by Chuck Wendig
With that, he leaves, case held up between him and Killian—a wall constructed, temporary but effective.
“Still nothing?” Cael asks the visidex screen.
His sister, Merelda, shakes her head. “No sign of him, Cael. I’m sorry.”
After leaving Pegasus City more than three months ago—just before Cael and the others arrived—Pop hasn’t been heard from. Not back at Curtains. Not anywhere. Best the hobos could figure, they tracked Arthur to the house of a pair of old raider cohorts—Pressman Horner and his wife, Kallen—and after that, vanished. No skiff in the corn. No body. And Empyrean spies have been hard to come by, but there are rumors of some dramatic changes up there in the Seventh Heaven. Some political shift that Cael doesn’t understand.
“Shit,” he says.
“They’re gonna scrub the line soon.” Takes a good bit to hack a new signal pathway to other visidexes—took them a while to even figure out how to do it, though Balastair was a big help in showing them how the dang things worked in the first place. Whenever they carve out a new connection, the Empyrean comes along and “scrubs” the line—wipes it of data so all that comes across is a garbled transmission. Warped visuals, distorted audio. Like trying to watch something on a broken Marconi.
“Yeah, I know.” He hesitates. “How’s Mama?”
“Same as she ever was. Not much changes for her, I guess.”
“Give her a kiss for me.” He massages his temples. Tries not to think about his poor mother. “And you? You good there?”
“We get more folks every day. Things are changing.”
“Yeah, no, I mean, how are you?”
He sees a twitch at the corner of her lips. “I’m good.” He knows this isn’t her life. Not the one she pictured anyway. Once she imagined a life of opulence—and she almost had it on the Saranyu, according to Gwennie. But now here she is, hanging out literally underground with a small army of Blighters and hobos? Hell, she’s pretty much in charge until Pop gets back.
If Pop gets back. If.
He tries not to show the anxiety on his face just as he wagers she’s trying not to show hers. He says, “I’ll see you soon, sis.” I hope.
“We’re still trying to figure out a way to break the blockade—you’re too far to reach underground but ffzzzzjrrr—”
The image warps and distorts, as if pulled in a hundred different directions. Merelda’s face pixilates, and the words go wonky.
Cael curses and ends the connection.
A hand slides over his biceps, up to his shoulder, and down to his chest. His breath catches, startled. The vine around his arm tenses, then relaxes.
He knows her scent. The soap.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” he says.
Gwennie bends down and they share a quick kiss.
Then he looks behind her, sees no one. She laughs. “Don’t worry, no one saw me.”
“You sure?” he asks.
“I’m sure,” she says.
They kiss again. Warm, soft, slow. She moans against him. He pulls her down toward him as her tongue slides into his mouth.
The dream comes again, as intense as it always is. Wanda wandering a blasted, cracked land. Fissures forming in dead earth. Black vines snaking from the gaps—vines of white thorn and red sap, twisting, curling, twining. Men and women speared on those thorns. Thorns jutting out through their hands, their feet, their eyes, their mouths. Lifted as the tendrils rise.
As Wanda walks this dead space, her feet crunch—on stones, on corn, on little bones.
Whispers chase her.
You’re failing.
You’ve done nothing.
Everyone hates you.
Who are you?
You’re different.
You’re not like them.
The Heartland is sick.
Time is escaping.
The whispers grow louder and more insistent, repeating the same things over and over again—accusations of mutation and monstrousness, of total inhumanity—until soon she’s running and the voice is screaming. Vines thrash at her face, thorns tearing at her cheeks, her eyes, her lips. That’s when she starts to change.
Her fingers fall off—it’s bloodless, this act, they’re just like handles that come off a drawer, and in their place are unfurling leaves. Her teeth fall out and seeds remain. Her throat is full of milky sap. The skin on her feet suddenly splits like the seam of a small shirt pulled over the trunk of a fat man—and what’s left is a squirming pile of roots that suddenly fix her to the ground. The roots burrow like chewing worms, and she can run no farther—instead, she falls forward, hands hitting the ground. The finger-leaves bury in the dirt, too, and a thick vine pushes up past her throat and out of her mouth and plunges into the cracked ground, and she gags as the vine pulses and fluid courses within it—
All that is Wanda is slowly lost.
The ground cracks, opens, a yawning chasm strung together by roots pulled taut like stretched stitches in a ripping wound—and the dirt crumbles beneath her heels and then she’s falling, falling, forever falling until—
She hears Mother Esther laughing in the darkness of her mind.
We are one, child.
The baby twists inside of her.
The child as long as a night crawler, squirming inside her belly.
She sits up, bathed in sweat, clutches at the space beneath her stomach as a wave of pain radiates out from that spot. Wanda winces, bites down on her cheek, rolls onto her side, and curls into a ball. . . .
The pain fades, cast to the wind.
For a while, all she hears is her breath.
Chest rising. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.
Around her, the Engine Layer is quiet, dead, doomed. A blackened, charred place—when the Saranyu fell, it must’ve broken apart and caught fire. She wasn’t there, but she can imagine the way the flames pushed through these tight channels—through the wire mesh, through the ductwork, through all the pipes and around all the hard corners.
She found corpses. They hadn’t cleaned them out yet. Burned up like briquettes. Hard and flaky like a shuck rat left too long on a campfire.
For three months, Wanda has slept here. She gave up the room they had her in—she wanted to get away from everyone. The dreams started, dreams like the one from which she just awakened. But everyone looked at her strange. The folks of Boxelder always treated her a bit like a special case—gawky, awkward girl, too eager by a Heartland mile, a flower that was both too delicate and not pretty enough.
It’s different now. They still treat her like a special case. Except now it’s the opposite. She’s not the delicate one. They are. They are afraid of what she’ll do to them. What the Blight will do to them.
They don’t seem to have this problem with Cael.
It’s because he’s a boy, she tells herself. Men with power are routine. Women with power are not. People are frightened by change. Which means they are frightened by women with power.
But it’s something else, too. Cael hasn’t changed. He’s still the same—a patch of Blight on his chest, a vine leading from it to his arm. His Blight is singular, unchanging, itself a kind of status quo.
Wanda, however, has changed.
Is changing, even still.
She feels it in her belly. A twitch. Like a root poking through stubborn dirt.
And there’s something else, too. The power swells within her and, like in the dream, she can hear—no, she can feel—Mother Esther laughing. Not a mocking laugh. But one of pleasure, of kinship, of celebration.
She picks up a shard of mirrored glass she found poking through the ruins of Empyrean homes. Then she looks at herself—this, an act she performs every day, sometimes every few hours.
“I barely recognize you,” she says to herself. Leaf-gloss tongue flicking. Face now comprising many hard angles: cheekbones, brow line, lips, nose, chin. The veins in her eyes are no longer veins but, rather, tiny pea-shoots. Her eyes have gone from brown to green. Underneath her straw
berry-colored hair is a fine layer of dark purple tendrils forming a kind of mesh—she almost wonders if her hair will soon grow real strawberries, and as the thought reaches her, a real strawberry plumps up just above her ear, hanging there, tugging on the skin like a heavy weight—then it drops off, rolls down her shoulder and into her hand. A hand she didn’t command to catch it.
Reflex.
She thinks to eat the berry, but then her stomach roils. It came from her, didn’t it? Wouldn’t that be like eating your own hair or fingernails?
The strawberry thuds and splats against the wall as she throws it.
Even without meaning to, another berry grows in the space between her neck and her jaw, and she feels them hanging heavy there—she can grow fruits and vegetables like this. Sometimes she controls it. Sometimes she can’t.
Something she’s seen only one other person do—
Mother Esther.
Strange, that.
Wanda bows her head, says a small prayer of thanks to Mother, asks for her help in this dark time. She wipes away tears.
Again the baby inside her moves.
It’s Cael’s. She knows this because he is the only person with whom she’s ever been intimate, though a little voice inside her nags her with a series of troubling questions: What if you created the baby out of nothing? What if the Maize Witch did it? What if there’s no baby at all and truly you’re just going mad, you dumb, daft girl?
No. No. Those simply aren’t options.
The child is Cael’s.
He doesn’t know. Yet. But she’s going to tell him today. She’s going to tell him that the baby is healthy and will be happy with them and that the baby is human, but yes, the baby is Blighted. She knows this because she can feel this. The first true Blightborn? Wanda doesn’t know. But she likes to believe it.
She will tell Cael this, and she will also tell him that she knows he’s back with Gwennie. Despite everything. She will tell him that it’s okay, that she forgives him because in his heart, Gwendolyn Shawcatch came first.
But she will not be his last.
That is reserved for Wanda.
Because Wanda is his Obligated.
And Wanda is the mother of his child.
A gasp, and then the ragged sheets are kicked off, and Gwennie looks over, sees Cael launching himself up, pawing at the air. She grabs his hands, his wrists, holds him still. She presses her forehead against his cheek, shushing him. Then she kisses him there. Kisses his jawline. Wipes hair slick with sweat from his brow—he leans into it, eyes closed, and his breathing calms.
“Dream again?” she asks.
“Mm,” he says, “yeah.”
“Same as usual?”
“I think. Trying to remember it is like trying to catch a moth. But I feel it. Something talking to me. Dunno if it’s the Blight or Hiram’s Golden or if it’s her—” The Maize Witch. A name that still scares Gwennie, if only because the old stories had some truth to them. “But, shoot, it feels like it’s mad at me. Mad because I’m not . . . doing something. And I dunno what.” He turns toward her. He looks scared. “I think maybe this is what drove Earl Poltroon mad.”
“Is Wanda having the dreams, too?”
He looks sheepish and afraid.
She sighs. “You haven’t talked to her at all, have you.” A statement, not a question.
“Not in a bit, no. Been a few weeks, I think. She . . . she’s off on her own.”
“She knows, doesn’t she? About you and me.”
“I have no idea.”
“Lord and Lady, Cael.”
“I should find her. I’ve been a jackass.”
“What else is new?” she says with a small smile. He doesn’t return it. “Hey, I’ve been an ass, too, McAvoy. She and I talked a while back, and I was all like, We don’t need to care about boys and who needs Cael anyway, and now that . . . this is happening again, all that rings hollow. Like I was just setting her up to forget you so I could swoop in.”
“You did swoop in,” he says—and there’s that smile.
He’s not wrong. A month ago they were out on the wall, looking out across the corn at night, the moon shining in slivers of shining leaves, and they had found a bottle of something called Old Bumbo Rum, and Cael uncorked it with his teeth, and the two of them took turns drinking and talking about the past, and that lit a fire inside her, a fire so warm and so pretty all she wanted to do was spread it as far as she could, and so she walked up to him, took the bottle out of his hand, and kissed him hard as she was able.
And then before too long, clothes peeled away, and the two of them leaned against the edge of the wall, the infinite Heartland and endless sky around them, and they did what they hadn’t done in what felt like an eternity. It felt right. And familiar. And new, too, in its own way. When his Blight-vine coiled around her arm and pulled her close, she felt scared, but being scared felt good, too, and now it doesn’t bother her at all. It’s just part of who he is.
“She’s probably hurting, poor girl.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Dangit. It’s just—you know, all that talk of being Obligated. Like that matters anymore? I just . . .” He grunts in frustration—a sound with which she’s definitely familiar. Cael is not always the best at expressing himself. “Aw, man. It was a lot of pressure. She changed for me. And then those times we . . . you know, we did it, it was like something else entirely. I could feel her light up like all the stars in the sky. It was like it wasn’t even just her and me, it was like the Blight was there with us, binding us together.”
Gwennie listens to him, tries not to acknowledge the knife-twist of jealousy that sticks in her when he talks. He and Wanda shared something she and he never could. Does she light up like all the stars in the sky for him? Or is being with her like reading a book in the dark?
“You gotta talk to her,” she says.
“I will. After the Council of Seven.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“Funny,” she says, fingers playing across his chest.
“What’s that?”
“Last time we were together was before Harvest Home, back in Boxelder.”
“It was at that.”
She ponders. “Us doing a proper Harvest Home here in Pegasus City is a good idea. It feels a little like the way things used to be. You think we can ever get back there?”
She knows the answer. He doesn’t even need to say anything. All Cael does say is: “Better get dressed, unless we feel like showing off our . . .” He ahems. “Assets.”
She laughs. It’s nice, the laugh. For now, in this moment, she’s happy.
But happiness is a curious thing, she thinks.
Hard to catch, harder to keep, she thinks. What did Cael say about remembering his dreams?
Like trying to catch a moth.
Tonight Wanda is going to the Council of Seven. Less official name: the Boxelder Seven—a misnomer, maybe, since one of the group is an Empyrean man, but the rest all come from the same place. Cael, Wanda, Lane, Rigo, Gwennie, and Boyland. Boyland sometimes doesn’t bother showing up. And neither does Wanda. Which makes it more of an unofficial Council of Five, but nobody wanted to call it that—something about the group that founded the Sleeping Dogs being the Sawtooth Seven. Lane said, “I like the parity,” and so it was decided.
She doesn’t feel much a part of the group, though she wonders if that’s more her doing than anybody else’s. Is her exclusion real? Imagined?
In their heads, or in hers?
Probably doesn’t matter. Nothing to be done now. She tried to tell Cael that: Once they didn’t find what they were looking for, they had to go. But the hooks were in him again. His friends. His old life. He forgets how different he is. How different they are. Wanda’s wondering if she should leave, too. And yet, she remains. For him.
Cael. Sigh.
She’s about to exit the Engine Layer—through a hole where a massive chain fell, cutting this hallway ring clean in half�
�when she hears a voice just outside.
A girl’s voice.
She doesn’t recognize it at first—it’s been some months since she heard it. But then it clicks: Luna Dorado. Once Lane’s adviser—since then, she’s been missing. Rumors said she left, fled Pegasus City for . . . who knows where?
Wanda presses flat against the wall. She listens, but catches only the end of the conversation:
“You have everything you need. The deal is the deal. Don’t screw me on this. You have no idea the risk I’m taking.”
And then a chime—the sound of a visidex call ending.
Wanda thinks: I could just kill her.
That has been a thought creeping into her mind with some regularity these days—and that chills her to the bone. Any problem she sees or imagines, she thinks: I could choke it, break it, tear it apart, let it feed the earth.
Or, sometimes, more simply:
Blood makes the grass grow.
By the time she peers out the rift, stepping over a rusted chain that’s twice the thickness of her thigh, she sees no one. Luna is gone. Maybe, Wanda thinks, she’s going mad, and Luna was never there in the first place.
Madness is almost more comforting, isn’t it?
Balastair feels gutted. He’s a doll whose stitching has popped, whose stuffing has been pulled out by a cruel child—a cruel child named life, and suddenly that common refrain of this place, That’s life in the Heartland, echoes in his mind, and for a moment he feels infected by it. Like this place has gotten into him, into his blood and bones and every one of his cells. This emptiness, this hopelessness, is altogether worse than the Blight, he realizes.
Because at least with the Blight, you can use it.
This . . . this feeling, it has no value. Just a slick-walled hole, grim and lightless. No way out. Just a place to stand and wait for the dirt to be piled atop your head. Even though he’s walking through this so-called Pegasus City, he feels like he’s standing still in his own grave.
This used to be his home, this place.
And it is, once more. But not in a way he recognizes.
Dirt beneath his feet.
Shattered remains of buildings.