by Chuck Wendig
“What kind of contagion?” she calls out to him.
“. . . biological.”
“Step forward.”
Balastair looks back. “Trust me.” Then he whispers: “Do not drop that.”
The cylinder is suddenly heavy, and cold, and Cael’s hand sweats.
Just drop it, he thinks.
For now, he tightens his grip.
She’s just a girl.
That’s what Balastair thinks. He can see that now. She’s damaged—her mutilation made beautiful by the gold dust that paints her scars—but suddenly vulnerable. Her eyes are dancing about. With every scream in the distance, every pop of glass, every sonic trill, she flinches.
She’s a girl, and she’s human.
Balastair, having set down the crate on the bridge, steps forward. His hands are up as he approaches gingerly. In the distance he hears someone yelling for help. A guardsman? A citizen of the Ilmatar? He has no idea.
“We need to save this flotilla,” he says as he closes in. “Or it’ll crash. There are . . . insects. Ants. They will be a plague and they will—”
She interrupts him: “Why?”
“Why . . . what? Save people?”
“Why would you join with them? The Heartlanders. I don’t understand it. It disgusts me. It literally makes me ill. The taste on the back of my tongue is like the blood after you bite the inside of your cheek.” Her face twists up like a closing fist. Her humanity, a cloud passing in front of the moon—there and then gone again. He stammers:
“I-it doesn’t matter, taking sides like this doesn’t matter, when lives are on the line—”
Her arm flashes.
A gleam of moonlight on metal.
The gun smashes into the side of his head.
He drops sideways, to one knee—can’t think, can’t see—
Somewhere, someone is screaming—No, don’t shoot!
Drop it!
Blood running into his eyes.
Drop the canister!
The barrel of the gun presses to his temple.
Cicero flies.
Balastair—!
Everything happens at once.
Gwennie moves fast—hands up, two knives. One flies, then a second—
Pop, too, is drawing the rifle from under his arm, hand flying to the lever-action, drawing it back, ch-chak—
Cael thinks, All it would take would be for me to open my hand.
The cylinder would drop. He could dump them all over—all the colonies, crashing down against the engines. Some spinning to the Heartland below. The plague of ants could begin. The corn would end.
The Empyrean would end.
Wanda hisses: “Drop it, drop it, godsdamnit drop it—”
But his hand tightens and he pulls the cylinder over the edge.
I can’t. I can’t do what Lane did.
I can’t kill all these people.
The first knife sticks in the meat of her biceps.
Enyastasia shouts, her arm drops, the finger twitches—
The gun goes off.
A red bloom opens up on Balastair Harrington’s chest.
The Dirae shrieks, sees the glint of the second knife—
She swings the gun upward, bats the flying blade away with the Heavenkiller revolver—the blade tings and spins away.
Gwennie watches that second knife knocked out of the air like a butterfly, and she curses herself for throwing too late, or too soon, or not fast enough, or—it doesn’t matter, because the monstrous girl is still there, and Balastair is still dead or dying, and this she cannot abide.
She launches herself across the bridge—running at full speed, pulling the one last blade she has left tucked in the hem of her pants—
Ahead, the two evocati on each side of the scarred girl plant themselves and draw long, sparking thrum-whips. Their arms rear back and the whips crackle as they snap forward—
The girl between them sneers, bleeding, and points the revolver.
Right at Gwennie.
Cael extends his arm—
His Blight-vine, still stunted by the scarred girl’s knife, feels hot, hot like scalding water in his veins, hot like a star going supernova—
The vine grows. Immeasurably fast, tendrils sprouting, braiding, weaving together into a larger vine, bulging and pulsing—
He lashes it, curls it back just over Gwennie’s head.
Both the thrum-whips catch his vine instead of her.
Gwennie ducks under them, just as the whips begin to vibrate, chewing through his vine once more.
Cael screams.
Balastair stares up at the stars.
Madness all around him. He tilts his gaze past his nose toward his feet—and there is Gwennie. Ah, Gwennie. He likes to think he helped her get off the Saranyu but, truth be told, she probably helped him even more.
Gwennie dances forward, knife in her hand, launching toward the poor, deluded, damaged girl. The one so broken she’d burn the house down to kill a lonely moth. But the gun goes up, and he gurgles a strangled cry—
Cicero.
Sweet, sweet Cicero.
The little catbird appears in a blur of blue-gray feathers, slamming himself into the face of Enyastasia Ormond. Wings beating. Talons scrabbling. The gun goes off, but it does so too late and in the wrong direction, and then Gwennie is right there, pistoning a knee into the girl’s gut, and stabbing the knife down into her neck.
He thumps his head back again.
Once more, the stars. And a fingernail sliver moon.
Then a flutter of wings rippling the fabric of the night.
“Balastair!” chirps a voice.
At first he thinks it’s Cicero, but it’s not, not at all—Cicero is still in the air, still chirping and screeching in alarm.
“Erasmus,” Balastair says with a small smile. “I’ve missed you.”
THE HEARTLAND WAR
FOR A TIME, Esther Harrington thinks: All is according to plan.
War has erupted.
A hobo army from the south, hundreds of them with makeshift weapons: single-shot guns made from cans and gunpowder. Some of them gifted with the Blight—those, she thinks, will be hers soon enough. They will see that the path has opened for them and that it was she who opened it.
From the north: her people, her own glorious Blightborn. Marshaled by Edvard and Siobhan. Lashing vines and cracking roots.
All around them: their Empyrean enemies, once her people.
People who denied her.
They will all break.
They will snap like the stalks of Hiram’s Golden Prolific.
Their machines will rust. The skull of every mechanical will be a pot for a plant. The spines will form trellises on which will grow flowering clematis, or wisteria, or fat and luscious grapes. From their wires will hang baskets.
And the guardsmen themselves?
Their blood will fertilize the ground.
Esther Harrington stands in the midst of all of it. The war whirling on around her like the winds of a twister, she the mistress of its eye, the keeper of its funnel. She lets pollen cascade up into the sky—streamers of golden dust—and each grain of pollen is an eye from which she can see, a tiny mote like a fingertip so that she touches what the cloud touches.
Above her head, in the night sky, one flotilla—the Ilmatar. The other, more vicious one hovers close by, launching great sonic fusillades against the corn, taking out Empyrean as often as it takes out its enemies. A clumsy hammer held in the hand of a foolish child swatting roaches and smashing his own toes in the process. That flotilla—this war-flotilla—matters little to her.
What matters is the one far above her.
The Ilmatar.
Because there are her children.
Balastair, her true scion, but her other adopted children, too: Cael and Wanda. Soon with a child of their own.
It’s during this moment of considering motherhood—hers and Wanda’s—that something very delicate breaks. Like a hair h
olding a sword above her head. A hair that snaps. A sword that drops.
It feels like something is ripped out of her.
Some vital organ, a reproductive system—like an apple pulped in a crushing hand, like roots ripped out of dark earth.
Balastair is dead.
Her son’s life force winks, and then it’s gone. Gone in a sudden wave of panic and fear—and, for one small second, a kind of bliss.
But for her, that bliss is hollow: a crass facsimile, a signal ruined by transmission. All she feels is raw acid, sick bile, burning, stinking, corrosive sap.
My son is dead.
Rage fills her every space.
Her body begins to shift. The flesh warps. The bones crack. Her teeth become thorns, her hands become seeking roots—she rises off the ground, her cells multiplying at an exponential rate. The air around her a whirl of golden pollen and whipping seeds, a threshing tornado of corn-leaves slicing air.
The Maize Witch—the Blight Queen now—begins to scream.
UPROOTED
THE SOUND OF GUNFIRE. Rigo pats the side of his prosthetic leg nervously. Tap tap tap tap. Teeth gritted. Again to Kin: “We have to go.”
“Sit tight. This is all . . . this is all normal. This has to happen.”
“Gunfire? Gunfire is normal?”
Kin says nothing. Even Rigo can see the pensive look.
Nearby, off to the side of a building, a garden box hangs; from it dangles pink and purple flowers and some kind of berry drupes.
Those plants begin to shudder.
Rigo ducks, shushes Kin, then points at them.
They watch as the flowers whip about, twitching at first, but then thrashing—suddenly dismantling their own box. Then climbing down the building like some kind of nightmare monster.
And that’s when, in the distance, the lights start going out.
“Hell with this,” Rigo says.
The Dirae runs.
Or tries to.
She dropped the gun. Her foot is hobbled. Her neck is home to a short, stubby throwing knife—and blood bubbles up over her hand holding the knife in place. She knows not to remove the knife because then she is truly dead. Behind her, the girl—Shawcatch, the Lottery winner—kneels over the dead Empyrean man. Her grief has stopped her pursuit of Enyastasia. Good. Maybe the Dirae will fight another day.
But then, while looking behind her, Enyastasia’s good foot catches on a root coming up out of the cobbled street. A root that has no place here, but she has no time to consider the proper placement of roots. All she can do is hold her hands out—palms that sting as they barely catch her fall. She cries out in rage and frustration. She looks for the remaining guards, but all she sees are dead shapes bound in tightening vines.
The air shakes and shudders around her.
A shadow descends upon her.
Leaves drift through the air. Scraping as the wind moves them about.
She looks up.
Propped up on its roots: a massive tree. Earth hanging, bits of broken stone nestled in the crooks of those roots.
Its bark splits like a monstrous mouth—splintered teeth, tongue of leaf and branch. It bellows: You killed my son!
Then it bows toward her. She feels branches cracking over her. Stabbing into her. Something winds around her neck. Another in her mouth, down her throat. Flowers bloom inside her heart, her lungs, her stomach.
She erupts.
A garden blooms in her pieces.
The flotilla comes alive. It is a green flotilla—vineyards, trees, flowers, greenhouses. Then the greenhouses shatter. The trees become hands pulling themselves out of the ground. Vines pull bricks from bricks. Flowers twist and spit, coughing poisonous pollen.
Cael can sense it all.
Wanda must be able to as well.
Because her head lolls back on her neck.
The look on her face is one of bliss.
A horrible thought reaches him: Maybe she’s doing this all on her own.
No—can’t be. He can sense the Maize Witch’s shoots and tendrils. But Wanda is in there, too. She’s part of it somehow. Helping her do all this.
Pop is next to him, firing the rifle at the advancing guardsmen—
Cael has a moment. One moment to get this right.
He picks up the crate. Hauls it over to the other end of the bridge, where Gwennie is kneeling by Balastair, where Boyland has joined her and is trying to get her to come away—“Come on, Gwennie,” Boyland is saying, “we have to go, we have to get out of here—”
Cael drops in front of her. Next to Balastair—who lies still, his empty eyes looking heavenward. Don’t think about him right now, there’s no time.
“Gwennie,” Cael says. He yells her name, shakes her: “Gwennie!”
“Cael,” she says. “Oh, gods, Cael. What’s happening?”
“This,” he says, thrusting the crate toward her. “Take it. Get out of here. Get to the skiff—get it down to the Heartland and as far away as you can.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know! Somewhere. Anywhere.”
“The factory,” she says. “The old processing facility.”
“East of Boxelder, south of Bremerton. Yeah. There you go.” That’s where they first really came to know each other, saving her little brother from a misguided adventure in that old rat-trap. It’s way outta the way.
And then, as if on perfect cue, the hum of a skiff’s engines. Rigo pilots the skiff into the canyon between Empyrean buildings, setting it down on the far side of the bridge.
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!” Boyland shouts.
He and Cael help Gwennie up.
They afford one last look at Balastair.
Cicero the bird trails after them, whistling a mournful dirge.
Boyland and Gwennie head back over the bridge, hauling the crate. Cael trails after—Pop is waving them on, hobbling toward the skiff as Rigo shouts.
Cael turns, stops, grabs Wanda, shakes her: “Wanda, we have to go. I don’t know what’s gonna happen to this place, but it’s time—”
She catches both of his wrists. Her gaze flits all over him, worry crossing her face, then bewildered rage.
“Where is the crate?” she asks.
“Don’t worry about that,” he says. “We have to fly!”
Her hands close tighter around his wrists. Pain shoots up his arms. Her mouth opens. He sees a throat spiraling with thorns, each red as fresh blood. The words that come out are not spoken so much as they are a song sung by all her cells—she a flower that is opening, petals blooming, a horrible thing awakening. “We. Need. That. Crate.”
His gaze betrays him, and he knows it, but he’s not sure what else to do—he looks to the skiff, to the others watching this scene unfold on the bridge. He rips a hand away from Wanda’s grip, waving them on:
“Go! Go, godsdamnit, go!”
She takes her free hand and points it at the skiff.
No, no, no—
Her arm ripples, becomes bark, then glistening cellulose, then a tangle of roots and vines—it extends outward, a botanical geyser of plant-flesh, reaching toward the skiff even as it rises in the air—
“Wanda, stop! Stop!”
But she doesn’t stop.
He knows what happens next. She’ll tear the skiff down out of the air.
She’ll have the crate. The colonies.
And he doesn’t know what happens then.
“I’m sorry,” he says. He says it softly, knowing that the words cannot be heard over the din by human ears, knowing, too, that despite that, Wanda will hear his words anyway—the apology there inside her mind, pleading as if it were a living dream.
Her eyes flick toward him, verdant, inhuman, enraged.
Cael tackles her off the bridge.
THE CEILING OF HEAVEN
THE SKIFF ROCKETS through the darkening streets of the flotilla. Gwennie knows she should be frightened—Rigo is pushing the craft to its limit, and though he’s turning out to be a fa
r more capable pilot than she would’ve expected, she knows that at any moment they could crash: hit a bridge, clip a building, go spinning off the edge of this thing like a top. And even then, once Rigo takes it over the edge—can he pilot this thing through the sky? Back down to the ground? Can he handle the buffeting winds, the swift descent? Are they all dead and they just don’t know it yet?
These things should terrify her, but right now, all she feels is raw. Shocked. Emptied of everything. The images flit through her head like blackbirds: Balastair, shot dead. Lane, dead back in Pegasus City. And Cael, once again high in the sky and then suddenly lost to her, plunging down to gods-know-where—crushed by the engines in the Engine Layer, or gone through to the unyielding ground below. He survived it once. Maybe he could survive it again.
But she’s not an idiot. The chances of surviving that kind of fall twice—?
A deep cold settles into her. All around her in the skiff, they’re packed like sardines: the suffering and those similarly shocked. Boyland with bloody arms and haunted eyes. Pop weeping into his hands over the son he just lost anew. Rigo piloting the ship with wide eyes and white knuckles, shell-shocked into frightening competence.
And in the middle of them: a crate.
A weapon. Her weapon. In their hands.
Beneath them, in the city, ants already crawl. Soon they’ll bring the city crashing down, killing the people who remain here. And enough will probably survive to breed more in the Heartland. Spreading out. Killing the technology they already have.
A triumph, however small, for the Maize Witch.
Back there, Pop said: They’ll wipe out the Empyrean and the Heartland. No visidexes. No motorvators. No corn to run the engines, but no engines, either.
Rigo rockets them toward the edge of the flotilla. On her shoulder, the catbird, Cicero, trills and tra-la-las. The ghost of Balastair watching over her.
That’s when something hits her. Something else said back there.
What was it Balastair told them?
About killing the ants. Extreme heat. Or cold, maybe.
She shivers.
Or cold.
She reaches up, grabs Rigo’s shoulder, and yells: