“Is that still your answer?” Agrasanto says.
Pop nods, and Varrin again thrusts the gun barrel against his hip. Another scream.
“Just tell her something,” Grey says, wincing.
Pop spits a gob of bloody spit on Agrasanto’s uniform.
She barks to Varrin, “Again!”
Pally hauls back and kicks Pop in the hip with his boot. The cry that rises from the old man’s throat is a warbling shriek, a sound Cael’s never heard another man make before.
Cael hears the drumbeat of his pulse. A dull thumping in his neck, his temples, all the way down to his feet and his fingertips.
Rigo has his hand on Cael’s shoulder. He’s saying something about a plan. Lane is asking him again about the roof. But all Cael can really hear is the sound of his father in pain.
Varrin hauls back again with his foot. Pop topples over, and Varrin kicks him in the side.
They’re killing him.
Agrasanto is yelling for Varrin to stop.
Cael pulls away from Rigo.
As he rounds the corner of the house, the slingshot is already in his hand. A steel ball bearing in the pouch, pinched there so hard it hurts Cael’s fingers.
He screams as he runs toward them.
“Honey, please,” Richard is begging her.
But Gwennie wants none of that. Her father’s wrong. Plain and simple. This is not the time to be a docile little lamb. To roll over and let the shears take what’s yours.
She flips the stubby couch leg in her hands. Hears the footsteps outside the door.
It’s time.
The door opens, and one of the guards steps through. Gwennie rears back with her makeshift weapon—and a hand catches her.
It’s her father.
“I’m sorry,” he says. He gets his hands under her and holds her fast. “We need this. I can’t have you doing this to the family.”
“Dad!” she cries, thrashing, kicking out.
“Help me!” he says, and at first she doesn’t know who he’s talking to; but then the grim realization hits her: he’s talking to the guards. The horse-faced soldiers grab at her legs. They produce plastic cords and fix them to her ankles, and then spin her over and bind them to her wrists. She screams. One of them drops her to the floor while the other dials back the power setting on his rifle.
He lances a muted sonic pulse into her back.
Gwennie’s chin hits the floor and she tries to cry out, but she can’t. Her words are lost as she begins to drool and dry heave. She looks up through bleary eyes and sees her father—face stricken with grief and guilt—sit down next to her now-weeping mother. Scooter, crying, crawls into Mom’s lap.
Cael can’t make a good shot while running, so he skids to a stop. He squints his eye over his hand.
Pally sees him.
Agrasanto sees him, too.
Aim straight, aim true.
Both of them draw their pistols on him.
Agrasanto reaches down to dial up the power. Pally just fires.
The shot misses Cael.
He lets fly with the ball bearing.
The sonic pistol drops from Varrin’s grip as the ball bearing strikes him right in the throat. It collapses his windpipe. He staggers backward, clawing at his throat as though his wildly searching fingers can somehow put it all back together again. The only sound he makes is a wet gurgle.
The small man behind Agrasanto—her attaché—bolts for the barn, head down.
Agrasanto points the pistol, and Cael knows it’s over. Maybe she has it on lethal. Maybe she’ll just knock him flat. But he knows what’s coming next.
Except he’s wrong.
Suddenly Grey Franklin is behind her—his rifle against her throat, choking her. The pistol fires, and the air ripples as a warbling sound rushes by Cael’s head. The shot hits one of the shutters on the farmhouse windows and blasts it to splinters.
Varrin drops to the ground. His legs start kicking, then stop.
I just killed a man.
He runs to Pop and begins dragging him toward the house.
She blames herself, of course, even as she fires off a shot that misses the kid by a scant few inches, even as her own throat starts to close as Franklin presses the rifle tighter against her neck.
She should have clamped down. Should have made a better effort to control this herself. Instead, she let these fool-headed Heartlanders get in the way.
Her fault or no, this won’t do.
It’s time to take control.
She stabs her elbow backward, catching the Overseer in the ribs. Then she pivots her hips and ducks forward, throwing the traitor over her shoulder. Franklin hits the ground on his ass bone, and the rifle goes clattering away into the dust and gravel.
Simone has to give it to him. By the time she’s leveling her pistol at him, he’s already rolled over and got his feet underneath of him, charging forward like a bull.
The thing is, he only knows how to fight like a Heartlander. The Overseers get a little training—mostly how to disarm some rowdy hick with a broken bottle or a sharp stick. But they don’t learn the Heavenly Stance. Nobody teaches them how to fight like a proper Empyrean.
He comes at her, and she uses his momentum to throw his own body past her. Once more he loses his footing, and he face-plants into the driveway.
She takes a shot. The sonic blast hits empty earth as he rolls out of the way and kicks up a pocket of stone and dirt. Again Franklin’s on his feet, but this time he’s adapted. He doesn’t charge in blindly. He comes at her from the side and hugs her like a circus bear—close enough that she can’t get off a shot.
This is a distraction she can no longer abide.
With her empty hand she claps his ear and then rabbit punches him in the kidneys. When she hears his grunt and feels the air go out of him, she knows the job is done. Punch the kidneys and the liver, and the fight goes right out of a person.
He staggers back, and she snaps a kick into his jaw. His teeth slam down on his tongue, and blood wells instantly at the corners of his mouth.
“Betrayer,” she hisses.
Then she shoots him in the face.
Grey tumbles backward. Blood erupting out of his nose. Eyes bulging. The back of his head hits the driveway hard, and a greasy froth oozes from his lips like soapsuds. The body twitches for a few seconds. And then it stops.
Now to finish this.
The boy with the slingshot—clearly the McAvoy heir, a rogue element she should have known was not buttoned up and taken care of, thank you, Mr. Mayor and your ineffectual Babysitters—is dragging his father toward the stoop and the steps of the farmhouse.
Easy pickings.
She levels the pistol and pulls the trigger.
Rigo doesn’t know what happened. One minute there they were, ducked down behind the cellar doors, and he was acting as master strategist—and then Pop was screaming, Cael was gone, and the whole thing went to hell in a husk-bucket.
He stumbles out into the middle of the driveway, eyes wide, unable to parse what’s going on. Is that Pally Varrin over there, his body jumping like it has an electrical current running through it? Why the hell is Grey Franklin fighting with the proctor? Cael’s got his pop and is dragging him over to the house. Where did Mayor Barnes go?
Rigo turns to Lane. “What the hell should we—”
But Lane’s already gone. His gangly legs are pumping, and he’s taken off like a bottle rocket.
It’s then that Rigo sees Grey Franklin’s head fountain twin jets of blood from the nose. Just like that, the proctor points her pistol and Grey Franklin is dead.
Rigo feels his bowels go to ice. He thinks, Run, just run, just get out of here, don’t piss your pants, you might piss your pants, she’s going to hurt you kill you run stupid run. His head’s like a switchboard of flight over fight, and yet his feet remain fixed to the Heartland earth.
Agrasanto points her gun. Not at him but past him.
At Cael. At Pop.<
br />
And before Rigo can think twice, he is running, bolting forward like a fat pony with a swarm of hornets stinging his ass. Except he’s not running away from anything. Instead, he’s leaping forward and making a sound like he’s never heard himself make.
He barrels into the proctor just as she pulls the trigger.
The visidex.
Lane knows what that thing can do. It’s not just a computer. It’s a communication device. It can call the flotilla. It can bring reinforcements down on their heads like a hailstorm of hot coals. So when Agrasanto’s attaché flees down the driveway with the visidex tucked under his arm, Lane knows he has to get that damn computer.
So he runs.
Agrasanto’s pet has probably never run this far in his life—not from bullies calling you a sissy, not from Babysitters who caught you out after curfew, not after a fruit cart so you can get the sweet taste of a half-rotten apple. But if there’s one thing Lane can do, it’s run.
Privileged prick, he thinks. Never had to work for anything.
The lackey cries out as Lane flings himself forward, tackling the man to the ground. The visidex spins away. The man squirms from beneath him, and his face is a contorted mask of terror.
He’s scared of me, Lane thinks as he raises his fist. He thinks I’m some kind of damn savage. Like I might start eating his face off.
All Lane can feel is contempt.
And then Lane hears the sound of the proctor’s pistol, and his heart damn near quits.
Rigo thinks, I’ve been shot.
His ears ring. His head is like a bell someone just struck with a carpenter’s hammer. He hits the ground, but his feet won’t hold him and he tumbles over like a stack of milk bottles hit by a rotten apple.
Even his vision isn’t working right. Two images—same but different—swim toward each other and then apart again, as though trying desperately to become one. In both he sees Agrasanto slowly walking toward him, pressing the back of her wrist against her lips—a wrist that comes away red with blood—wearing an incredulous look on her dour face.
He expects his stomach to roil. He figures any moment blood will come boiling out from inside his skin—but he just blinks as the charge of adrenalin surges through him.
No blood. No death. Nothing.
“I’m not shot,” he says, but his words are lost in the dull roar of blood and bell ringing going on in the echo chamber of his head.
Then Simone Agrasanto says something to him.
Again she raises the pistol.
“You little shit,” she says.
She had a clean bead on Cael McAvoy. Until this little melonhead connected with her own head, and before she knew it, her teeth were cutting through her lower lip. The tang of iron and copper fast filled her mouth as the gun went off right next to the kid’s ear.
The pudgy bastard looks up at her with pleading eyes. He feels his chest as though he’s been shot.
She can oblige.
She licks blood from her lip and raises the pistol.
And her head snaps back. All she sees for a moment is half a starburst, a white field of flash that explodes in her vision. She screams and she thinks, My eye! My fucking eye—it’s gone!
She brings her hand to her face and knows it’s absurd. It’s not her eye, everything’s fine; it’s just the madness of the moment.
But then she sees Cael McAvoy standing over his father, the slingshot held firmly in his hand, the tubing and pocket dangling slack. And when she pulls her hand away from her face, it comes away wet. Wet with blood.
Frantically, she feels for her eye.
It’s there. But it’s just a mushy bubble—it gives way to her finger like a stepped-on grape.
She cries out. This can’t be. This won’t do. McAvoy just stands there, jaw agape, looking horrified at her, as if she’s some kind of freak. She senses somebody behind her, and she wheels on them, pointing the pistol—
It’s the tall one with the shock of dark hair. He’s got her visidex. She thinks to shoot him, but she doesn’t know if she could make the shot. Her head is vibrating. She can only see out of her one eye. Everything else is a pulsing tide of darkness giving way to light and then again to darkness. The pistol drops from her hand, and she does the only thing she can think to do.
Proctor Simone Agrasanto runs.
Cael watches her bring her hand to her eye. An eye he ruined. When he let fly, he knew what he was doing. He knew where that steel ball would go. It wasn’t that he didn’t want her dead; in a sense, that was all he wanted. She’s an emblem of the Empyrean, a symbol of their crushing grip and callous control.
But he’s already killed one person. Someone he knew. Someone he didn’t like and, given the state of things, someone who may very well have deserved it.
But still, Cael killed him.
He just couldn’t do it again.
And now she stands, staggering about. She’s got the pistol raised, but she’s not even pointing it at Lane, who’s coming up on her flank.
Her eye looks like a blackened mess. Blood trickles down her cheek. She feels for it. Cups her hand over it. Makes a sound like a wounded animal.
And then it’s over. The pistol drops, and she runs.
Cael goes after her.
He can’t let her live.
He can’t let her leave on that boat.
Gwennie.
The woman staggers around the corner of the barn just as Cael lets a metal ball fly—it chips a splintery pucker out of the wood, missing her by a hair’s breadth.
Pop calls his name. He can’t listen. Can’t care.
He hurries after her, rounds the corner, sees Agrasanto bolting for the ketch. Lines up his shot…
Two Empyrean guards appear at the base of the boat’s stairs, their rifles drawn and firing. Two sonic pulses hit the barn behind him, the wood shuddering and cracking with the weight of the blasts. Cael screams, skids to the ground, crawls behind an old thresher bar lying there in the dirt.
He gasps, desperately struggling to get another ball bearing in the pocket.
Two more pulses come shrieking forward, striking the thresher bar—Cael feels it shudder with the blast, and it’s just enough for him to drop the metal ball onto the hard earth. It rolls away.
He leaps forward, slapping his hand down on it. By the time he stands, he sees Agrasanto staggering up the steps of the ketch. The guards follow behind her.
The hover-rails glow and hum.
“No!” Cael screams. He bolts toward the ship.
But it starts to lift from the corn, the stalks shuddering and straightening.
Cael fires the ball bearing upward at the ketch-boat.
The metal marble plinks off the side and falls to the earth.
And then the boat lurches forward, shooting up over the Heartland.
Gwennie is gone.
OLD OBLIGATIONS
POP’S IN THE kitchen on the floor, leaning up against the corner of two cabinets. He winces, clutching his side with one hand and his hip with the other.
Cael comes into the house with a bucket of cold water from the well and motions for Rigo to hand him a cloth napkin sitting on the table. Rigo pitches him the napkin, and Cael dunks it into the water and begins to wash the mask of blood off his father’s face.
“Thanks, son,” Pop says.
“How’s Mom?” Cael asks.
“Quiet.” As if she could be anything else.
“Gwennie’s gone,” Cael says.
“I know.”
“I killed a man.”
“You did what you did because you had no recourse. You’re going to have to let it go. At least for today. Let your guilt pursue you some other day, Cael.”
Cael nods, but he’s not so sure.
Pop winces as Cael runs the cloth over the wound across his temple and brow. He looks to Rigo and Lane. “I want to thank you all for your help. The way everything shook out today wasn’t the way I expected it to. I’m still here because of the three o
f you, and I am very grateful for that.”
“Anything, Pop,” Rigo says.
Lane says quietly, “We’re still paying you back for all the good you’ve done us.”
“Listen here,” Arthur says. “We’re not safe. Not here. Not for now. We’ve hit a juncture in this road where one path is now closed to you, to all of us. What I’m telling you is to run home. Pack a bag—a light bag, just some provisions and clothing and whatever else you’ll need out there. Then get back here as soon as you can. Race like the wind, because I can assure you, this isn’t over. The proctor’s going to send more people. The Empyrean does not brook this kind of trouble.”
Rigo and Lane share a look.
“You boys trust me?” Pop asks.
They nod, all three of them.
“Then go.”
Rigo and Lane clap Cael on the arm and give Pop’s hand a little shake. And like that, they’re gone. Off to do what needs doing.
“You okay, son?” Pop asks.
“I reckon all right.” It’s a lie, but Cael can’t see any reason to speak the truth right now.
They sit there for a while like that. Cael doesn’t even know how long. Long enough that the bucket of well water has gone from clean to pink to a little too red. But already Pop’s looking better—less like someone who got mauled by a bear. He’ll make it through okay.
“Everything’s going to be different from here on out,” Pop says.
“I’m starting to figure on that.”
“Your sister.”
“What about her?”
“She’s going to be in danger, too. This is all my fault, Cael; I know that. This isn’t over, and in fact it’s just beginning. They say the sins of the father are repaid on his children, and I know now how true that is.” He winces as he sits up straighter. “But regret doesn’t change anything. Where we are is where we are. And your sister thought she could get away from all this, but now it’s going to find her. These people are going to track her down the way a shuck rat sniffs out a crumb in the corner. Which is why I need you to find her first.”
Pop’s words echo in Cael’s head—I need you to find her first—when he hears it. Upstairs, a bend in the floor, a groaning creak.
Under the Empyrean Sky (The Heartland Trilogy) Page 21