Blightborn (36 page)

“Gwendolyn. Yes. Do they have her? Do you know? They said they wouldn’t execute me until they had her in hand—”

“I do not believe they have her. But they seem confident that their move will work.”

“Move. What move?”

She tells him. How today the peregrine executed the girl’s father and then offered her a very public deal over the Empyrean signal. An
impossible
public offer to bring in not only herself, but her raider cohorts.

Balastair feels the color drain from his face.

He cannot imagine what this news will take from the girl.

“You can punish them before they punish you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You can rob them of the satisfaction they get from killing you.”

“I don’t . . . I can’t.”

The priestess takes his hand, presses the pill into the palm.

“Just in case you decide to reclaim your power.”

“I’ve never had any power.”

“History suggests otherwise.” A sly smile. Then she retreats from the bars of the cage. “May Saranyu bless you and carry you on the winds to the places your soul must see.”

And then she’s gone.

An hour later the priestess—Amrita is her name—returns to the birdcage room. There, in the center of the cage, the scientist lies on his back. Hair splayed out behind him. Arms wide in a gesture of openness to things behind this curtain, to things beyond this veil.

His chest rises and falls. Then stops for ten, fifteen seconds and rises and falls again. Little lifts. Little drops. Like the slowing heartbeat of a small animal: a hummingbird, a toad, a baby fell-deer.

And then it stops rising and falling altogether.

She withdraws her visidex. Taps the screen to record a message:

“It is done,” she says. She sends the message into the ether.

GUNBREAKER

THE RAIDER FLEET
—what’s left of it—hurtles out over the blasted Heartland, the Dead Zone where all that’s left is dry, lifeless stalks sticking up out of the split skin of dry earth. Cael sits toward the back of the trawler. The stalks look like bones to him. Arm bones. The desiccated tassels like skeletal hands, frozen and arthritic.

He also thinks,
I’m really drunk.

Everybody’s drinking. It’s a funeral of sorts for those they’ve lost. Though nobody’s talking about that. It’s just a lot of drinking and yelling. Boasting and belting songs. Play fighting that sometimes turns into real fighting. All of them forming one big pressure valve that needs release.

As the wind sweeps over him, so too do whispers.

Come to me, Cael
.

It’s almost time.

It’s as if they’re coming from inside his own head.

Or worse, inside his own heart.

But at the same time, he thinks he can hear them out there over the corn, just as he did when the twister ripped through—

Whatever. He takes another long pull of skee.

Ohhh. Warm. Hot. Cool. Everything foggy. All a little numb. The finger-stem scratches at the fabric of his shirt, and he smacks it the way you’d slap at a fly. He’s come to hate this thing just as he’s come to accept it as a part of him.

Lane approaches with Rigo—it’s slow going because that’s how it is with Rigo now, hobble-
thump
, hobble-
thump
. Lane holds a couple of tin cups. “A little something different,” he says with a slur. “White-fire moonshine. Guaram—” He blinks, laughs. “
Guaran
-damn-teed to strip the thoughts right out of your fool head. Which is about what I need right now.”

He doesn’t sit next to Cael so much as
drops
himself there, his long body slumped with the weight of the day’s events.

Nobody’s talking to them. Or looking at them.

They’re outcasts. Again. Anew.

Word spread fast, it turns out.

Cael’s been hunting with Mayhew. He learned to use the rifle a little better—how to use the sights. How to hug the butt of the rifle to his shoulder. How not to jerk the trigger but to squeeze it oh so gently—so that the shot is almost as much of a surprise to the hunter as it is to the hunted.

Cael didn’t kill anything. But Mayhew got a couple of Ryukyu rabbits out there in their dens—skinny things, patchy fur, but not sick in any way, so they’re part of the funeral feast going on.

But Cael’s not very hungry. Thirsty, yeah. Hungry, no.

When they got back inside, Mayhew helped Cael take the
rifle apart then. Showed him a small sigil scored into the steel: looked like a long, lean fox running.

Teeth out.

“Swift Fox,” Mayhew said. That was the name his father went by.

Cael says that name now, to Lane and Rigo: “Swift Fox.”

“What?” Rigo asks.

“The name of a famous raider,” Cael slurs.

“Not just a famous raider,” Lane says, “but one of the
most famous
raiders. One of the Sawtooth Seven. They founded the Sleeping Dogs.”

Cael tells them that Pop’s rifle had the Swift Fox sigil on it.

“Whoa,” Rigo says. “You think Pop maybe stole it from this raider?”

“Maybe Pop
killed
that Swift Fox,” Lane says.

“Maybe Pop
was
Swift Fox,” Cael answers.

The other two boys stare. Rigo laughs a little.

But Lane gets it.

“Oh, shit.”

Cael nods. “Yep.”

“Your pop was a raider.”

“I think so, yeah.”

“Explains why he was such a bona fide badass.”

Rigo adds: “And hiding out in Boxelder.”

Cael swigs from the moonshine. It’s like drinking torchfire. He winces,
urp
s, and tries not to throw up.

The whispers again:

Come to me, Cael.

Before it’s too late
.

Cael lurches forward and stands up.

Out behind the boat, the forest of dead corn recedes (
graveyard arms, skeleton hands, all reaching up, trying to pull the moon and stars out of the sky so that all we’re left with is darkness
). Dizzy, he dips and swoons.

Lane catches his arm.

“You all right?”

“I could just jump,” Cael says. “Just . . . fall out into the corn.”

“Cael, hey, c’mon now—”

“The Blight. I don’t want to become Earl Poltroon. I don’t want to hurt either one of you. And it could go that way.”

“It won’t,” Rigo says. An hour ago—as soon as the sun had gone down and the revelry started up—Cael had pulled Rigo into the bunk room and played the most uncomfortable game of I’ll Show You Mine in history.

Rigo, to his credit, hadn’t totally freaked out. Sure, he’d made a sound in the back of his throat like a cat caught under a motorvator. And his eyes had bugged out like a pair of chicken eggs about to plop into the nest.

“Can I see it?” he asks.

Cael gives him a look. “I showed you earlier.”

Rigo shakes his head. “No, I mean, the gun. I want to see the rifle. And the marking of the Swift Fox.” Even now he’s doing what Rigo does best: avoid, change the subject, talk about something else. Same way he never really talked about his father or mother or anything else that bothered him.

“It’s all back together again,” Cael says. “Though only takes a screwdriver to pop the stock off. Well. All right. Hell with it.”

He steps off the edge.

“I’ll go get the gun. Be back in two lambs of a shake’s tail. I mean—Well, Jeezum Crow, you know what I mean.”

And he trudges forward, the whiskey haze pulling him along as much as his own feet are.

Rigo’s worried.

He looks to Lane and says, “You think Cael’s gonna be all right?”

Lane’s smile is long gone. He stares down into his cup and slams back a gulp of white lightning. He winces and exhales sharply through his nose.

“Nope,” Lane says.

“The Blight’s pretty bad stuff.”

“And someone’s gonna find out soon enough.”

Rigo’s quiet for a while. He, too, looks down into his cup, but the fumes coming out of it seem as if they could strip the varnish off nice wood. Hell, or dissolve the wood into a goopy paste.

Finally, he says, “I’m sorry to hear about you and the captain.”

“He’s a prick.”

“You liked him.”

Lane sighs. “I did. I do.”

“Just because he was a raider?”

“At first. But something about him. Always smiling. Has his own way of saying things like he’s got two words for every one of ours. I felt hooked into him, connected somehow.” Lane shakes his head, looks sad. “I thought he didn’t care what everyone else thought. He told me as much. Turns out he’s like every other Heartlander out there: full of bad notions.”

“Not every other Heartlander,” Rigo says, trying to sound chipper.

“You’re such a kiss ass,” Lane says, smirking as he pulls out a cigarette. “Killian’s shacking up with Hezzie Orden now. That big-hipped girl from the crow’s nest? What a slut.”

“That’s mean. You don’t know she’s a slut.”

“Not her. Him.
He’s
the dang slut.”

“Oh.”

“You miss your leg?” Lane asks.

Rigo snorts. “That’s a dumb question.”

“Says the king of dumb questions.”

“That’s fair. Yeah, of course I miss it.”

“You miss your father?”

“I dunno. Maybe. Maybe I miss the idea of him. If not so much the actual
him
. That’s stupid. I dunno.” Rigo wonders if the old man really had been on that boat out there. And if he’d made it. A little part of him wants to see his father again, thinking,
Well, if he was coming after me, maybe he loved me.
Maybe he was going to try to do right by Rigo and his mom.

Or maybe he woulda stomped up and cuffed him in the ear and tied him to the back of the boat and made him run after, through the corn.

Wouldn’t be the first time.

Lane shrugs. “Isn’t stupid. I feel the same way about mine.”

“I wish things were back to normal. That we were back in Boxelder again. Harvest Home and Busser’s Tavern and heading out on scavenging runs with Cael and Gwennie.”

“I don’t wish that. Those days were bad, too, just in a way we didn’t much talk about.”

“Least then I had a leg. And Cael didn’t have the Blight.”

Lane shrugs. “If it wasn’t those things it would’ve been something else.”

Cael reaches under his cot. Finds the rifle there. On a lark he figures he’ll pocket some ammo. Take it back up there, start shooting off the back of the boat. Maybe see if they can hit a couple rotten cobs as they pass by—moon’s out fat and bright; should be able to see all right.

It’ll draw attention. Gun going off like that. It should. Cael feels bold all of a sudden. Bolstered by a kind of unsettled, unfixed anger. It’s the whiskey, but it’s also not the whiskey.
Let them come,
he thinks. He’ll wave the gun around, drunk. Let them worry. Let Killian try to stop him.

“I’ll shoot you dead between the eyes.” Cael growls even though he doesn’t mean it. Just the same, it feels mighty good to say.

He starts to head back. But before he does—

He hears footsteps in the hall.

And then voices.

Killian. And the first mate, Billy Cross.

Cael once again finds himself in the position of snoop.

Cross is in the middle of saying something. “They say it’s happening tomorrow morning. The timetable’s moved up.”

“Well, shit, Billy, that puts us in a rather
contorted
position, wouldn’t you say? We won’t be at Tuttle’s Church for at least another day of hard going—that twister sucked the spit right out of us.”

They both head toward Killian’s chambers, their backs to Cael.

He sneaks out into the hallway. Creeps up behind them.

Killian. That sonofabitch. He wants to give him what-for. Teach him a lesson for hurting his friend. Above deck, there were too many others. But down here, maybe, just maybe—

I’ll shoot you dead between the eyes
.

But then another voice, not his own:

Come to me, Cael. Find me. Find . . . me. . . .

“Is what it is,” Billy is saying. “Seems like the horse is out of the barn on this one, Cap.”

Killian says, “Reckon we just keep pushing ourselves inevitably forward then, Billy Cross. We may submit a prayer to the Lord and Lady above that—” They walk through the door and shut it behind them, but Cael can hear the conversation continued, if now muffled. “—we don’t encounter too much resistance there in Tuttle’s Church. But if what we’re hearing is true, well.”

“We’re hearing the Empyrean isn’t even there anymore.”

“And neither are the good people of Tuttle’s Church. That seem like the proper sum of all the parts to you? Doesn’t to me, Billy Cross, doesn’t to me. If the data bank is still there in the old mine, I’ll piss in my own eyes if they aren’t protecting it somehow.”

Cael thinks,
Now’s the time. Push open the door. Tell Killian what’s what. Tell him he hurt your friend. Put your gun under his chin, your boot up his barrel bung—let the whiskey and the bullets do the talking
.

And he’s about to.

But then he hears Billy Cross say, “Lotta people gonna die when that flotilla comes down.”