The Harvest (42 page)

“They’ll be fine.”

“And if they’re not?”

Kin snaps: “Then they died for the greater good. Now stay quiet, will you? I’m still here with the boat. I’m not running off and joining the revolution. If they come, we’ll get them off the flotilla safely.”

They pass by chaos.

That’s all it is, chaos.

Balastair understands. Kin and the others set this in motion. Frumentarii marching into homes. Sonic rounds shrieking from within. A horseheaded guardsman thrown out of a window. A gleaming pewter ashtray held in the hands of an old man as he bashes it down on the guard’s helmet, crumpling the horse’s head—the man cries out, gurgling.

They try to turn one way and instead meet a gout of gas-flame from a broken pipe. One Frumentarii thrashes, burning. A nearby
evocati
lashes his thrum-whip, catching a woman on the arm, flinging her into the gap between floating neighborhoods—her scream goes quieter as she falls.

“Can’t get out that way!” Boyland calls.

Balastair eyes his options. They’re dwindling—and they need to get to the skiff. They need to get
off this flotilla
. “This way!”

The gun is heavy in her hand.

Heavenkiller,
Enyastasia thinks. Not today. This gun, pregnant with power, will not destroy heaven but, rather, save it.

If it kills anybody, it will be the devils. The devils who hope to pull the Saintangels down out of the sky. Bullets, blessed purely by her will to do right and exterminate evil where it roots like a gluttonous pig.

She likes that. She likes subversion. Taking someone else’s weapon and turning it against them. It’s practically poetic.

I should read more poetry,
she thinks unexpectedly.

She and the two
evocati
march forward, toward where the peregrine awaits. It’s then that she feels the tingle at the nape of her neck—

There.

Dead ahead, a hundred yards off.

Her enemies. The Boxelder Seven.

Well, six now.

She laughs.

Then raises the gun, cocks the hammer, aims, and waits.

As soon as they cross the arched bridge between islands—

She pulls the trigger.

Choom
.

A cannon-fire boom like thunder rolling over dead earth. A fist-sized hunk of stone kicks up out of the bridge’s railing just a second before Cael puts his hand there—the stone chips fly, sting his hand, arm, cheek, and he reflexively shuts his eyes and yanks his head back.

“Turn back!” Pop shouts—

But even as they turn, they see that retreating in the other direction is no longer an option—guardsmen of both the peregrine and horsehead varieties are closing in, first bolting at top speed, now slowing as they see they’ve got their quarry pinned on a bridge.

“We’re doomed,” Balastair says. “Trapped like mice.”

Wanda stiffens. “No. Never.”

Her eyes gleam green.

Whip-cord tendrils extend once more from her fingers—

But Cael knows that once she’s loose, once she’s given over to the Blight, this will be a bloodbath. And there may be another way.

He puts a hand on her shoulder and says: “Wait. I have an idea.”

Enyastasia growls. She heard the tales of Peregrine Percy Lemaire-Laurent’s first attempts with one of the Heartlander irons—the recoil of the gun made him miss again and again before he finally met his demise. And she swore that the same fate wouldn’t be hers. She was better, smarter, faster—but the gun is heavy, and it bucks like a malfunctioning auto-mate.

But she will not miss a second time, of this she is certain.

Once again, her small thumb drags the hammer back—

Cl-click
.

Her finger snakes toward the trigger—

“Stop!” one of them shouts from the bridge.

The McAvoy boy. The Blight-freak. He’s got something in his hand—a canister of some kind. He’s holding his arm—and with it, that strange glass cylinder—out over the railing. “I’ll drop it if you shoot!”

She’s tempted to shoot anyway.

And yet—the terrorists have surprised them all before.

She eases her finger away from the trigger.

“I want to talk,” he shouts.

She yells back: “So talk.”

“This is a bomb,” he says. A lie, but Cael doesn’t really have time to explain the whole scary
antpocalypse
thing. “I drop it from here, it goes right to the Engine Layer. Then
boom
. Another flotilla lost. That what y’all want?”

Behind them, the guardsmen all share panicked looks. They take a measurable step back—as if that would save them.

“I’m prepared to accept your surrender,” the scarred girl responds.

“No surrender,” Cael calls. “Just let us leave.”

Balastair shakes his head. “You don’t want this, Dirae. You’ve already lost control of this flotilla. They’re rebelling against you! Don’t you get it? It’s time to think about saving these people. There’s a contaminant—a contagion loose in the flotilla. It’ll bring this ship down, but I can stop it.”

“What kind of contagion?” she calls out to him.

“. . . biological.”

“Step forward.”

Balastair looks back. “Trust me.” Then he whispers: “Do
not
drop that.”

The cylinder is suddenly heavy, and cold, and Cael’s hand sweats.

Just drop it,
he thinks.

For now, he tightens his grip.

She’s just a girl
.

That’s what Balastair thinks. He can see that now. She’s damaged—her mutilation made beautiful by the gold dust that paints her scars—but suddenly vulnerable. Her eyes are dancing about. With every scream in the distance, every pop of glass, every sonic trill, she flinches.

She’s a girl, and she’s human.

Balastair, having set down the crate on the bridge, steps forward. His hands are up as he approaches gingerly. In the distance he hears someone yelling for help. A guardsman? A citizen of the Ilmatar? He has no idea.

“We need to save this flotilla,” he says as he closes in. “Or it’ll crash. There are . . . insects.
Ants
. They will be a plague and they will—”

She interrupts him: “Why?”

“Why . . . what? Save people?”

“Why would you join with them? The Heartlanders. I don’t understand it. It disgusts me. It literally makes me ill. The taste on the back of my tongue is like the blood after you bite the inside of your cheek.” Her face twists up like a closing fist. Her humanity, a cloud passing in front of the moon—there and then gone again. He stammers:

“I-it doesn’t matter, taking sides like this
doesn’t matter
, when lives are on the line—”

Her arm flashes.

A gleam of moonlight on metal.

The gun smashes into the side of his head.

He drops sideways, to one knee—can’t think, can’t see—

Somewhere, someone is screaming—
No, don’t shoot!

Drop it!

Blood running into his eyes.

Drop the canister!

The barrel of the gun presses to his temple.

Cicero flies.

Balastair
—
!

Everything happens at once.

Gwennie moves fast—hands up, two knives. One flies, then a second—

Pop, too, is drawing the rifle from under his arm, hand flying to the lever-action, drawing it back,
ch-chak
—

Cael thinks,
All it would take would be for me to open my hand
.

The cylinder would drop. He could dump them all over—all the colonies, crashing down against the engines. Some spinning to the Heartland below. The plague of ants could begin. The corn would end.

The
Empyrean
would end.

Wanda hisses: “Drop it, drop it,
godsdamnit drop it
—”

But his hand tightens and he pulls the cylinder over the edge.

I can’t
.
I can’t do what Lane did.

I can’t kill all these people
.

The first knife sticks in the meat of her biceps.

Enyastasia shouts, her arm drops, the finger twitches—

The gun goes off.

A red bloom opens up on Balastair Harrington’s chest.

The Dirae shrieks, sees the glint of the second knife—

She swings the gun upward, bats the flying blade away with the Heavenkiller revolver—the blade
tings
and spins away.

Gwennie watches that second knife knocked out of the air like a butterfly, and she curses herself for throwing too late, or too soon, or not fast enough, or—it doesn’t matter, because the monstrous girl is still there, and Balastair is still dead or dying, and this she cannot abide.

She launches herself across the bridge—running at full speed, pulling the one last blade she has left tucked in the hem of her pants—

Ahead, the two
evocati
on each side of the scarred girl plant themselves and draw long, sparking thrum-whips. Their arms rear back and the whips crackle as they snap forward—

The girl between them sneers, bleeding, and points the revolver.

Right at Gwennie.

Cael extends his arm—

His Blight-vine, still stunted by the scarred girl’s knife, feels hot, hot like scalding water in his veins, hot like a star going supernova—

The vine grows. Immeasurably fast, tendrils sprouting, braiding, weaving together into a larger vine, bulging and pulsing—

He lashes it, curls it back just over Gwennie’s head.

Both the thrum-whips catch his vine instead of her.

Gwennie ducks under them, just as the whips begin to vibrate, chewing through his vine once more.

Cael screams.

Balastair stares up at the stars.

Madness all around him. He tilts his gaze past his nose toward his feet—and there is Gwennie.
Ah, Gwennie
. He likes to think he helped her get off the Saranyu but, truth be told, she probably helped him even more.

Gwennie dances forward, knife in her hand, launching toward the poor, deluded, damaged girl. The one so broken she’d burn the house down to kill a lonely moth. But the gun goes up, and he gurgles a strangled cry—

Cicero.

Sweet, sweet Cicero.

The little catbird appears in a blur of blue-gray feathers, slamming himself into the face of Enyastasia Ormond. Wings beating. Talons scrabbling. The gun goes off, but it does so too late and in the wrong direction, and then Gwennie is right there, pistoning a knee into the girl’s gut, and stabbing the knife down into her neck.

He thumps his head back again.

Once more, the stars. And a fingernail sliver moon.

Then a flutter of wings rippling the fabric of the night.

“Balastair!” chirps a voice.

At first he thinks it’s Cicero, but it’s not, not at all—Cicero is still in the air, still chirping and screeching in alarm.

“Erasmus,” Balastair says with a small smile. “I’ve missed you.”

THE HEARTLAND WAR

FOR
A
TIME,
Esther Harrington thinks:
All is according to plan
.

War has erupted.

A hobo army from the south, hundreds of them with makeshift weapons: single-shot guns made from cans and gunpowder. Some of them gifted with the Blight—those, she thinks, will be hers soon enough. They will see that the path has opened for them and that it was she who opened it.

From the north: her people, her own glorious Blightborn. Marshaled by Edvard and Siobhan. Lashing vines and cracking roots.

All around them: their Empyrean enemies, once her people.

People who denied her.

They will all break.

They will snap like the stalks of Hiram’s Golden Prolific.

Their machines will rust. The skull of every mechanical will be a pot for a plant. The spines will form trellises on which will grow flowering clematis, or wisteria, or fat and luscious grapes. From their wires will hang baskets.

And the guardsmen themselves?

Their blood will fertilize the ground.

Esther Harrington stands in the midst of all of it. The war whirling on around her like the winds of a twister, she the mistress of its eye, the keeper of its funnel. She lets pollen cascade up into the sky—streamers of golden dust—and each grain of pollen is an eye from which she can see, a tiny mote like a fingertip so that she touches what the cloud touches.

Above her head, in the night sky, one flotilla—the Ilmatar. The other, more vicious one hovers close by, launching great sonic fusillades against the corn, taking out Empyrean as often as it takes out its enemies. A clumsy hammer held in the hand of a foolish child swatting roaches and smashing his own toes in the process. That flotilla—this
war-flotilla
—matters little to her.

What matters is the one far above her.

The Ilmatar.

Because there are her children.

Balastair, her true scion, but her other adopted children, too: Cael and Wanda. Soon with a child of their own.

It’s during this moment of considering motherhood—hers and Wanda’s—that something very delicate breaks. Like a hair holding a sword above her head. A hair that snaps. A sword that drops.