Blightborn (2 page)

RAIL RIDERS

COME TO ME, CAEL
.

Cael lurches upright with a gasp, patting at his chest, the sharp pain fading to a dull murmur before revealing itself as the remnant of a dream that flees like a shadow in sunlight. The voice in his head (
Come to me, come to me, come to me. . . .
) falls apart, too, a chip of dirt in a closing fist.

The rail-raft slides over the tracks, the magna-cruxes buoying them above the rails. A frictionless ride that calls to mind flying. A sudden pang of loss strikes him then: he misses his boat.
Betty
, the cat-maran.

On all sides, a familiar sight: corn. Endless tall stalks of it whoosh past, each pregnant and bent with the burden of many ears. Above their heads, a distant flotilla, big as a dirty thumbprint on a set of clean bedsheets. That flotilla, or one of them, is where they need to go.

Rigo sits cross-legged, carving slices of parsnip. He hands
one to Cael, who takes it and pops it into his mouth. Sweet and bitter.
Crunch crunch crunch
. Lane lies back next to Rigo, his long, lean body taking up the whole back end of the raft. His legs dangle over the side. Just out of reach of the hungry, searching corn.

“Parsnip gives me the runs,” Lane says, smoking.

“You say the sweetest things,” Cael mumbles, rubbing his eyes and yawning. The skin above his heart itches. The dream, lingering?

“Got any rat jerky left?” Lane asks.

Rigo shakes his head. “You know we don’t.”

“Meh. I’m tired of eating root vegetables.”

“I’m just tired,” Cael says. “Amazing how doin’ nothing feels like doin’ everything.”

They’ve been sitting on the raft for a week now, stopping whenever one of the Empyrean trains comes barreling down the track—each a charging beast of black iron and eye-blistering chrome. When that happens, they pull the raft off the rails and use it as an opportunity to stretch their legs and perform nature’s other unpleasant necessities.

“Guys,” Rigo says, “look around you. We’re free. We’ve got food. Got a rifle. Haven’t seen a piss-blizzard or a tornado. Beautiful day. No Agrasanto chasing our butts. Life could be worse.”

Rigo. Ever the optimist. Cael neglects to grouse about how they’re now officially hobos—probably worse. They’re likely enemies of the whole Empyrean, their faces on every proctor visidex in the Heartland. Cael’s got no idea where Pop and Mom are, or if they’re even alive. Gwennie’s gone. Wanda probably hates him. His sister, Merelda, is . . . well, that’s who they’re supposed to fetch if they ever get to where they’re going.

Cael may not say all that aloud, but Lane isn’t afraid to complain.

“I thought it’d be more exciting,” he says, finally sitting up and popping his knuckles, his elbows, his knees. “I mean, Jeezum Crow, it’s corn, corn, more corn. Big sky. Barely a cloud in it. At least if there were a couple clouds I could say, ‘Hey, that one looks like a fell-deer, that one like a caviling grackle, that one like Boyland Barnes Jr. licking dirt off the end of my boot.’ We’ve seen—what?—a few off-load way stations. One kill-sprayer. No towns. No people. How close are we? We gotta be close.”

Cael looks at the number of hash marks carved into the top board of the rail-raft. “Seven marks, so seven days. Pop said it’d take us little over a week.”

“Slow and steady wins the race,” Rigo says, echoing the proverb from the old story of the Haiphong Hog and the Ryukyu Rabbit.

“Blech,” Lane says. “Slow and steady puts my ass to sleep. I always liked the rabbit more, honestly.” He suddenly gets a look on his face. His eyes narrow. His mouth twists into a mischievous smile.

Cael knows the question that’s coming, and frankly, he’s surprised it took any of them this long to ask.

Lane asks it: “How fast do you think this thing can go?”

“Oh no,” Rigo says.

“Oh yes,” Lane answers.

Cael holds up a hand. “Wait a minute, now. Lane might be right. Dang, I’m bored, too. Maybe we can get a move on and
make it to the Provisional Depot by nightfall—wouldn’t that be a peach?”

“Guys,” Rigo says, “I dunno about this. . . .”

Lane waves him off. “Let’s do it.”

“Hell yeah.” Cael grins. “Let’s see how fast this baby can fly.”

THE PEGASUS GIRL

IN A ROOM FULL OF MUTANTS
, Gwennie still feels like a freak.

Her shovel scrapes the bottom of the stall, scooping up bedding made from dried corn husks and corn leaves—bedding that is also soaked through with the waste of the stall’s inhabitant. An inhabitant that now stands in the next stall over, probably soiling
that one
while she cleans
this one
.

The horse—or rather the “horse”—shoves its head over the stall wall. It whinnies and snorts, nostrils flaring and expelling a fine mist of snot.

Gwennie scowls, wipes her cheek with the back of her hand.

She looks at the animal—this one pinker than the skin of a baby’s bottom, as pink as the frosting atop a cake made by an Empyrean baker—and shoots out her tongue, blowing a raspberry that gives the creature a taste of its own medicine. Her own spit flecks the animal’s nose.

The “horse” blinks, irritated.

She calls this one Pinky.

She props up the shovel, her muscles aching. The sour smell of the soiled stalls has crawled up inside her nose like a cob-snake coiled around a cornstalk, and it just won’t leave.

“What are you looking at?” she asks Pinky.

The horse’s gums peel back, showing off yellow teeth.

Whenever the horse moves, she hears a clicking, a scraping—and though the lights here in the stable are dim, she can see the shadows rising and falling on the animal’s back. Shadows like black fingers. Shadows that are in fact long, long bones—jointed and bent like parts of a busted umbrella, bones that rise off the shoulders and curl to the ground.

They were supposed to be wings.

But they didn’t “come out right,” according to Balastair Harrington, her keeper and their designer—they came out featherless. Skinless, too. Just bones. Bones that jut out of the horse’s flesh, painful at the source. That’s another of Gwennie’s many jobs: apply a salve to the juncture of bone and body. A job that Pinky finds none too pleasing, and just yesterday he stomped down on Gwennie’s foot with a heavy, cracked hoof. Nothing broken, but she still feels it.

Pinky is not the only inhabitant of this stable of freaks.

Across the way is Blackjack, a black horse with black wings—wings that are neither swan-like nor elegant but rather bat-like and diseased. They twitch and tighten, even in the creature’s sleep. Blackie’s a real unpleasant animal. He bites. Thrashes. Has milky eyes that look right through her.

In a farther stall is Goosedown (a horse with no wings and
no fur at all but rather an entire body covered in dirty white feathers) and then Stubby (four too-short legs and a set of stubby nodules protruding over the animal’s shoulders as if the creature once had wings but someone clipped them off).

None of these are their official names.

They’re just the names Gwennie’s given them. Better than calling them Subject #312 or Subject #409.

These animals are the lucky ones.

Many others were born with deformities far too severe. Horses without skin. Without legs. Blind, deaf, hearts outside their bodies. One of them was finally born with a beautiful chestnut coat and wings like feathers from the softest pillow—and then when they asked it to fly, they shoved it over the edge (for it’s not a horse’s inclination to leap into the void), and the wings unfurled and tried to catch air. . . .

The horse pitched forward, heavy in the front, and dropped like a brick through the air.

Sure to die a terrible death upon striking the ground somewhere far below their feet.
Probably,
she thinks just now,
crushing some poor Heartlander’s house.

Flying horses.
A Pegasus.
The Empyrean wants a Pegasus. Like the one on their official sigil. Something to represent them. Some iconic ideal of—what was it that Harrington had said? “The iconic ideal of man’s dominance over nature and proof that he deserves to sit at the manor table with the Lord and Lady themselves.”

He didn’t seem convinced by that line of nonsense, and neither was she. Not that she had much room to argue anyway, what with her being the stall-mucker of mutant Pegasuses.

The life of a Lottery winner laid bare.

She scoops another load of soggy corn piss-mush into the small wagon, and the horse apples (or as she likes to call them, “Pegasus pears”) thud-bump against the metal bottom. Then she pulls the wagon to the far end of the room past the other stalls—Blackjack stomps his hooves and gives her a demonic look—and grabs the handle to the hatch and lifts.

The wind fills the room and rustles her hair, and the volume of the flotilla’s engines and hover-panels becomes more than just a droning thrum—it fills the space, an ear-ringing roar that upsets all the horses.

She stops for a moment. Gazing down, down, down—there, below, the endless corn of the Heartland carved into squares and lined by the various motorvators (tillers, threshers, seeders, sprayers), all of which look like Scooter’s toys from way up here.

Scooter. The Heartland. Cael. Boyland.

Her heart hurts. She blinks back tears. Gwennie bites the inside of her cheek, tastes blood, and feels that little jolt of pain that spins the thread of her grief into a tattered rag of rage—
I hate this place; I hate these people; I want to go home.

Eyes winced, she upends the wagon.

Corn husks and Pegasus waste go out through the hole.

And fall. Breaking apart in midair. Bits turning to specks turning to nothing. She thinks,
We always used to wonder exactly why shit was falling on our heads.
And not necessarily metaphorically, either.

Just then the door to the stable flings open.

Young Balastair Harrington, the man behind the genetic half of the Pegasus Project, hurries into the room, leading as
he always does with his head and shoulders. Gwennie thinks he looks as if he’s in a perpetual state of almost falling forward, his legs the eager and only saviors that stop him from landing on his face.

He’s a few years older than she is. Different from the Heartlanders she knows. They’re rugged, dirty, broad shouldered. He’s thin and bony, like an articulated wooden doll. Handsome, though. In his own peculiar way.

He is not dressed in his usual white coat. His hair is not in its typical disarray: the blond wisps atop his head have been tamed and forced to lie down, and his white coat has been replaced with a pinstriped mandarin collar suit, the stripes themselves a liquid gold that bubbles and climbs from hem to shoulders. An effect that is, in its way, quite hypnotizing.

A caviling grackle with a small jeweled collar hops about on his shoulder. Wings fluttering. The bird is Erasmus. Forever on Balastair’s shoulder—though Gwennie’s never seen the jeweled collar on the bird before.

Or the pinstriped suit coat.

“Why are you—” she starts to ask, but he interrupts her.

“We’re late!” he barks—a sentiment of panic, not anger.

“Late!” Erasmus chirps. The small, bruise-colored bird shakes its wings and dances side to side.

“Late for what?” she asks.

“Late,” he hisses through clenched teeth, “
for the party
.”

THE RIVER SLURRY

THE RAIL-RAFT ROCKETS FORTH
.

Lane hoots and cackles while Rigo winces, eyes mostly shut.

For Cael’s part, he just likes the reminder of how it feels to captain his own boat and to stand at its helm. As if he’s the knife that cuts the sky in half—wind sliced in twain, rushing on all sides.

They got the raft moving pretty fast by jamming a pair of dry, broken cornstalks against the earth—stalks they’d taken on the first morning of travel to use as makeshift oar-poles. The brace roots were thick; the stalks were stiff. Rigo asked Cael if he could use the butt end of Pop’s lever-action rifle, but Cael shot him a look that contained the singular message of
Have you lost your cotton-headed mind?