by Chuck Wendig
“Not curious,” Balastair says. “Not curious at all!”
“It’s the ants,” Cael says again.
That, Wanda thinks, is curious.
TOOLBREAKERS
THE CORN BREAKS LIKE SNAPPED BONES.
The Maize Witch walks through the path she carves before her. Behind her, an army of her own Blightborn. To her side, Mole tottering along—a board in his hand, a board with a nail stuck through it, his weapon of choice. Ahead, in the distance, the sound of battle. Sonic shrieks. A whumpf.
She reaches out with her mind.
Cael and Wanda are above. As is her son. Twinkling lights in the sky—part of the shadow cast by the Ilmatar flotilla. They have her weapon.
It has begun.
Cael feels something tickling at his mind—not like the ants that had, only minutes before, been crawling all over his flesh (before eventually moving on, as the humans held little interest for the swarming colony)—but rather, like tree roots pressing at an earthen cellar wall, trying to break through.
He knows what it is. Or, rather, who. Every time he blinks, there she is: the Maize Witch. Esther Harrington. Mother Esther. She’s far below them, in the Heartland—straight down, right now. It’s like she knows. She knows they’ve found the weapon. She knows they’re close. She’s ready to meet them.
As they hurry back toward the House of the Sky, Wanda presses her hand to his forearm. “That crate you’re carrying. It’s what Mother wants?”
He nods. “It is. But I don’t know, Wanda.”
“Don’t know what?”
“If we can give this to her.”
Wanda frowns. “But she’s waiting for us.”
Balastair, overhearing, steps in and says: “My mother is quite fond of irony. Ants, the hardest workers nature has offered us. Tireless creatures, thinking only of the whole, never of themselves as individual beings. And what is it that we fine citizens of the Seventh Heaven despise most? Work. Boring, ugly, endless work. Ironic that she hopes to undo us with such hard little workers. It’s a message. Mother is fond of . . . messages.”
“You guys are talking about ants, right?” Gwennie says.
Boyland shudders. “Gods, can we stop talking about ants?”
Cael starts to explain the ants—though Balastair takes over, tells the others what he told them up in the Palladium Tower.
Pop stops suddenly, holding his hip. “I need a moment.” He unslings the rifle, begins to use it as a cane. Delicate, flinching steps forward. “There. Not what a rifle is meant for normally, but perhaps this is its kindest utility.”
“You all right, Pop?” Cael asks, handing the crate to Balastair. He gets under his father’s shoulder, helps him walk forward. The memory of doing the same to Lane—as Lane was dying—suddenly haunts him.
“Fine, fine, all fine.” Truth is, Cael can hear the pain. Worse than it’s been before. Watching his father like this—skinny as a starving cat, gray-faced, broken down like a hammered-on motorvator—is killing him. “The ants. How many colonies are in that crate?”
“One . . . opened already,” Balastair says with no apparent pleasure, but also no apparent desire to throw Boyland under the wheels. “Which means we’ve got another forty-eight to go. Approximately twenty to thirty million ants. That’s, of course, before they breed. And I assure you, the Reaper ant breeds with great alacrity.”
Pop’s face suddenly crestfallen. “They’re a weapon.”
“Her weapon,” Cael says.
“Our mother’s,” Wanda says, pressing a hand to Balastair’s arm—a move that makes Balastair flinch. Cicero tweets and hops away from her.
“They’ll kill the Heartland.”
“The corn,” Cael says. “They’ll kill the corn.”
“No, no, no.” Pop shakes his head. “Not just that. They destroy . . . electrical equipment. Electronics. And they’re not easily dispatched?”
Balastair shakes his head. “Like Hiram’s, they’re . . . tolerant of most attacks that would try to destroy them. I don’t know what would do it.” He pauses. “Extreme heat. Or cold, maybe. But of course the Heartland has a moderate climate. No rain. Middling heat. It never gets cold, but rarely gets hot, either.”
“Which means the ants will survive. They’ll wipe out the Empyrean and the Heartland,” Pop says. “No visidexes. No motorvators. No corn to run the engines, but no engines, either.”
“Sounds like bad news,” Gwennie says.
“Sounds like heaven,” Wanda snaps. “Return us to the start. Like a chalkboard—just wipe all these foul scrawlings clean.”
Balastair looks suddenly horrified. “You sound like her. My mother.”
“Well, good!” Wanda says, sounding petulant.
Cael stops under the boughs of a massive tree growing up out of a ring of stones on the corner of this Empyrean street. He turns, stands in front of Wanda: “We’re not her children. Okay? We can’t just . . . accept what she says blindly. We gotta . . . think about this a little bit.”
“You? Think?” Wanda barks. “That is not one of your strengths, Cael McAvoy.”
“Hey!” he protests.
“You do. You act. But you wanna think this through? Okay! Let’s think this through, Cael. We’re slaves to the corn. And we’re nothing but Empyrean pets. You know how they control us? Through all their . . . damn technology. Worse, now they’re turning people into technology, sticking Heartlanders in metal bodies. We can end that. We can take their tools and break them over our knees. Technology doesn’t have a soul. But we do. The plants of the ground do. So do the birds of the sky, and fell-deer, and even dumb shuck rats and moths. Even the ants do. So let something work for us for a change. Let’s tear it all down.”
He swallows.
Gods, she’s right.
He presses his back up against the tree (and there, he can feel it—that “soul” she’s talking about, like channels of light pulsing up through the ground, into the branches, to the leaves, back down through the roots again).
“The corn is evil,” he says. “And maybe so is the technology that they use to make it. To enslave us. Lord and Lady, I never thought of it like that.”
He suddenly sees it. If you take away the corn, their ships can’t fly. But it’s more than that, too—you have to take away everything they have, don’t you? Their mechanical men. Their ships. Their screens. He thinks of how Esther lives: a simple house, a bounty of food always on the table, a community of people living together. Nobody enslaved.
And then it strikes him: nobody will hate him because of the Blight.
They won’t even fear him.
Because the Blight—
It’ll save the world.
What was a curse will be a blessing.
A bounty of food on every table.
He says it aloud: “They won’t hate us.”
“That’s right,” Wanda says. She walks over, cups his chin in her hands. When she does, he senses all the lights within her—hers and their daughter’s. The little girl, swimming around like a tadpole. Turning like a seedling batted about by rain. Wanda kisses him. She tastes of honeysuckle nectar.
“They will hate you,” Pop says, his voice dry and dark, a thundercloud blotting out a sunny day. “Think about it, Cael. Hiram’s Golden Prolific isn’t evil. A visidex isn’t evil. Neither is a gun, a flotilla, a mechanical man. They’re just objects. Tools. What matters is who holds the tools. Who has access and who doesn’t? The tools aren’t evil. Power is. Power over others. That’s what the Empyrean want. And they use the corn and their wondrous marvels of technology to get it.”
Cael steps forward. “So we break their tools. Then they can’t control us.”
“But then we can’t have it, either. Don’t you see?” Pop says.
“Maybe we don’t need it!” Cael suddenly yells. He knows his voice is loud, too loud out here on the flotilla, and he knows that time is sliding through his fingers, caught on the wind like campfire ash, but his mind is going faster
than an auto-train barreling down the tracks, and he needs this. “With the Blight, we will always have food, and once the corn is dead we can again tend the soil—”
“Cael,” Gwennie says. “Pop’s right. What happens when all of it goes away? Only those with the Blight will have power. The witch—”
Wanda snaps: “Don’t you call her that. She’s our mother!”
“She’s my mother,” Balastair says. “Not yours.”
“She hasn’t been your mother in a long time,” Cael says. “Don’t speak to my Obligated like that. She’ll tear you a couple new holes—”
“Everybody shut the King Hell up!” Boyland yells. “Look!”
He points. Eyes follow.
The lights are going out. A growing wave of darkness creeping toward them. Darkness is cascading up buildings, too—where once a few windows had lights, they go dark. Up, up, up, the darkness climbs.
“The ants will bring this flotilla down,” Balastair says. “Not quickly, but most assuredly. Boyland, for once, is right. We must move, and we must do it quickly. Agreed?”
“To the temple,” Gwennie says.
They move out from under the tree. Cael lags back a moment, getting Pop situated once more on his shoulder.
Pop turns to Cael and in a low voice says: “This might fall to you, son. Don’t make any hasty decisions. The fate of our world and the balance of power that controls it is far more fragile than it has ever been. Promise me you’ll do what’s right.”
“I promise, Pop.”
If only he knew what doing right meant.
THE BRIDGE TO NOWHERE
A CRASH OF GLASS. Ahead: panicked voices. Shouting. Someone snapping orders. They round a corner, and ahead they see horseheaded guardsmen dragging people out of doors, windows. Throwing them to the ground. Their own people, Cael thinks. What is happening?
Balastair says: “They’re looking for us. There. Look. The temple—”
Frumentarii gather in a mob around the door. Blue smoke drifts from the doorway, already dissipating. A small woman, old and pinched like a clothespin, stands watching with her hands clasped behind her back.
“Where are they?” she snaps, her voice shrill and loud.
Guardsmen drag a priestess—an older, rounder woman, not Amrita—out the door and throw her to the ground.
“May the . . . sky bless you, Peregrine,” the old woman says, coughing.
The other woman—the peregrine?—backhands the priestess.
“You were hiding terrorists!”
“I don’t know who you mean—”
A sharp sonic trill—the blast empties the old woman of her guts. She cries, clutching her middle, before dying.
Balastair gasps.
“We have to go back,” he says. “There’s an alternate way—”
“But Rigo,” Cael says. “We need Rigo.”
“He’s not there, I don’t think. They’d have him on the ground already. At the first sign of danger, Kin was supposed to take him to the ketch—that’s where you must go. I’ll show you the way—”
“You’re not coming with us?” Gwennie asks.
Cicero chirps, and it sounds like the same incredulous question—tweet twoot twee woo?
“This flotilla is in danger. If I can get to the control tower, I might be able to override the settings and deal with the Reaper ant contamination. Cold may kill them—I don’t know, truly, but I have to try.”
“Why?” Wanda hisses. “Let them fall.”
“Because!” he retorts. “Because there are people here. And because more death isn’t going to fix things.”
“He’s right,” Gwennie says. “I’ll go with you.”
“Gwennie, no,” Cael says.
“Let her,” Boyland says. “She gets shit done, in case you haven’t noticed.”
From the direction of the temple, a cry of alarm. “Over there!” One of the Frumentarii points in their direction.
“Move!” Pop says.
Rigo hunkers down by the skiff. In the distance, he hears shouting, glass breaking. Under the spotlight of a streetlight, an evocati guardsman staggers into sight, bleeding at the head and neck. A young couple—he in a crisp white shirt, hair slicked back but for a mussed curl at the front; she in an iridescent dress with a gleaming silver umbrella—advances upon him. She clubs the guardsman with the umbrella. He kicks the evocati in the side.
“You don’t have any right!” the woman screams.
“Tell your mistress she can no longer have the Ilmatar!”
The guardsman scrambles to stand, then hurries off—they pelt him with stones and coins before chasing after.
“I don’t understand,” Rigo says, breathless. “What’s happening?”
“We’re fighting back,” Kin says. “The call is out. We hacked the visidexes. Everyone knows now. Tonight’s the night we retake the Ilmatar.”
Rigo scowls. “It had to be tonight?”
“Of course.” Kin’s smile is like a glinting razor. “The chaos you and your friends are causing makes a prime opportunity to reclaim what we lost.”
“This could be putting my friends in danger.”
“They’ll be fine.”
“And if they’re not?”
Kin snaps: “Then they died for the greater good. Now stay quiet, will you? I’m still here with the boat. I’m not running off and joining the revolution. If they come, we’ll get them off the flotilla safely.”
They pass by chaos.
That’s all it is, chaos.
Balastair understands. Kin and the others set this in motion. Frumentarii marching into homes. Sonic rounds shrieking from within. A horseheaded guardsman thrown out of a window. A gleaming pewter ashtray held in the hands of an old man as he bashes it down on the guard’s helmet, crumpling the horse’s head—the man cries out, gurgling.
They try to turn one way and instead meet a gout of gas-flame from a broken pipe. One Frumentarii thrashes, burning. A nearby evocati lashes his thrum-whip, catching a woman on the arm, flinging her into the gap between floating neighborhoods—her scream goes quieter as she falls.
“Can’t get out that way!” Boyland calls.
Balastair eyes his options. They’re dwindling—and they need to get to the skiff. They need to get off this flotilla. “This way!”
The gun is heavy in her hand.
Heavenkiller, Enyastasia thinks. Not today. This gun, pregnant with power, will not destroy heaven but, rather, save it.
If it kills anybody, it will be the devils. The devils who hope to pull the Saintangels down out of the sky. Bullets, blessed purely by her will to do right and exterminate evil where it roots like a gluttonous pig.
She likes that. She likes subversion. Taking someone else’s weapon and turning it against them. It’s practically poetic.
I should read more poetry, she thinks unexpectedly.
She and the two evocati march forward, toward where the peregrine awaits. It’s then that she feels the tingle at the nape of her neck—
There.
Dead ahead, a hundred yards off.
Her enemies. The Boxelder Seven.
Well, six now.
She laughs.
Then raises the gun, cocks the hammer, aims, and waits.
As soon as they cross the arched bridge between islands—
She pulls the trigger.
Choom.
A cannon-fire boom like thunder rolling over dead earth. A fist-sized hunk of stone kicks up out of the bridge’s railing just a second before Cael puts his hand there—the stone chips fly, sting his hand, arm, cheek, and he reflexively shuts his eyes and yanks his head back.
“Turn back!” Pop shouts—
But even as they turn, they see that retreating in the other direction is no longer an option—guardsmen of both the peregrine and horsehead varieties are closing in, first bolting at top speed, now slowing as they see they’ve got their quarry pinned on a bridge.
“We’re doomed,” Balastair says. “
Trapped like mice.”
Wanda stiffens. “No. Never.”
Her eyes gleam green.
Whip-cord tendrils extend once more from her fingers—
But Cael knows that once she’s loose, once she’s given over to the Blight, this will be a bloodbath. And there may be another way.
He puts a hand on her shoulder and says: “Wait. I have an idea.”
Enyastasia growls. She heard the tales of Peregrine Percy Lemaire-Laurent’s first attempts with one of the Heartlander irons—the recoil of the gun made him miss again and again before he finally met his demise. And she swore that the same fate wouldn’t be hers. She was better, smarter, faster—but the gun is heavy, and it bucks like a malfunctioning auto-mate.
But she will not miss a second time, of this she is certain.
Once again, her small thumb drags the hammer back—
Cl-click.
Her finger snakes toward the trigger—
“Stop!” one of them shouts from the bridge.
The McAvoy boy. The Blight-freak. He’s got something in his hand—a canister of some kind. He’s holding his arm—and with it, that strange glass cylinder—out over the railing. “I’ll drop it if you shoot!”
She’s tempted to shoot anyway.
And yet—the terrorists have surprised them all before.
She eases her finger away from the trigger.
“I want to talk,” he shouts.
She yells back: “So talk.”
“This is a bomb,” he says. A lie, but Cael doesn’t really have time to explain the whole scary antpocalypse thing. “I drop it from here, it goes right to the Engine Layer. Then boom. Another flotilla lost. That what y’all want?”
Behind them, the guardsmen all share panicked looks. They take a measurable step back—as if that would save them.
“I’m prepared to accept your surrender,” the scarred girl responds.
“No surrender,” Cael calls. “Just let us leave.”
Balastair shakes his head. “You don’t want this, Dirae. You’ve already lost control of this flotilla. They’re rebelling against you! Don’t you get it? It’s time to think about saving these people. There’s a contaminant—a contagion loose in the flotilla. It’ll bring this ship down, but I can stop it.”