Blightborn (40 page)

Oh, Erasmus,
Balastair thinks with some pain.

Everything in this place is made of metal, it seems. Brasses, bronzes, silvers, a little chrome, a dash of titanium. Gaudy and impressive at the same time. He hates it. He hates all of it.

From upstairs, the thud of footsteps.

A voice. “Cleo? Is someone here?”

Accompanied by the mechanized chirping of his little monkey.

Ahh. There we go.

The footsteps grow closer. Down the steps. Through the hall. Toward the parlor. Here.

He steps into the room. Sees Cleo first—

His face is a mask of fear and rage.

It gives Balastair pause. That Eldon Planck loves Cleo is a thought that never occurred to him before. He always assumed it was just a power play against him. The Mechanics Man thumbing his nose at the Biological Boy. Playing with his toys. Breaking them in.

“You,” Eldon says.

The little mechanical monkey on his shoulder recoils, whirring and purring in a mimicry of fear.

Balastair shoots Eldon.

As the man falls, the monkey screeches, leaps to the birdcage, and clings there, shuddering. Metal limbs chattering together.

Balastair strides over. Grabs a hip-height ashtray from the corner. Then rushes the birdcage and smashes it into the little monkey.

The artificial primate breaks into pieces. Pieces that continue to chirp and twitch. Balastair bashes the ashtray down again and again. Until the auto-primate stops moving.

He drops the ashtray. Then strides over to Eldon.

Eldon gurgles. Spits. His face is the color of split pea soup. His eyes are slightly jaundiced. “You . . . bastard.”

Balastair shoots him again. And a third time.

Then he kneels.

“I concede the Pegasus Project,” Balastair says through the teeth of a mad smile. “Congratulations! You were the better man for that task. For many tasks, it seems: bedding my future wife, building that horse, sucking up to the loftiest among us for lucrative contracts like . . . what is it called? The Initiative? Dare I ask what that even is?” He shrugs. “You seem out of sorts. I’ll slice through all this airy talk, then, and get right to the dirt of it. I want your Pegasus. I want the mechanical beast. It’s mine now. I’m buying it with your life. To be clear, what I’m offering is
not to kill you
in exchange for control of the metal horse. Please nod if you accept my offer.”

Eldon hesitates.

Balastair presses the gun barrel to his head. Visibly turns the dial at the back of the weapon all the way up—away from
STUN
, through
MUSCLE FAILURE
, through
ORGAN DAMAGE
, all the way to
PUNCH A HOLE THROUGH THE BRAIN PAN AND SPILL ONE
’
S BLOODY MEMORIES ONTO THE FLOOR
.

“
Nod
if you accept my offer, Eldon Planck.”

Eldon slowly but clearly nods.

Balastair grins, pats the man on the back. “Ah. Then we have a deal. Seems I just bought myself a horse, and you just bought yourself a second chance.”

LAMBS LED TO SLAUGHTER

“YOU’RE SURE
this is going to work?” she asks, hands balling into fists and relaxing again and again, a nervous tic.

Gwennie and Davies stand in the mouth of the alley. Behind them, Squirrel bebops around like a rubber ball bouncing between the white stone walls. The little girl slices at the air with one of her knives.

“It’ll work,” he says.

“I just . . .”

“You just go over. You tell that skybastard who you are.”

There, down toward the circle, standing near a fountain, is one of the
evocati augusti
, a tall guardsman milling about, looking bored. Rifle clipped to his back. Thrum-whip at his hip. Here on the flotilla they don’t wear their trademark horse-head helmets.

“He won’t . . . kill me?”

“Not long as you tell him you want to give up the rest of us. That’ll buy you some time. Get you close to your family.”

“And you’ll save me?”

“You save them, and I’ll save you. I’ll follow you. Me and Squirrel will dog your every step.”

“Doggy!” Squirrel says, giggling. She’s got two knives in her hands now, doing battle with whatever invisible combatant has sprung forth from her imagination. “
Ruff ruff!
”

“This suddenly seems like an insane plan,” Gwennie says.

“Don’t knock insanity until you’ve tried it, girl.”

“Just in case I die,” she says, “I gotta know. Why do you call me dummy?”

“Because we’re all dummies. Anybody who wants to be a part of the Sleeping Dogs is a dummy. Who just can’t leave well enough alone. Can’t keep tonguing the broken tooth or picking that scab every time it heals. Instead of just rolling over and enjoying the sunshine or the blue sky, we snarl and we bite and piss on what little we have in the rare and desperate hope of making a better world.” He offers a grim smile. “Sounds pretty dumb to me.”

It does. Dumb, and heroic, and maybe absolutely necessary.

He snorts. “Enough of this. Time ticks. Go get your family back.”

And with that she leaves the safety of the alley and heads toward the guardsman near the white fountain.

Mary Salton stands at her pine-board table—the makeshift desk. A simple desk. Unadorned. Like her.

Her father made coffins. Her mother hemmed pants, darned socks, patched holes in clothes.

They were simple people who made simple things.

Things are no longer simple. Mary wishes for a day when they can again be simple—for her, for her people, for the Heartland. That day is not today. Today is complicated. Lots of moving parts. Lots of hard decisions that are already made but will be difficult to execute.

Out behind the doors of her office, the raiders ready themselves for war. Sharpening blades. Painting lines on their wolfish masks. Stringing smoke bombs to their belts. Some will have pistols. Others hammers or shovels.

Soon they will storm the control tower. As the peregrine is focused on effecting his revenge, they will take advantage of his averted gaze and move to the tower. There, they will await the code from Killian.

He’d better have that soon.

She checks her maps. Closes her eyes, goes through the plan.

Then at the end of it she opens a leather satchel at her feet.

And she withdraws a revolver. A bona fide revolver. Heavier than any of the flimsy-feeling sonic shooters. Heavy with weight, yes—blued steel and iron sights. Cylinder etched with whorls of scrollwork. The grip carved in a checkerboard pattern.

It’s heavy also with power and consequence.

At the base of the grip, the symbol of the Sleeping Dogs.

Underneath the barrel, the sigil of the one who carried the pistol: a five-petaled flower allowed to oxidize with rust.

The sign of Corpse Lily.

One of the Sawtooth Seven.

And Mary Salton’s own sister.

She takes the pistol. Thumbs open the cylinder, grabs a fistful of bullets from inside the satchel, screws them delicately into each slot.

Then, outside—

Men yelling. A sudden din. Shrieking blasts—sonic weapons.

Her hand tightens around the grip of the revolver. She jerks the weapon hard to the right, snapping the cylinder shut.

We’re under attack.

Somebody gave us up.

The girl,
she thinks.
Shawcatch.
Instead of abiding by the plan, she’s sold them all downriver. Is that even possible this fast? She admits now that the girl was a risk: Salton chose to play on her anger and need for revenge over everything else. Judgment muddled by the fog of hot blood and spite. Her plan was always to leave the girl to the Empyrean, a lamb skidding about on the blood-slick floor of the slaughterhouse, but she didn’t think that would come back and bite her so fast.

Maybe it hasn’t. Maybe this is something else.

Either way—

She sets down the revolver, grabs the visidex from the far side of the table. She quickly sends a message out to Davies. The missive makes clear that this is on him now. She sends him the maps and schematics he needs.

He’s a good soldier. Was once a righteous muck-up, but now he’s the real deal. He’ll do the right thing. He always has. And he will until it’s over.

Her door is suddenly thrown open—

She sees a flash of a ponytail and a panic-stricken face. It’s
one of her raiders, Elsie Golden. They call her Goldie even though her hair is dark and so is her skin. Goldie yells, “The peregrine’s guard—”

A screaming sonic blast pulps her head, taking her face off the front of her skull. Blood and bone bits spray, and then she falls.

Salton’s chest tightens, and she points the revolver at the door, the iron sights never wavering.

It doesn’t take long for the din to die down.

She hears footsteps approaching.

She fires a shot through the open door. A warning. The air suddenly stinks with spent powder. In her ears is a tinny bell caught midring.

“You’re armed,” calls a voice from beyond the doorway. She knows it. How could she not? Peregrine Lemaire-Laurent. “With something more than a peashooter, it would seem.”

“You come through that door, I’m gonna shoot,” she barks.

He laughs. “That’s why I’m not planning on coming through that door. But I do plan on powering down the lights. It’ll take me a little while to cut through whatever defensive programming you’ve done to stay hidden from the rest of the circuit, but I’ll find it. And then? When it’s dark? I’ll send in men. You’ll probably shoot one, but we have excellent health care here on the flotilla—he will live, perhaps. You’ll live, too. Because we want you to live. Because we want you to tell us
everything
. Everything you know about your terrorist group. How they stay hidden from our scans. How they’re organized. Who belongs. Names, faces, locations, anything and everything. And you’ll tell us. Because the first thing we’ll offer you is a spoonful of honey. And when
you inevitably reject our generous offer, we won’t break out the knives or the pliers. We’ll just give you the pharma-cocktail. The one that
makes
you tell us everything. When you first skinned your knee. When you had your first bleeding as a woman. When you smoked your first ditchweed cigarette. And you’ll tell us everything there is to know about the Sleeping Dogs.”

Mary holds the gun close.

Nostrils flare with panicked breath that she’s desperately trying to still. She says a small prayer to anybody who will listen: Jeezum Crow, Old Scratch, any and all of the Saintangels.
Save me. Give me a plan.
She thinks,
Run out, shoot Peregrine
. But they won’t kill her. They’ll still save her. Even if he’s dead, she’ll be on the hook for all this.

And so that means one thing.

She takes the butt of her pistol, smashes the visidex. It won’t stop them from finding things out, but it’ll slow them down. And the Dogs have switchback programming in place; he won’t learn everything.

Then she tastes the metal tang of the gun barrel.

The sights scraping the roof of her mouth.

Another small prayer.

Her finger squeezes—

It’s a mess.

The peregrine wades into the room.

He can’t help but feel disappointed.

Salton, collapsed backward. Half her head just . . . gone.

He really thought she’d give in. The fact that she’d rather die
than give him anything else is . . . well, it shows her devotion to her cause. Which is admirable. Or would be, if her cause wasn’t so misguided.

He plucks the gun from her hand.

He’s never held one of these before.

To think it was here all along. On his flotilla.

Heavy. Balanced. A brutal weapon—its barrel like a perpetually screaming mouth. Contained therein is none of the elegance of the Rossmoyne at his hip. But maybe this is a time to put aside elegance. Maybe the fight is so serious, so real, that these terrorists would up and sacrifice themselves when offered a very real way out of pain and suffering.

Maybe it’s time for him to become a brutal weapon.

Peregrine carries the gun out of the room. To his men who come in after, he says, “Sweep the room. Let’s learn everything we can.”

His visidex
ding
s.

A message:
We have the Shawcatch girl.

Well, well, well.

As he steps over the bodies of raiders in the hallway, he thinks that this has been a very good morning, indeed.

They take her away. Davies watches as they cuff her. Kick her legs out from under her so they can cuff those, too. Another
evocati augusti
shows up a minute later. By now onlookers have gathered. They gape and stare as the guards haul her off the way one might lug a rolled-up carpet.

And then they cheer.
Clap, clap, clap.

He wants to hurt them for that.

“Will she be okay?” Squirrel asks, poking her head through his legs as if they’re a pair of iron bars in a jail window.

“I think so, Squirrel. We’re gonna save her and her family.” Salton doesn’t care if he saves her, but he’s got to. His heart tells him so, whispered in the voice of his dead wife, Retta. While he saves Gwendolyn and her family, the other raiders—