by Chuck Wendig
Well, shoot, Cael likes gifts.
He steps over to the table, pops the case—
Lickety-quick, his breath is gone, stolen away by the sight of his father’s lever-action rifle sitting there. Last he saw the weapon, it had been broken in half on the floor of Killian Kelly’s chambers just before Cael leaped out the window and into the corn. He assumed the gun was gone, destroyed. Here, though, it’s been mended. Gilded brass plates holding the two pieces together. Each of those plates carved with images of a fox running fast, ears back, legs outstretched in either direction. Swift Fox, Cael thinks. Pop.
He runs his hands over the oiled wood, the polished barrel.
“You still have it,” he says.
Lane nods. “Yeah. Took it back from Killian. I hoped one day I could get it in your hands again. When you came to Pegasus City and we sorted through our bullpuckey, it seemed high time to give it to you, but I didn’t want to hand you a broken-ass rifle. There’s an old raider here, gunsmith name of Mutu, and I paid him to do it.”
“It’s a beauty.” Cael picks it up. It feels good against his shoulder. It feels proper. Righteous, even. Slowly, the Blight-vine slides along the back of his arm, then his hand, until it winds its way around the stock of the gun. Feels firm, snug, stable. He jacks the action, opens the chamber with his hand, the vine holding the weapon in place.
“Almost forgot,” Lane says, and pulls out a small cardboard box of bullets. “You left those behind. Only a handful left.”
Cael uncoils the vine and sets the rifle in its case.
“Thanks, Lane.”
“My pleasure.”
“I’m sorry about everything that’s happened. Feels like Boxelder was a lifetime ago.”
“A lifetime? Three lifetimes. Four! A hundred. I don’t feel like the same person I was three months ago, much less three years. I’d wager a stack of ace notes that Busser or Doc or Bessie Greene wouldn’t even recognize us.”
“No fooling.” I bet they really wouldn’t recognize Wanda. That thought strikes him as cruel and petty, somehow. He needs to be there for her. He’s the only one here who understands what she’s going through, and he’s been avoiding her like she’s a distempered dog. “We gonna be okay?”
“Who? You and me? All of us?”
“I dunno. Any of us, I guess.”
Lane laughs, though it’s not precisely a happy sound. “Cap, I sure as shit don’t know. I suspect it’s gonna get a lot worse before it gets better. All of it just depends on if we can get through the bad parts in order to see the good ones. That’s the rub, as they say.”
“That’s life in the Heartland.”
“If we do our job right,” Lane says, “in a hundred years they won’t be saying that anymore. One day maybe folks won’t be able to recognize the Heartland, either.”
“I’d like that very much.”
“Me, too, Cap. Me, too.”
Cael steps out of the elevator—and into a scene he doesn’t yet understand.
Wanda stands, arms crossed. Looking worried.
Gwennie sits nearby on a heaped mound of steel chain. She looks like she’s on the verge of tears. Not uncontrolled sobbing, not the kind of weeping where you grab fistfuls of hair and yank them out of your head—this is a dam breaking, a wall whose cracks are plainly seen but can still hold back the water. She meets his eyes once—then looks away.
“I do not know what’s happening right now,” Cael says.
Everything feels loose and slippery—a rope sliding through his hands.
Gwennie stands and walks over to him, head bowed.
“Congratulations,” she says to him, then gives him a smile that has all the strength and certainty of a wilted leaf—lips crinkled, pressed hard together again, like she’s trying to hold something back.
Then she pivots, heel-to-toe, and hurries away.
Leaving him alone with Wanda.
In the distance, he sees everyone setting up for Harvest Home. Stakes, tents, ropes. A few Heartlanders roll a big wheel painted into colorful pie slices—a game of some kind, a game of chance. He watches Gwennie duck between those tents, and then she’s gone.
“What did you say to her?” Cael asks, suddenly angry. He knows the anger isn’t fair, but who said anything was fair?
“I’m pregnant,” Wanda says.
A fist to his middle.
Hard to get air—
“Wh-what?”
“I’m pregnant, and it’s yours.”
It feels like he’s on that wheel now, spinning around and around, watching the world whip past. Faster and faster, all the bolts and screws coming loose, like he’s about to break down and fly apart at any moment.
“How?”
A sharp bark of a laugh. “I think you know how.”
Wanda hugs herself tight, rocks back and forth on her heels. Her brow is knitted, her lips pursed. She looks worried. Cael thinks, no, it’s more than that. She looks human. Right now, she looks more like Wanda than she has in a long time—and any anger he had vanishes in the wind of that revelation.
“I gotta sit,” he says.
He goes and sits on the giant mound of metal—taking Gwennie’s seat. The metal is still warm. He sets the case with the rifle by his feet, almost as if it’s a wall between him and the news.
“You don’t have to be involved,” she says. She stares at him. He can’t tell if she’s sad or mad or what. Probably both. “But you needed to know.”
“I’m just a kid. A kid can’t have a kid. I’m only seventeen.” He pauses, thinks. “Damn, I’m probably eighteen, aren’t I? I missed my birthday in that . . . Blight-pod or whatever it was. King Hell. King Hell. I missed your birthday, too, didn’t I? Aw, man. Happy birthday. I’m sorry I missed it. Gods, I’m not too young. Pop wasn’t much older than this when they had me. Folks get Obligated, they’re expected to . . .” Gulp. “Be expecting. Is that the word? Expecting? King Hell!”
Wanda rubs her arms. “You’re rambling.”
“Hell yes, I’m rambling! This is—” He makes a noise that isn’t a word but more of an animal sound. “This isn’t how I thought today would go.”
“I’ll leave you to think about it,” she says. And then she takes a few steps backward—a slow retreat. She wants him to stop her. And he wants to stop her.
“Wait,” he says, standing up. “We’re having a baby?”
A hesitant nod.
“Okay. Okay. Okay. Is it . . . uhh, healthy?”
“You tell me.” She comes over to him, takes his hand, presses it against her middle—a middle that hasn’t yet grown, really, a middle whose expanse is still a flat stretch of skinny girl. Wanda moves his hand underneath the hem of her shirt and against her skin—flesh that is oddly cool—and then . . .
He’s aware of her once more, all the bonfires of life that compose her, all the pulses of energy—bursts of verdant vitality like bright blooms on dark vines. But then he senses something else in there.
A small flame nested. Like a lit match burning in a ring of fire.
It doesn’t belong to her. Not really.
It belongs to itself.
Another life.
He gasps, almost pulls his hand away, but she grabs his wrist and holds it firm. He feels further for the little creature without even meaning to. Cael can detect the baby’s margins. Gods, it’s not even a baby yet. It’s not much bigger than his thumb. But it has a heart beating. Dark little eyes searching. Little fingers searching. Fingers that have fingerprints.
Fingers that bloom into little flowers. Petals fluttering in the fluid.
Cael says quietly: “Is it human?”
“Partly,” she says. “And it’s not an it.”
It’s a she, he realizes.
“A little girl.” He says this with some awe and a great deal of fear. Boys, he gets. Girls—oh, gods, they’re a mystery to him. Cael suddenly thinks: I’m going to be a father. And a terrible one, at that.
“A pure little girl. That’
s what she is. Pure. You and I, we had to be changed into what we are. But she didn’t. She’s perfect. Half you, half me. But also: She has the Gift from the beginning. It’s part of her.” Wanda smiles. “The power she’ll have. The glories she’ll be able to give the Heartland . . .”
Cael leans forward, presses his forehead against Wanda’s. “They’ll judge her. The Heartland. The world. They won’t understand.”
“Then she needs us. Together.”
He swallows. “Together. Okay.”
She kisses him on the cheek.
He smells strawberries. And honeysuckle. And rotten blossoms long fallen off their tree.
The metal plate grinds as he shifts it aside.
A yawning black tunnel awaits.
“This goes out to the corn,” Lane says. “Few know about it.”
His mother blinks, rubbing her wrists. “Honey, I don’t understand.”
“You need to go. Go back to your Empyrean friends.”
“I . . . they’re not my friends. . . .”
“They’re more your friends—gods, more your family—than I am. You’re not welcome here. But I also hate to see you on work detail like you’re some kind of prisoner.” Which you are, he thinks. “So. Go. Be with them. Join their ranks. Their time’s almost up. Maybe you can pass a message along for me? Just tell them ticktock, ticktock. Mm?”
“You don’t have to do this,” she says. She sniffs, wipes her nose with the back of her hand—he’s not sure if she’s really about to cry or if it’s all just part of her act. “We could work this out, you and I, we could . . .”
“Do you wanna go back to the Empyrean or not?”
She hesitates.
And doesn’t say anything.
And that silence says everything.
Lane steps aside. He crosses his arms. “I’m going to bolt this thing shut once you’re through. After you’re gone? You won’t be a part of my life ever again. Not that you were to begin with, so you won’t miss it.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice small as a fly, and just as welcome.
“Go.”
And just like a fly she flits away, gone through the hole.
He feels something tumbling around inside of him, and he knows suddenly what it is: It’s his voice. A plea to her. He wants to yell, wants to call to her as she hurries through the tunnel: No, don’t go, you’re right, we can figure this out. I love you. But he swallows that. Digs a hole, buries it deep.
He blinks away tears that he tells himself are from dust or pollen or rust flakes in the air. Then he closes the metal plate.
CURRENTS AND CURRENCIES
ARTHUR’S MOUTH IS A DRY, cankerous crater. His tongue, sandpaper. Eyes, too—they feel dry as grapes gone to raisin. He hangs in the cylindrical chamber, a room soundproofed against his screams with spongy, textured foam. Arms spread out. Legs tucked back. Scalp burning from where the probes have been left for so long. They should be infected by now, but once a day someone comes and applies a spray of Annie cream to fight any disease taking hold.
He doesn’t know how long it’s been.
Weeks. Months.
Years.
He gasps. Wheezes. He has no sense of anything. Is he still on a flotilla? Hard to say. He’s been hooked up to this machine, in this blank room, for so long sometimes he wonders—maybe he’s back in the Heartland. Maybe he’s up in the air. Or on a yacht. Or somewhere far-flung from the borders of the Heartland—maybe on an island somewhere in the wind-churned Sea of Angels. He’s never been there, never seen the Shattered Coast. So much of the world kept away from him. And from his family. He never even told Cael and Merelda about the world because he was afraid.
Afraid they’d want to see it.
He tried to protect them, and now he worries that he did the opposite.
He always relished information and knowledge. It was his desire to know everything and to share what he knew—he told his own father that way back when, and that formed the fundamental rift between the two. Arthur’s father wanted the boy to keep his head down, fly straight. Arthur thought the Empyrean were trying to control them too much. He didn’t like that they were restricting information, withholding knowledge. Arthur railed against that, struggled against its bonds. That was part of what the Sawtooth Seven was about. Coming together as part of a shared goal—a shared goal that itself grew out of an incident, an incident where an Empyrean proctor died by their hands: an accident of sorts. They meant to hurt him but not to kill him. . . . And suddenly, just conjuring that memory brings it fully to bear against him, and once more Arthur feels himself standing there in a ring of corn, the ground blasted beneath him, Proctor Posilack clutching at his ruined throat—and he thinks, Oh, by the gods, it’s happening again, everything turns and tightens and I’m back here, and there’s Eben Henry, Black Horse, a feral grin on his face—and there’s his lover, Bellflower, and Iron-Red Neddy gone pale, and Corpse Lily staring down at the writhing, bleeding man, stone-faced . . .
Light shines in.
The door to the chamber opens.
Merelda walks in.
Chin lifted. Shoulders back. He feels the proud father—but he feels scared, too, because that means she’s no longer with him anymore. She’s here, part of the Empyrean, here to punish him, here to hurt him. Unless she’s here for other reasons . . .
“Are you here to save me?” he says, his voice a whisper full of fiberglass and small sharp stones. “Is Cael all right?”
The girl sniffs. “I am here to release you from the machine.”
That voice. Not Merelda at all.
The cruel girl. Face with the golden scars.
“You,” he croaks.
“Yes. Me.” She begins to feel along the top of his scalp. She begins to unmoor the probes one by one. Each feels like she’s ripping a clump of hair out of his skull. “Your time here has been well served. What you know—the breadth and depth of your entire life—has been plucked from your mind like a cat pawing the guts from a frog’s belly. It has been cataloged and sorted through. Your life as a series of books. Or software on a visidex.” She stops, chuckles. “It’s really pretty cool, honestly.”
“You’re a monster.”
“I am. I won’t disagree. Sometimes the world needs horrible people. Though really, it’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it? I mean, consider that to the weeds in the garden, the gardener is a monster, viciously yanking them from the dirt. What horror! Such cruelty! An apocalypse of weeds!” She begins unhooking his arms from the cables that encircle them. “And yet, it’s a job that needs to be done, right? That’s me. I’m the gardener. Your people, the Heartlander terrorists: you’re the weeds.”
He falls forward. She doesn’t bother catching him. Arthur crumples like a handkerchief thrown down upon the ground.
“It’s really amazing,” she says, “how little you people appreciate us. We feed you. We clothe you. We give you purpose. The corn down there in the dirt is an amazing thing. A beautiful crop that saved your lives. It kills mosquitos that spread bonebreak flu. It kills the blister flies that come from Bleakmarsh. It stabilized the climate. It can be made into fuel, plastic, food additives, anything and everything.”
“It’s a disease. You’re a disease.”
She makes a disgusted sound. “Ugh. You know, some of us up here in the sky have gotten soft about you. It was a fad for a time to dress like you, to pretend to be like the salt-of-the-earth Heartlanders. There began this . . . idea that you were these noble workers, toiling in the dust for us. But we’ve disproven that, haven’t we? You don’t work hard. You’re not the shepherds—you’re the sheep. You barely tend to the motorvators. You work the processing lines, and a third of you get injured or die from it because you’re clumsy. Meanwhile you keep reaching up to the heavens, waiting for a handout from us.” She sniffs. “My own father was like that. He was Empyrean, obviously, but what a waste of space. Not a contributor. Content to live off the dole.”
Arthur ch
uckles, laying his cheek against his own forearm. “So that’s what this is about. You have daddy issues. You’re ruining the world because you’re mad at your father.” His laugh almost becomes a sob. He struggles to keep that bottled up. He doesn’t want to show this horrid girl any weakness.
“Whatever helps you sleep at night, Arthur. And you don’t have many nights left. You’ve been scheduled for execution. Seven days. I thought it might be more fitting to have you become part of the Initiative—after all, you’re already halfway there, aren’t you?—but I’d rather make a show of it.”
“Kill me. I don’t care.”
She hmms. “I might believe that, actually. You’re pretty beaten down. But I bet you’ll care when I tell you about your son, Cael.”
Cael. Cael. He turns his face toward her. One eye staring at her so hard he hopes the hate he’s projecting is a transmission that can kill her—an invisible laser that will cut her apart, dissect her into her pieces.
“What about my son?” he hisses.
“He dies. Tonight. We have all we need from you. My girls are trained. We have the map, the technology for our descent; we even have someone on the inside—and in fact, it was you who showed me the way. Showed me a weak link in the chain: someone who had cause to battle with Lane Moreau, that erstwhile ‘mayor.’ I was able to contact this someone thanks to the information contained inside your amazing mind. And it is amazing. You are far smarter than most of your Heartlander companions. You should’ve been born Empyrean.”
“My son . . .”
“Is the walking dead. Thanks to you.”
Arthur weeps as the scarred girl snaps her fingers. Other shadows descend upon him. Hands reach for him and drag him into the light as he calls his son’s name.
Miranda waits for her outside, like a heron watching for fish by a stream.
Enyastasia tries not to register her surprise. “Miranda.”
“I just came to wish you good luck tonight. I still think it’s premature.”
“They’re having a celebration. The chaos of their festivity is our opportunity. The door is open. I’d like to walk through it.”