The Harvest (28 page)

Gwennie listens to him, tries not to acknowledge the knife-twist of jealousy that sticks in her when he talks. He and Wanda shared something she and he never could. Does she light up like all the stars in the sky for him? Or is being with her like reading a book in the dark?

“You gotta talk to her,” she says.

“I will. After the Council of Seven.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

“Funny,” she says, fingers playing across his chest.

“What’s that?”

“Last time we were together was before Harvest Home, back in Boxelder.”

“It was at that.”

She ponders. “Us doing a proper Harvest Home here in Pegasus City is a good idea. It feels a little like the way things used to be. You think we can ever get back there?”

She knows the answer. He doesn’t even need to say anything. All Cael does say is: “Better get dressed, unless we feel like showing off our . . .” He
ahems
. “Assets.”

She laughs. It’s nice, the laugh. For now, in this moment, she’s happy.

But happiness is a curious thing, she thinks.

Hard to catch, harder to keep, she thinks. What did Cael say about remembering his dreams?

Like trying to catch a moth
.

Tonight Wanda is going to the Council of Seven. Less official name: the Boxelder Seven—a misnomer, maybe, since one of the group is an Empyrean man, but the rest all come from the same place. Cael, Wanda, Lane, Rigo, Gwennie, and Boyland. Boyland sometimes doesn’t bother showing up. And neither does Wanda. Which makes it more of an unofficial Council of Five, but nobody wanted to call it that—something about the group that founded the Sleeping Dogs being the Sawtooth Seven. Lane said, “I like the parity,” and so it was decided.

She doesn’t feel much a part of the group, though she wonders if that’s more her doing than anybody else’s. Is her exclusion real? Imagined?

In their heads, or in hers?

Probably doesn’t matter. Nothing to be done now. She tried to tell Cael that: Once they didn’t find what they were looking for, they had to go. But the hooks were in him again. His friends. His old life. He forgets how different he is. How different
they
are. Wanda’s wondering if she should leave, too. And yet, she remains. For him.

Cael. Sigh.

She’s about to exit the Engine Layer—through a hole where a massive chain fell, cutting this hallway ring clean in half—when she hears a voice just outside.

A girl’s voice.

She doesn’t recognize it at first—it’s been some months since she heard it. But then it clicks: Luna Dorado. Once Lane’s adviser—since then, she’s been missing. Rumors said she left, fled Pegasus City for . . . who knows where?

Wanda presses flat against the wall. She listens, but catches only the end of the conversation:

“You have everything you need. The deal is the deal. Don’t screw me on this. You have
no idea
the risk I’m taking.”

And then a chime—the sound of a visidex call ending.

Wanda thinks:
I could just kill her
.

That has been a thought creeping into her mind with some regularity these days—and that chills her to the bone. Any problem she sees or imagines, she thinks:
I could choke it, break it, tear it apart, let it feed the earth
.

Or, sometimes, more simply:

Blood makes the grass grow
.

By the time she peers out the rift, stepping over a rusted chain that’s twice the thickness of her thigh, she sees no one. Luna is gone. Maybe, Wanda thinks, she’s going mad, and Luna was never there in the first place.

Madness is almost more comforting, isn’t it?

Balastair feels gutted. He’s a doll whose stitching has popped, whose stuffing has been pulled out by a cruel child—a cruel child named
life
, and suddenly that common refrain of this place,
That’s life in the Heartland
, echoes in his mind, and for a moment he feels infected by it. Like this place has gotten into him, into his blood and bones and every one of his cells. This emptiness, this hopelessness, is altogether worse than the Blight, he realizes.

Because at least with the Blight, you can use it.

This . . . this
feeling
, it has no value. Just a slick-walled hole, grim and lightless. No way out. Just a place to stand and wait for the dirt to be piled atop your head. Even though he’s walking through this so-called Pegasus City, he feels like he’s standing still in his own grave.

This used to be his home, this place.

And it is, once more. But not in a way he recognizes.

Dirt beneath his feet.

Shattered remains of buildings.

The memory of his mother following him. The ghosts of all who died when this place fell. Cleo, too. Manifesting as a whisper.

Who is he? What’s his point? He’s helping these people with their infrastructure. Helping them with the visidexes and with the greenhouses so they understand how to actually
grow
food instead of just consume it. (At first he blamed them for being so stupid, which he realized was rather judgmental given how the Empyrean have helped to ensure that this knowledge was kept as far from the Heartlanders as the moon, sun, and stars.) Even still, he feels like a hanger-on. An Empyrean freak. Was this what Gwennie felt like on the flotilla?

People wave as he passes—friendly enough. They smile, too. Though it’s not the same treatment that other Heartlanders get. They get hugs and handshakes and good-natured insults and angry arguments that end in a night of drinking and laughing and, sometimes, crying. He gets the polite nods, the
toodle-oo
of the fingers, the short, crisp language.

He waves back. Smiles back. Keeps walking, hoping they don’t see how upset he is. Upset over . . .

Over a little bird.

Over little Cicero. Tiny catbird fledgling.

He curses himself. It was too soon. The bird should’ve biologically been able to fly—but it had no mother, it had only him, a man who thought he could do for this bird what he did for a little grackle named Erasmus. Of
course
the bird wasn’t ready to fly. He pushed it off the ledge and—

No! No. Thinking about it is about to push
him
off a ledge.

There. Dead ahead. A prison tower that Mayor Lane Moreau has taken as his office. It’s where they meet for their so-called council, an advisory group to which he knows he doesn’t belong. They, the Heartlanders from a small town. He, an Empyrean man a world apart.

He sighs.

Begins to walk toward the door.

Then—a surprising thing.

A little sound in the air. A
warble-woo
.

He turns, shields his eyes from the sun with the flat of his hand. And then something
lands
on that hand. Little feet. A flutter of something soft.

Balastair brings the hand down.

The bird, Cicero, shrugs its wings and shakes them. Then it chirps a strange, discordant song.

The bird never died.

Cicero is alive!

Balastair laughs and nuzzles the little bird. It jumps up onto his head and he strides toward the elevator, feeling suddenly alive, buoyant, and bewildered.

THE BOXELDER SEVEN

THE
MEETING
STARTS.
Five of them sit around the table underneath the ornate human-sized birdcage. Lane stands at the head of the table, leaning forward, hands flat. Rigo sits to his right with a visidex—the boy has changed since taking on the right-hand-man role to Lane. He’s leaner, sharper, seems more confident. His new leg doesn’t hurt, either; Balastair found a proper replacement in the crumbling wing of the old hospital. This leg is strong, metal, with bold scrollwork and real leather straps. It’s as much a thing of beauty as it is a thing of function, and it appears to have given Rigo renewed purpose.

Balastair also seems to have brightened up. He’s looked so sad, so lost, for so long that Cael half expected to find the man hanging from a rope somewhere one day. But now? Cael watches him across the table—a little bird hops from the back of one hand to the back of another, then to a finger, then to his wrist, occasionally interrupting the proceedings with a little song. When it does, Balastair chuckles and shushes the creature.

The real surprise is that Boyland showed up. Drunk as a skunk in a funk, his lower lip hanging open like the mouth of a broken mailbox. Occasionally he seems to focus, then he snorts loud through his nose, smacks his lips, and goes back to staring off at nothing.

Though sometimes he straight up stares at Gwennie.

A sad, hard glare.

Cael doesn’t much like that look.

Underneath the table, Gwennie bumps her knee into his. At first he thinks it’s a mistake, but it’s not—she presses up on him harder, moving her leg against his, knee sliding up and down, then in circles. Just that small touch sends heat to his brow and sweat to his palms.

“Tonight is Harvest Home,” Lane says. “Rigo had the right idea, I think—I know it’s not the right time of the year, but people are already perking up about it. We’ve got boxes of whiskey, gin, ’shine. Got a chicha beer stand set up and a few games going, plus a band calling themselves—”

“Itself,” Rigo corrects. “Not themselves.”

Lane rolls his eyes. “Calling
itself
the Pegasus City Irregulars—they’re actually a bit all right. Got a banjo, washboard, keytar, accordion. Shit, what else? Rigo, what am I missing?”

Rigo goes on: “I think it’s pretty well covered. Dancing. Drinking. A lottery—a real lottery, like, folks don’t win a trip to the sky where they get treated like freaks and animals.”

Gwennie laughs, but Cael feels her tense up at the mention of it.

“Don’t forget drinking,” Boyland mutters.

Everyone shares a look.

But Cael notices that Balastair and Gwennie are sharing their own look. A long gaze, too. He thinks, okay, maybe they’re each reliving a memory from when they were both on the flotilla. Gwennie doesn’t like to talk much about what happened up there, but Bal probably already knows. They shared something there.

Suddenly Cael is wondering:
Just how much did they share?

Jealousy sinks its teeth in—a rat-bite looking for blood.

But he doesn’t have long to think about his own jealousy, because the elevator dings, and the door opens.

Wanda steps into the room.

Underneath the table, Gwennie’s leg suddenly pulls away from his own.

Everyone turns. The looks of shock are obvious—eyes wide, jaws slack. She hasn’t come to a meeting since the beginning. Some haven’t even
seen
her since then. Wanda’s changed. She seems . . . taller. Thinner in her limbs, her neck, even her fingers. Cael can’t put his finger on it, but she even
moves
differently, like she’s a praying mantis considering its next meal. The Blight has taken her. The undersides of her forearms are ridged and textured like tree bark. Red flowers thrust up from behind her ears—not stuck there, but
grown
there, out of her hair or from the back of her neck. The whites of her eyes are shot through with green, her fingers tipped with thorns.

She stands there for a moment, regarding all the eyes upon her.

“Sorry,” she says.

Wanda closes her eyes.

And her flesh changes.

Thorns shrink into fingers. Her eyes clear. The flowers bloom in reverse, shrinking, imploding, disappearing. The bark on her arms shudders, ripples, then becomes a stretch of pale pink flesh—raw, as if it had been abraded.

Jeezum Crow,
Cael thinks.
She can reverse it at will?

She looks more like Wanda used to.

But every inch of movement remains calculated and considered with an eerily confident certainty. She comes around the side of the table and stands behind Cael. She puts her hand on the empty chair next to him.

“Can I sit here?” she asks.

Cael looks up. He smiles sheepishly, moves to pull out the chair.

She sits, turns her head toward him, and smiles. “Hi, Cael.” She leans forward and gives him a kiss on the cheek. Just that small connection sends up a fireworks display of lights behind his eyes—and again he is reminded of her presence, thrumming with life that is both hers and the Blight’s. It’s stronger now. No longer is she just a field of fireflies or a spread of stars across the sky—now she’s bright as a hundred moons.

He swallows hard. “Hi, Wanda.”

Wanda looks past him.

“Hey, Gwennie.” She utters a gawky, awkward laugh—the one Cael knows from back in Boxelder, the one that sounds like Wanda. But Cael fears it’s an act—like she’s
trying
to convince them that’s who she is. “Aw, jeez. Sorry, everybody, didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Godsdamn, Wanda,” Boyland says, breathy with awe. “You know how to”—he
urps
into his hand—“command a room.”

“Nice to see you, too, Boyland.”

Silence breeds. Everyone shares uncomfortable looks.

Lane says, “Uhhhh. Whh-where were we, Rigo?”

“Well.” Rigo clears his throat. “We were talking about Harvest Home tonight and all the—”