by Chuck Wendig
That’s when Cael yells: “Wanda, run!”
Not Gwennie, run.
Wanda. It’s Wanda Mecklin. Jeezum Crow, she looks different.
And then Gwennie watches what unfolds next with a nauseating mixture of fear and excitement. Equal parts Cael is alive and why in the Lord and Lady’s good green earth is he with Wanda?
As the soldiers spin and Cael calls to Wanda—
She turns, starts to break away.
The stalks of corn all around them begin to whip about—
The evocati draws a thrum-whip and cracks the lash back toward Wanda just as a stalk of corn rips out of the dirt, borne on a lurching perch of spider-leg roots, and catches the whip. The coil lashes around it instead—
A flash of a corn-leaf, and Cael’s bonds are cleaved in twain.
His hands are free.
Which means so is his Blight-vine.
One of the mechanicals wheels on him with its sonic cannon—
The vine coils around it. Cael pivots, turns hard, the gun jerking suddenly to the side, re-aiming it at the last moment as a sonic blast punches the evocati’s golden armor like an invisible battering ram, denting it so hard and so deep the breastbone beneath must also be broken—and given the pained look on the man’s face, seen clearly despite the grainy blur of the video, that’s about right. Then Cael rips the mechanical’s arm off and uses that arm like a bludgeon to smash it back to the dry, dead earth.
The other mechanical, though, is fast.
And its cannon is still loose.
And pointed at Cael.
Gwennie actually cries out, as if this is happening live, or as if her voice calling to warn him could travel back through time and change what’s coming. Then, she thinks, maybe it does.
Because even as the cannon tracks him, Wanda is there—running fast, her mouth open and—oh, gods. Tendrils, dark tendrils from her mouth like a hundred rat-tails squirming. Except they’re not tails. They’re vines.
She’s got the Blight, too. Wanda leaps on the mechanical’s arm. Her head dives toward it and then wrenches back—
The arm snaps off in a shower of sparks as Wanda—looking now like some feral thing, some monster out of a storybook—jerks her head sideways, sending the arm flying into the shuddering corn. The men in the bar hoot and clap and gawp as she rips into the mechanical, her vines tearing it into sparking bits.
The last evocati, the one with the whip tangled in the corn, has freed a sonic rifle from his back—
Cael points at him. An accusing finger.
And following the line of that finger, his own Blight-vine flies.
The vine punches clean through the man’s helmet and out the back of his head. Dripping red before sliding back through, retracting to Cael and once more winding back around his arm.
Again, a roiling mixture of emotions. Gwennie is happy that he’s safe, but scared of who he is, of what he’s become. And Wanda . . .
Cael, on the video, points toward the boat—toward the camera on the boat.
Wanda joins him in facing the lens.
Both of them raise their hands and all the stalks shudder and suddenly launch from the ground like rockets firing—their image on the screen is lost to all the motion and clamor, and then everything tips over and lists sideways.
Static remains on-screen before clicking over to darkness.
One of the men, a thick-browed thug with a nose like a lug nut, raps on the bar. “Play it again. Play it, play it.”
Another man, hollow-cheeked and with an archipelago of dark melanomas rising up the side of his face, shakes his head and whistles. “I dunno who to root for there, boys. Blighters freak me out, but the Empyrean can suck Old Scratch’s bung—”
“Ish called a win-win shit-u-a-shun,” Horgo the drunk mutters. His breath is so bad she has to recoil, holding her own breath lest she lose that sweet apple all over the bar-top.
Bhagram spins the visidex around, goes to press play again, and the whole thing starts all over. She can only hear it now, the crunch of cornstalks underfoot, the sound of the cob hitting a helmet, Wanda, run . . .
Then a quick crackle of static. She can’t see exactly what’s happening—the angle doesn’t allow it—but she can tell that the video has been replaced with a face on-screen. A visidex call.
She recognizes the shape of the head, and the voice confirms it.
It’s Solow, the Mercado Maven.
Round, bulbous, like some corrupted fruit.
“Looking to round up a posse,” he says, speaking like he’s talking through a mouthful of wet rice. “One of those kids from the east came to me—Bayland or Boylan or whatever, the big one, the thickskull . . .”
Gwennie’s blood goes cold even in the warm, dank air.
Solow continues: “Said he’s out there growing fruits and veggies that damn sure ain’t on the list, wanted to make a deal, blah blah blah, who cares. I looked him up, though, and you know the girl he’s with? They’re all wanted. Check the visidex, look at the reward board. Piles of ace notes—”
They all slowly turn and look at her.
Dark, suspicious eyes narrowing to slits.
They’ve figured it out.
On the screen, Solow must be following their gaze. “What the—? Whaddya lookin’ at? Oh. Oh. Jeezum god, are they there? The kids?”
Bhagram is the one to say: “We got this, boss.”
Then he turns off the screen.
They all stare at each other like that for a while. Nobody moves. Only sound is the mouse-fart squeak of shifting floorboards underneath everyone as they tense up, ready for something, anything, to happen.
“You said you don’t like the Empyrean,” Gwennie says, trying to put as much steel and gunpowder in her voice as she can manage—but fear is a hard river running right through her. She remembers being in the tunnels in the Saranyu’s Engine Layer, chased by that man and that boy. The things they wanted to do to her. The intent here in the eyes of these men seems to be greed more than it is lust, but she doesn’t trust it to remain that way. Then, someone saved her. Now, she won’t be so lucky.
“We don’t,” Bhagram says.
Melanoma grins, his mouth full of rickety teeth, like the cob man’s teeth. “But we do like ace notes, little girl.”
“Solow was right,” she says. “We are growing fruits, vegetables. Proper ones. We can share them. There’s money in there—and the garden keeps growing. The ace notes won’t stop with one harvest.”
“To hell with nancy-pansy fruits and vegetables,” Lugnut grumbles. “Sounds like a lot of work, tending a garden. You, though . . .” And there it is. The flash of lust like light across a knife’s blade. “You don’t look like much work at all, do you, girl?”
Girl. The way he says it. He doesn’t think anything of her except that she’s a poppet doll to be flung around and used for his pleasure.
“You don’t wanna do this,” she says. A last warning.
“We do,” Melanoma says.
“And we will,” Lugnut adds.
Horgo scurries backward, looking frightened, like he doesn’t want to be involved in any of this. So much so that he covers his eyes.
Bhagram lifts up something from underneath the bar: a sonic pistol. Dinged up and pitted like it had been in an explosion. Probably another gift from the fallen Saranyu: the crashed flotilla serving as an overflowing cornucopia of Empyrean things.
He lifts the pistol, casual, as if he has all the time in the world, and gently turns the dial—probably to stun, she thinks, unless the reward is for her dead or alive. The dial clicks and she thinks: This is the only moment I have.
She can’t run. If she runs, she’ll end up with a sonic round discharging in the middle of her back.
So that leaves her with only one option.
She executes that option before she even finishes thinking about it.
Melanoma gasps as Bhagram’s head jerks from the knife—a knife that was in her hand just a moment before and
now sits buried in the gelatin of his eye, all the way back to the brain. Drool creeps from the barkeep’s lips.
Then he drops.
“You killed our bartender,” Lugnut growls.
He and Melanoma charge at her.
Melanoma pirouettes and tumbles. Lugnut’s heels skid out from under him, and he topples backward like a stack of milk bottles hit with a rock. The thinner man has a knife sticking out of his chest. Lugnut has one in his throat.
The thinner man lays there, narrow belly heaving with what will surely be his last breaths. Lugnut gives one last bubbly wheeze before dying.
Gwennie bites back panic. Tries not to scream. Tries to regulate her own breathing even as her vision narrows. Think of your mother. Of Scooter and Squirrel. Solow will come here. Sooner than later. She has to move.
They all do.
BLOODLINES
LANE PACES. Everything feels buzzy and awful. He has to stop every ten feet or so, as vertigo threatens to drop him to the ground. Nausea tumbles. The lean bridge across his shoulders feels tight, like a clove hitch knot pulled too taut. His mother. His mother.
He almost killed her.
Maybe he did kill her.
He hasn’t slept well these last couple of nights. Hell, he hasn’t slept hardly at all.
The hallway in which he walks belongs not to a hospital but to what was once an Empyrean residence. At one time the floors were black glass, but they’ve since shattered, the fragments held together by—well, he doesn’t really know. Some kind of plasto-sheen or floor glue (probably made from corn, because oh, hey, isn’t everything?). The walls, alabaster, also ruined—not shattered like glass, but with lean cracks running end to end, giving them the look of fractured bone. Everything is dusty and in disrepair: a clamshell light hanging off the wall, tube wiring dangling, bits of ceiling pulled down. The city fell, and it did not land well—though, Lane supposes, it fared better than most things that drop from the sky. The fact that the Sleeping Dogs have been able to put Pegasus City together out of the Saranyu’s wreckage is a testament, he thinks, to Empyrean engineering.
There. A moment of peace. Away from the thoughts of his mother.
But of course, once he realizes that, it’s like shining a flashlight in a dark corner—and suddenly he sees the creature that waits there. A conflicted creature of guilt and anger. A spider with Lane’s face.
Someone behind him. He turns—it’s Killian.
The pale raider comes up, throws his arms around Lane, kisses his temple. Shushes him. Strokes his hair. “It’s all right, Mister Moreau. It’s all right. Everything’s gonna be all right. Just fine, just fine.”
Lane feels angry, but his tone can’t muster it: “It’s not going to be fine, Kill. Where’ve you been?” He suspects he knows the answer to that question. Finding Pheen. “That’s my mother in the other room. I shot her. Do you get that?”
“Hellfire, I wish you’d shot my mother,” Killian mutters into the space behind Lane’s ear. “She was a whore. I don’t mean that as an insult. I mean, quite literally, that she gave it up to whoever had an ace note to stick up her dress. My father could’ve been any number of motorvator repairmen or corn processing linemen from Blackgable to Freehold.”
“I didn’t know,” Lane says, pulling away. “My mother was no picnic, either. Went off to be a . . . a godsdang Babysitter, of all the things.” Traitor to the Heartland. But there, then, that iron spike of guilt through the back of his mind, hitting like a headache. She’s still your mother, you animal. “And now she’s here. I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. She was dead, maybe. Or just so far from here that I didn’t have to think about her.”
Lane pats his side, finds the small cigarette case he has there—sterling silver, though tarnished, with an enamel Pegasus inlaid in the center. One of the many treasures given up by this ruined place. He pops the lid, finds a twisted cigarette—this isn’t ditchweed, this is something they grow, or grew, here on the flotilla. It smells piquant. Fresh earth and dry cherry. He wraps his lips around it, doesn’t light it. Just fiddles with it, waggling it about with his tongue, tasting the dry paper.
The door down the hall moves—all the angles are wrong since the buildings fell, and it sticks in the frame, has to be shouldered open.
The doc comes out. Nika Vellington. Broad-shouldered woman, looks like she could pull a motorvator through the corn all on her own. Skin darker than any Lane has seen—rumor is, she has blood of the Shattered Coast folk in her. A year ago, Lane hadn’t even heard of the Shattered Coast, didn’t even know that there existed a world beyond the corn.
He expects an absurd scenario—her emerging with hands slick with blood—but the only sign of her work is the line of sweat on her brow and her sleeves rolled up over her thick forearms and knotty elbows.
“She’ll live,” she says.
A sigh of relief escapes Lane’s lips. And swiftly after, a match tip of anger pressed to the back of his mind sets the whole thing aflame, burning up any shame or guilt he had there. How dare that woman. His mother. Showing up here. Showing up now. “Thanks, Doc.”
“That’s your mother?” she asks. The ghost of an accent haunting her words: Dat’s your muthah?
“Yeah. Yes. In name anyway.” He fumbles for a lighter but can’t find one and winces. “She awake?”
“The sonic did a number on her. The pills I gave her got teeth, and she’ll be out cold rest of the day, maybe a week or more.”
Killian perks up. “What, ahhh, what pills are those?”
But he swallows the question soon as Lane shoots him a look.
“But she’ll live?” Lane asks.
“She’ll live,” the doc says.
Lane offers a hand. The doc shakes it. He says to her, “I know you weren’t one of us before, but your services are . . .” He’s looking for the word, but he’s frazzled. He tries to sound leaderly, tries to conjure the tone and the words to sound properly mayoral. “Valuable. Invaluable. And I just want to say, also—” Here, suddenly, whatever he was going to say has gone out of his head like a sheet blowing off a clothesline, caught on a wind, poof, whoosh—
Behind the doc, he sees his salvation:
Luna Dorado, striding up with purpose.
She pushes past the doc because—well, because that’s Luna. “There’s a sitch,” she says to Lane. Ignoring everyone else in the room, as is her habit. “You need to deal with it.”
Killian says: “We’re a bit busy here—”
“Lane,” Luna says. “Situation.”
And then she pivots heel-to-toe and storms off. Like a hard wind blowing in one direction, unwilling or unable to be deterred.
They stand on the wall. It wasn’t there when the Saranyu floated, but it’s here now because Killian had the idea to build it: He said they were going to need protection beyond just the guns, and so he set all the ships and motorvators they could muster to dragging the rest of the flotilla wreckage back to Pegasus City so that the barrier could be cobbled from the remains. It’s a patchwork wall of varying colors and building materials, giving it the look of a brock-turtle’s mottled shell. That is in fact what some folks call it: the Shell.
Up here, a hundred feet above the Heartland, the wind whips. The corn looks like little blades of grass, gently swaying.
Lane thinks how far he’s come from Betty the cat-maran.
He misses those days, in a way.
“What am I looking at?” he asks.
Luna points. Out over the wide-open green, a small ship hovers. A skiff of some kind. Empyrean, obviously, because Heartlanders don’t have skyboats.
Then she hands him a visidex. A zoomed-in look at the skiff—again, definitely Empyrean, though beat to hell and back. Which is curious.
“The guns are trained on the ship,” she says. Above the wall, at the corners, and then below, running laterally, are the guns of Pegasus City—massive sonic cannons that once hung below the floating city or along its edges. Meant to deter an en
emy attack from below, they repurposed them to repel attacks from above and from the side, thanks to Rigo’s suggestion. It gives them one hell of an advantage, because they can shoot anything out of the sky that comes for them. The Empyrean don’t have a ship that can get in range.
“It’s an Empyrean scouting ship,” she says.
“How do you know?” he asks.
“Because I’m not an idiot.”
Well, okay, then.
Behind them, the ragged breathing of Killian, who’s finally catching up as the meager platform that passes for an elevator disgorges him.
“Thanks for waiting, everybody,” Killian rasps. “No, really, I’m fine, it’s good, not dying over here or anything.”
Luna shoots him a look, then rolls her eyes. Back to Lane: “Shoot it down. Then we’ll check it out.”
“You sure that’s what’s best?” Killian says, still doubled over, hands on knees. He straightens, holding his side with the flat of a hand. “I’m all for decisive action, really, truly, I am. But I find it a bit of a barbed burr to swallow that this ship out there is Empyrean. It’s just hovering there like a fly. A harmless little puzzle.”
Lane’s about to speak, but Luna jumps in:
“Harmless. Harmless? Do you know who my father is?”
“Oh, here we go,” Killian moans. “Of course we do, girlie. Obviously.”
And yet she tells them anyway, because that’s how Luna is. “My father is Carlton Dorado. Legacy member of the Captains’ Council. And what he always said was expect the unexpected—”
“Oh-ho-ho, and how’d that work out for him?”
Lane winces at the sting. Because Luna’s father is dead. Dead because one of the other captains on the council—Hvin Jarlskoenig—assassinated three of the other captains, betraying them for the Empyrean. (Reportedly, the Empyrean did not welcome Hvin with open arms so much as they threw him off one of the flotillas when he arrived expecting a hero’s welcome.)
It’s been a hard year on the Sleeping Dogs. They’re ascendant now. Bigger than they’d ever been. But the chaos of the Heartland puts them all in precarious positions, and the ground continues to move beneath everyone.