Blightborn (7 page)

Eben sniffs. “I got my own brand of lullaby right here.” He holds up a brown jug. Something splashes around inside of it. “Bottle of rotgut fixy.” He pats the jug and hands it off to Lane, who takes a long pull and comes away wincing and clearing his throat.

“That’s like drinking”—Lane hacks into his fist—“like drinking motorvator fuel.”

He passes the bottle to Rigo, who takes a swig and spits it out—right into the burn barrel. The fire flares up, vengeful, and Rigo yelps like a startled puppy. Cael can’t help it; he starts cracking up, and soon Lane follows. Even Eben chuckles, a shoulder-shaking
huh huh huh
.

“That’s the worst thing ever,” Rigo says, looking stung. “You guys, seriously, it was really gross.”

Cael reaches for the jug, takes a turn. It’s like swallowing piss-soaked razors. The jagged glass slides all the way down his throat and into his belly, but once there a wave of heat radiates outward, filling him with a pleasant warmth. “That’s a real horse kick,” he says, voice raw.

He hands off the jug to Eben, who takes a swig.

“I make it myself,” he says. “It does the trick.” His eyes rove over them, flashing in the firelight. “I’m hungry. What’s in the bag?”

Seems pushy,
Cael thinks,
but that’s all right
. They told him they’d share, so they’ll share. Rigo starts pulling the last of their vegetables: a bulbous sweet potato, another grub-white parsnip, a few stubby, fat-bellied carrots. Eben whistles.

“Don’t see vittles like that much,” he says.

They all pause, a collective hesitation. Cael fumbles around for an explanation. “We, ah, we have a little garden on the side.”

“Root veggies grow well in hard soil,” Lane says, lying.

Rigo just buttons up and stares, visibly nervous.

Eben shrugs. “I don’t care where you got ’em. Food is food. Like the saying goes, You don’t pick fleas off a shuck rat.”

He wanders away, and Lane looks to Cael and mutters, “Actually, I’d pick fleas off a shuck rat.” Cael shrugs and says, “Shoot, me too.”

Isn’t long before Eben comes back with a couple pieces of wire that they use to spear the vegetables and hold them over the barrel, slowly turning them so that the vegetables grow dark from the fire’s kiss. He pulls out a couple strips of rat jerky, too—it’s hard and salty and tastes like it’s just this side of gone south, but it goes okay with the sweet char of the vegetables, and once
they all start getting enough fixy in their bellies, nothing tastes like much anymore.

Soon they’re telling stories—Lane talks about the time he stole what he thought was chicha beer from Busser’s but it ended up being mop water (“I drank the whole damn thing, too, wondering why I wasn’t getting drunk!”) and how he threw up for hours after. Rigo talks about that time he got chased around by one of Bende Cartwright’s goats, but that story ends on a down note when Rigo mentions what his father did to him after. (“He locked me in the shed for the night because he said no son of his was scared of no goat.”) Cael talks about the first time he and Gwennie were fooling around, how they found a space in the attic of her house and how her little brother, Scooter, caught them with their shirts off, pawing at each other like clumsy bears. (“That poor kid cried for a week!”) And that gets everybody laughing again, and they’re all drunk, and Cael can’t see straight—he can feel his teeth but not his lips; his hands are like numb mitts; his toes are soft clay-blobs in his ragged boots.

He takes note that whenever they pass the jug to the hobo he doesn’t take too big a swig, and when Cael finally asks, Eben shrugs and says, “Got to be clear for my boy.”

That’s when Cael asks him, “The mother’s not around anymore?”

“She died” is all he says, and for a moment his face sags with sadness as he looks into the fire.

But just then the baby starts crying again, making that hitching, stitching cry that ramps up fast to hunger or irritation or whatever it is that upsets a baby in this dead and empty place.

Eben starts to get up but then looks at Rigo and says, “You—Little Brown Mouse. Go check on the boy.”

“Me?” Rigo asks, flummoxed. He hasn’t been drinking like the other two, not as much anyway, so Cael gives Rigo a shove.

“Go help the man out. He
did
fish your butt out of the slurry.” Speaking of slurry, he can hear his own words running together, mushy like mashed peas. “Least you can do is go . . . do whatever that baby needs.”

“Probably needs a burping,” Eben says. “Pick him up, pat his back.”

Rigo stands, laughing, saying, “Okay, okay,” but then a horrified look crosses his face. “What if he’s got . . .” Rigo points to the back of his pants.

“Shit in his britches?” Eben says, and that makes Cael and Lane whoop with laughter. “For the sake of Old Scratch, what do you think? If his wrapping’s fouled, Little Mouse, change it.”

“Sure, sure,” Rigo says, and then scurries off like, well . . . just like a little mouse.

Cael and Lane both keep laughing until their guffaws kind of . . . lose steam, like a motorvator slowly powering down. Eben comes up behind them, taking the jug and then circling back around to the far side of the barrel. He looks over both of them, his black eyes catching the dancing firelight, and he says with a flinty smile, “You know the Rovers aren’t real, don’t you?”

LOST AT SEA

GWENNIE HEARS ANNALISE
calling for her. But she’s already marching forward, ducking into the crowd and around it, peering over it, crawling through it, and it’s then that the party reminds her of being out in the Heartland on the boat, over the corn. Lost with no sense of bearings. The horizon a meaningless guide.

Here it’s a sea of strange faces. Weird clothing. Some hands reach for her; others step away, giving her curious, even frightened looks. As if she’s a savage hobo plucked from the hardscrabble.

Merelda. I need to find Merelda
.

But all around her, a dizzying array of sights and sounds that only serves to distract and confuse—

That woman in a corn maiden costume. A headdress of corn husks. A bra of pointed cob-tips. Showing off for a small crowd.

Beyond her: a giant clock face, except it’s made mostly of
people
. Humans in black bodysuits. Forming hands and numbers
each. Are they slaves? Artists? Both? She doesn’t know and can’t care.

Gwennie nearly staggers into a trio of androgynes in flamboyant costumes that call to mind living firework displays, who all stand over a single musical instrument: a giant brass thing with a bell at the one end and a series of levers and plungers and bladders at the other, the whole thing bleating a discordant warble-and-honk. They give her a look, and she pirouettes past, feeling like a tin can spinning—

Her shoulder catches a tray of drinks carried by a Bartender-Bot, and it flips end over end. Fluted glasses topple and shatter. Foam hisses beneath her feet; the Bartender-Bot makes a disappointed noise from its speaker (“
Ohhhhhhhh
”); and a hatch opens at the base of the auto-mate, and many-hinged spider arms begin scooping the mess into his body.

But there—
there!

Merelda again. A flash of ravensblack hair.

Annalise sees her. “Gwendolyn Shawcatch! You’re jumping the line!”

Damnit.
Gwennie presses her hands together and uses it as a wedge to separate a couple lapping at each other’s mouths like thirsty dogs and winds after Merelda—

Cael’s sister looks over her shoulder, sees Gwennie following. She makes a panicked face and darts right through a gauntlet of partiers holding visidexes—they all look at their screens and not at one another, tapping and swiping and laughing. As Gwennie shoots through them, they erupt in some triumph she doesn’t understand, arms raised: “Wooooo!”

Merelda. Only ten feet ahead.

But someone steps suddenly in front of Gwennie.

It’s another Heartlander.

That’s her first thought. Because of the clothes. A simple flowered dress with a crocheted collar. Wooden shoes with raised heels. Hair in a simple braided ring—white baby’s breath flowers throughout.

But something’s off. The lipstick—the color of pulped cherries. Or the eyeliner, so thick and dark it might as well have been slapped on with a paintbrush. The woman beams and grabs Gwennie by the shoulders even as Gwennie tries to get past her—

“How do I look?” the woman asks.

“Wh . . . what? You look fine.”

“No, no, I mean, how
authentic
do I look?” The woman lets go and does a twirl. “Humble-drab will be all the rage; just you watch—I really tried to express the plain-folk ennui, but I worry the flowers in the hair go against that and the style—”

Gwennie smiles the biggest fake smile. “You look perfect!”

Not far behind: Annalise. Cutting through the crowd like a knife.

As the fake-Heartlander is beaming, Gwennie shoves past her.

“Hey!” the woman calls after her. “Ow.”

Again Merelda’s gone. Melded with the crowd—

Except, no. She’s above the crowd now. Gwennie sees a set of steps—glass like the rest of the balcony, and again she’s reminded that the whole world now sits below her, a world slowly drenched in the darkness of the coming night. Those steps ascend to a balcony (where, of course, more people stand packed shoulder to shoulder like squealers in a pig chute).

On the steps. No one else is there. Perfect place to catch her.

Gwennie throws caution and propriety to the wind and darts through the crowd, shoes clicking on the glass balcony.

Merelda looks over the crowd, pausing halfway up the steps. She’s searching the wrong places, because already Gwennie is charging up behind her. Merelda sees, tries to hurry away—

But Gwennie catches her arm.

“You,” Gwennie says.

The two of them share a moment of silence. Looking each other over. In Merelda’s face Gwennie sees the absurdity of the situation reflected back: two Heartlander girls from the same town and connected to the same boy standing face-to-face on an Empyrean flotilla. It’s like something out of a dream.

Or maybe,
Gwennie thinks,
a really weird nightmare
.

Merelda’s about to say something—

When another hand grabs Merelda’s arm.

The arm belongs to a pale man. High cheekbones. Hair so blond it might as well be white. Everything about him is sharp angles: the shoulders and elbows of his silver-skin suit, the long dagger nose, the tips of his pointed fingernails. Even his lips look as if they’re cut out of pink paper with a few spare clips from a pair of scissors.

“My love,” he says. Then he kisses Merelda on the cheek. He stares at Gwennie, and she feels as if his gaze is dissecting her, cutting her apart for purposes of examination. “You are the Shawcatch girl.”

“I . . .”

Behind her: footsteps clicking up the glass steps.

Annalise locks her in an incredulous stare.

“Girl! So impudent.
So impatient
. You can’t just . . . bypass all these people! It’s an art,
an art
, like a . . . a butterfly flitting from flower to flower. Collecting a dusting of pollen before—”

The man with the white-blond hair interrupts: “I think it will be fine, Miss Annalise. Let the throngs think her a wild girl plucked from the corn. It’ll be gossip fodder for weeks.”

“Well. Yes. I suppose—”

“Certainly we are the ones who set the rules, are we not?”

She smiles. And laughs. “Of course.
Of course!
”

“Then come, Miss Shawcatch. Time to join the
real
party.”

THE JAW TRAP

RIGO CREEPS INTO
the dark of the building, his ears filled with the sound of a yowling infant. It’s not a house but a storefront. Or it was. It’s hard to see anything, but through the torn-up roof, shafts of moonlight lean like spears thrown from far away. Rigo can make out shelves bracketed to the wall and also freestanding shelves in the middle of the room, suggesting this was a provisional store: just a few goods here and there, some for sale, most earned by Heartlanders as payment for work. The goods that stocked these shelves would’ve come from the Provisional Depot nearby—the very place where they’re hoping to catch a ride up into the sky.