by Chuck Wendig
“We need to turn around! We need to head to the control tower!”
THE BLIGHT QUEEN
CAEL GASPS.
He sits up. Everything aches.
It’s morning. Everything is quiet but for the sound of wind through the corn. Hissing and crackling. The susurrus of the field.
The wind has teeth, he thinks—an absurd, old thought.
He stands up and almost gags.
Empyrean soldiers hang impaled on cornstalks, stalks that shouldn’t be able to support that weight but . . . so goes the powers of the Maize Witch. The ground beneath them is red with gore. Flies hum about. Whatever battle happened here, it’s now over. This is the aftermath. Which leaves the question: How did he get here?
It strikes him, then, the memory—
Falling. He and Wanda tumbling through the air. His old nightmare of falling from such a great height played out again, as if it was always his destiny to fall. As they plunged through cold, open air, Wanda changed. She became something else in those final moments of descent, as the hungry corn rushed up to greet them—her body ruptured in all directions, and she became some thrashing, horrible thing. Limbs and whip-cord vines and spiraling thorns. A hundred mouths, a thousand eyes. Even now he can smell the too-sweet stink of rotten flowers and ruptured fruit.
Wanda enveloping him—this time, not Esther saving him, but his Obligated. They fell hard, but she swaddled him, and they rolled—all his world gone topsy-turvy, ass-over-eyeballs, until his head struck the ground and:
Darkness.
Behind him, the whisper of something else. Not corn. Softer leaves. And the moistened squirming that comes with it.
“Cael,” Wanda says.
He turns, and she’s there—once more looking like Wanda except for her leaf-tipped fingers and iridescent eyes. She’s not alone.
Cael’s blood goes to cold sap.
“You . . . what . . .” He can barely find words. “Esther.”
Esther Harrington is like a spider caught in a web of her own design—her naked human form seems small in the massive nest of plant matter surrounding her. Vines like snakes hold her up. Flowers bloom and die and rebloom. Flytrap mouths snap at the air. The gunshot crack of roots breaking as they knot together. Fruits swell, ripen, then pop.
He is small in her shadow.
“You may call me the Blight Queen,” she says. Her voice comes not just from her mouth but from all around him—as if the corn echoes it.
“The war is over, Cael,” Wanda says.
“It was short,” the Blight Queen says, her voice resonating with a buzzy sound, as if her body was home to a hive of hornets. “Our time is now.”
Cael wants to ask who won the war, but he knows: nobody did.
Nobody but her.
“Where is my weapon?” the Queen asks him.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he lies.
“The crate. My son’s legacy.” Her voice thrums with anger. “You know.”
“I sent it away. We can’t use it. We use that, everything changes—”
“We can. We must. The corn must die.”
“It’s not just the corn. You know that. It’ll doom all the Heartland. Those ants will kill all the progress we’ve made.” He shakes his head, grimly resolute. “Don’t lie to me. You coulda killed the Golden Prolific any time. Right? Right?”
All she does is smile.
He goes on: “How much of this has been you all along? You invented the damn corn. What about the piss-blizzards?”
“My eyes and ears. And how else would I spread my Gift?” She drifts closer to him. “Where. Are. My. Colonies.”
“I told you, I sent them away—”
A cracking branch hits him across the face, cutting his brow and knocking him to the ground. A vine snakes along the blasted, flattened corn and then around his ankle. He tries to crabwalk away, but it yanks him forward again, toward her.
“We have an opportunity here. My son is dead, but I think of you like my son. A scion. An offshoot. All your life, you lived in poverty. Hardscrabble and dust-caked. That can change. Your sister. Your father. Wanda. Your daughter. We can all be a family. We can all have whatever we want. Our Gift grants us that, but only in a world we control. Can you imagine what that would be?”
Wanda smiles sadly. “We can finally have a taste of a good life. Not just for us. But for our daughter. Don’t you want that?”
“Is this what you want?” he asks Wanda. “To be some kind of . . . monster, some murdering freak of nat-aaaaaaaar—” The vine tightens and yanks, snapping the bone inside his ankle. The pain is white-hot, like staring into the sun. “Please. Please. Stop.”
Wanda flinches at his cry. She looks to Esther. Her voice, a grief-struck plea. “Don’t hurt him.”
“He stands in the way of our future,” the Blight Queen says. Then, to Cael: “Do you want to limp like your father?”
The vine coils farther up his leg, to his knee, to his thigh.
It tightens.
“I can make that happen for you,” the corn whisper-screams.
“Wait—” Wanda says.
But the Blight Queen hisses at her, and Wanda grows quiet.
“We can have a different world,” Cael says, growling through the pain. “We can do it our way. A world where we all work toward something bigger than us. Where we try to figure it all out together. Pop was right, Wanda. This is about power. We can’t just trade one monster for another, can’t go from the Empyrean to—”
The vine twists again. His shinbone cracks.
He weeps, head slamming back into the corn. He presses his fists against his eyes. “Please. Lord and Lady, don’t do this. . . .”
The Blight Queen hovers closer. Other vines tickle the ground and slide up alongside him, tracing lines up his arms, his sides. “I should have made you like I made Wanda. I put more of myself inside her. She’s more like me than anyone else in this world.” She chuckles. “She practically is me. My wishes made manifest. My flesh, my blooms, my fragrance. We share it. You are a rogue shoot. Proving yourself an invasive, a mutation I cannot abide. I will give you one last chance, Cael, my son. I saved you so many times, but I will end you if I must. You won’t make me do that, will you? If you make me hunt down my prize, I will do so with great cruelty. I will take your precious Gwennie and I will tear her to pieces. The earth will digest your father. Young Rodrigo—a plump little dumpling. Him I’ll keep alive. My thorns can drink from him for endless nights, that fat little tick.”
“Wanda,” Cael says. “Please.”
The vine breaks his knee. He bites through the tip of his tongue.
The Blight Queen sighs. When she sighs, all the corn sighs. A shudder of stalks, leaves, tassels.
“Then I will do this the hard way.”
He suddenly can’t breathe. Vines coil around his neck, tightening. He holds his arm up—his own Blight-vine grows again, but it’s nothing against her. She catches it, braids her own matter into it, then rips it out at the root, unmooring the whole thing from his arm and chest. Wanda screams, but the sound of her cries are lost under the thrumming drum of his blood trapped in his ears—head like a bucket under a rainstorm, like a blister about to pop—
Darkness—
At the edges—
Wanda clawing at the Blight Queen—
His heart stops.
Pulses. Like light flashing underwater.
Something inside of him.
Blood-slick vines.
Wanda standing over him. Tear-shiny face.
Screaming. Soundlessly.
The breath he takes feels infinite. A great heaving, sucking gulp—air rushing in, in, in, so much air that he feels like he must have a hole in him where the air is leaking right back out—
But then he can’t take in any more breaths and—
The air rushes out in a hot, ragged exhale.
He tastes blood.
Above him, movement. The darkness of unconsciousness—maybe ev
en of death—recedes, and when it does, he sees Wanda and Esther the Blight Queen. They smash together, rising up on roots like stilts, hundreds of vines twisting together, braiding, merging. No. Not merging—battling.
He tries to stand—but again his breath leaves him, and worse, he’s reminded that his one leg is now nothing more than a shattered broomstick held together by the barest splinters. Cael drops back to one knee, screaming.
From the tangle of roots and vines above his head, he sees Wanda’s face emerge—she looks upon him in horror.
And the Blight Queen tears Wanda apart.
Wanda knows she’s dying.
And even now, a part of her thinks: I deserve this. She has gone against the woman who created her. Esther. Her new mother, who took the frail thing that Wanda once was and changed her. Made her strong. Took her differences and made them meaningful. But then Esther—the Blight Queen now—was going to hurt Cael.
And Cael said things. Things that made sense.
He spoke of a world that was better. Where they worked together. And where the power wasn’t just in the hands of one group. That, Wanda realized, was what the Blight Queen wanted. She didn’t want freedom. She didn’t care about the Heartland. She only wanted power. The same thing everyone wanted.
Except Wanda. Wanda didn’t want power. She just wanted Cael.
And then the Blight Queen killed him. Stopped his heart dead.
Wanda leaped upon him, plunged herself into him—all her threads and shoots and runners. She found his heart, squeezed it and gave it life anew, and once it began to beat again, she threw herself against the one she once thought of as Mother.
A betrayal. She knows that.
Then she heard Cael awaken in pain—and Esther seized the opportunity. Now Wanda’s the one who’s dying. Esther is rending her apart. Prying branches and serpentine vines punch through her, hook her by the ribs, curl around her hip bones, all of them pulling in different directions.
Then, suddenly, a shriek. A familiar sound. She feels Esther hesitate—and again Wanda can see. Through the maze of roots and the mesh of leaves she sees a surprising face: Mole, the boy, once one of Boyland’s Butchers, lately of Esther’s entourage. He’s shrieking, clambering up Esther’s body and smacking her limbs and tendrils with a nail-stuck board. Wanda can feel Esther’s pain and surprise.
“Told you not to hurt her!” Mole whoops.
It’s a small moment, but valuable.
A vine curls around his middle, flings him into the corn.
For one moment, Esther’s face is exposed again—her true face, her human face.
Wanda feels Cael’s awareness flare anew.
And a ball bearing flies straight and pocks Esther right in the temple. An arc of amber blood squirts from the wound. Wanda sees Cael on the ground—the slingshot in his hand, the sling’s pocket dangling free as his eyes roll back in his head—
Esther screams, mouth wide.
Wanda puts everything she has into it.
She plunges herself in through that opening.
And she tears the Blight Queen asunder.
Cael awakens once more.
Wanda holds him close.
“It worked,” she says, kissing his cheek, kissing his mouth. Spit connecting them—she laughs, giggles nervously, wipes it away.
“Wh . . .” It feels like he’s talking through a throat lined with rusty razor blades. “What . . . did you . . . do?”
“I opened up your chest and made your heart beat again.”
“Oh . . . Okay.”
He passes out again.
The sun is high in the sky when he awakens.
This time, it’s like waking from a fever dream. Sweat-slick and terrified.
His head rests in Wanda’s lap. He looks up and she smiles down at him.
She helps him sit up. And that’s when he sees Esther Harrington.
Dead. Or presumably so. Her nude human form mounded atop a hillock of dead vines and arthritic roots. Her eyes stare out, empty. Her hair lies draped over the desiccated plants like a waterfall.
“I had to kill her,” Wanda says. “Because she killed you. I’m sorry about everything. She was in my head. I really thought . . . I really thought she was my mother, in a way. But I broke her tender neck and pulped her brain. I think maybe her consciousness fled into the corn. But don’t worry, I think I can kill that, too.” She smiles sweetly and kisses his cheek. “I love you, Cael McAvoy.”
“I . . . love you, too, Wanda Mecklin.” He doesn’t say: I don’t know who we are or who we’re gonna become or if we can even be together. But he does love her.
“Whatever,” Mole says, standing there, his cheeks smudged with dirt. He flings down the board he was holding and, shaking his head, stomps off into the corn.
EPILOGUE
LONG WAY FROM BOXELDER
THUNDER RUMBLES across the Heartland. In the distance, rain falls from gray clouds—like pulling insulation down through a ruined ceiling.
Amaranth McAvoy hawks up a loogey and spits it in the limestone gravel of the driveway—splat. She bites on a fingernail, chomps it down to the cuticle, and flicks away what she chews. Her feet tap. Her fingers snap.
“You are so gross,” comes a voice from behind her.
“Well, howdy, Ginger,” Amaranth says, cocking an eyebrow. “And whatever. I spit like a boy, so what? Boys do it and nobody says boo to them about it.”
Ginger Zinger—tall, lean, wispy as wheatgrass, pretty as a pink rose—shakes her red hair and pouts. “So. Gross.” She pulls out a small brown bottle from her leather satchel. “Nip of gin?”
Amaranth rolls her eyes. “I ain’t drinking now. Today’s too important.” Fancy little Empyrean girl, that Ginger. Whatever. Amaranth casts her eye back toward the house and the barn. No sign of Pop. Good. She drops to her knee like she’s about to tie her shoe, but instead, she rolls one of the logs marking the lines of their driveway back by a couple feet, exposing a dug trench. “Besides, gin? Ick.”
Inside: a few bags of fruit, vegetables, goat jerky. Plus a visidex and a long lever-action rifle with the picture of a fox engraved into each side.
“Holy hell-wang, a rifle.” Ginger whistles. “And how old is that visidex?”
“Does it matter?” Amaranth shrugs. “Got all the maps we need.”
Another voice calls to them. A boy.
“I don’t think we should do this!”
It’s Ernie Cozido.
“Ernie, shush,” Amaranth says. “You don’t have to come. Nobody’s twisting your nipple.”
Ginger arches an eyebrow, then sighs—a common sound, as if All The Things exasperate her. Amaranth swears: that girl is like an old woman.
“Ernie is too going with us,” Ginger says, and then to Ernie: “And don’t think you’re getting out of this. This is important to Am, so it’s important to us. Are we copacetic on that point, little dumpling?”
Ernie—gawky, with a bright white set of overbitten chompers—nods. “I know, I know, I’m coming. It’s just—I’m scared. I’ve never been out of the Heartland before. It’s . . . scary.” He sighs. “And I hate the rain. And the jungle. They have bugs down there big enough to suck your eyeballs clean. They do that. Suck all the juice out of your eyeballs and then plant eggs in there and then you’re all bug-eyes after that.”
“You are so dang dramatic, sheesh.” Amaranth rolls her eyes. “It isn’t scary. It’s just . . . new. New things are awesome, old things are dumb.” She wets her lips and picks up one of the bags. “Guys, I just . . . I just wanna find her. Okay? We won’t go far. I promise.”
That is a promise she’s gonna have to break. She feels bad about it now, dragging them along like this, but it is what it is. She needs them and figures it’s better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.
A few drops of rain patter against the tin barn roof, like little stones thrown. Ginger says: “Your pop’s gone, right? He won’t know we left right away? I’m presuming we have some lead
time.”
“He’s off at Mader-Atcha City, selling a couple goats.”
Ginger grins. “Then shall we?”
“I’m ready,” Ernie says.
“Me, too,” Amaranth says, puffing out her chest and her chin, trying to make it look like she isn’t scared, too. “Let’s go find my mama.”
From the knothole in the barn door, Cael peers out.
He watches his daughter and her two friends hoist their packs. Amaranth picks up the rifle—his rifle, or, more properly, Pop-Pop’s rifle—and then they wander out down the long driveway to the plasto-sheen road.
He sighs. “They’re headed into the River Glades through Bleakmarsh.”
“And you want me to go after them.”
He hasn’t seen Gwennie in a handful of months, but she hasn’t changed much. A little ropier. Leaner and meaner. Her hair is longer, too, bound up into tails on each side of her head in the Moon Coast way—can’t see it under her rumpled leathers, but her one arm is inked from wrist to shoulder. All the various sigils and signs of the places she’s been, the people she’s seen.
“No,” Cael says. “I just . . . want you to follow along. Make sure they’re okay. Things ain’t easy out there.”
It was fifteen years or so ago, when the walls came down, when the world opened up. The Empyrean had to park their flotillas after the day the Blight Queen died. Together, and only together, he and Wanda reached out and killed all the corn in the amount of time it takes to snap your fingers, the reign of Hiram’s Golden Prolific brought to a jarring halt—and that was a rough transition all its own, turning the floating cities into terrestrial ones (modeled in fact after what Lane had accomplished with Pegasus City) and helping merge all the worlds: the Heartlanders, the Empyrean, the Blighted, the hobos. At first, chaos reigned. Things still aren’t quite right. Fights rise up—folks get hurt, killed. But a relative peace has been ongoing in this part of the world. It’s not the same everywhere else. Pockets of the old Empyrean civilization still exist. Not flotillas, but in mountaintop fortresses, jungle camps, undersea bases.
And turns out that not everyone in the world gets along with everyone else in the world, too. The fisher-folk of the Braided Glades, for instance, got something they call a “blood debt” against the River Glade nomads, and that means Amaranth and the other two kids are heading right toward bad mojo.