The Harvest (39 page)

Cael blinks away the chemicals and opens his eyes just in time to see Boyland behead the thing with an old book. Dust flies from the book. More of the noxious chemical geysers from the thing’s black-tube neck-stump.

Ffffpppssssst
—then it sputters and goes dry.

“I hate these things,” Boyland says.

“I’m not an admirer, either,” Cael says, wiping his eyes again and spitting the chemical taste onto the floor. It’s then he sees a glimpse of something just over his shoulder. A tag, dangling.

He picks it up.

He reads:
Harrington, Esther
.

Beneath it, the words:
Reclaimed goods from Palace Hill home;
Ormond Stirling Saranyu
.

“Whoa-dang, here we go,” Cael says, and he cracks the lid of a box. He calls to Balastair: “Hey, Bal—I got your mother’s stuff here!”

He hears Cael calling. Faintly. And he calls back, “I . . . I’ve found some of her stuff, too.” He feels a tightness in his throat and chest as he stares down at a gilded frame. Inside the frame: a picture of himself, his mother, and his grandfather Hiram.

In the photo, he’s just a little kid. Ten, maybe twelve years old. Which means this isn’t long before Hiram passed, before Mother began her . . . change.

He’s holding a macro-oculus in the picture—they don’t make them anymore, now it’s just a lens that fits over the eye (uncomfortably, he adds), but as a child, this was his favorite thing. He decorated it with paint and stickers. Used it again and again to stare at the microscopic world and marvel at it. It was his first step on the road toward manipulating that tiny, unseen world—twisting helical forms and ushering forth replication and mutation.

Those days are gone,
he thinks.
Aren’t they?
The closest he got to doing any kind of science down in the Heartland was growing those vegetables at their little house. When Cleo was still alive. When everything had only just started to fall to pieces—he lies to himself, suddenly, pretends that he was happy then, but he wasn’t. He knows it. He wanted things he couldn’t have: a life back on the flotilla, a laboratory to do work, and Gwennie.

He takes the photo, then smashes the glass on the corner of an old desk. With a circular movement he removes the rest of the glass using that corner, and once it’s all gone, he reaches in, plucks the photo from inside the frame.

His mother looks young and happy.

Hiram looks magnanimous. A glow about him. Forked beard, proud smile, big and eager eyes. Balastair looked up to that man. Spent a lot of time with him, too—Hiram had retired, and Mother was always so busy.

Inside one of the desk drawers, Balastair hears something rolling.

He pops the drawer.

His oculus has rolled to the front.

Haha! He grabs at it. It feels so small in his long-fingered hands. But there, at the end, the dome shape with the crystal lens. He feels around, finds the switch, pops it—

A tiny blue laser emits from the front end.

He points it at a little tumbleweed of dust rolling across the desk, then presses his eye against the viewer—

The microscopic world made massive, blooming bright against his eye. Spherical, spiny shapes mingle with rods that look like shattered crystals. A dust mite, monstrous when seen so big, clambers across the tangle as if drunk.

He removes the oculus. Wonderful. Wonderful!

What other treasures await? His youth, contained in these boxes and drawers, suddenly laid bare and—

“I found it!” Cael calls from across the room.

“What?”

“Get over here! I think I found it!”

Balastair longs to remain with the nostalgia of his life on the Saranyu, but for now, duty calls. He hurries down the radial aisle, reaches the center, then follows Cael’s voice and finds him and Boyland standing over a crate wreathed in drifting steam—no.

Not steam. Dry ice sublimating to a gas.

Cael says, “Found this crate. Was wrapped up in all this red and black tape.” Sure enough, next to the crate is a wad of the binding. Balastair sees
DO NOT OPEN
and lots of exclamation points contained inside triangles.

Icons of warning. That’s promising.

And the crate’s a good size—three feet by three feet.

What could be in there?

Cael waves him over. Down in the box: forty-nine cylinders, each glass capped with gleaming metal.

With ginger fingers, Balastair slides one out of its socket and places it atop the crate’s lid. Inside the glass is—

“I don’t know what that is,” he says. And he doesn’t. It’s packed tight with something—some kind of material. Tiny little white orbs. Like tapioca blobs, though significantly smaller. In fact, they look like . . . “Eggs.”

“From the world’s tiniest chicken,” Boyland mumbles.

Balastair shakes his head. “No, no,
insect
eggs.”

It dawns on him.

No, it couldn’t be.

Could it?

He takes the oculus, shines the laser against the side of the glass, and—

Yes. The cylinder is packed with tiny white eggs. He does some quick calculations in his head—the volume of the cylinder, the size of each egg. That means—a half million eggs in each cylinder. Nearly fifty cylinders. And if these are what he thinks they are . . .

“Don’t open these,” he says suddenly.

But even as he finishes those words, he hears the
click-hiss
.

He pulls away from the oculus, eyes wide.

Boyland stands over a cylinder, the metal cap in his hand. The open cylinder in front of him.

“Why not?” Boyland asks.

The cylinder starts to hiss and vibrate.

“Oh, gods,” Balastair says. “What have you done?”

POPCORN

ARTHUR
DOES
WHAT
he can to exercise his body. He stands and plants his hands against the wall and lifts his heels up again and again—his legs are wobbly, and they feel like they’re on fire. He sobs doing it. But he needs to do it. If he has any chance of escaping the gallows, he can’t be limp—can’t flee on atrophied legs or with rubbery arms. While he works his body, he also works his mind: He thinks of his wife, his son, his daughter. He does math problems in his mind. Old problems from when he was just a student—hard ones, too, ones that took him months to solve. Symbols on a chalkboard. Sketches on paper.

He does this day after day.

Night after night.

His body aches. His mind feels like mud.

Everything in him just wants to give up—like an old dog who can’t dog anymore.
I’m tired,
he thinks.
They have me. I’ll never see the Heartland again, except as a corpse thrown off the edge of this flotilla.

And that’s if he’s lucky.

Then comes the night when the wind howls through the bars of the birdcage prison they’ve placed him in, and two men come.

Frumentarii. Peregrine’s Guard. He’s already met the peregrine of this flotilla—Lirong Yau. An old woman. Bitter and wrinkled as an apricot pit. Dark eyes like chips of flint beyond pinched skin. She seemed tired during their meeting. Like all of this bored her.

Now, her men have come for him. Two men, each muscled beneath his leather. One looks young, naive, untested. The other is old, grizzled, a lantern jaw speckled with ill-shaven salt-and-pepper hair.

The old one mutters, “Your presence is requested, terrorist.”

“By whom?” Arthur croaks.

It’s the young one who answers: “The Dirae.”

Then he opens the cage.

Arthur launches himself.

The older one deftly steps aside and brings a hard knee against Arthur’s hip—right into the bone spurs that have haunted him since he was a young man. The pain is like sticking a screwdriver into the soft meat of a rotting tooth, except across his whole body. Everything lights up with excruciating agony, and Arthur falls down and crumples.

They haul him to his feet.

They step out of the elevator, and things happen fast.

Something lashes around the young guard’s neck. He claws at it in the darkness, gurgling, eyes bulging. From around the corner steps someone with a gun held against her shoulder—

It couldn’t be—

But it is. Gwendolyn Shawcatch.

She points the rifle, a proper rifle, a rifle Arthur recognizes as his own. The older Frumentarii reaches for the pistol at his hip, letting go of Arthur in the process, but having to do all that makes him slow.

And Gwennie is fast.

She jabs him hard in the solar plexus with the rifle barrel. As he
oofs
and doubles over, the rifle butt comes crashing down against the back of his head.

He drops, face-first.

And the young one slumps forward, too, in a lazy somersault against the other one’s hind end.

The whip-cord vine around his neck withdraws as Wanda steps forward.

“I told you not to kill him!” Gwennie hisses.

Wanda shrugs. “He isn’t dead, relax. He’s just taking a snooze.” She turns to Arthur. “Hi, Mister McAvoy.”

He tries to find words, but none arrive.

Gwennie thrusts his rifle into his hands. “This is yours, I believe?”

He nods.

She smirks. “We gotta move, Swift Fox. Your son awaits.”

COLONIZE

THE CANISTER FOAMS OVER.

All the eggs bubble up and out.

And they begin to hatch.

Cael doesn’t know what the hell is happening. He steps back and curses at Boyland: “The hell are you doing?”

The buckethead scowls, looking suddenly nervous. “I don’t know! I figure we don’t have time to dally so let’s, you know, pop the seal on one of these bad boys, see what’s inside. . . .”

“What part of
secret weapon
do you not understand?” Cael looks at Balastair. “Do we need to cover our mouths? Run for the hills? What?”

But Balastair is frozen in place, eyes unblinking. All he says is:

“Ants.”

“What?”

The eggs begin spilling over. And splitting as they tumble. Little white maggoty things burst out, doubling the volume of the eggs, making the whole pile grow and grow—and then the white maggoty things twist and throb, growing little rubbery leg-stalks and flicking antennas—

“They’re ants,” Balastair says again. “Oh, Mother.”

“Kill ’em!” Boyland shouts, and takes a fist and brings it down on the growing pile of ants. They pop underneath his assault—sounds like a string of little firecrackers going off—and then Balastair is screaming for him to stop and is pulling him back, then Boyland is screaming—

The underside of his hand is blistering, growing red—

“Ow, ow, shit dang
gods it burns
.” Boyland, shaking the larval corpses from the bottom of his hand, wiping them on his dungarees—where he leaves a smeary bug-gut trail, the fabric begins to smoke.

Cael grabs the hem of his own shirt, uses it to clean off Boyland’s hand. His own shirt starts to smolder and fray. The scent in the air smells acrid, acidic, like the contacts of an old motorvator battery.

He affords another glance at the ants, still foaming over and spilling out of the cylinder in a white tide—

The little legged larvae start to change now, too.

They shimmer, iridescent like the blue of peacock feathers.

Ants. They’re growing into ants. Hatching, pupating, swelling. Now what spills out of the top of the cylinder are proper ants, not just eggs, not just maggots—little insects, each the size of a pin’s head.

They begin spilling out over the table. Thousands of them. More, even. Balastair and the others backpedal toward the elevator.

“Those little sum-bitches!” Boyland shouts.

“Bal,” Cael asks, “what is happening?”

“Those are my ants,” he says, looking horrified, shell-shocked. “They were my first. Mother said to begin with something small, something with a simple code, a creature that can breed quickly so that the results of my meddling would be plainly seen. She wanted me to work on little vinegar flies, but I said, oh no, I’ll show her, I’ll
impress
her—and I cheated. The first thing I changed inside my little ant specimens was how fast they bred. From egg to larvae to pupae in a matter of
moments
, not days or months.”