Blightborn (12 page)

“I can hear you,” Rigo murmurs.

The two of them step away from Rigo and begin to argue over what they’re going to do about him. He can’t distinguish who’s saying what. Someone says, “He needs medicine, man. He needs cillin-pills fast.” One of them answers, “Where the hell we gonna get those?” “The depot.” “We don’t know where the depot is. Or if there even
is
a depot out this way. Not like we have a map. Or a clue. Just moving in a straight line hasn’t gotten us anywhere yet no matter what Pop said.” “I trust Pop, and after everything, so should you, and—”

Meanwhile, Rigo lies there.

He has to push his breath out and suck it back in. Each time as if it’s running over a wood rasp. A dry whistle in the back of his throat.

His forehead feels like a hot plate.

He hears his father’s voice in his ear: “Rodrigo, Rodrigo. You’re a shit kid.
Nobody wants you
. And now you’re going to die.”

Rigo winces, pauses for the strike of his father’s hand.

It never comes.

He opens his eyes instead and sees a black shape drifting across the sky above. Not a flotilla. Lower than that. And flying lower still.

A ship.

To take them all away.

Suddenly he’s getting up, and his leg is okay, and he’s walking toward the ship as it lands in the corn, smashing stalks. Cael and Lane haven’t caught up yet, and Rigo thinks this is good; this is him doing something before them; this is him escaping this world before they can.

They always get to do everything first.

He laughs, but then that laugh dries up like the last drops of water falling out of one of their water bladders, and he finally says, “Oh.”

Rigo must’ve said it pretty loud because Cael and Lane look over.

“What?” Lane asks.

“I just realized.”

“Realized what?” Cael says.

“That it’s a hallucination. The ship.”

“What ship?”

He lifts a shaky finger and points.

They follow his finger.

The two of them start laughing.

“A ship!” Cael hoots. He slams into Lane, and they hug. Together they clap him on the shoulder. “Rigo, that’s no hallucination. That’s a real ship!”

That’s it,
Cael thinks as he watches the ship descend out of the sky and fly over the corn and away from them.
That’s our ride
.

He knows that ship isn’t just a ship—it’s a scowbarge—and those are meant to carry heavy loads. A scowbarge means the depot is near.

It means they’re close.

He laughs as he and Lane help Rigo stand once more.

Cael positions the crutch under Rigo’s arm, and he starts saying, “Rigo, the depot ain’t far now, and if anybody’s going to have cillin-pills or some other Empyrean medicine, it’ll be them.” And he’s telling Rigo about how it won’t be long now, they just need him to power through and hobble just a little farther, and hey, Heartlanders are made of mean stuff, tough as the corn, hard as the earth, and just as they get Rigo settled, Cael feels it.

That itch again on his chest. This time it comes with a hot twinge of pain almost like someone’s trying to twist a screw into his breastbone.

He winces and reaches under his shirt.

Everything stops. His blood goes cold.

No no no this isn’t possible it’s not what you think it is
.

The back of his wrist tents his shirt as his fingers find the soft margins of the thing growing out of his chest. Cold and smooth, with a faint indentation on one side that manifests as a ridge on the other.

A leaf.

It feels like a leaf. With a little stubby stem.

He blinks back tears and tugs on it.

Pain, electric and sharp, shoots from his skin. Same kind of pain that comes from pulling a scab. The stem won’t give, though. The leaf stays.

And by the balls of Old Scratch, it sure does itch.

He tries not to make any sound. Tries not to show the fear that is crawling through him like a colony of termites.

Lane catches his eye. “Hey, you all right? Looks like you just saw the Maize Witch.”

I have the Blight
.

“I’m fine,” Cael lies.
I have the Blight.
He forces a smile. “Just worried about Rigo.”

And then a thought that isn’t his own enters his mind like corn shoots prying apart floorboards or pushing up asphalt—

Come to me, Cael
.

“You’re not gonna die,” Lane says, mussing Rigo’s hair. “We won’t let you, because life just wouldn’t be as much fun without you to kick around. Ain’t that right, Cael?”

Come to me, Cael
.

He swallows hard.

“Totally right.”

“Then let’s go hitch a ride,” Lane says, and whoops with glee.

Cael nods and tries to smile, helps Rigo along.

But that one thought keeps turning and flipping in his head, jumping around like a bird with a broken wing trying to fly:
I have the Blight
.

PART TWO

BLACK MIRRORS, BROKEN KEYS

THE MAN FROM WHEATLEY

THE MIRROR ISN’T MUCH.
A shard of reflective glass sitting between two corners of old frame, held there as if by divine providence. The bottom of the glass is blackened from smoke and soot—this whole house is burned up, and the mirror is one of the few things left.

He’d laugh, but it hurts too much. Every twitch of his lips sends sparks of pain jumping as the skin breaks and blisters pop.

His face looks like a shuck rat turned inside out.

Cael McAvoy
.

That name. That boy. At first he thought
that
was the divine providence—he’d been looking for Arthur McAvoy for a good long while, waiting for that snake to pop his head up so that Eben could cut it off. And then what should happen? An alert on the visidex he stole from that Empyrean guard—before he broke the fool’s neck—that said Arthur McAvoy was some kind
of “terrorist.” And that his son was wrapped up in it, too. Well, gosh-and-golly.

At the time Eben had been far west, toward the squealer town of Baird’s Furnace, pretending then to be just another hobo looking for work but doing his
own
work in the meantime, the work of the Lord and the Lady. The first thing he did was pack up everything and start heading east. McAvoy was in a town called Boxelder, so that’s where Eben figured he’d go.

And then there, across the trestle, he’d spotted them.

The fat one with the raft—
sploosh
. Into the slurry.

An easy introduction.

He thought he had them.

Eben lashes out, kicks a burned-up chair into char-dust. The rage rises inside of him, and he growls and then whimpers in pain as the burned mask that is his face stretches and pulses and just plain
hurts
.

Back to the mirror. His forehead is still smooth except for a lone blister. His eyes were blessedly untouched, though the brow-hair burned. But the lower half of his face is pitted and pocked with red, raw flesh. The ash stuck to him like tar. Burning and burning. He has some lesser burns on his forearms where he tried to wipe away the ash, but those aren’t too bad. His face, though, his face . . . will never be the same. Not without some of the voodoo they got on those Empyrean flotillas, and he doesn’t see himself going back to one of those anytime soon.

Another spike of rage pounds heavy into his heart. The Empyrean.

The Empyrean people want to be like the gods. And the Heartlanders want to be like dogs. Both disgust him, and they
disgust the Lord and Lady, too. He knows, because they tell him things. Sometimes Jeezum Crow comes to him in visions. Or Old Scratch even, who’s evil as anything but a part of the plan just like he is. Sometimes he’s visited by the Saintangels, like Agnes or Bethesda or Hypatia or Lyria, and they tell him things, too, whispering the sweet songs of the two gods in his ear.

And right now he needs a message bad.

Eben moves to the floor, and it groans beneath him as he clasps his hands together and makes a silent entreaty to the Lord and Lady in their manse above, begging them to come to him and guide him, to bless him with a message once more.

He doesn’t know how long he sits like that, but soon his knees begin to ache, and the shadows in the room shift with the passage of the sun. His face pulses with a heartbeat that feels like the heavy hooves of spooked cattle stampeding across the dead and blasted earth, and each beat brings a widening, thickening aura of pain. It moves beyond the margins of his skin, feeling as if his head is growing, swelling, twice as big, then twice that again, then as big as the face of the fallen Wheatley clock tower, then bigger than this house, then the moon, then the sun, then—

Outside. Voices.

He scrambles to stand.

Eben goes to the second-floor window and peers out over the street as a fancy, fat-bottomed boat slides into town, the quartet of sails bulging with the wind the way a child’s cheeks puff out as he tries to blow spit-bubbles. The boat slows, and a drag-anchor drops.

First one off the hovering yacht is a spindly, gawky thing—a young girl whose copper-wire hair is all akimbo, and when she
hits the ground, he sees the wobble in her knees. She doesn’t have her sail-legs.

Next onto the ground is a little towheaded urchin who crawls from the mast like a monkey and lands like a spring—one hop, then a second.

Third off is a man almost as old as Eben himself—a man both lean and paunchy, with mussy hair tucked under a crumpled blue hat. The man moves slowly, peering out from under the brim of that hat with a dark, muddy gaze.
Looks like he’s been run through a corn-press,
Eben thinks. He recognizes the signs of sin. The wages of a wasted life.

Last off: another boy. Teen. This one built like a bull, with broad shoulders, thick neck, and a head to match.

The bull whoops and turns his finger like a carousel.

“All right,” he says. “Take a few. Poke through the buildings. They might be here or might’ve stayed here.”

That one’s the captain then.

The gawky girl puts her hand over her brow like a visor.

“You think Cael and the boys would’ve stopped here?” she asks.

The other boy scowls. “Don’t ask me stupid questions, Wanda. Just close that flytrap you call a mouth and do as I say, okay?”

Eben smiles.

He just found a new path toward vengeance. He utters a small prayer of thanks to the Lord and Lady and quickly gets to swaddling his face with some dirty rags he found in the kitchen downstairs.

Then the Remittance Man hurries to meet some new friends.

Wanda doesn’t like being hated. And Boyland Barnes Jr. hates her. She’s used to being dismissed, sure. Pushed aside or looked over or downright forgotten, but nobody’s ever seemed to
hate
her before, and the look in his eyes tells her that Boyland is the first. His gaze wills her to wither, and she does, though she imagines a day when she does not.

Wanda wonders why he hates her so bad.

Cael, she figures. It’s irrational that he’d hate her as much as or more than Cael, but Momma always told her that you can’t count on people to make as much sense as you want them to.

Still, it wounds her that Boyland despises her for something she didn’t even do. Hate by association.

Damn that Cael.

And damn her for the butterfly flutter in her chest and belly any time she thinks of him. Even that name:
Cael
.

She wants him back. She
needs
him back.

Because Cael is her Obligated.

That has to mean something out here.
That
is a bond that counts. It’s not just love. It’s a promise.

And Wanda is real about her promises.

Still. Boyland may hate her, but Rigo’s father, Jorge, doesn’t seem to care one whit about her. She doesn’t think he’s looked at her once in the couple-few days they’ve been out here. And as for Mole . . .

The kid hurries up to her. Eyes all a-goggle. He thrusts something out toward her. Rope waggles, twisted into a curious shape of four loops bound by a central bundle. “What is this?” she asks.

“It’s a flower,” he says, and he winks. “Er, a flower knot.”

“Oh. It’s very nice.”

“Yeah.” He adopts a cocky pose. “I know
all
the hard knots. The Treasure Knot. The Star Knot. I know . . .”—his tongue presses the inside of his cheek, making a bulge—“. . . the Cob-Twister, the Anchor Bend, the Clove Hitch, the Braided Glade, the—” A big hand falls on the boy’s shoulder and pulls him back.

Boyland scowls. “This doesn’t look like either of you jabber-jaws is going through the houses. Now, see that damn burn barrel fallen over there in the middle of the street? That tells me somebody’s been here.”

Mole thrusts out his chin. “That don’t mean poop-squat, Cap. That barrel mighta been here for years—”

“The ash is still
warm
.” Boyland growls.

“Oh.” Mole shrinks.

Wanda rolls her eyes. “We’ll get looking, okay? Jeez.”

“Don’t roll your eyes at me, you little twit.” Boyland sticks a finger and pokes her hard in the chest once, twice, then—