The Harvest (38 page)

Balastair waggles his fingers. “Uh, hello? Time for what?”

“For revolution, of course.” The way Amrita says it, it sounds to Cael like,
Uh, duh?
Kin nods and plants both hands on Balastair’s arms, then says:

“The winds are shifting. We need to retake the skies—”

“Who cares?” Wanda blurts out. She squeezes her fists, and her arms ripple—the flesh suddenly studded with thorns. Her eyes are swallowed by a shimmering wave of green, and then a foul perfume rises up around her—an acrid, corpse-flower stink. “
Your
revolution. That’s
cute
.”

Cael sees her—thinks her look is beautiful, though the odor is foul. He doesn’t know whether to bow before her or recoil in fear. He recalls a similar reaction when he saw the Maize Witch do her thing, too. Still. He wets his lips, nods for now. “She’s right. Your problems ain’t a damn thing to us. We’ve been fighting
our
revolution for a long time. Lane understood that. Took me a while to come around to it, but I did, and here we all are. You want to revolt inside your pretty houses and your robotic elevators, then you do that. But before you do, get us where we need to go.”

Amrita takes a long breath, is about to say something when—

Wham wham wham
.

A fist on the door.

A muffled command: “Open up. By order of the peregrine, Lirong Yau. Open up!”
Wham wham wham
.

“The Frumentarii,” Kin says.

Balastair makes a frightened sound in the back of his throat.

“We can sneak you out the back,” Amrita says, waving them on.

But then Wanda marches over to the door.

Cael hisses to her: “Wanda, wait—”

She flings open the door.

A squat man and a tall woman stand there, both clad in dark leathers—the man with a sparking baton, the woman looking down at a visidex.

The woman, lean and lithe with high-shelf cheekbones and purple eyes, is muttering: “No cameras in this area, but the Goddessheads have harbored refugees in the past—”

She looks up and gasps when the man’s neck snaps.

From each of Wanda’s fingers grows a cirrus of dark green—five strangling appendages, like tentacles searching the air. They slide silently away from the man’s head and neck. The woman’s about to cry out—but she never manages the sound. The finger-tendrils grab the visidex she’s holding and smash the screen hard against her face. Blood squirts. The woman falls back.

Wanda never moved anything but her right hand.

Cael gently steps in, eases her back. Her eyes are a turbulent storm of colors—the green of leaves, the red of rose-bloom, the black of rot, the amber of sap—all swirling there. Hypnotic, almost. He wants to be lost in them. But when Cael holds her face between his hands and kisses her cheek, the eyes clear. Human once more.

“Now they’ll know we’re here,” Amrita says.

Wanda wheels on her. “I don’t care. Let them know. I will tear this place apart at the seams and fling each piece to the dirt if you don’t give us what we came to get. Unless you don’t have it?” She extends her right hand—the vines squirm and twist in the air like snakes.

“Wanda—” Cael cautions.

“No,” Gwennie says, to Cael’s surprise. “Let her. I’m tired of waiting, too. And don’t mourn those corpses.” She gestures toward the bodies as Kin and Balastair drag them through the door. “I don’t know who this peregrine is, but the last one was a monster.” To Amrita: “Give us what we want. Or we’ll let her go all . . . angry tree-girl on you.”

Amrita nods stiffly, then reaches into the folds of her sari. She produces a clear glass key—long as her palm and toothy. “This is the key to the Palladium Tower. I had to spend a great deal of . . . capital to get this. I hope what you’re looking for is worth it.”

“I suppose we’ll find out,” Balastair says, reaching over and taking the key. “Thank you, Amrita.”

“There’s one more thing,” she says.

“Amrita . . .” Kin warns.

Amrita then turns to Cael: “Your father is Arthur McAvoy?”

That name sends a sharp shock to his heart. “Wh-what? Yeah, why?”

“Your father is here. On the Ilmatar.”

THE PALLADIUM

“I DON’T THINK
they should’ve gone off on their own,” Cael says.

Above them: a massive bleach-white tower that looks like a bone spur, jagged and curved—a crooked talon. Two statues frame a pair of golden doors—two winged women, each with one wing pointed to the ground and a second wing pointed over the door, meeting in the middle.

Boyland laughs: a bitter, dry sound. “You’re just upset because your two girls are off by themselves saying who knows what about you.”

It was Wanda’s idea to go off and find his father. She had good reasons: he would be well guarded, and if anyone was prepared to deal with that kind of threat, it was her. It was a thought that both disturbed him and filled him with pride in equal measure: this girl, once gawky and awkward and uncertain about every breath she took, is now a confident killing machine.

He told her no way, no how, that wasn’t gonna work for him.

Gwennie stepped in and said she’d go, too. That she’d keep Wanda safe. Wanda bristled at that, of course, said, “I’ll be the one keeping
you
safe,” but she consented just the same. Cael gave Gwennie his rifle. Said to give that to Pop—and, if she needed it, to use it. After getting directions from Amrita—the birdcage cells were nearby, just one bridge over—the two girls went off.

Rigo chose to stay behind with the other two Empyrean, Kin and Amrita. Not just because of his leg (which slows him down considerably when they need no such delay), but also because he can keep an eye on them. Make sure nothing hinky is going on.

Balastair steps up to the doors. He starts looking around. “There’s no . . . there’s no lock here!” Frustrated, he begins to slide his hands over the metal.

Boyland continues: “They’ll be all like,
Oh, I think Cael loves me
, and then the other would be all like,
Cael doesn’t love you like he loves me
. And meanwhile you sit back, arms crossed, picking and choosing which one you wanna make kissy-kissy with when they get back.”

“It’s not like that,” Cael protests. Then, to Balastair: “Look, here—there’s a mechanism in the middle.”

“Uh-huh. Sure it ain’t,” Boyland says. “You’re like a spider in the middle of a web, McAvoy. Are you good for anything?”

Cael wheels on him: “Wanda’s pregnant, you ass!”

As he blurts that out, Balastair’s hand touches the center of the doors, and a seamless panel hisses suddenly, sliding away to reveal a keyhole.

“Can we talk about this later?” Balastair says.

Cael wets his lips—lips dry from the air up here—and says, “Sure, yeah, whatever.”

As the doors groan open and they step inside, Boyland shakes his head and says, “Well, heck-a-dang. Cael McAvoy, a father. We’re gonna save the Heartland just to doom it again when your spawn gets here.”

The auto-mate inside the elevator extends up from its pillar, waking the way a wooden fortune teller inside a carnival game might suddenly stir—lights flicker behind its eyes, and as its arms move, the wispy cobwebs strung between its elbows and its bell-shaped torso stretch and then break and then drift.

Folks haven’t been inside this tower for a good while,
Balastair thinks.

The Palladium Tower: a place where the Empyrean puts its odds and ends. Things that don’t belong out among the populace, yet must remain kept and cataloged: old experiments, forgotten books, artifacts from the other parts of the world. When someone dies, if nobody is around to receive their estate, it goes
here
. Sealed away, like a tomb.

(Appropriate, given that just past the Palladium Tower is the Obol’s Coin Tower—a needlelike structure that houses all the cremated ashes of the dead Empyrean citizens, each urn pressed with a coin minted to the family.)

Here, the auto-mate’s speaker-mouth grinds and sparks and then comes to life with tinny, scratchy words: “Hello . . . Bala
stair
Ha-
ring
-ton!”

“Jeezum Crow!” Boyland barks, startled. “Kill that thing with fire.”

“Calm down, it’s just a dang robot,” Cael says, though he feels the anxiety, too. Up here, they might not have human brains, but down in the dust, those metal bodies are melded with Heartlander flesh and blood.

Balastair says: “I’m looking for the property of Esther Harrington.”

“
Esss-
tur Ha-
ring
-ton. Thirt
teenth
floor.”

The elevator suddenly clangs and shudders. Gears squeal as it begins to ascend. Balastair watches the two young men with him—Boyland’s still pale as an unmoored soul, and Balastair can see the striations of red peeking past the bandages. Infection may be setting in. Hopefully the antibacterial unguent that Amrita applied will save those arms. (At the very least, it smells pleasant, redolent with unusual spices: black tea, karak, khashamur pods, rose petal.) Cael just looks anxious, shifting from foot to foot.

At least,
he thinks,
Rigo didn’t come
. Nice lad, smarter than he gives himself credit for. But he’s slower than they need right now.

“You all right?” Balastair asks Cael.

“Peachy,” he says.

Cicero the catbird whistles a rough mimic of the tone of that word—
Whee-chee! Whee-chee!

“A lot to take in.”

“You think?”

“Are you ready for whatever awaits?”

Cael makes an incredulous sound. “Ready? I got a baby on the way that may or may not be human, with a mother who is cagier than a snake-bit hobo. Then I’m on a flotilla where I just found out they have my own father imprisoned for who knows why or for how damn long, and meanwhile I’m about to ignore all that and try to find some secret weapon for the Maize Witch—another mother whose humanity is wonky as hell—and for all I know we’re waltzing into a trap that might end up being a recipe for her Heartland-renowned shoo-fly pie. That about cover it?”

The elevator bangs to a stop, jostling them all.

“I suppose it does,” Balastair answers. “Let’s see what surprise my mother has in store for us, shall we?”

The door opens to darkness.

And then a series of sharp
clicks
before bright fluorescent bulbs turn on one by one across the length of the room, illuminating an oblong space many times the size of Cael’s own Boxelder home.

Ahead: plastic crates stacked high. Shapes that might be furniture (or, Cael thinks with a shudder, that might be metal men waiting to reach out and crush them with steel claws) hide under heavy tarps. Aisles radiate out from the center elevator, like the rays of a hand-drawn sun.

“Where do we start?” Cael asks.

“Where
don’t
we start?” Boyland asks.

Balastair arches his eyebrows. “Mister Barnes Jr. is right. Start anywhere. We’ll split up—cover more ground that way. And I choose”—he leans his head forward like a certain gravity is pulling him—“this direction.”

The Empyrean man ducks down an aisle. Cicero hops off his shoulder and flies after him.

“Well,” Cael says, “I’ll go this way.”

He heads down an aisle. He quickly notices that each box, covering, or bundle has a tag associated with it. Plastic tag on a little beaded metal chain. He lifts one up and peers down at it, and as he reads it, he calls out: “Hey, these tags tell you what’s under the bundle. And where it came from. Look at the tags!”

He stands, and there’s Boyland, all up in his orbit.

“We’re splitting up,” Cael says.

“I’m following you.”

“That ain’t the plan.”

“It is the plan, farm boy. I don’t wanna lift up some plastic blankie and catch a face full of some stomping mechanical, or end up breathing in a whiff of some weird experiment. I’m staying with you.”

“Which means you ain’t doing squat.”

“By the Lord and Lady, Cael, I don’t feel so hot, okay?” Cael gives Boyland a good long look and sees that his old rival is the color of a sun-bleached gravestone. Covered in a shining sheen of sweat, too. His tongue is pinkish gray and smacks as he speaks. “I think I got a fever.”

“You look like something that came out of a goat’s ass.”

“Thanks, McAvoy.”

Cael rolls his eyes. “All right, Barnes, sorry. Just hang with me. I figure that goop the priestess spread on your arms will take hold soon enough. Meanwhile, just . . .”
Hover there, like a skeeter.
“C’mon.”

He heads down one aisle, then another, peeking under tarps—he sees bookshelves and lamps and, sure enough, an old auto-mate with ragged mop-head hands and giant suction cups on its knees and elbows. Boyland mumbles: “What in King Hell is that?” And Cael answers: “I think this thing washes windows. Look—climbs up using the cups. Arms got a couple extra joints in ’em, and those mop-hands look like they spin—”

He touches one, and the thing suddenly lurches to life—thrashing about, mop-hands whirring fast, too fast, smoke coming off them.

“Quik-kleen window! Gleam-shine spray!”
Its jaw unhinges, and a mist spritzes from a hole inside its mouth, catching Cael right in the face. Cael flails, tastes chemicals, eyes burning—he trips over something, tumbling backward.
“Window-bot do a squeaky-sparkly job! You have a squeaky-sparkly day, Mister—”