Blightborn (39 page)

Over the corn, with the wind, comes that singsongy voice—a woman’s voice. The Maize Witch’s voice. “
I can help you, Cael. Come to me. Come to me. . . .
”

The Blighted echo her in unison. “
Come to me
.”

“I won’t. Leave me be, godsdamnit!”

“
I will help you control it. I will help you save your friends. . . .
”

“
Control it . . . ,
” the Blighted hiss. “
Save your friends . . .
”

Then the Blighted, now ten feet in front of him, step to the side, revealing a way through. The dead, dry corn shudders in the earth. Stalks contort and snap like bones breaking. Like Brank’s arm.

They form a path. A path that grows longer as more and more stalks twist and break farther and farther away. He can still hear them in the distance as the path is made.

Over the corn, the voice whispers, “
Walk the path, Cael McAvoy. . . .
”

“
Walk the path
,” the Blighted echo.

“Walk the path,” Cael says himself. He draws a deep breath and wills his feet forward. It is time to meet the Maize Witch.

PART FIVE

HEAVEN’S FALL

THE INITIATIVE

IS THIS MY HOME NOW?

That question haunts Simone Agrasanto. She feels trapped by the mayor’s house, by this town, by the whole of the Heartland. It’s as if her boots are stuck in the mud, and the day she envisions wrenching them free is seeming more and more like a fantasy.

She tosses. She turns. The sheets on the mayor’s bed are snarled around her legs like a tangle of ivy.

Eventually she kicks them off.

She’s a proctor. That means administrating not just one town but many. Herding the Babysitters to do their job. Ensuring that sanctioned holidays go off without a hitch and that nonsanctioned holidays are pounded into the dust like a tenpenny nail. All in all, it’s her job to inflict order and bureaucracy on these land apes, these dirt-cheeked, blister-fingered, back-broken workers.

As she heads into town, toward Busser’s, she passes by townsfolk. Gives a lift of her head to Doc, who sweeps the front of his office with a ratty broom. He gives her a small smile, yells that it’s going to be a nice day. She yells back her agreement, even though she knows it won’t be. It’ll be sunny and warm, but the breeze will be like a stillborn calf, and the smell of sweat and dust will still cling to the inside of her nose like a rime of grease.

She passes by the Tallyman’s office and spies Frieda Wessel inside, working a visidex—a piece of technology she really shouldn’t have, but Agrasanto felt bad for her and procured her one on the sly. Simone knocks on the window. Frieda smiles.

It’s a small town, but she sees a lot of people. Little Gabby Tremayne playing with a barrel hoop. Her uncle Stanley popping kernels off a cob with the flat of a knife, setting up rat traps. The oldest Poltroon son, hammering tread onto the wheels of a Harvester-Bot with a big wrench; they still never found his father. Walking toward the provisionist’s is Francine Goggins, who will be disappointed to learn that provisions still haven’t come in, that Boxelder has been shut off from that. Of course, the girl has other reasons to be disappointed—her Obligated is Lane Moreau. So Simone sidles up next to her, hands her a couple of protein bars from her own stash. Francine smiles, tries not to cry, and scurries off.

Most of the folks lift their heads, say a few words of greeting.

Inside Busser’s, she asks the tavern man, “Busser, I’m beginning to think people don’t hate me anymore.”

He shrugs, wiping off her table. “They don’t. You’re a better mayor than Barnes was.”

“I’m not your mayor.”

“Suit yourself, Proctor.”

She sits. Sets up her visidex. As she does, it
ding
s.

Her breath is almost stolen by the message.

First line:
You are to leave Boxelder, effective immediately, and return to active duty after three days of holiday
.

Her laugh is bold, broad. And maybe a little hollow.

Then she keeps reading.

You will be reassigned to the hunt for Arthur McAvoy—now believed to be terrorist raider Swift Fox.

Well. Barnes was right after all. Something
was
fishy about McAvoy.

Her bosses don’t know she has a posse set after Cael and his friends. They know she’s handling it; they just don’t know
this
is how she’s handling it. She thinks suddenly that perhaps she can do both at once. Have Boyland and his ragtag lot find Cael, and she’ll use Boxelder as her base to lure Arthur McAvoy into a trap.

She keeps reading.

The next sentence:
Boxelder has been chosen for the Initiative
.

And here her breath truly halts.

The Initiative.

She’s . . . heard stories. They popped up on the radar a year ago, bound up with a town out at the edge of the Heartland. Something Church? Tuttle’s. Tuttle’s Church.

If even half the stories are right . . .

She thinks of the people out here. Francine, Earl Jr., Stanley, Frieda, Gabby, Doc. Across the room, Busser gives her a small
smile. She reminds herself that she hates this place and she hates these people, but suddenly those words feel like lies.

Though loathe to admit it, she was starting to think of this place as her home. But that can no longer be true. It won’t be anybody’s home before long. She smiles back at Busser, tries to hide the fear on her face.

OFF TO SEE A MAN ABOUT A FLYING HORSE

THE MAN IN THE HAT
pulled low knocks on the door. The door is golden—on it, a depiction of one of the Saintangels (Alice of the City of Love) with her sickle held aloft, rays of bronze light cascading from her.

As the man knocks, the Saintangel moves. Unexpectedly, though the man realizes he
should
have expected it—

The door begins to
unfold
as the Saintangel emerges. The
tink-tink-tink
of gears and flywheels come from behind her as the flat-bodied Alice of the City of Love tilts forward like a cutout. The sickle eases aside. Her head cranes toward him. Her one eye opens; a telescoping lens thrusts out like a thumb through a hole. The lens focuses on the man with the hat.

“
Who goes there?
” the Saintangel asks in a mechanized feminine warble. “
Identify yourself before Alice-Bot
.”

Alice-Bot. Hmph. If one were religious, one might take offense at seeing a Saintangel reduced to so banal a creation.

“My name is Professor Reich. I’m from the Mader-Atcha flotilla.” He tries to affect Reich’s curious accent. “I was called upon.”

“
Scanning
. . . ,” the Alice-Bot says, the lens suddenly orbited by flickering red lights.

The man presses his thumb to it, mutters, “Ah, you’ve got a little something, a speck . . . a smudge.”

His thumb is greasy. It smears the lens.

The red lights never turn to green.

“
Confirmation impossible
,” the auto-mate hums. “
Human verification required
.”

Apparently these things can’t do
everything
, can they?

The Saintangel retreats into the door with a series of clicks and whirrs. Once again the door is still and silent, as if it never moved at all.

Eventually, footsteps.

More clicks—this time as someone opens the door.

It’s Cleo. Cleo
Planck
.

She gapes.

“Balastair,” she says, nearly breathless. But breathless with what? Fear? Love? Disbelief?
Not love,
he thinks. Couldn’t be. Not now. Not after she left him to be with this
trifling mechanic
.

Maybe it’s because of the gun in his hand.

“Back into the house,” Balastair says, “and I won’t shoot you.”

“You won’t shoot me,” she says. So confident. So cocky. She always was. It was part of why he loved—
loves
—her.

So he shoots her in the chest, then shoves her through the door.

He must hear her coming because he says her name as she approaches.

“La Mer,” Percy says.

“Hello, Percy.”

He stands there on the Balcony of Eagles. Overlooking Tailor’s Point Park. The apples down below are in season.
Always
in season.

He sips from a cup of steaming coffee.

“Come closer,” he finally says, still not looking at her.

She hurries up. Nervous. Her palms slick with sweat.

“This coffee is something special,” he says. “Grown on the Gravenost Ernesto Oshadagea. Ground coarsely. Cold brewed. Allowed to steep in wine barrels. Drink it cold or warm, it’s lovely. And it is a symbol of what we can do here as the Empyrean. We can grow coffee in the clouds. We’ve long escaped the gravity of the world below. We don’t need the Heartland.”

Merelda flinches at that. “You do need us. For the corn.”

He smiles. “If you say so.”

“I’m here to—”

“I don’t hate you Heartlanders. I should make that clear. I respect your people utterly, and you have every right to want what we want. Your people are hard workers, which is admirable, to a point. The problem is, you work
hard
but are not particularly
smart
. You’re good people in the sense that you seem noble, but ‘good’ is not a necessary component to success. We are smart. We are successful. And so that is why I get to drink coffee grown here in the sky.”

He takes a noisy sip as if to emphasize.

“I—”

“Why have you come back to me, La Mer?”

“We have something special.”

“Had,”
he says. “Past tense. You hit me with a lamp.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I had to have my head stapled.”

She sees the way he draws a breath through his nostrils, the way he purses his lips and closes his eyes for a moment. “You still love me.”

“I do,” he confesses.

“I know we can’t . . . be together—”

He grunts.

“But please, Percy. Just let me and the Shawcatch girl go. I don’t care what you do to the radiers. I’ll take her away; you won’t have to deal with us any longer—”

He reaches down and strokes her hair.

“You’re not like her,” he says. “The Shawcatch girl is tough as a leather belt. Hard as a stone. You’re soft. And sweet. Like a little marshmallow. And so that’s how I know you’ll yield to me.”

That last sentence, spoken so coldly.

“What?”

He grabs her face hard and squeezes. “You have their stink on you,” he says after a sigh. “Raiders. Terrorists. Heartlanders.
Dogs
. I’ll never be able to think of you as anything other than those things. A weak girl with a raider father and a criminal brother. A girl who betrayed me. Who ran off with that vile Shawcatch brat. A girl who threw away her trust like an old poppet doll that had come to bore her.”

“But you love me; you said you did—”

“And I do.”

“Please—”

He pulls out one of his Rossmoyne pistols.

She stares down the barrel. She has only a moment to wonder what it’s set to. Will it stun her? Or kill her?

The peregrine fires.

Cleo writhes on the floor, dry heaving.

It kills him, what he just did to her. But she’s made her alliances clear. She never would have let him in the door. Would never have let him get close to Planck. This is the easiest way. The sonic shooter on stun will leave her feeling ill, but only that. No scar other than the mental one that comes part and parcel with betrayal.

Balastair pulls her through the foyer into the parlor.

Fascinating.
This is Planck’s house then. Friezes on the wall that aren’t paintings at all but animatric sculptures—like the door. Men crossing rivers in boats. Men with artificial wings, flying toward the sun. Great ships drifting together—the forming of the first flotilla, if Balastair is not mistaken. A proud moment. And a dark one, in many ways.

In a cage, an auto-mate bird hops on its perch in alarm. Eyes that are little brass spirals turning. Wings clicking.