The Harvest (5 page)

And sure enough, they shot those Empyrean sons-a-bitches out of the air.

The Empyrean retreated, and as the days and weeks went on, other Sleeping Dogs—and soon other Heartlanders—wended their way to the Saranyu’s wreckage. And any time the Empyrean showed their heads, they got smacked on the nose by sonic blasts and sent back to the sky.

Killian’s sickness changed him, though. Hard, high doses of Annie pills kept him alive—but for the pain, he began to take Pheen. And drink, too. It saved him. Maybe. But his body has been weak. Ravaged by the teeth of the infection—and the drugs did a number on his mind, too. Now he wanders about like a ghost.

Lane thinks:
I’m too hard on him
. He’s always been that way. Hard on his father, on his mother, even on his friends.

Guilt pecks at him like a bird looking for worms.

Shit.

His frustration crumbles, and he moves to Killian and holds the man’s hands, then cups his face. “I’m sorry. Okay? I know none of this has been easy. And I know you need . . . to self-medicate. Just try to ease off a little. Because damnit, man, I need you sharp. I’m lost out here. You’re my sail, my rudder, my everything. Keep me pointed straight, yeah?”

The former captain grins and kisses Lane just under the jaw. Lane tilts his head back, feels the warmth of lips trailing down his neck.

“Anything, Mayor Moreau. Anything at all.”

Killian’s hands lace behind Lane’s back.

“Mayor Moreau,” Killian repeats. “See, now I’m liking it. Are you?”

Lane moans.

Across the room:
ding
.

Lane’s visidex. Incoming call.

Killian holds him still. “Don’t take that call.”

“I need to,” Lane says. “You know I need to.”

“You need
me
,” Killian slurs. His breath is off—something rotten in there somewhere. A foulness, wet and fungal. Like the cure for the infection never took hold, like it’s still in there, somewhere, hiding not far out of sight.

Lane pulls away and takes the call.

On the other end: Luna Dorado.

“The facility is ours,” she says. “I’m coming home, and I’m bringing friends.”

“We gave ’em the kiss-off,” Luna says, a mad spark in those green eyes—like lightning flashing in emeralds. “Lost a few of our own, may the Lord and Lady put ’em to work. Lost Pablo Riggins. And Chick Bailey. Dagmar is alive, but she’s gonna lose an arm out of this, guaran-damn-teed. But it’s done. It’s over. The mechanicals are scrap. The place is ours.” She bites her lip, pumps a fist.

Luna Dorado is Lane’s . . . well, everything’s a little ragtag here, so right now she’s called “Captain of the Guard,” but that’s a bullshit descriptor if ever there was one. Luna is more than that. She’s a problem-solver. A fixer. A flare gun you can shoot into the air to bring light to a situation—or straight at your enemies to set them on fire. She’s a farking moonbat, wild-eyed and unhinged. And Lane is incredibly glad she’s working for the Heartland.

Everything about her is sharp-angled and severe. Jawline like an ax-blade. Cheekbones like bullets. Eyes big and bright, blazing with the craziness of youth (she’s only a year older than Lane, after all).

The two of them take the elevator down into the city center—what Lane has named Boxelder Circle—and above them, the reconstructed flotilla rises like broken teeth. It’s slapdash, haphazard, ugly as a shaved shuck rat, but it’ll do. The ships of the Sleeping Dogs were able to pull the buildings upright. Men and women died anchoring the structures back together with chains thrice as thick as Lane’s own (admittedly lanky) body. Most of the city had crumbled or was worthless to them, and some of the Saranyu never fell (or fell too slowly to be of value, buoyed as they were by giant balloons). But from the wreckage remained enough of value. And now those broken teeth composed their city.

The elevator door opens. They ripped out the mechanical man that once controlled it—now it’s moved with cables and pulleys, hand-cranked by men, not machines. Been a lot of anti-machine sentiment recently, and anything that even
looked
like a mechanical in the crashed Saranyu was dragged out into the light and crushed with boots, sticks, stones.

Luna and Lane step out of the box.

It’s then that Lane sees five men lined up in the circle, kneeling.

Burlap sacks over their heads, bound loosely at the neck with wire.

Luna hoots and cackles. “We took a few prisoners, boss.”

Jeezum Crow.

All around stand Sleeping Dogs, many with their wolf and dog masks pushed up over their heads, sweaty faces staring out. Transmitting hatred toward the kneeling men. More are gathering, too, curious to see.

“Wh-what do we do with them?” Lane hisses to Luna so that nobody else can hear.

“We make an example of them,” Luna says, then winks.

She pulls out a sonic pistol.

Lane steps in her way. “Luna.
Luna
. Wait. Hold up. What do you mean, make an example of them?”

“C’mon.
C’mon
.” She gives him a look, like,
You’re joking, right?
But he presses her with a stare, and so she sighs and says, “The boys and girls of the Dogs like a little justice now and again. We got five traitors to the Heartland here, boss. Two Babysitters. Two facility workers. And the facility boss, man named Hale. These ain’t Empyrean. They’re Heartland folk who chose a different side. And so they need to be made to understand what happens to folk like that.”

The gathering crowd is starting to murmur now. And people are closing in on the five kneeling men. They’re not touching them yet, but already Lane can smell the bloodlust in the air. Anger, carried on the wind like a vibration, like a frequency everyone can hear and none can resist.

They’re Heartlanders,
he thinks.

“You want to hurt them,” he says, nodding, starting to accept that.

“We gotta
kill
’em,” she says, smiling.

“Luna—”

“I can do it if you want. But the Dogs wanna follow you, not me. And you don’t
want
them following me more than they follow you. You’re the top of the pops, the big boss with the red pepper sauce.” She spins the sonic pistol around, tilts the grip toward him. “They wanna see
you
do it.”

He takes the pistol.

The grip is warm in his hand. And yet it sends chills up his arm.

The men and women gathered—hell, even a few kids hanging around, nestled in between the knees or at the hips of parents or guardians—see him take the pistol. And they start to chant.

May-or.

May-or.

May-or.

MAY-OR!

Grungy, dust-caked faces stare on.

Dark eyes watch.

Mouths open, some in happiness, others in anger. All yelling for him.

Every part of him feels tethered to a cable, and it’s trying desperately to yank him back from this. Reel him in. He wants to turn and toss the gun to Luna, or better yet, find a way to give these five clemency. He wishes Killian followed him down. Then he wishes Rigo were here—Rigo, who had to leave the city. Rigo who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, stay, who felt out of place, who one night just packed his things and left. Gods, it’d be nice to see him now. Rigo would know what was right and what was wrong.

Lane always found the line between those two things blurry.

His mind strays. Looking for justifications. Excuses.
Reasons
. And they aren’t far out of reach. The Empyrean has ruined the Heartland. And it has done so with the help of Heartlanders. Men like these who are complicit in the ruination. Who, even when given other options, choose to fight for the bigger side, the meaner dog. Who leaned into the shadow of the bully instead of stepping out into the light.

And that pisses Lane off.

His jaw sets tight, teeth grinding against teeth.

Cael with the Blight. Rigo without his foot. Gwennie gone. Lane’s own father dead. His mother on the side of Old Scratch.

He can do this.

Maybe he
wants
to do this.

He steps up. The chants grow loud. Luna is behind him, the small of her hand on his back, urging him to get on with it. He looks at her. The madness dances in her gaze like twisters. That scares him. What do his own eyes look like? It scares him enough to look at the pistol, set the dial back. Reduce the severity just a notch.

Enough to kill. But not enough to knock their brains and hearts out of their bodies. Enough to shock the system, but not enough to spill blood.

He knows the crowd wants blood. But the people will have to settle for just shy.

Should I say something?

He thinks he should, but he can’t conjure words. Not sure he could force them past his mouth even if he did manage to figure out what to say.

Lane raises the pistol, fires it into the chest of the first man.

The body tumbles back. The body shuddering, heels juddering against the cracked earth. Crying out from behind the hood. The others begin to wail. Their howls reach Lane’s ears, but he can barely hear them beyond the rushing of the blood behind everything, and part of him thinks,
Do it slow, make it count, let them savor it
, but then that strikes him as cruel and needless—and his people are already enjoying it, whooping and hooting, fists pumping in the air. This isn’t torture. Right? This is justice and mercy shaking hands.

He shoots the other four in quick succession.

They all drop. Some on their backs. Others on their sides.

Twisting, writhing, dying. Not dying quickly, though, oh no, dying slowly because he didn’t set the dial high enough, did he? This isn’t mercy. This
is
torture. Lord and Lady, no, no, no. He sets the dial up higher, and the crowd is raging now, bigger, larger, a storm of dust and rage—

He points the pistol at the first man again. Time to end it, really end it, pull the trigger and be a leader—

But then the voice reaches his ears again, a cry that isn’t like the others, a cry of a woman, not a man, a cry he recognizes—

No, no, that’s not possible.
No
.

Everything seems to go slow, sideways.

The pistol falls from his hand, lands in the dust.

The balls of his feet carry him forward just far enough to drop down onto his own knees, reaching for the hood of the first one to fall. Pulling the hood off. The burlap obscuring the sun for just a moment—a shadow falling, but then light once more.

Lane’s own mother stares up at him. Face twisting in pain. Eyes bulging. Mouth ringed with froth. He screams for a doctor. Someone, please, a doctor.

“Mom!”

YOUNG HOBOS IN LOVE

THE HOBO BOY IS IN LOVE.

Or like. Or lust. Something.

It’s a crush. The girl is his age, maybe a hair older. She’s a sneering, pouty, surly creature. Dirt-cheeked and sharp-teethed. She’s got the vibe of an animal trapped in a cage, an animal gone feral—you stick a hand through the metal and you’ll pull back four fingers instead of five. And yet, she’s a rock in his shoe; he can’t quit thinking about her.

He watches her scamper up a building, her short-cropped black hair like a bundle of unkempt grackle feathers. She uses a rust-eaten drainpipe to clamber up, then disappears. Two minutes later, she comes back down again.

Eating a strawberry.

A fat, plump, red-as-arterial-blood strawberry.

She eats it quickly, palming it and biting it in one go, then spitting the green top into her hand. A hand that goes into her pocket before wiping a red smear on the patchwork, moth-eaten denim that covers her legs.

The girl pauses for just a moment.

She turns. And matches eyes with him.

She sees him seeing her.

Panic seizes him in a closing fist. Air out of his lungs. Eyes bulging. He knows he should duck, move, look away, something,
anything
, but he can’t. His feet—the good one and the other one—stand fixed to the ground. He knows his mouth is open, catching flies, but he can’t quite manage to close it.

She winks at him.

And then she turns and hurries off.

The Fringe, they call it.

The edge of the Heartland. Ringed by the Boundary. The fence posts are gleaming steel spires, each topped with a shining sphere. It looks like you could just walk between them, leaving the corn and entering the thick jungle beyond. But if you did, the wall would activate. A sonic barrier would screech like a hundred thousand crows, shrieking into existence in the same time it takes for lightning to strike—and you would be sheared in half.

Most folks know what will happen. And yet, sometimes, people still walk through that fence anyway. Suicide with a dash of lottery-like uncertainty.
Maybe
this
time I’ll walk in and the fence won’t get me. And then I’ll be free
.

That’s what they think.

That’s what they
hope
.

Then—the sonic screams. The invisible fence, a fence of sound, rises.

Slice.

The town that sits only a half mile from the Boundary, here in the Fringe, has taken on a senseless, hopeless atmosphere—a feeling that death hangs in the air, an invisible cloud, an unshakable fear. It’s a rat’s nest of a town, the buildings all leaning up against one another like sluggish Pheen addicts. Tin roofs dented, corroded. Stone walls cracked and crumbling. The plasto-sheen has long been perforated by Hiram’s Golden Prolific, and for a while, apparently, folks with sickle knives and Queeny’s Quietdown kept the corn culled. They’ve long given up that fight. The corn intrudes. Pokes up through the street. Through floorboards. Lone stalks serving as advance scouts, bending toward those who walk past, twitching, swiping, thirsty for blood.