The Harvest (25 page)

“Just let us find what we’re looking for, and we’ll be on our way,” Cael says. “You can kick my ass back out into the corn if you want.”

“Oh, we’ll throw you to the corn all right,” she says. “You’ll be food for it, you Blighted—”

A sound, outside, and she looks over her shoulder—

Killian Kelly comes in through the front.

His face wearing a sneer-smirk.

“Like rats in a trap,” he says. “Shame neither of you are particularly keen on following the rules that have been set out before you.”

He clucks his tongue.

Balastair rolls his eyes. “Might I point out the irony that you’re raiders and rebels whose
very existence
relies upon not following rules?”

Again the pistol rises, and Luna’s finger eases toward the trigger.

Balastair’s hands fly up, and he’s ashamed at the cowardice in his voice when he says: “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

“Lane will be very displeased with his old friend,” Killian says.

“Who says he has to know?”

It’s Luna who asks that. Balastair puzzles at it—but Killian is already ahead of him, frowning. “You sure about that?”

“It would be easiest. No fuss.”

“I don’t understand,” Balastair says.

“They’re gonna kill us,” Cael growls.

Oh.
Oh
.

“I don’t like it,” Killian says, “but it would be easier. Lane doesn’t need to know about this. He has enough to worry about. This treachery would wound him far more gravely than my own physical injuries did me.”

“It’s decided, then,” Luna says.

She raises the pistol.

Balastair winces. Another act of cowardice—he is sure that Cael is meeting this fate with eyes open, face forward, chin thrust up in defiance, and again he’s reminded why Gwennie likes him.

He hears the click of the dial on the side of the weapon.

And then:

A sonic shriek.

It’s Killian who cries out.

Balastair’s eyes jolt open.

The girl, Luna, drops to the floor on her knees, hands planted against the cracked marble. She makes a
hurrk
sound. Vomit splashes the floor.

Balastair doesn’t even realize what’s happening until the young mayor of Pegasus City steps through the door, long-barreled sonic rifle in hand.

“Lane,” Killian says. “How—?”

“Get out,” Lane says to him, his face a mask of rage.

“They were—” Luna tries to say, but she gags again and presses her face into the crook of her elbow to hold it back.

Killian steps in front of Lane. “They defied you. You see that, right? This callow cur, supposed to be your friend—”

“Get. Out.”

The older raider reaches for Lane, but Lane tugs his head away, then says: “And take her with you.”

GIFTS FROM OUR MOTHERS

THEY
FIND
NOTHING
in the house. The three of them now—Balastair, Cael, Lane—climb and clamber through the remains of his onetime home, and they find nothing. It has been pored over, picked through. And still, Balastair looks. And thinks. And listens.

He listens to the two others talking outside. The acrid, heady tang of one of Lane’s cigarettes—an Empyrean brand, if Balastair’s nose has it right—rising up through the broken windows and off-kilter frames.

Their voices drift up to his ears.

Cael: “I thought . . . I thought we were done, man. I thought maybe you didn’t trust me anymore.”

Lane: “I trust you, Captain. I do. But I also have this place and . . . I was afraid to do wrong by the people here in order to do right by you. The greater good and all that.” The sound of an exhale. Another plume of blue smoke against the black window. “Like I know anything about the greater good.”

Cael: “Me neither, man, me neither. I don’t know what’s right or wrong or upside down or sideways anymore. I feel like I don’t know rat-crap from my right foot. I’m just . . . going day by day. One step at a time, which means I’m going somewhere.” He laughs. “I just don’t know where.”

Lane: “I hear that, boss, I hear that.”

Balastair kicks aside a broken light fixture: a brass seashell, dented and pocked and pitted. He follows the wires, finds where the fixture once hung, peers into the black. It’s just more crumbled mess—a guillotine of stone. If this was the hiding place—and it isn’t, because it’s too simple, too easy—then it’s long sealed off. They’d need to demolish this place first and sort through the fragments piece by miserable piece before they’d find what it was his mother thought they should have. A worthless, futile endeavor.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

Because really: What kind of weapon did his mother hide here so long ago? Wouldn’t someone have found it by now?

No. She would’ve hidden it well.

Hmm.

Outside: the
fing
of a lighter opening. The crackle-hiss of flame touching a cigarette. Lane: “My mother’s here. In the city.”

Cael: “Whoa-dang. Your mama’s here?”

Lane: “Mm-hmm. She got rounded up with a couple others and brought here and . . . well. She and I had a conversation, and that’s when I realized: She’s not my family, not really. You guys are. You were always there for me when she wasn’t. Pop, too. But this past year put blinders up and—well, shit, it took her to rip them back off again, get me seeing straight.”

Cael: “I’m still floored she’s here.”

Lane: “Yeah.” A pause. “Yeah. Anyway. I just wanted you to know I’m putting my ace notes on the table. I’m all in, brother. I just had to remember who my real family was.”

Remember family
.

A feathery tickle in the back of Balastair’s brain.

Cael and Lane keep talking, but his mind wanders like a sick rat through the pipes and walls of memory. Back to that time when his mother first saw her own Blight. There in the back garden. On the stone terrace. That small word.

Oh
.

That moment is a splinter in the skin of his memory.

And surely it was one in hers, too.

Can’t go down the steps, so instead he heads back to the window—the one Cael fell out of only an hour before—and climbs out over the edge. And here, another memory, because didn’t he do exactly this one time?
One
time he thought he’d be a rebellious little tit and flee home as a young boy, only twelve, running out into the night. That, the first time he discovered the Lupercal . . .

His muscle memory of that adventure has long gone from him, and his foot slips and he almost falls—

But still, he manages. He dangles. Drops.

“Shoulder still hurts—” Cael is saying, but his words cut short as Balastair lands in an awkward crouch. “Hey, uhh, Bal. You okay?”

But Balastair barely hears the question. He moves past them, alongside the house where the stone accordions and a hole sits in the side like a mouth puking up a frozen tide of bricks. There, then. The terrace. Bent iron fence, trellis cracked and snapped like little bones.

The terrace. Built right off the foundation of the house.

The homes here in Palace Hill did not fall individually—it was the whole hill that fell, buoyed by the inflatables that surely opened the moment the engines failed and chains broke. Some of this is still intact.

Balastair drops to his knees, starts prying up bricks. It’s slow going, but not hard—the bricks aren’t held together and sit crooked against one another, leaving little gaps for his fingers. But then he reaches in and feels a sharp lance of pain through his finger, to his wrist—

He retracts a hand already bleeding. The nail bent back, half torn, beads of blood dotting the edge like the round heads of red pins. He winces, sucks it into his mouth.

Next thing he knows, someone’s easing him aside. Cael.

Cael has part of the iron fence.

So does Lane.

They begin to dig. And pry. And crack bricks in half. Where they pull things apart, Balastair reaches in and removes the bricks. And yet, nothing. They’re finding nothing at all but more brick, or corn shoots already crawling up through the dead city. (Hiram’s Golden Prolific is damn near indestructible, and suddenly Balastair thinks,
It knows, it knows we’re hoping to kill it, and so it’s trying to beat us to whatever weapon my mother wants us to have
, but that’s absurd, the corn doesn’t think, it just
does
.)

And then suddenly—

Thunk
.

Cael’s bar hits something.

Something that sounds like metal.

He pulls it away, and Balastair leans into the hole, begins to cart out broken bricks—his blood spattering in the bone-white dust—and he reaches in, finds the margins of something. A box. A crate. Big enough that he asks them to get back in there with the iron posts, to clear it away and lift it out.

This feels like a holy moment. The two young men levering the box out of its crater. Bricks crumbling and tumbling away.

Lane squints over his pinched cigarette.

“This it?” Cael asks.

Balastair says: “I think so.”

It’s a metal crate with rounded edges.

Three feet square, roughly.

Balastair leans in, wipes dust off of it. He finds a latch that’s been taped shut with yellow tape. That means—

No.
No, no, no
.

He feels around him, palms a small flat chip of brick and brings it up to cut through the tape—it slices with a whisper. He pops the top of the box.

Lane and Cael peer down into the box.

“It’s empty,” Cael says.

“Wait,” Lane says. “Something’s in there.”

Balastair reaches in, finds a small slip of paper. Even before he reads it he can feel the embossed Pegasus at the bottom, the Empyrean seal.

“Property of the Empyrean,” he says without even having to read it.

“I don’t get it,” Cael says.

“It means they have it. Whatever it is my mother wanted you to find, they possess it. They have the weapon, Cael.”

Cael growls, cries out, pitches the iron bar like a spear.

And that ends their hunt.

REPATRIATION

“YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO THIS,”
Pop says.

“I’m afraid I do,” Agrasanto answers.

The skiff hums as it rises toward the flotilla. At first there’s just empty sky, and then the blue is blotted, the sideways sun casting into shadow as the Grantham Jorum Tempestas fills the window. First the glowing hover-panels, the grimy underlayer, then the skiff eases forward and ascends through the drifting islands and tilting structures of the flotilla—each chained together or held fast with telescoping bridges, strung up with wires and cables. Something about it feels like being reborn, resurrected, drawn up through tangled root and rich grave-earth before emerging out into the light—to glass and chrome, to silver and steel, to statues of Saintangels and Pegasus wings. Flat ribbons of morning sunlight shining bright, trapped in mist and slowly burning it away, pooling in windows like paintings inked in glowing magma.

The chains bind Pop’s wrists and loop through an eyebolt under the skiff’s dash. Agrasanto’s hands are bloodless on the wheel, and stick.

“Will your husband be here?” he asks her.

“I hope so. Rutan’s the one who set this up for me. He is a man of leisure but still has political connections through his family.”

Pop nods. “So you will be able to buy your way back in.”

“It seems. Rutan knows the Granthams. So that is who will receive you: the Grand Architect of this flotilla and the praetor, Mydra Alamene.”

“You’ve already negotiated the deal, then.”

She nods stiffly. “I take you in, all charges against me go away.”

“I thought you were different,” he says. “Thought maybe you’d changed, saw the error of your people. I know the Seventh Heaven isn’t populated with monsters—many of you don’t like what’s being done to us, haven’t liked it or understood it for a long time. I’m a little disappointed, to be honest.”

“The guilt of a parent,” she growls. “Don’t bother. I already have it. My mother was good with all that. Guilt. Shame. Regret. But it is what it is. I’ve made my decision. Maybe I can change things from up here. Maybe I can work to alter the landscape from within.”