by Chuck Wendig
“Vengeance,” she says, but the word suddenly rings hollow.
“What have you done?”
“Blood feeds the corn.”
She sees the sonic shooter in his hand.
He fires.
Kill her, Balastair thinks. She’s just a girl, though, her face cut up like a patchwork quilt. Hard to be too angry—she’s kneeling there, gagging and spitting and crying. The sonic blast did its number on her, but he set it to stun, and even now he looks at the weapon and thinks maybe he should turn up the dial, set it to kill, and put her out of her misery.
“You came to kill me,” he says. Then he leans down. “But I won’t kill you. I can’t. Don’t make me regret this decision.”
Then he extends his finger into the air.
“Come, Cicero.”
The bird lands on his finger.
It’s time to find the others.
Cael thinks: There’s a doctor here somewhere. Nika something. She treated Lane’s mother. And he tells Lane that, too—he says, “I’m gonna find that doc you were talking about. She’s gotta be here, man. Gotta be here somewhere. Then we’re gonna get all of you stitched up and put back together—I just—” His words, drowned out by someone yelling. Ahead, a group of raiders fire sonic weapons into the air at another girl somersaulting above them, a pistol in her hand, too—by the time she lands atop the peak of a nearby tent, the raiders who fired at her are all dead or dying on the ground.
Not that way, then.
Cael pulls Lane sharply right, behind the now-overturned Sully’s Kitchen food wagon. His friend’s feet drag limply, and as Cael pulls Lane down he says, “The doc. Where do you think she is?” But Lane doesn’t answer.
Lane’s head rocks back, mouth open, eyes wide.
No. No, no, no.
Cael’s heart catches in his throat like a frog in a cat’s mouth, and he pats Lane’s cheek and feels under his friend’s throat—there’s nothing there, no pulse, no feeling at all but the cold and clammy skin. Lane’s chest isn’t rising or falling. What was once there is now gone. Some presence, fled. Cael knows that but can’t admit it, can’t believe it. He grits his teeth and cries out, screams Lane’s name, holds his friend close. He rocks him back and forth. He begs for him not to be dead. Come back to me, brother. Don’t be gone. Don’t leave me alone. We were just figuring all this shit out.
He doesn’t know how long he sits there like that, blubbering and keening and holding Lane’s body close. Cael doesn’t care. Can’t care. He barely recognizes Balastair’s voice at his ear—“We have to go. Come on, Cael. We will mourn him later, but please, we have to go now.”
CHOOSERS OF THE SLAIN
I HAVE FAILED.
Enyastasia, Dirae of the Harpies, limps into the crooked alleyway between two crumbling buildings. A trail of blood marks the ground behind her—the tendon on her left foot is sliced to ribbons. Her head, too, is cut up, bits of glass still stuck under the skin of her brow, her scalp.
That foolshead mayor did this to her.
With one bottle.
She stinks of blood and white whiskey.
Tonight was supposed to be her crowning glory. A proof-of-concept moment that showed the necessity of Project Raven. It took a great many sacrifices to get here—it was supposed to have been worth it!
Already she’s formulating excuses. I didn’t have enough time. We didn’t have enough support. The old men who run the flotillas . . .
No.
Don’t do that.
She needs to own her failures. If this were a success, she’d certainly claim it—she’d wear it like a shield and mantle, parade it about for all to see. Failure must be that way, too. Failure must be an instructional manual written in scar tissue. That’s what her face was always meant to represent—the ugliness of Empyrean failures put forward for all to witness. A revelation of weakness.
Enyastasia slides down behind a fallen stone pillar.
She looks at her sonic pistol. Thinks what it would be like to place the barrel in her mouth—what would she hear as the sonic blast tore off the top of her skull? Would she hear the shrill cacophony of crows screaming? Would she hear a secret song—a lullaby sung to her by the Lord and Lady as she entered their sacred sky-manse? Would she hear nothing at all?
Again: no.
No!
Suicide is for the weak. It’s meant to be a demonstration, a cry for help. Or worse, an escape into something bleaker and blacker: the sucking gravity of helplessness and lost hope.
She will not make excuses.
And she will not end herself.
What she does instead is hope. Hope that her Harpies accomplished more than she herself managed. That the blood on their hands is predominantly from others and not from themselves. And she hopes they will not judge her too harshly for what must happen next.
She takes a small communicator from a strap around the inside of her thigh—she presses the red button. Into it she whispers:
“Miranda?”
The woman answers: “You’re alive.”
“It’s time.”
“You’re still down there. Extract yourself first.”
“I said it’s time! Let the bombardment begin.”
Up in the sky, above the Heartland, a black shape hovers.
Soon, wind turbines—silent and black matte—spin to life.
The black shape begins to drift forward, sliding across the night like a starving vulture, desperate for death.
DOOM FALLS
THE TREACHERY doesn’t sit well with Luna. It’s a heavy beast upon her shoulders, hunched there, pecking at the back of her neck with a grave persistence. But Lane Moreau was weak. Her father always said, Don’t truck with pussies, and she started to seriously question whether the erstwhile mayor of Pegasus City was always a pussy or was just becoming one.
(Of course, her father was a serial abuser, and her mother was dead from a cancer that ate half her face so early in Luna’s life that she barely remembers the woman.)
Either way, Lane didn’t have the stones to keep doing this thing. He was compromised. Tainted by the presence of his mother and the appearance of his so-called friends—folks who, way she saw it, only wanted to keep him down.
Even Killian saw it that way.
Not that she much cares for him, either. He was just one more anchor wound around Lane Moreau’s ankle.
She feels guilty.
Would that there was a better way to handle this.
But there damn sure wasn’t.
The other girl—the Empyrean one with the scarred face, those scars glittering with gold—contacted her on her visidex. Said her name was Enyastasia Ormond, and she told Luna that a very important opportunity had presented itself. The girl said, Things are shifting up here. A changing of the guard. But that means I need a changing of the guard down there, too. Maybe with new blood in control, we can end this struggle. We can stop it before others die.
Luna asked what that meant—
It meant information. Anything she could tell Enyastasia about Lane, about Pegasus City, about his friends. The girl grew more and more frustrated until Luna mentioned the Harvest Home celebration.
That, the scarred girl said, was all she needed.
She said to prepare, because after Harvest Home, Luna would become mayor of Pegasus City. And then together they would end this struggle between the sky and the land below.
And now she stands on the wall of Pegasus City. Beneath her, the screams have died back. So, too, have the sounds of sonic weapons discharging.
This is my city now. She’ll go down soon, clean up the mess, proclaim herself the interim mayor. Luna will do a good enough job of it that they’ll look past her age or the fact she’s just some girl, and they’ll let her keep the position because they’ll see that she’ll do what has to be done to keep them strong. And no one will ever know she sided with the enemy once—just this once—to achieve that end. Because soon the two sides will talk. Soon they’ll find com
mon ground. The deaths will cease. The blockade will break apart.
She’ll be a hero.
Her and her new friend up there in the sky.
The deal now sealed.
Or so she believes.
The imaginary badge she’s placed upon her chest does not last long in her mind. Because she looks up one last time at the moon—her namesake, really—and no longer finds it there. Nor does she find the stars that normally surround it—the glittering panoply gone dark.
Dark, because something drifts across the sky.
Dropping lower and lower.
A ship, she realizes.
Or is it? No ship is that big.
It occurs to her then—she’s been betrayed. This isn’t part of the plan.
She pivots to bolt and head back to the elevator—
The first sonic cannon fires into the wall. It tears through the cobbled-together barrier like a child’s fist through a pile of blocks. Her legs bicycle, carrying her face-first into the elevator accordion, slicing open her brow. She grabs a hold of it as everything grumbles beneath her.
She thinks: Is anyone manning our own defenses?
Then the wall crumbles beneath her, and all goes dark for Luna Dorado.
THE WAKE
RIGO REMEMBERS THUNDER, lightning, and rain.
They’re a distant memory. Artifacts from when he was a little kid, because of course it doesn’t rain anymore. He hasn’t seen the forked flash of lightning or heard the ground-grumbling boom of thunder since he was just a boy.
But he remembers being scared by the flash, bang, and clamor. Terrified, actually. It made him feel tiny and more vulnerable than he already was. The sky tumbling and drumming, the heavens opening up and pouring buckets of water—it felt like he had no control at all. Like he was exposed to the elements: a shivering little bird in a gale wind. His mother’s soothing didn’t help, because he wanted to scream at her: It’s you, too! You’re just as small and tiny as I am! You can’t make it stop! And of course his father’s only response was to scowl and grouch at him, call him names or, if he was really in the bottle, laugh at him until he cried.
It was Pop who eventually made him feel better by explaining what was actually going on: electricity built up, discharged from ground to heaven, the sonic wave of air like hands clapping in reverse. Still scary in its way—great bolts of lighting ripping the sky in half!—but no longer a terrifying mystery.
A few years later it wouldn’t matter anyway. Because then the Empyrean announced that all that pesky rain wouldn’t fall anymore. No more thunder, no more lightning. Hiram’s Golden Prolific would drink its fill from the tables of water a hundred feet below it—hungry, searching roots cracking the earth like hands breaking bones, like tongues sucking out marrow. (Though how long the water there would last? Nobody knows.)
Now, he feels it all over again as the city shudders and booms, bombarded by sonic blasts from above—nobody knew what was coming for them, and when they finally saw the moon and stars blotted out, it was too late. Already most of the north wall is crumbled. The city’s defenses—their own sonic cannons—have been taken out prematurely. All but one anyway, whose valiant attempts to take out the specter above their heads has been worthless, because it’s too far away for their own cannons to make any difference. Which means the cannons the Empyrean are using must be something new.
Another boom and crackle.
He wants to stop what he’s doing, curl up, and cry.
But he can’t. Because right now, he’s the only one keeping it together.
It took all night for everyone in the group to finally find one another, thanks mostly to Balastair, who used everyone’s visidexes to coordinate. Now, they all sit huddled in the charred remains of the Engine Layer. Wanda said it was pretty well protected, and she wasn’t wrong. Hard steel encases them. A building already half collapsed sits on top of them. The sonic blasts can’t get here.
Yet.
Rigo takes stock: Cael, Wanda, Boyland, Balastair, Gwennie—and her mother, and the two kids, Squirrel and Scooter. Then a half dozen other Heartlanders picked up amid the chaos and the crumble.
And Lane.
There—Lane’s body under a raggedy quilt. Too tall to fit, so from the one end emerge his boots. And from the other, a wisp of his dark hair.
Rigo quakes. My friend is gone, my friend is gone, my friend is gone. . . .
He has to bite into the meaty pad of his thumb and palm to keep from crying. Not now, he tells himself. Later.
What is happening now is that Rigo has a map of the city sprawled out in front of him. It’s a work in progress, because Pegasus City was itself a work in progress. All hand-drawn, with lots of scribbles and question marks added by himself and others: initially part of an effort to get organized.
Now part of an effort to get the hell out of here.
“These cuts are deep,” Gwennie says. She cinches the last bit of cloth around Boyland’s other arm and tucks it underneath the wrapping. He’s not soaking them with blood anymore, so that’s good, though pink lines already crisscross the wrappings, one line to match each wound.
For a while, Boyland just wept, rocking back and forth like a baby.
Now, he’s quiet, his face the color of concrete dust. “Am I gonna die?”
She offers a small smile. “Not today, I don’t think.”
“Glad you found your mama,” he says. He looks across the way, where Gwennie’s mother lies sleeping, Squirrel and Scooter lying on each side of her, using bundles of rags and dirty blankets as bedding.
“Me, too.” Maybe you can start treating her right, Gwennie thinks.
“Cael okay? He and Moreau were close.”
“I don’t think any of us are okay.”
“I love you,” he says.
“Boyland, I don’t know—”
“No, nah, wait, hear me out. We might not survive till morning, and if that’s the case I’d rather just say what I wanna say before it’s too late. I know I screwed things up for us. I’m not a big thinker. I don’t see ten miles down the road like some of these other guys. I’m clumsy and selfish and, ahhh, at this point—” He clears his throat, swallows hard. “It’s pretty clear I got a drinking problem. I don’t know that I’m ever gonna be a good man. But I know that for you I’d give it my all. Maybe I’d never be good. But maybe I could be better.”
Her face warms. A bloom rises to her cheeks. “I know, Boyland. But right now I don’t think we should be thinking about—”
“I said hold on. Hear me out. I want to be with you. But I don’t want you to be with me.”
“What?”
“I don’t want you to be with me or with anybody. Not now. You’re smarter and stronger than most of these boys who fawn over you. That’s why they—uh, we—do that. You ain’t like a lot of the other girls. You pop like a firecracker. You’re strong like an iron bar. You’ve always done your own thing, and being with me—being with anybody—will take that away from you. Nobody should take anything away from you. Least of all me.”
She leans in, kisses him on the forehead.
“Thanks, Boyland, that’s . . .”
His eyes go unfocused. And stare off at a middle distance.
“Oh, gods,” she says, a sob struggling in her chest to be free. “No, no, no, you buckethead, you can’t—”
He jostles back to awareness with a snort. “Huh? What?”
“Jeezum Crow,” she hisses, and swats him on the knee. “I thought you were dead, godsdamnit.”
“Oh. No. Just resting.”
She almost laughs, then slides up next to him. “Asshole.”
He shrugs as if to say, It is what it is.
Cael, with a gentle hand, lifts Wanda’s chin. “You gonna tell me what this is about?” He runs a finger across what looks to be a scar—it’s pink along the margins. Skin, except in the middle, where it’s like a braid of tiny roots and shoots.
“One of those . . . girls slit my throat.”
/> “Ho-holy heck.” He feels suddenly dizzy. “Wanda, whaddya mean?”
She lifts her eyebrows like, Hey, no big thing, even though this sounds like it’s the biggest damn thing Cael ever heard. “She cut my throat and almost popped my head like a bottle-top. It’s okay.”
“It is not okay. Are you all right? Is the baby—?”
Again she grabs his hand, presses it against her belly. His awareness of the child flares inside his mind. Her little hands searching, big eyes staring. An umbilical cord like ivy—a tether gently turning and twisting.
“You can always touch me to see her,” Wanda says.
“I didn’t want to presume. Your body isn’t my property.”
“Your property? Naw. But I’m a part of you and you’re a part of me now.” She lifts her chin. “Literally. You have permission. She’s yours. You wanna check on her, just reach over and check on her. Stop acting like she ain’t yours—because she is. Before, us being Obligated was maybe a little bit of a fantasy, at least for me. But our little girl changes that. This is for real now.”
He nods. “I know.”
“I don’t know if you really love me. And if you do, I suspect you’ll never love me the same way you love her.” Her. Gwennie. “But we’re in this together no matter how it shakes out. You hurt me, I might be able to get over that. You hurt our little girl, and I’ll bury you so deep even the corn won’t be able to find you. We square?”
“We’re square. Also, you’re scary.”
Her face softens. She looks suddenly sad. “I know. I don’t mean to be.”
“I know.”
“I’m changing.”
“I know that, too.” It isn’t just the baby. Hell, she’s seemed more human since she told him about their daughter. “You can do things I can’t.”
“I’m sorry about Lane.”
Just a mention of his name sends something wriggling up from inside his chest, and suddenly his bottom lip is shaking, and he has to bite it all back. Eyes shut tight, fingernails digging into the flesh of his palms. “Thanks.”
He pulls her hand up and kisses it.
She rests her head on his shoulder.