by Chuck Wendig
“And yet, you always lost her.”
“I did.”
“What’d your father do with his Queen?”
“Always held her back.”
“And he always won.”
He shoves his tongue into his cheek. “Yeah. That’s right. It’s just—I can’t wrap my head around it. Why have a weapon like that if you’re not gonna use her?”
“She’s the most potent, but also the most vulnerable.”
“Why?” But then he thinks about it. “Because she’s just one piece.”
Esther smiles. “Exactly that. She is just one piece. That’s why you have all the other pieces. To support her. To protect her until that moment when her powers must be used.”
He gets it now. “You’re saying you’re the Queen.”
“It feels a bit ego-fed, but the idea is the same, yes.”
“So that makes me . . . what? One of your peon pieces?”
“You are no peon, Cael McAvoy. You’re more important than that. Though it remains to be seen how important. Are you a Black Rider? Or maybe a Hierophant? Or a Gunfighter? Depends on how tricky you are.”
“I’m not tricky at all. If I’m not a peon, then I’m damn sure the Hermit.” The Hermit—a piece he never quite understood. It just sits there. Can’t move unless to jump an enemy piece that gets near it. But that’s who he wants to be now. He wants to just stay away from all this nonsense.
“You’re too powerful to be a Hermit.” She says it again: “I need your help, Cael. Things are moving fast. The Heartland is on the brink.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means the Empyrean are going to take all our pieces and knock over the game board. They’re taking over whole towns, turning the folks there into metal monsters. It’s war, and the Heartlanders are losing.”
“And what can I do about that?”
“You can fetch something for me.”
“Fetch. Like a dumb dog. See? Peon.”
“No. Fetch, like a skilled, trained hound.”
“You’re not making me feel any better comparing me to an animal.”
“You’re assuming I put men above dogs in my assessment of animals.”
“Okay. Fine. So, whaddya want me to fetch?”
“A . . . case.”
“A case. Case of what? Fixy? Micky Finn’s gin?”
“The case is a weapon. That we will use against the Empyrean.”
He arches an eyebrow so high he’s sure that it’s floating about three inches above his head. “A weapon? What kinda weapon?”
“A corn-killer.”
“I don’t follow you. Thought you said this was a weapon against the Empyrean, not a weapon against a bunch of dumb cornstalks.”
“Hiram’s Golden Prolific is everything to the Empyrean. They use it for food additives, building materials. But most of all, they use it as fuel. To keep their ships aloft. They control the corn, so they control the skies. They control the skies, so they control the Heartland. I want to rob them of that control. I want to kill the corn.”
“That’s a tall silo to climb.”
She smirks. “I created the corn. I might as well be the one to kill it.”
That comment from Esther explodes. I created the corn. I might as well be the one to kill it. It leaves him reeling, and so she suggests they take a walk. Like on the first day they met, they take a stroll through the back gardens. These, wilder and madder than those in front—gardens without margins or borders, bursting at the seams like a scarecrow stuffed too tight with hay. The effigies of stalk and stick still stand tall but are no longer “naked”—they are dressed as Empyrean. Crude, handmade Pegasus symbols. Some wear helmets like the evocati augusti. Others are made to look like what Cael assumes to be specific men and women, given the details—ragged corn silk hair on one, a dark-dyed thatch-worn beard on another.
All around the garden are more structures now. Huts and the construction of what he suspects is the longhouse mentioned at dinner.
Gone is the skiff platform, though.
Cael stops and looks up at one of the effigies. It’s three, maybe four times his height. A giant. Its wicker basket head is slumped against its shoulder, arms stretched out in cruciform.
“So,” he says, “you’re Empyrean.”
“Was. But no longer.”
It should’ve been obvious to him. Way she carries herself is . . . what’s the word? Stately. Like she owns all the world seen and unseen. And her voice has that trim, clipped rhythm.
He asks her: “You created the corn? Just you?”
“I was team leader. But it’s my patent. That genetic design afforded me naming privileges. Hiram was my father. I loved him very much—the love I had for him was as strong as the hate I had for my mother. I named the corn after him, because just as he changed everything for me, I knew the corn would change everything for us. I just didn’t know how.”
“Must be painful to wanna kill it.”
“It’s not. I’ve seen the error of my ways. I want to remove its stain from this world. I can free Hiram’s name from this poisonous crop.”
“And you think I can help you with that.”
“I do.”
A wind whips through the garden. Flowers nod their heads like agreeable drunks. Leaves hiss and rustle.
He shakes his head. “I appreciate what you wanna do. But I just want to find my family and go home.”
“I understand that. I, too, would love to be with my family. And I would love for everything to be wrapped up as nice as a box of Empyrean candy.” She offers a small, mirthless chuckle. “My mother was a candymaker. Oh, what treats. Sugar caramels and blood orange truffles and spun lavender floss, light as air, fragrant as a dream. My mother liked everything . . . neat and particular. And when things did not conform to the order that she imagined, she cracked like an egg. What a temper she had. She beat us without mercy, using the flats of her hands. She called it ‘spanking,’ but my mother wasn’t content to bend us over her knee. She knocked my sister’s eye out of her head one time. My father found out, and . . . I never saw my mother again.”
“I appreciate the family history, I do, but my pop isn’t like that. He’s a good man and I ought to do my level best to find him. Which is exactly why I can’t help you, Esther. I’m sorry.”
“Your family has experienced some pain.”
“It has. All families have, I guess.”
She tuts and shakes her head. “Not most Empyrean families. Mine was an exception, not an example. The Empyrean are creatures of privilege. They don’t starve. They don’t choke on dust or pollen. They have the luxury of frowning at a day’s work as if it’s work for the animals.” She turns a hard gaze toward Cael. “Their mothers are not saddled with tumors, bedridden and fixed with pain.”
“How’d you know that? About my mama?”
“I knew her.”
“Horseshit.”
“I knew her and your father. Not well. But we met.” He’s about to follow this trail of bread crumbs, but she keeps talking: “Your father’s hip. Your mother’s tumors. All the pain of all the families of Boxelder and beyond. It has one source. One origin point: the Empyrean. The wealthy monsters above us. They’ll do anything to keep what they have, tightening their fists around Heartlander throats. Your life would be different without them. You’d have opportunity. You’d have the food you wanted instead of what was doled out to you.” Here, a pause before saying: “You’d have the freedom to marry the one you love instead of the one chosen for you.”
He wonders what Wanda would say about that.
Just the same, she’s right. A roaring river of anger runs through him like a gush of boiling water. Even just growing a few fruits and vegetables got him and his family and friends labeled as terrorists. And now, the Empyrean is doing far worse than that. Turning people into mechanicals?
How is that even possible?
How can that be just?
He tries to imagin
e a world without the Empyrean telling him and everyone else what to do. A fantasy plays out, fast and loose. Him and Gwennie together. Maybe no kids, maybe a whole litter. Growing a garden. Or tending an orchard. Doing whatever the hell they want, when they wanted. Rigo still with two feet. Lane still with his parents. Pop able to run and jump. Mom up and beautiful without her tumors, helping him milk the goats or butcher a couple of chickens, or teaching him how to talk to girls so they don’t think he’s some kinda dumb jerk chawbacon asshole—
“I’ll do it. Whatever you need, I’ll do it.”
“That’s good. Because I’m afraid if I send anybody else, your friend Lane Moreau will shoot them on sight.”
“Lane? What are you taking about?”
“He’s mayor of Pegasus City.”
PEGASUS CITY
EVERYTHING IS CORN.
That’s how the Heartland works. That’s how the Empyrean engineered it to work. And it’s going to be their downfall. Just as Lane is subverting the image of the Pegasus, he and the Sleeping Dogs are going to take over the skies. And that means taking over the corn.
Pegasus City—once the Saranyu—will fly. The engines are mostly intact. Hover-panels undergoing repairs. But they need fuel.
Because this sonofabitch is gonna fly.
“I still don’t think you should’ve called it Pegasus City,” Killian says. He makes a disgusted sound. “It’s a bit . . . on the nose.”
“Well,” Lane says, pacing, “it’s the name I picked, damnit, so it’s there and you’re just gonna have to like it. And I still think I should’ve been allowed to go out there. I’m capable, you know. Good with a pistol. Good for morale, too.”
Behind him, Killian groans as he leans forward on a broad, round bed. He’s pale, sweating. Gone thin, thin as a starved mutt. Beneath his pallor lies various intersections of bony lines. When he grins, it is a skullish one.
“You’re no longer a raider captain,” Killian says. “You’re a mayor. Big man now. You don’t just . . . flutter out on missions. You lead a city, not a strike force.”
The strike force.
Lord and Lady, will it succeed?
Lane’s gut clenches. Not far from the wreck of the Saranyu sits the town of Fort Calhoun. Once it was a town bent on doing the one thing that the skybastards always need doing: collecting and processing Hiram’s Golden Prolific.
Lane hopes like hell that the Empyrean never expected the raiders to send an attack force, even a small one, to take over some nowheresville corn processing facility. If it were a supply depot? Or a big town? Maybe. But Fort Calhoun was compromised. The people taken. Turned into those . . . things.
It’s a dead place now.
And hopefully unprotected.
Lane leans forward, looks out the window in the white tower. A tower once used as some kind of prison, it seems: level after level of cages. Ornate, beautiful cages. Brass and iron. It occurs to him only now, at this moment, that they look like birdcages. The Empyrean see themselves as skyborn, and so that is a fitting cell for a creature of the clouds—but why would they jail one another? Not an enlightened idyll, apparently. Here a small voice reminds him that not all the Empyrean are the same, but that is a hangnail he dare not pull unless he wants to unzip the whole thing in a gush of blood and guilt.
“Mayor,” Lane says. The word still sounds strange to him.
Killian says as much himself: “Mayors and cities and Pegasus blah blah blah. It doesn’t feel right on my tongue, none of it. We’re the Sleeping Dogs, my love. Rebels. Revolutionaries. Beasts with teeth. Not some poncey, preening, prancey-fancy horse with oh-so-precious wings. It’s a ding against morale. You should’ve called it, I dunno. Wolfthorn City. Or, or, ahhh. Hounds . . . ridge. Dog . . . towns . . . ville?” He snorts a laugh.
Lane gives Killian a look and rolls his eyes.
“Well, what the hell,” Killian protests. “That’s not my job, is it? Naming things. You’ve got to find a proper namer for things like that. You can hire one of those now. Since you’re the mayor and all.”
Past the window, the people of Pegasus City continue their work—breaking things, fixing others, building whole new structures. Industrious like ants. Heartlanders have come from all over to join the Sleeping Dogs (though some folks call the raider group the “Woken Beast” now instead) because they know that this is a safe place. The walls that have gone up around the fallen Saranyu flotilla have yet to fall. The Empyrean have tried to penetrate the defenses and get past those walls.
But they haven’t succeeded yet.
And soon, when the raiders get their own corn processing facility, they’ll get this city in the air. The ground will no longer be their only home. And the skyborn will piss their very lovely trousers in fear when they see a Heartlander flotilla hunting them.
Lane turns and points. “I told you, I called it Pegasus City because we’re . . . we’re subverting this place. It was theirs. Now it’s ours. The Pegasus is their thing. Or was. And now it’s our thing. Best of all, it’s a promise. This baby’s gonna take off, and then the Empyrean better worry.” Before Killian can say anything else, Lane jumps ahead: “And tell me, my love, exactly what is your job around here?”
Killian offers a cheeky grin. “Moral support? Sense of humor?” The former captain stands with a wince, clutching his side, then saunters over. He walks a pair of fingers up the opening in Lane’s crimson jacket, trailing them across the cleft in the shirt, across the young man’s smooth chest. “Midnight kisses? Lusty satisfaction and—”
With a scowl, Lane pushes him back. “No. You’re my first mate. That job description does not include getting high on Pheen day in and night out.”
“I sacrificed,” Killian says, his playful demeanor pivoting suddenly to dour and grim. He lifts his shirt, shows the irregular constellation of scars across his chest. “I gave up things. For us. For the Heartland. For you. We got out of Tuttle’s Church, and I didn’t ask to sit and rest. I demanded we move. I said we come here and we take this place. And we did. But that . . .” His voice breaks. “That wasn’t easy for me.”
“It wasn’t easy for any of us,” Lane says.
Back then, a year ago, the pieces of the Saranyu fell—streaks of bright blue and fire red against the black of the sky. It was, indeed, Killian who said they had to come to this place. They were going to pilfer it—pick over its bones like a skull-vulture, then take off with their bellies full of plunder. But when they got here, Lane felt something—an idea, scratching at the back of his head like a dog wanting to be let in the door. And then the Empyrean showed up.
The battle to hold the wreckage of the Saranyu was long, protracted, an even uglier fight than the one at Tuttle’s Church.
It was Rigo who won them that battle.
Rigo, poor Rigo.
Rigo said: “I bet the city’s defenses could be activated.” He thought if they turned them on, the big sonic cannons could be used to blast the skybastards out of the air. They were up against time. Death was on them like a stink. Back then, Lane was confused, the Sleeping Dogs were down too many, and Killian was already ravaged with an infection, a sickness from his injuries that ran through him like a herd of spooked cattle. But Rigo’s idea saved the day. He and Lane together went to those cannons. They got them working.
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 alw
ays 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.