little, and Cael looks at her with a concerned stare as if to ask,
How could you find any of this funny?
and she wants to ask him in turn:
Don’t you find it funny?
But of course he doesn’t.

She closes her eyes and becomes one with the corn.

Some of it trampled under metal feet.

Some of it darkened by the shadow of the trawler, or the other raider ships, or the Empyrean ketch-boats.

Some of it searching, whirling, knowing there’s blood in the air somewhere and desperate for a taste. (Wanda feels desperate for a taste, then, too—an ache on the back of her tongue where she wants blood to slide down the back of her throat.)

The raider ships aren’t moving forward, she realizes, suddenly.

And they need to move forward if this is going to work. The line of Empyrean ships needs to be broken.

Her eyes jolt open.

Wanda reaches out and grabs Cael’s hand.

He mouths the word:
What?

She doesn’t need to answer out loud. She knows that now. Instead, she lets the thought move through her—like a baby rabbit down a snake’s mouth, like blood through an artery:
We need to help them
.

His eyes go wide. His mouth opens just slightly.

Message received.

The thought comes back to her like a boomerang:

Okay. Let’s help them
.

His eyes roll back in his head.

So do hers.

Killian roars. He spins the sonic cannon toward the ketch-boat coming up on the starboard side and lets fly with a screeching blast that knocks it off-kilter, punching a hole clean through its side. Then he rolls out of the seat, ducking a hail of blasts from within the corn somewhere—he has to get to the next cannon while this one recharges. He’s a one-man war machine—he and the old blast-pocked trawler—and he cackles, half dizzy, body no longer hungry for the Pheen he’s been sticking down his throat, but ravenous for retribution and violence.

But a little part of him knows this battle is lost.

The trawler is jammed up. The line of Empyrean just ahead is unyielding. He can’t press on—can’t push forward. And the others in the raider fleet are already dropping like flies. Even now he peers over the trawler’s railing and watches a trio of mechanicals leap forward like metal rabbits and land atop the bow of a skiff—the skiff’s nose dips into the corn, and the one poor raider captaining that boat (a young woman, Sally Forthright) screams as they drag her into the corn. The boat drops with her.

Killian bolts for the next cannon—

And a mechanical clambers up onto the deck right in front of him.

The raider captain skids to a halt.

“Out of my way, you soulless tinbody,” he snarls.

The thing stomps a hard foot forward, aims its cannon-arm, and fires. Killian leaps out of the way of the blast—it shrieks past him, and something in his side stitches tight. Haunting pain from the ghost of his old injury (ironically, from the
last
time he tangled with one of these horrible things, he realizes). He hits hard on his shoulder, his head
gonging
against the deck of the trawler. He scrambles to stand as the thing pivots at its hip and points its arm once more, the cannon’s tip wheeling on him—

There’s a moment—a precious, strange, distant moment—when he feels Lane’s fingers in his hair like a comb. Hands untying the cloth binding his hair in the warrior’s knot. Tossing it aside. Breath on the back of his neck. Hand flat against his chest. Lane’s whisper in his ear:
Come home, now
. Killian feels loved in this last moment. It washes over him like the warmth of the day’s sun.

And then the mechanical’s head jerks sharply right as a cornstalk spear pierces it.
Ka-chang!
Sparks fly. The sonic cannon never fires.

The metal man tumbles off the side of the boat.

“Crowsblood,” Killian says. In awe of what just happened, but also with grief over what
didn’t
happen: He failed to die and did not meet his love anew. Odd, that—to be disappointed in the lack of one’s death.

But he has little time to consider it.

He hears the sound before he sees what’s making it.

A ripping. Snapping. Breaking like bones.

Out there, in the corn.

Pollen begins to stream up and into the air, a haze of gold dust. Everything gone bright, so bright that he can barely see the shape that rises up out over the corn—a twisting, living thing. Like a lightning bolt that never flashes back to nonexistence—like a tree (
Remember those?
he thinks) that’s shot up out of nothing and is thrashing its way through the stalks.

Then he realizes: It’s not crashing through the stalks.

It
is
the stalks.

The corn is whipping about and joining a twister—a narrow tornado—made of more corn. Stalks upon stalks, corkscrewing together into a whirling, hungry thing—he watches it slam into a ketch-boat, splitting it in half before the sudden piss-blizzard swallows it all up.

He doesn’t know how they’re doing it, but they’re doing it.

They’re opening the door for him.

Which in turn opens the door for
them
.

Killian yelps, then hurries back to the wheel. He drops to one knee, kisses the forehead of Lane Moreau through the drapery of the red flag, then swings himself back up to the wheel of the trawler. Hell with pain. Piss on what’s lost.
It’s time to get something back
.

The great beast, the Sleeping Dogs’ trawler, pushes on through the hole—a hole in the blockade smashed open by the whirling twister given life by Cael and Wanda.
Wanda, mostly,
Cael thinks.

They hear Killian hooting, shouting, cursing.

And then the trawler charges forward. Three other Sleeping Dogs ships make it through, too, slipping through the opening.

It works. The Empyrean line breaks. The ships follow after while the rest move on to Pegasus City to pillage and plunder its bones.