by Chuck Wendig
“Can I trust her?”
“Esther?” Balastair moans, pinches the flesh above his hawk’s-beak nose. “I honestly don’t know, Cael. I myself cannot decide if she’s a noble martyr, a brave academic, or a villainous monster. Or some strange helical twist of all three.” He pulls his hand away from his face, and Cael sees his gaze narrow. “I suppose we’re about to find out, though, because . . .”
He points toward a half-collapsed house of beige brick, a house enrobed in a mesh of dead, withered vines. Desiccated flowers dangle from trellises snapped like broken bones.
“That’s it?” Cael asks.
“That’s it,” Balastair answers. “Shall we?”
The ghost of home haunts him. This place was his, long ago—his and his mother’s, though since lived in by someone else. (He recalls, just now, passing by the window the day he visited the Lupercal and seeing a small boy standing there behind the glass, looking out.) Still—the specter of this place, of their lives here, is an almost tangible presence. There: the mantel on which sat a silver brazier in which she burned incense. In the corner of the room he no longer sees, the birdcage that once sat there, but the memory of it is so powerful he feels like if he were to reach out he’d be able to touch it—maybe even hear the chirps and burbles of Erasmus not long after hatching.
Oh, Erasmus.
He suspects this Heartlander—Cael, who seems a bit . . . well, not simple, but straightforward—wouldn’t find much sympathy in the bird’s death. So Balastair bites back his grief the way one swallows bile.
Images of his mother dance like wraiths behind his eyes.
Esther, passing through, always passing through, rarely stopping to eat dinner, never cooking a meal, sometimes tending to the lilacs that lined the windows or the wishful-bashfuls hanging off the trellis. Her corn-silk hair, her pale eyes with too much knowledge dancing in them, a mouth ever twisted up in a small smile or down in a scrutinizing scowl. Early on, in her lab coat, always in her lab coat. But as time went on, her dress changed—gone was the coat, in came a diaphanous dress. Her hair ceased to be pulled up around her head and ears and flowed over her shoulders: golden, like sunlight striking waterfalls. She changed, then. Became obsessed with plants. With lineage and legacy.
With mutation.
He shudders, remembering the first sign of her Blight—they were out back, in the small garden terrace. He with the young Erasmus (no longer a hatchling but not far past it), training the bird not to speak, not yet, but to modify its sounds for a different purpose—a chirp for food, a shrill trill for warning, a fluty warble for play. She was moving white bricks, making a new planter and—
He still remembers the tiny snap.
Her fingernail broke off. Clattered on the bone-bleach pavers beneath them.
He looked over in horror as she held her finger aloft—the index finger on her right hand. The nail was gone altogether.
In its place, a small puckered pink hole.
A pea-shoot tendril rose from that hole.
It uncoiled, twirled in the air, testing it the way an inchworm does before taking an uncertain step. Balastair yelled out, a moment of weakness he still recalls. And he recalls that she did not cry out.
All she said was a small, curious “Oh.”
“What’re we looking for?” Cael asks, interrupting Balastair’s reverie of memory. “This place looks like a picked-over corpse. Can’t even get upstairs.”
Sure enough, the stairway up is so collapsed it’s unusable.
“We’ll still have to check up there,” Balastair says. “Which means finding our way to climb out and up.”
“I’m game for that.”
Cael stretches out his right arm, and the vine coiled there relaxes, like a snake lazily removing itself from a tree branch. Balastair realizes he watched his mother take to her own mutation that way—any fear that Cael may have once had over what had happened to his body was fading away. Now, it’s becoming a tool. And soon, Balastair suspects, it will become part of him rather than something outside him. A transition that should come with fear, but won’t.
McAvoy steps out the front door once more. From inside, Balastair watches as the young man does a few stretches, cranes his neck a few times, then reaches his hand to the sky.
The Blight-vine follows the line created by the arm. It extends upward, and Balastair can’t see what happens to it—but he can see the look of surprise and glee on Cael’s face.
“Well, King Hell and Old Scratch, look at that!” Cael calls, then grits his teeth and disappears as the vine pulls him upward.
This is the boy Gwennie was pining over?
He supposes he gets it. Cael is—how to put it? A creature of action. Impulse and impetus. He does things. Balastair was always more internal, living an intellectual life, one of imagination and infinite possibility. Making a choice changes the nature of possibility, doesn’t it? Before acting, a thousand options remain open.
Act, and your options winnow to one.
That’s what Cleo always hated about him. She said he was too afraid to do anything, too afraid to take a step for fear of how the ground would move when he did.
Cleo, gone from him now.
Her death leaves a hole in his life. He knows that abstractly he’s good to be shut of her—she was a vain creature. Not a monster, but eminently selfish. Like too many of his fellow Empyrean citizens. A traitor to him in so many ways and yet he hoped to rekindle something with her. Though here a small voice reminds: You wanted to rekindle that only to make Gwendolyn Shawcatch jealous, isn’t that right? And it is right, though he’d never admit it out loud.
A vision again of Cleo spinning around, killed by what she hoped would be her own saviors. Spun body. Blood.
He shudders, tries not to cry out. A hand over his mouth to prevent it.
A quick shake of his head to clear out the spiders that have nested there, and then he’s out the door, looking up. Cael waves down, extends his hand, and the vine reaches for him. Balastair has to repress the feeling of discomfort watching this braided, veiny vine slide through the air silently toward him. Cael calls down: “Take it, I’ll pull you up.”
Balastair begins to reach upward—
Something moves behind Cael.
A shape taller than he is.
McAvoy hears it. The vine starts to retract. Balastair calls out a warning—but it’s too late.
The mechanical man steps out from the shadows of the room above and knocks Cael backward with a hard metal hand. Then a sonic shriek cuts the air, and suddenly he’s tumbling out of the second-floor window, catching the lip with the Blight-vine—a save that doesn’t last long as Cael spits blood and falls two stories, cracking hard against his shoulder, head snapping against shattered cobblestone. Balastair yells, runs toward him—
But a shadow emerges from the side.
He catches the glint of a pistol. It clips him in the side of the head—his heel skids out from under him, and before he even realizes it, the ground is rushing up to meet his tailbone. A sudden flashback hits him—coming out of the Lupercal, the falcon tearing into Erasmus, turning the little bird into a red pulp. The peregrine descending, shooting him, leaving him wrecked.
Even as the shock travels up his spine and he rolls over onto his side, a sharp, angry thought cuts through everything: But I showed him, didn’t I? Percy the peregrine, dead by mechanical Pegasus.
And yet, some fear haunts him, some fear that the person walking toward him now out of shadow, out of night, is Percy—the peregrine returned from death, vicious and vengeful—
But it’s not.
It’s just a girl.
A wild-eyed, sharp-faced girl with a sonic pistol. He doesn’t recognize her at first—though then he remembers seeing her when they first landed here, rescued from the blockade and brought to the wreckage of the Saranyu.
Luna is her name, isn’t it?
“You’ve got to—I don’t—” he stammers, trying to find words. A trickle of bl
ood crawls down his temple, clinging to his jawline.
“I don’t have to do anything,” she says.
And then she shoots him.
The front of Balastair’s shirt is gummy with vomit. A few feet away, pressed up against the wall, sits Cael—cradling his shoulder, his nose rimed with dry mucus, eyes red. McAvoy looks unhinged: teeth bared in a feral gesture, flinty eyes darting from Luna to the two metal men that attend her.
Balastair recognizes the mechanicals. One is a Bartender-Bot. The other, a Constructor: meant for building things, fixing things, and demolishing them in turn. Both repurposed. Each with sonic shooters fitted to the arms.
The young girl twirls her pistol and chews on a stick.
“You naughty little princes,” she says.
Cael spits. His lips and tongue smack drily. “I hope you’re Obligated to Old Scratch, you little brat.”
“Ooooh,” she says, then whistles. “Little brat. Big words for a Blighter.” Balastair watches Cael tense up. The vine seems to tense with him. Luna points the pistol at him. “Oh no, no, no. Keep that abomination tucked tight, or I’ll find cause to pull this trigger again.”
“This was once my house,” Balastair says. His words are mushy, muddy—the results of having been hit by a sonic blast. One that was thankfully set to be nonlethal. “I have a right to be here.”
“You have no right except what I say is right. This house is property of the Sleeping Dogs, Harrington. And, see, that’s how I beat you idiots here. I do my research. I learned pretty fast how to use those visidexes. Didn’t take long to search your name, find the places here you once called home. Killian is at the other location in case you showed up there.”
Other location? Then he realizes: his home. The one before everything went to ruin. He hadn’t even thought of it still existing, that’s how distant that life seems to be now.
“Just let us find what we’re looking for, and we’ll be on our way,” Cael says. “You can kick my ass back out into the corn if you want.”
“Oh, we’ll throw you to the corn all right,” she says. “You’ll be food for it, you Blighted—”
A sound, outside, and she looks over her shoulder—
Killian Kelly comes in through the front.
His face wearing a sneer-smirk.
“Like rats in a trap,” he says. “Shame neither of you are particularly keen on following the rules that have been set out before you.”
He clucks his tongue.
Balastair rolls his eyes. “Might I point out the irony that you’re raiders and rebels whose very existence relies upon not following rules?”
Again the pistol rises, and Luna’s finger eases toward the trigger.
Balastair’s hands fly up, and he’s ashamed at the cowardice in his voice when he says: “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”
“Lane will be very displeased with his old friend,” Killian says.
“Who says he has to know?”
It’s Luna who asks that. Balastair puzzles at it—but Killian is already ahead of him, frowning. “You sure about that?”
“It would be easiest. No fuss.”
“I don’t understand,” Balastair says.
“They’re gonna kill us,” Cael growls.
Oh. Oh.
“I don’t like it,” Killian says, “but it would be easier. Lane doesn’t need to know about this. He has enough to worry about. This treachery would wound him far more gravely than my own physical injuries did me.”
“It’s decided, then,” Luna says.
She raises the pistol.
Balastair winces. Another act of cowardice—he is sure that Cael is meeting this fate with eyes open, face forward, chin thrust up in defiance, and again he’s reminded why Gwennie likes him.
He hears the click of the dial on the side of the weapon.
And then:
A sonic shriek.
It’s Killian who cries out.
Balastair’s eyes jolt open.
The girl, Luna, drops to the floor on her knees, hands planted against the cracked marble. She makes a hurrk sound. Vomit splashes the floor.
Balastair doesn’t even realize what’s happening until the young mayor of Pegasus City steps through the door, long-barreled sonic rifle in hand.
“Lane,” Killian says. “How—?”
“Get out,” Lane says to him, his face a mask of rage.
“They were—” Luna tries to say, but she gags again and presses her face into the crook of her elbow to hold it back.
Killian steps in front of Lane. “They defied you. You see that, right? This callow cur, supposed to be your friend—”
“Get. Out.”
The older raider reaches for Lane, but Lane tugs his head away, then says: “And take her with you.”
GIFTS FROM OUR MOTHERS
THEY FIND NOTHING in the house. The three of them now—Balastair, Cael, Lane—climb and clamber through the remains of his onetime home, and they find nothing. It has been pored over, picked through. And still, Balastair looks. And thinks. And listens.
He listens to the two others talking outside. The acrid, heady tang of one of Lane’s cigarettes—an Empyrean brand, if Balastair’s nose has it right—rising up through the broken windows and off-kilter frames.
Their voices drift up to his ears.
Cael: “I thought . . . I thought we were done, man. I thought maybe you didn’t trust me anymore.”
Lane: “I trust you, Captain. I do. But I also have this place and . . . I was afraid to do wrong by the people here in order to do right by you. The greater good and all that.” The sound of an exhale. Another plume of blue smoke against the black window. “Like I know anything about the greater good.”
Cael: “Me neither, man, me neither. I don’t know what’s right or wrong or upside down or sideways anymore. I feel like I don’t know rat-crap from my right foot. I’m just . . . going day by day. One step at a time, which means I’m going somewhere.” He laughs. “I just don’t know where.”
Lane: “I hear that, boss, I hear that.”
Balastair kicks aside a broken light fixture: a brass seashell, dented and pocked and pitted. He follows the wires, finds where the fixture once hung, peers into the black. It’s just more crumbled mess—a guillotine of stone. If this was the hiding place—and it isn’t, because it’s too simple, too easy—then it’s long sealed off. They’d need to demolish this place first and sort through the fragments piece by miserable piece before they’d find what it was his mother thought they should have. A worthless, futile endeavor.
Maybe that’s a good thing.
Because really: What kind of weapon did his mother hide here so long ago? Wouldn’t someone have found it by now?
No. She would’ve hidden it well.
Hmm.
Outside: the fing of a lighter opening. The crackle-hiss of flame touching a cigarette. Lane: “My mother’s here. In the city.”
Cael: “Whoa-dang. Your mama’s here?”
Lane: “Mm-hmm. She got rounded up with a couple others and brought here and . . . well. She and I had a conversation, and that’s when I realized: She’s not my family, not really. You guys are. You were always there for me when she wasn’t. Pop, too. But this past year put blinders up and—well, shit, it took her to rip them back off again, get me seeing straight.”
Cael: “I’m still floored she’s here.”
Lane: “Yeah.” A pause. “Yeah. Anyway. I just wanted you to know I’m putting my ace notes on the table. I’m all in, brother. I just had to remember who my real family was.”
Remember family.
A feathery tickle in the back of Balastair’s brain.
Cael and Lane keep talking, but his mind wanders like a sick rat through the pipes and walls of memory. Back to that time when his mother first saw her own Blight. There in the back garden. On the stone terrace. That small word.
Oh.
That moment is a splinter in the skin of his memory.
And surely it
was one in hers, too.
Can’t go down the steps, so instead he heads back to the window—the one Cael fell out of only an hour before—and climbs out over the edge. And here, another memory, because didn’t he do exactly this one time? One time he thought he’d be a rebellious little tit and flee home as a young boy, only twelve, running out into the night. That, the first time he discovered the Lupercal . . .
His muscle memory of that adventure has long gone from him, and his foot slips and he almost falls—
But still, he manages. He dangles. Drops.
“Shoulder still hurts—” Cael is saying, but his words cut short as Balastair lands in an awkward crouch. “Hey, uhh, Bal. You okay?”
But Balastair barely hears the question. He moves past them, alongside the house where the stone accordions and a hole sits in the side like a mouth puking up a frozen tide of bricks. There, then. The terrace. Bent iron fence, trellis cracked and snapped like little bones.
The terrace. Built right off the foundation of the house.
The homes here in Palace Hill did not fall individually—it was the whole hill that fell, buoyed by the inflatables that surely opened the moment the engines failed and chains broke. Some of this is still intact.
Balastair drops to his knees, starts prying up bricks. It’s slow going, but not hard—the bricks aren’t held together and sit crooked against one another, leaving little gaps for his fingers. But then he reaches in and feels a sharp lance of pain through his finger, to his wrist—
He retracts a hand already bleeding. The nail bent back, half torn, beads of blood dotting the edge like the round heads of red pins. He winces, sucks it into his mouth.
Next thing he knows, someone’s easing him aside. Cael.
Cael has part of the iron fence.
So does Lane.
They begin to dig. And pry. And crack bricks in half. Where they pull things apart, Balastair reaches in and removes the bricks. And yet, nothing. They’re finding nothing at all but more brick, or corn shoots already crawling up through the dead city. (Hiram’s Golden Prolific is damn near indestructible, and suddenly Balastair thinks, It knows, it knows we’re hoping to kill it, and so it’s trying to beat us to whatever weapon my mother wants us to have, but that’s absurd, the corn doesn’t think, it just does.)