Blightborn (46 page)

Esther turns to him, her fingers still on his neck. “We think of mercy as a gift given, and sometimes it is. But know that sometimes it returns to us like the crack of a whip in an ill-trained hand. Sometimes mercy is a gift to others but an injury to ourselves.”

There, again, her scent filling his nose. Flowers and sweetness. His vision goes soft at the edges. He realizes suddenly,
It’s more than that, more than just her perfume—she’s inside me.
He can feel her there. Pushing. Pulling. Not in any one direction, but reminding him that she can, if she wants to.

Then she’s gone. The scent from his nose. Her presence from within his heart and his mind.

“Let him go,” he says one last time.

And like that, the vines uncoil, and Boyland drops to the floor like an anvil tossed from a second-story window.
Whump.
He gasps. Props himself up on his elbows, rubbing his neck and panting like a thirsty goat.

Boyland looks at Cael with a feral gaze.

“Shoulda known you were a Blighter now,” he growls.

“Don’t push me,” Cael says. “I’m letting you leave.”

Boyland stands, dusting himself off. His throat is a ring of red already darkening to a wine-dark bruise. His gaze flits left and right, scanning the room, the ceiling, Wanda, Esther, her two Blighted servants behind him. He’s sizing up his chances. “I oughta kill you here and now.”

“Good luck with that,” Cael says.

“This ain’t over,” Boyland says with a sneer.

“Good luck with that, too.”

Esther walks to the door and stands between her two Blighted servitors. “You have been granted a reprieve on this day. And now I’d like you to leave my home.”

She opens the door.

Just as a boat crashes into it.

Boyland’s always thought of his yacht as a woman. It’s big and bold in the front, which to him calls to mind a heaving bosom, a heavy bust of a beautiful lady.

And that lady’s fist is now jamming itself through the front doorway—as if she’s punching somebody right in the mouth.

The boat breaks apart the wall—walls already weak and half rotten by the looks of them—and part of the ceiling collapses, too. Seeing his boat’s hull crack and rupture is like a knife stuck up between his ribs—

But it’s a wound swiftly salved by seeing all of it fall atop the witch-woman and her two Blighted monsters in a big, godsdamn heap.

Because with that, everything has changed.

Boyland cracks his knuckles.

Cael stands in the middle of the room. Gaping, gawking.

“Now,” Boyland says, “I’m going to make you hurt.”

Cael blinks.

Boyland reaches out.

The Blight strikes. The vine uncoils from Cael’s arm as fast as lightning discharging from a rain-heavy cloud, and Boyland tries to catch it as it dives for his face—

He fails. Again a thick cord of green tightens around his throat—slamming Boyland back into the half-shattered hull of his own boat. Once. Twice. It pins him. He grabs the vine. Tries to twist it. Rip it. Tear it in half. But thorns suddenly line the vine, thrusting up into his palms—blood flows, his grip grows slick, and his vision darkens as the vine constricts.

Everything goes blurry. Cael’s vengeful shape is now just a hazy smear, like a smudge of oil across the lens of a spyglass.

Then, movement.

Behind Cael.

A loud
thud
.

The Cael-shape falls to the ground. The vine loosens. It uncoils and crawls back to Cael like a retreating serpent. Again Boyland is left with his skull throbbing, with air rushing fast and furious back into his blasted lungs.

Cael lies crumpled on his side, clutching his head.

Blood wets the back of his hair.

Wanda stands there with a broken board. It, too, is wet with red. Bits of hair stick to the end.

Her mouth goes slack with the horror of what she’s done.

The board clatters from her grip.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m sorry, sorry, so sorry.”

Boyland storms over.

He grabs Cael. Throws him over his shoulder. He says to Wanda, “C’mon, there’s a skiff out back.”

But she just stands there. Eyes wide. Trying to speak but failing.

“I said we gotta go!”

She’s trauma-jacked. Lost to him, like a motorvator off its program.

He doesn’t need her. He doesn’t even want her.

“Hell with you then,” he says, shoving past her.

Movement. Light filtered through closed eyelids. The world lifting and dropping, air pushed out of lungs in little puffs. Consciousness pushed out in little puffs, too—one moment awake, another moment down there in the dark, lost in the corn, falling
from the sky, trapped in an old pine box as hard heaps of broken earth mound on the lid.

And then Cael awakens for real, this time as the ground beneath him begins to vibrate and hum. He sits up, sees that he’s in a small open-air skiff, a six-seater with a head’s-up display flickering across a dirty, cracked windshield. He tries to remember what happened—
the Maize Witch, Boyland, Wanda, the Blight-vine around Boyland’s throat, then a creak of a board behind him and a white flashbulb of pain—

A familiar shape sits two rows ahead of him in the pilot’s seat—a bucket-headed silhouette, with short, square ears; broad shoulders. Boyland.
Boyland
. He looks around, sees that they’re in the skiff out back of Esther’s house—and that Boyland’s starting it up. The skiff lifts off the ground, the hover-panels blowing clouds of dust and pollen, yellow motes captured in midair before falling again to the ground.

Cael tries to clamber over the seats—

But his right arm, his
Blight
arm, is bound to a handrail running along the edge of the skiff, tied there with a loop of rope and a constrictor knot: a hard knot to undo, a knot he knows himself how to tie (though Lane was always better at that sort of thing). He tries to wrench his arm free—a ridiculous idea, he knows, and it only causes bursts of pain to rip through his shoulder like wildfire. He tries to will his Blight-vine to do something, anything, and it does suddenly—

The vine uncoils from his hand and reaches for Boyland—

But it’s too short. It whips across the air along the back of his neck like a beast’s tongue looking for a taste. Useless.

Boyland looks back. Grin as big as the broad side of a barn.

He gives Cael his middle finger.

Then something hits the side of the boat like a bull—
boom!

Cael thinks,
It’s her. Esther is here
.

But someone climbs up over the edge of the boat. Someone Cael thought he’d never see again: Eben Henry.

No, no, no—no!

“Thought you were dead,” Boyland says.

“Let’s go,” the hobo barks. Boyland launches the skiff skyward.

EDGE OF THE WORLD

THE ELEVATORS
won’t work for them. They don’t have the right faces. They don’t have the right voices. None of the dead guards has a visidex. Gwennie asks Squirrel how she got here, and the girl—after a couple clumsy ballet twirls, a bloody knife held in her little hand—says she came in through the ducts like they always do because nobody in the flying city ever likes to look in “dark places.”

Gwennie hunkers down in front of Squirrel.

“Are you okay?” she asks her.

“Ducky,” the little girl says, a manic gleam in her eyes. One that suddenly rattles Gwennie to the core.

“Thank you for saving us.”

“Papa said to.” Her face suddenly scrunches up as if she’s trying to think about what she wants to eat for breakfast. “But he also said not to kill anybody, and I think I maybe killed some people.”

Gwennie doesn’t know what to say to that. She brings Scooter over. His tears have dried, but he looks like a rag that’s been wrung out. “This is my little brother, Scooter.”

“Hiya, Scoots!” she says. “I’m Squirrel.”

“Hi,” Scooter says. A fearful, uncertain voice that sounds as if it lives a thousand miles away. Gwennie thinks,
This is going to mark him. He’ll either turtle into himself or he’ll become like Squirrel—numb to it, maybe a killer.
Neither option is a good one.

She has to get them off this city. Now.

She has no idea how to do that.

But Squirrel chimes in: “We’re near the Fabrication District! Papa says that’s where they make stuff and that’s where ships will be.”

Ships
.
There we go!
Gwennie asks Squirrel, “Can we get there without using the elevators? Is there a way?”

The gleeful twinkle in Squirrel’s eyes again. “Yup! We just follow the edge and”—here another pirouette—“voilà!”

Gwennie stands. Gathers everyone.

“We okay with the plan? We’re going to play follow the leader, and this little girl is going to take us to some ships. Once there we’re going to . . .” She takes a deep breath. “Get off this floating city. We good?”

Suddenly, her mother pulls her aside.

“Your . . . your father . . .”

“I saw,” Gwennie says. Her throat tightens. She pushes emotion down inside her into the rest of the churn. “Mom, we have to go.”

“He loved you, and we never knew what it would be like up here.”

“Mom, please—”

“Gwennie, we’re so sorry. We’re so, so sorry. This place is poison. If we knew what happened to Lottery winners—”

She doesn’t mean to, but she shouts at her poor mother: “Mom! I can’t do this right now. Later. Okay?
Later
. We have to
move
.”

Her mother looks shocked—but blessedly, she’s shocked into submission. The woman gives a curt nod.

“Squirrel,” Gwennie says. “Lead the way.”

They’re coming.

And Davies still doesn’t have the code.

He’s in the control room. Getting up here was hard enough—he had to shoot the Elevator Man with the sonic shooter three times before he could even get into the circuitry and command the damn thing to take him up. He silently thanked the many years he, as a field shepherd, had to tend to an occasionally (more like
frequently
) grumpy motorvator. Helped him learn his way around electronics and electrical systems.

The elevator took him up.

Then he destroyed all the circuitry, ensuring it would never take him down again. He tries now not to think about what that means, about how this is a one-way trip for sure, about how all he has here in his last stand is the image of his wife and daughter living inside his head.

Don’t think. Pay attention. Present, not the past. The future isn’t written. All you’ve got is the right bloody now, dummy
.

At first he thinks the control room is some kind of joke, a
prank for anybody dumb enough to try to break in. The console is brushed nickel, all curves and contours but not a single button, switch, lever, or knob. No screen, either. Just a wraparound window showing the whole of the flotilla in every direction. He laughs looking at it. Just a cruel joke, a dummy station for a dummy intruder.

But then he runs his hands along it—

And it responds to his touch.

Metal pulls away from metal; invisible seams suddenly become visible as pieces of the outer shell slide back or lift up and out of the way, like pieces of an old puzzle coming apart before his very eyes.

There, then, sit all the buttons, switches, levers, and knobs.

A black keyboard awaits.

Two antennas—the amber metal of polished brass—rise up over the sides of the console. They crackle and spark.

Between them an image is projected: a single, winking cursor.

It wants a code.

It wants
the
code.

And he still doesn’t have it.

He hears them now. The shouts of men drifting up to this central tower. Soldiers. Guardsmen. Trying to hammer their way in. Maybe there’s an emergency way up—certainly should be, given that the central control tower commands all aspects of the flotilla. Automated, for the most part, but for a single code override . . .

He checks his pistol’s battery. It still glows green, though its color has dimmed. Another ten shots it’ll be orange; another ten
beyond that, red, and then that weapon is dead until he can find another battery to screw in.

So he tries to still his heart and quiet his mind. And he looks out over the flying city. The afternoon sun caught in a hundred skyscraper windows. The many hills with their many homes. Skybridges and elevator conduits. Ships at the edges of the city, some of them flying over and through.

Beautiful. A feat of human engineering. And kept from the bulk of humanity. A privilege reserved only for those lofty enough and with the right heritage. It’s a shame, really—he doesn’t want to do what he has to do. But the Empyrean have to learn. They have to learn that you kick a dog long enough, eventually that dog’s gonna bite.

Squirrel is fast while the rest of them are slow. She hops railings, clambers under and over metal grates, swings on chains to close gaps—frequently she disappears out of sight, which at first worried Gwennie. But over time the same events play out in sequence again and again: Squirrel dashes ahead with great nimbleness and what seems to be no fear, then disappears, leaving them all behind. But soon they catch up and she’s there, waiting for them. Impatiently, arms crossed over her chest.