The Harvest (10 page)

“You hit me again,” she says, “and next time I take the whole hand.”

“Gwennie, wait—”

She pushes past him.

Out through the dingy shack, flinging open the rotten-board door. It falls off its hinges, rattles against the ground.

“I’m sorry,” he calls after. “I’m so sorry. I just—I don’t want to live like this anymore. In this . . . rat-trap. I’m sorry, I love you, Jeezum Crow, I do.”

She marches out toward the skiff.

“I’ll be back,” she barks.

“Where are you going?”

“To fix your screwup.”

Mole watches as a narrow little vine, thin as a rat-tail, trails across the Checks board. It gets to one of the peons, then the end of it blooms into a flower the color of fresh blood. The petals grab the piece like a soft, delicate hand, then use it to jump one of Mole’s Gunfighters, knocking that piece out.

“Aw, man,” he says. One step away and his Queen will be taken. He can move her. But he knows what happens next: Mother Esther will chase him around the board like he’s a toad hopping away from a rumbling motorvator, trying not to get ground up in the threshing bar. Dangit. “I give up.”

“Don’t,” she says, sitting across from him. Watching him, not the board. Her eyes swirl, iridescent colors. Like fly-eyes. Beyond the porch on which they sit—where they play Checks—the Blightborn continue their work at the farm. Work he sometimes helps with, though they never look at him like he belongs. She does, though. Esther never treats him like an outsider. She smiles at him now and says: “You never know. You might get lucky.”

“You said this game is about skill, not luck.”

“So is life, and yet, luck matters.”

“Uh-huh. Okay, okay.” He considers his next move. As he does, he says: “You seem to be putting a lot on that McAvoy jerk.”

“Him and Wanda. The two of them.”

“She’s special.” Mole snorts. “He ain’t.”

“They’re both special. For different reasons.”

“It true?”

“Is what true?”

“I heard Edvard saying that you sent them right into the path of danger. Not away from it like you told them. Said they’d run into trouble a couple-few days out.”

She nods. “That is true.”

“Why? If they’re so special, don’t you want them to survive?”

Esther smiles. “Only if they deserve to.”

“So it’s like a test?”

“It’s a test.”

“But Wanda could get hurt.”

Esther nods.

Mole sits up straight. “She gets hurt, I’m blaming you. Which means I’ll kill you dead myself.”

“You like her.”

“I
love
her.”

“Good. Now put some of that passion into your game and make a move.”

Tin Cup is barely a town. It’s more a shanty popping up out of the corn. No plasto-sheen street—just a dirty, gravel-pocked X with a collection of crummy lean-tos and houses clustered together like hobos at a burn barrel.

At the far end sits the tallest building—a three-story hatbox with a rusted sign hanging out front reading
BHAGRAM
’
S BAR
.

It’s where Solow, the Mercado Maven, will be. Solow doesn’t make his wares public, like with most markets. He “curates.” (His words.) Curates both who gets to see the collections and what goes into—and out of—the market.

Gwennie parks the skiff out front. No time to do otherwise.

She storms into the bar.

It smells like cigarillos and puke in here. The chicha beer is to die for—maybe literally, because any time Bhagram pours a bowl, he first scrapes the mold off the top before handing it to you. It doesn’t just smell sour, it smells like a cup of puke soup.

Everyone’s gathered around the bar. A bar that is, in fact, just a series of old barrels strung up together, the hoops rusted, the wood stained.

Gwennie sidles up at the far end of the bar, away from the crowd of men hovering over something. They’re jostling together, gasping and laughing. She doesn’t know many people in this town, but she sees Bhagram there, obviously, and Horgo—that pig-nosed, toothless hobo. Resident drunk. Never
not
here in the bar. She has no idea how he makes the ace notes necessary to pay for drinks, unless Bhagram just serves him that sour mash bile-beer for free.

Thing is, she doesn’t see Solow. Maybe Bhagram knows where he is. She raises a hand, tries to get the bartender’s attention.

“Hey,” she says. “Hello.”

He holds up a silencing, impatient finger.

“Play it again,” he says. Not to her, but to the crowd. “Turn it up this time, turn it up.”

Gwennie looks over, notices that their faces are lit by a faint glow. A visidex, she guesses. Used to be those were a rare find here in the Heartland, but since the Saranyu fell, more have trickled out—so-called jail-broken devices that still connect to the Empyrean network but don’t send out signals. Which means they can’t be tracked. You get caught with one, the skyborn bring the pain, so most folks keep them hidden. Heartlanders use them mostly to follow news and watch Empyrean sex videos.

Which is probably what they’re watching now.

And then, out of nowhere, she hears Cael’s voice.

It’s like a ghost calling out to her.

Faintly, distantly:
Gwennie, run
.

Her breath, trapped in her chest like a bird caught in a hand.

She looks to the window. Then the door. Expecting him to be standing there, staring in. Waving his arms. Warning her about—what?

But then she realizes. It’s coming from the visidex.

With no thought toward rudeness or, frankly, her own safety, she pushes into the men and tries to spy the visidex. But the men push their shoulders together, walling her off. Bhagram’s the one who says, “Let her through, let her see, this is wild,
wild
. Replay it. Replay it!”

They grudgingly make room for her. She smells sweat and sour beer and breath that could kill a goat-fly—

All that is lost when the video begins to play.

Grainy video. Static, unmoving. As if mounted on something.

Horseheaded Empyrean soldiers—
evocati augusti
—march out of the corn with two prisoners, each with arms bent behind their backs.

One of them is Cael.

The other she doesn’t recognize at first. A girl.

Cael’s face is a bloody mess. They shove him toward the camera, and she realizes that it must be mounted on the front end of a skiff or a ketch-boat. He looks dazed. Beaten. When they shove him, he staggers, almost falls.

The two
evocati
flank him, and two more shapes come up on the side.

She recognizes the herky-jerky walk—

Mechanicals. Two of them. Chests like metal barrels, heads shaped like Boyland’s bucket skull. Each has an arm that looks like a sonic cannon. These are different from the ones she’s seen. Upgraded, if you can call it that. Swaddled in a coating of fake flesh. Big eyes. Wide mouths with gleaming metal teeth. It’s like by trying to make them look more human, they only succeeded in making them look less.

Cael looks up. She can see the moment when clarity hits—like he’s suddenly got focus, purpose, determination.

“Here it comes,” Bhagram says. The other men vibrate in anticipation. Gwennie doesn’t have to wait long to see—

Cael’s head has this barely visible twitch, and . . .

A dark shape sails out of nowhere, from way behind them. Blurry, at first, spinning. Then Gwennie realizes: it’s a cob of corn.

It hits one of the
evocati
.

Whonnnng
.

The soldier spins toward it. Two of the mechanicals pivot, too, their hip joints whirring and clacking as they train sonic cannons on nothing.

That’s when Cael yells: “Wanda, run!”

Not
Gwennie, run
.

Wanda. It’s Wanda Mecklin. Jeezum Crow, she looks different.

And then Gwennie watches what unfolds next with a nauseating mixture of fear and excitement. Equal parts
Cael is alive
and
why in the Lord and Lady’s good green earth is he with Wanda?

As the soldiers spin and Cael calls to Wanda—

She turns, starts to break away.

The stalks of corn all around them begin to whip about—

The
evocati
draws a thrum-whip and cracks the lash back toward Wanda just as a stalk of corn rips out of the dirt, borne on a lurching perch of spider-leg roots, and catches the whip. The coil lashes around it instead—

A flash of a corn-leaf, and Cael’s bonds are cleaved in twain.

His hands are free.

Which means so is his Blight-vine.

One of the mechanicals wheels on him with its sonic cannon—

The vine coils around it. Cael pivots, turns hard, the gun jerking suddenly to the side, re-aiming it at the last moment as a sonic blast punches the
evocati
’s golden armor like an invisible battering ram, denting it so hard and so deep the breastbone beneath must also be broken—and given the pained look on the man’s face, seen clearly despite the grainy blur of the video, that’s about right. Then Cael rips the mechanical’s arm off and uses that arm like a bludgeon to smash it back to the dry, dead earth.

The other mechanical, though, is fast.

And its cannon is still loose.

And pointed at Cael.

Gwennie actually cries out, as if this is happening live, or as if her voice calling to warn him could travel back through time and change what’s coming. Then, she thinks, maybe it does.

Because even as the cannon tracks him, Wanda is there—running fast, her mouth open and—oh, gods. Tendrils, dark tendrils from her mouth like a hundred rat-tails squirming. Except they’re not tails. They’re vines.

She’s got the Blight, too.
Wanda leaps on the mechanical’s arm. Her head dives toward it and then wrenches back—

The arm snaps off in a shower of sparks as Wanda—looking now like some feral thing, some monster out of a storybook—jerks her head sideways, sending the arm flying into the shuddering corn. The men in the bar hoot and clap and gawp as she rips into the mechanical, her vines tearing it into sparking bits.

The last
evocati
, the one with the whip tangled in the corn, has freed a sonic rifle from his back—

Cael points at him. An accusing finger.

And following the line of that finger, his own Blight-vine flies.

The vine punches clean through the man’s helmet and out the back of his head. Dripping red before sliding back through, retracting to Cael and once more winding back around his arm.

Again, a roiling mixture of emotions. Gwennie is happy that he’s safe, but scared of who he is, of what he’s become. And Wanda . . .

Cael, on the video, points toward the boat—toward the camera
on
the boat.

Wanda joins him in facing the lens.

Both of them raise their hands and all the stalks shudder and suddenly launch from the ground like rockets firing—their image on the screen is lost to all the motion and clamor, and then everything tips over and lists sideways.

Static remains on-screen before clicking over to darkness.

One of the men, a thick-browed thug with a nose like a lug nut, raps on the bar. “Play it again. Play it, play it.”

Another man, hollow-cheeked and with an archipelago of dark melanomas rising up the side of his face, shakes his head and whistles. “I dunno who to root for there, boys. Blighters freak me out, but the Empyrean can suck Old Scratch’s bung—”

“Ish called a
win-win shit-u-a-shun
,” Horgo the drunk mutters. His breath is so bad she has to recoil, holding her own breath lest she lose that sweet apple all over the bar-top.

Bhagram spins the visidex around, goes to press play again, and the whole thing starts all over. She can only hear it now, the crunch of cornstalks underfoot, the sound of the cob hitting a helmet,
Wanda, run
. . .

Then a quick crackle of static. She can’t see exactly what’s happening—the angle doesn’t allow it—but she can tell that the video has been replaced with a face on-screen. A visidex call.

She recognizes the shape of the head, and the voice confirms it.

It’s Solow, the Mercado Maven.

Round, bulbous, like some corrupted fruit.

“Looking to round up a posse,” he says, speaking like he’s talking through a mouthful of wet rice. “One of those kids from the east came to me—Bayland or Boylan or whatever, the big one, the thickskull . . .”

Gwennie’s blood goes cold even in the warm, dank air.

Solow continues: “Said he’s out there growing fruits and veggies that damn sure ain’t on the list, wanted to make a deal, blah blah blah, who cares. I looked him up, though, and you know the girl he’s with? They’re all wanted. Check the visidex, look at the reward board. Piles of ace notes—”

They all slowly turn and look at her.

Dark, suspicious eyes narrowing to slits.

They’ve figured it out.

On the screen, Solow must be following their gaze. “What the—? Whaddya lookin’ at? Oh.
Oh
. Jeezum god, are they there? The kids?”

Bhagram is the one to say: “We got this, boss.”

Then he turns off the screen.

They all stare at each other like that for a while. Nobody moves. Only sound is the mouse-fart squeak of shifting floorboards underneath everyone as they tense up, ready for something, anything, to happen.

“You said you don’t like the Empyrean,” Gwennie says, trying to put as much steel and gunpowder in her voice as she can manage—but fear is a hard river running right through her. She remembers being in the tunnels in the Saranyu’s Engine Layer, chased by that man and that boy. The things they wanted to do to her. The intent here in the eyes of these men seems to be greed more than it is lust, but she doesn’t trust it to remain that way. Then, someone saved her. Now, she won’t be so lucky.

“We don’t,” Bhagram says.

Melanoma grins, his mouth full of rickety teeth, like the cob man’s teeth. “But we
do
like ace notes, little girl.”

“Solow was right,” she says. “We
are
growing fruits, vegetables. Proper ones. We can share them. There’s money in there—and the garden keeps growing. The ace notes won’t stop with one harvest.”