by Chuck Wendig
His blood turns to cold syrup.
“You wouldn’t dare. Spare me. I’ll help you. You have my—”
He does not get to say “vote.”
The sonic shooter screams and cuts through his middle.
His meal paints the wall behind him.
MOTHER AND SON
LANE PACES LIKE a nervous barn cat, his hands clasped in front of him—one fist nested inside the other, the fingers trying to pry open the other fist in an anxious gesture. Here, the door. Behind it, his mother.
Nika leans forward: “You can go in now. She’s awake. And aware.”
“Just hold on,” he says. “I need to think.”
“He needs to think,” Killian says. For once the man’s eyes are bright and clear as a glass of water. The ex-captain steps in front of Lane and stops him from pacing by planting both hands on the sides of his arms and holding him there—not a cruel, forceful gesture, but a gentle urging to stop. “You don’t have to do this now. It can wait. She can wait—” And then, under his breath: “She damn sure waited long enough as it is.”
“No, I need this,” Lane says, then corrects himself: “I need to do this.”
He’s queasy.
Everything feels like it’s slipping through his fingers.
Pop rebuking him.
Cael coming here and demanding things Lane cannot give him.
Luna’s been cold.
Killian—at least he’s been good. Been staying out of the Pheen, away from the poppy, even off the whiskey and gin these last few weeks. His face no longer the hue of cigarette ash, his eyes no longer cloudy.
The ex-captain puts his forehead against Lane’s. “Go, then. Time to get this over, perhaps. Better to rip the stitching out than to extend this misery.”
“You’ll wait here?”
“I’ll wait here.” Killian leans in, kisses Lane’s temple.
Lane has a moment where it feels like—well, when he was a kid, he jumped off Burt and Bessie Greene’s barn roof. Beneath him was a heap of corn-leaf hay, just a pile of dried dead Hiram’s, and just before he jumped off that roof, he felt the same thing that he’s feeling now. Fear cutting through him like a cold knife. His stomach trying to crawl up between his ears.
He didn’t break anything, but the dried corn-leaf cut him something fierce. His walk back home with the rest of the crew saw him covered in a slick brown sheen of his own blood.
Thing was, that day, he jumped off the roof for a reason.
He told Cael and Rigo that it was because he wanted to see if he could do it. Ballsy, bold, doing it on a dare that nobody actually dared.
But the reality is, he wanted to jump.
He wanted to hurt himself.
Not because he wanted to die.
Not because he invited the pain.
But because he hoped, secretly, that if he hurt himself just badly enough, his mother would come and find him. She would leave the Babysitter life and come to him. And tend to him. And make it all better.
That never happened, of course. It was Pop who tended to his cuts.
“I’m ready,” he says, and he opens the door.
She looks small as a bird, sitting there on the cot.
His mother, Mitzi Moreau.
Time hasn’t been kind to her. It’s held her fast, carved lines into her face, pushed her eyes back into their sockets, painted shadows where there were none before. She’s not skeletal, not exactly, but she looks withered, winnowed, pared down to a smaller, more concentrated version of who she once was.
Mitzi sees her son enter, and she stands. The sound that comes out of her is halfway between a laugh and a sob. Her face softens; the lines warp and melt. She hurries over to him with small, squirrel steps, calling his name through that ongoing laugh-sob, but he throws up his hands and takes a step back to match her steps forward—
“Wait,” he says, firm, cautioning.
“Laney,” she says, her hands physically pleading. “It’s me. It’s your mama, sweetheart.”
“You don’t get to say that,” he says, each word cold and half dead. “You want to call me anything, you call me Mayor Moreau. You want to call yourself something, maybe you should try traitor to the Heartland.”
Her face is like a sky of falling stars. Everything sinks and sags. She takes a few ginger steps backward and sits down on the cot, looking numb.
“Oh” is all she says.
He didn’t want the conversation to go this way—at least, not so swiftly—but it feels like he’s already stepping off the edge of that barn roof again, so he lets himself fall into it.
“You betrayed the Heartland.” You betrayed me. “You turned against your own people and worked for the skybastards of the Seventh Heaven against them. You can’t do that and not be held accountable.”
“Lane, we all worked for the Empyrean. Every one of us.”
“I didn’t. And I don’t.”
“I did it because I needed the ace notes. We needed the ace notes. Once your father died—”
“Don’t you mention him. This isn’t about him!” He scowls. “And it damn sure wasn’t about the ace notes. How many ace notes found their way back to me, to the farmhouse, huh? Huh?”
“I should’ve sent more—”
“You should’ve sent some. Any! Anything at all! You went and took a cushy Babysitter job halfway across the godsdamn Heartland and the only thing it did is put ace notes in your pocket. It didn’t benefit me! It didn’t do anything for me except leave me alone in a rotting, ruined house on the edge of nowhere—if I didn’t have friends I would’ve died. Died because my father was too stupid to live and my mother was too greedy to stay!”
“I wasn’t greedy!” she protests, again standing up. “I wasn’t. You have to believe me, Laney, I . . . I left because I didn’t know how to raise you.”
A gulf of silence between them, like two townsfolk standing in the wreckage of their home after a tornado has come and gone.
“What . . . what the hell does that mean?”
She says, “Some women, Lane, they have a calling to be mothers. They understand their children. I never had that. Your father understood you. He was half a boy himself. But you were always a strange creature to me, some little needy thing who wanted me for reasons I just didn’t get. I left ’cause I figured I was going to screw you up.”
“No,” Lane says, stabbing an accusing finger in the air, punctuating each word. “You left because you figured I was gonna screw you up.”
She looks down at her feet. “Maybe you’re right.”
“You’re a traitor to the Heartland.”
“I was a traitor to you, you mean.”
“Whatever. Anybody else, I’d sentence you to death. But I figure you worked for them for so long, maybe you can work for us now that we’ve got you back. I’m putting you to work building this city for us.”
“That seems fair.”
“You don’t get to tell me what’s fair and what’s not.”
She takes a step toward him, but the look on his face must stop her.
“Just remember,” she says, “at the end of the day, we’re family.”
“I have a family,” he says. “And you’re not it.”
DIGGING IN THE DIRT
MOTHER’S EYES are flat matte, lifeless, and without spark, each a dirty spyglass looking nowhere, seeing nothing. She still gets up, moves around, speaks to Gwennie, but her words are dull and mumbled. Her shoulders hunch forward. She looks like she’s trying to push herself inward—farther and farther, perhaps, until she is able to simply disappear.
“Everything’s okay?” Gwennie asks. “With Scooter and Squirrel?”
“They’re fine. We’re fine.” The woman fritters about the half-collapsed apartment, scooping up little piles of dust as if that’ll fix it.
“Well, where are they?”
“They’re out . . . playing.” The way she says this last word tells Gwennie she doesn’t really know where they are.
/> Gwennie goes to the window—a window with the glass pane broken out of it—and looks down. The sound of the two children playing reaches her ears: it’s almost musical. Down below in a small lot lined with pulverized rubble, the two children come running. Scooter with a doll made of corn husk, Squirrel with . . . what looks to be a spear made out of a broomstick, some tape, and a shard of gleaming glass as its tip.
Squirrel is not very good at playing.
“Squirrel has a spear, Mom.”
“Oh. Okay.” Barely a reaction.
It’s like something has been bombed out of her. The ground blasted.
“It’s your job to keep them safe—” Gwennie starts to say.
Mother snaps. “I couldn’t keep Richard safe. Neither could you. Neither could any of us. We’re not safe, Gwendolyn. None of us are safe.”
And then she composes herself as if that never happened—her body again shifts inward and she continues pushing dust into her open palm.
Gwennie almost wants to cry, though a part of her thinks: At least she got mad. At least she’s still in there, somewhere.
Sigh.
She points to the basket over by the side. It’s full of food: she sees the green mop-tops of carrots, the bulge of tomatoes, a long, lean twist of bread. “Well. You have food. I’m going.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
She moves to give her mother a hug, but it’s entirely one-sided. The best she gets is that the woman leans into it a little. Another small sigh escapes her.
And with that, Gwennie’s back out the door.
Outside, she listens to the sounds of distant working as she faces the back end of the building. It opens up to the giant wall that surrounds the city, a mottled tortoiseshell wall that sometimes feels like protection, but just as often feels like a prison.
Somewhere around the side she hears the two kids laughing—which is good, because it means Squirrel hasn’t stabbed anybody today—and she goes to follow after it. But around the corner, she doesn’t find the kids.
She finds Wanda Mecklin.
Wanda. Standing there, arms folded over, nervously chewing her lower lip. “There you are,” she says.
“Here I am,” Gwennie answers.
And then neither one of them says anything.
Gwennie watches Wanda. The signs of Blight upon her are small—but she can’t help but look at them. The girl’s tongue hides behind her teeth, but even with evening coming Gwennie can see the sheen of the green leaf that tips it. Her fingernails are like little rolled-up leaves. The smell coming off her is floral—strongly so, almost aggressive.
“I need to find the kids—” Gwennie starts to say.
“Cael left.”
“Left? What?”
“He snuck out.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Wanda sighs as if she’s dealing with a stupid child. “He left with that other one, the Empyrean man, and they snuck off.”
“Empyrean? You mean Balastair.”
Wanda shrugs, looking irritated. “We weren’t introduced.”
“That means they’re going to look for the . . . well, whatever it is that the Maize Witch sent Cael here to get.”
A defensive sneer. “Sent Cael and me to get.”
“Right. Of course. Sorry.”
“It also means he went off without the both of us.”
That echoes Gwennie’s thoughts perfectly.
It stings her. He could’ve at least told her! Dangit.
Wanda starts to say, “Cael and I—”
Gwennie snaps: “I don’t care, Wanda. Don’t. Care. You and Cael have a thing, and I’m not going to mess with it.” Godsdamn do I want to mess with it. “I don’t wanna talk about Cael. Girls can get together without talking about boys, you know. We’re more than trophy cases to hold them up.”
Hard to read how Wanda takes that. Her face goes through some calisthenics—a scrutinizing frown to an eye-rolling whatever to, finally, a softer countenance that might just indicate acquiescence.
“Okay,” Wanda says.
“Okay.”
“So, whaddya want to talk about?”
“I dunno, Wanda.” She’s exasperated, but realizes that she’s the one who made the offer, so . . . “You miss Boxelder?”
“Not really.”
“I miss it. Sorta. I miss some of the people.”
“I miss my family.” Wanda suddenly hugs her arms to her chest and rubs her hands over her elbows. “I don’t know if they’d like who I am now.”
“My mother doesn’t like me, I don’t think.”
“Imagine what she’d think if you were Blighted.”
“I thought you liked being . . . that.”
Wanda pauses, seems to think on it. “I do. I feel strong. It’s a gift, not a curse, but I also know that most folks don’t think of it that way. Even here, where it seems like everybody’s an outcast now, they still look at me like I got two heads on my neck or a lizard tail whipping around.”
“Sorry.”
“I asked for it. I wanted this. I still do want it. It’s their problem, not mine. I went through my life thinking that everyone else was better than I was and that I was always trailing behind, trying to be like them. But now I know that I’m just me and they’re gonna have to deal with that.”
Gwennie thinks but doesn’t say: And yet you became something else in the process. Or maybe this is who Wanda was all along. Maybe the Blight is bringing something out of her that was always there, just buried.
Maybe it’s doing that for Cael, too.
She shudders.
PALACE HILL
EVERY FLOTILLA HAS a Palace Hill, Balastair said.
And he was right. Even this one—even after its fall.
Cael and the Empyrean man creep through the streets of Pegasus City as the moon crests high in the sky, signaling midnight.
Balastair described Palace Hill as a thing of beauty—but everything he described is in wreckage. There are the cobblestone streets: piled up in heaps and mounds, the stones cracked. Cael sees elegant marble and rare wood, much of it blasted to rocks and splinters. Scattered glass, bent chrome pocked with rust, trellises leaning on trellises.
And yet, many of the homes remain. Half collapsed, some partly imploded, a few entirely sound in terms of structure and shape—but if you squint hard in the light of the night sky you can see the shape of what the homes once were, manses of some expanse, born of craft and skill and looking like nothing Cael has ever seen before. The Heartland doesn’t have homes like these, shattered or no.
This area: cordoned off. Daily the Sleeping Dogs work through the space, rebuilding. But no one sleeps here. Not yet. It hasn’t been declared safe—not a lot of value in populating an area if it’s just going to kill those who stay here. Pegasus City needs its people alive, not mashed to a red mess under a crushing wave of broken stone.
“I don’t get it,” Cael says in a low voice. “I fell with this city. Most of this stuff shouldn’t be here. How the hell does a floating city fall from that height and stay together? Hell, some of the buildings back toward the city center are still tall towers—I’m not my father, I’m not smart like he is, but that don’t seem to make a lick of sense.”
Balastair sighs as if he doesn’t feel like talking about it, as if remembering it all is a chore. “It’s a combination of factors. Part of it is the engineering. Many structures are designed to absorb all kinds of shock—a flotilla isn’t so much a single city as it is a series of buildings and areas chained together and allowed to float, and they constantly push and pull on one another. Once in a very rare while, a chain snaps—no small feat, given the size of these chains—and the buildings smash into one another. And yet they remain whole. Foamcore walls behind the stone. Nano-width web-mesh infusing the building material. Everything tested for tension and tremor. The other part of it is, half the city didn’t completely fall. Parts were protected by massive inflatable buoys—balloons, rea
lly. Not strong enough to keep buildings afloat, but enough to make their descent gradual rather than . . . apocalyptic.” He sighs suddenly. “This was my home once.”
“The flotilla.”
“This area of the flotilla. I grew up here. With my mother.”
“What was that like, having her as your mama?”
Balastair groans as they push on through the ruins of Palace Hill. “It was something I don’t really want to discuss.” And yet here he goes, discussing it: “She was a strange woman, consumed by her work. I never knew my father—she didn’t deem it vital information, didn’t think him necessary at all. I believe her phrasing was ‘vestigial.’ Like a tail or one’s far-standing teeth.” Cael is nimble enough to make it through the wreckage, but Balastair keeps almost losing his footing on scree and broken stone. “Oof. Walking this hill made me tired enough then. Now, it’s downright torture.”
“You think that house is still here?”
“I cannot say. If it is, we’ll find it.”
“And if it ain’t?”
Balastair shrugs. “Then we do not find what my mother hopes you’ll find. And whatever plan B is, she will enact it.”
“You think she’s got a plan B, huh?”
“I think she has plans A through Z, and then one through a hundred, and several more lined up after that.” He picks up a cracked, chipped balustrade—part of two horses, each winged, one Pegasus with its nose against the tail of the other. He groans again and tosses it to the cobble, where it snaps in half like a clod of dried mud. “The way she told it, the Blight—strictly speaking, Brunfels Molecular Mutation Syndrome—was an accident, an unexpected hazard of the work she was doing. She blamed the Empyrean, said they were pushing too hard too fast, ignoring risks for the sake of progress. But one night, while wreathed in poppy-smoke, an assistant of hers—a woman named Ursula Aldrovandi—said that it was intentional. A design by my mother and tested on herself first above others, probably because she wanted to be as powerful as the Grand Architects, but no one would allow her that. Or maybe just because she had seen something in the skies of the Seventh Heaven that she didn’t like. I don’t know. Whatever it was, she didn’t share it with me. One day she was my mother, the next she was taken into custody, and the next after that she had escaped, thanks to the help of a small cabal of Blighted agents.”