Under the Empyrean Sky (12 page)

“I miss
Betsy
!” Lane yells over the buffeting mistrals and seething, hissing pollen.

“We’re lost,” Rigo yells.

“We’re not!” Cael says. It’s a lie. Everything looks the same. Blowing pollen. Corn beneath them. Corn sky and horizon swallowed in dust. No roads. No farms. Even the boat’s spotlight doesn’t help. He’s pretty sure they’re going south? Now he’s not so sure.

Suddenly Wanda hurries up behind him and tugs on his sleeve, talking right into his ear. “I’m so sorry again about the sails, sorry, sorry, so sorry—”

He waves her away.

“Wait, though, I thought you should know something.”

He squints, wishing he had his goggles. “What?”

“We’re going south.”

“I know that,” he lies.

“Your house is north of mine.” She says it as if she finds that odd. Because it is.

“Ah.”
Shit
. “Yeah. Wanda, we’re not looking for the goat.”

“What… what
are
we doing?”

He points and scowls. “I need you working that oar, Wanda. Go. Go!”

Chastened, she heads back.

But still the boat crawls. Every time the pollen blows, they lose sight of one another and then it’s easy to get out of rhythm. The boat lists—the corn grabbing at the bottom, tugging at the oar-poles.

Cael tries to coordinate them, yelling, “Lift!
Push
. Lift!
Push
.” With
lift
, the oar-poles rise, and with
push
they all bring the poles against the dry earth—moving the boat five feet, maybe ten, with each stroke. It’s not great. But it’s
something
.

Lane’s manning the console, and even here in the pollen drift his face can be seen cast in an eerie green glow. His eyes go wide. “We’re coming up on the beacon.”

“Beacon?” Wanda asks. “What beacon?”

(
The beacon we left for the garden
, he thinks but does not say.)

Cael can’t see anything. The wind kicks up a washout of
pollen so bright and complete he can’t see his own hand in front of his face. But then the gale dies down and he
does
see: gauzy lights off to starboard—the lights of Boxelder.

That means it won’t be far now. At least, he hopes. With the garden being way out in the corn like that, it’s easy to lose your bearings. The corn distorts the sense of where you are and how to get back. Made doubly worse when it’s night and
triply
worse when the sky is raining down golden dust into your eyes and mouth and nose.

Still. They have to push on.
Have to
.

He yells louder. “Lift! Push! Lift! Push!”

Cael sees Wanda’s face. Hers is the visage of worry. She knows something’s up. She just doesn’t know what. He hates that soon she’s going to find out.

Then Lane yells, “We’re just about on top of it!”

The garden
.

They ease the pinnace forward until all forward momentum ceases, though the wind still rocks it back and forth like a cup caught in a river’s grip.

Cael slides the oar-pole back in its socket and goes to the edge of the boat. “Stay here,” he yells. “I’m going to take a look.”

“Wait!” Wanda says, grabbing hold of his arms. Her expression is pleading. “Where are you going? Please let me come.”

Cael doesn’t say anything. Instead, he gives Lane and Rigo his own pleading look. The two of them come from behind her and—gently, oh so gently—pry her off him.

He leaps over the edge of the boat and drops ten feet into the corn. Stalks crash under his feet, the greenery thrashing beneath him. When he rolls off, the damaged stalks quickly spring back up, shuddering. Again the corn reaches for him, the filaments of corn silk squirming like tentacles in the storm.

“Spotlight!” he yells.

A cone of bleary yellow light—jaundiced like the pollen drift and a stone’s throw from being totally worthless—illuminates Cael. For a moment he thinks,
This can’t be it.
He doesn’t see the garden. No clearing. No plants. Nothing.

But then he catches sight of a red pepper hanging plump and lusty—a pepper where none dangled yesterday.
It really is aggressive. More aggressive than the corn.

Cael plucks the pepper, hands it up.

It’s Wanda who takes it.

“Is this what I think it is?” she hollers over the storm.

Cael says nothing. He eases forward, flagging them to nudge the boat alongside him. Rigo uses the spotlight to highlight the trail of vegetables. As they drift forward, the wind keening, the pollen stinging, Cael stoops again and again, fetching vegetable after vegetable. A tomato here. A
pepper there. A scooped shirt full of pea pods. A bundle of some crinkly leafed green that smells crisp and clean when Cael gives it a twist and wrenches it up out of the earth. All the while the corn reaches for him—pulling a leaf along his skin, drawing a bead of blood—but none of that matters. It’s here. The garden. The garden means ace notes. The ace notes mean buying a proper future for him and his family and his crew. He thinks of the flash in Gwennie’s eyes when she told him she stole that chicha beer and suddenly wishes like hell he could see that same flash right now.
Damnit, Cael.

He kicks the stalks aside and keeps moving.

It isn’t long before he comes upon a small trail of strawberries. Lush, each as big as a baby’s fist. He can’t help it—he kneels down, pokes through the strawberries until he finds one mostly shielded from the pleach of corn leaves. He dusts off the pollen and pops it in his mouth.

He damn near faints. It’s
that
good.

He hands everything else he grabs up to Wanda.

They’ve gone a hundred yards when Lane yells down, “Cael, you need to see this.”

“Not now!” Cael yells.

“Yes.
Now
.”

Muttering, Cael clambers back up into the boat.

Lane is pointing off the bow.

At first Cael doesn’t see it. But then the wind eases and the cloud of pollen parts—Cael sees something out there, glinting. Then it’s again swallowed by the drift. Cael scowls. “The hell am I looking at?”

“Martha’s Bend.”

Martha’s Bend was a town like Boxelder once upon a time. Before Cael and them were even born. Now it’s a dead town like so many others. For reasons that run the gamut of rumors—Blight! Hobos! Treachery by the Sleeping Dogs!—the Empyrean swooped in and quarantined it. All the people disappeared, and the Empyrean sealed up the town beneath a giant plasto-sheen bubble, the plastic fabric pinned not just to the ground but deep below it. (
As though to prevent roots from growing
is the thought that suddenly strikes Cael.)

A town like Martha’s Bend is a scavenger’s bread and butter—that is, after about fifty years pass and the Empyrean “opens” it, lancing the plastic blister and letting scavengers in to pick the bones. Martha’s Bend has more time on its clock, though—the town’s been concealed for almost thirty years now. Which means it’s a long way from being opened back up to the likes of them.

“How’d we miss that earlier?” Cael asks.

Lane shrugs. “We were in the corn. Can’t see squat from down there.”

The glimmer Cael sees is a shaft of moonlight reflected off the metallic sheen of the bubble. “The trail,” Cael says.

“It leads to Martha’s Bend.”

“Coincidence?”

Cael grips the deck rail, looks out from the boat. It’s then he feels something in his hand. A slight vibration. A vibration that’s getting stronger.

He grabs Lane’s hand, presses it against the railing.

“You feel that?”

“Listen,” Lane says. There, beneath the vibration, beneath the whisper of pollen and the rasp of cornstalk against cornstalk, is another, deeper sound. A rumble.

Like from a machine. Like from a motorvator.

Cael holds his hands over his eyes, trying to block the flying pollen. Sure enough, in the distance off to starboard, a pair of lights.

Coming right for them.

“Pull the boat back!” Cael says. “We’ve got a visitor.”

OF BLIGHT AND BOUNTY

THE RUMBLE GROWS
louder. Headlights in the pollen grow brighter.

Soon the shape begins to resolve: It’s a motorvator, all right. An old harvester by the look of it. The pollen whispers against the machine’s metal side as it trudges through the corn, the thresher bar silent, stalks crushed underneath instead of sucked up and processed. Cael thinks it looks like a trundling beast: mouth open, teeth forward, haunches high in the air.

Lane keeps the pinnace off to the side as Rigo and Wanda stabilize the boat with the oar-poles. The harvester churns slowly forward, perpendicular to them. Before too long it’ll cross over the garden trail, crushing the plants beneath.

“Spotlight,” Cael says.

The spotlight flicks to life. Lane points it at the motorvator, letting the weak circle of light drift over the whole robot.

Cael had figured this was another harvester gone off the grid—prime pickings or, if it belongs to someone from Boxelder, something for Poltroon to fix. But in the light Cael sees this old harvester is looking pretty cleaned up already. No grime stains. Fresh paint job, red as a barn door. It’s an older Thresher-Bot model, a 2400 series, but upgraded by hand.

“Take us over there,” Cael says.

Lane hops over to an oar-pole, and Cael picks up one himself. They push with the oar-poles so that
Doris
will intersect with the harvester’s path. As soon as they get close enough, Lane grabs a towrope and loops it around the Thresher-Bot’s antenna box.

It begins to pull the pinnace along.

Cael yells, “Steady the boat. I’m gonna go over.”

Wanda clutches at him, but he shakes her free.

“You sure?” Lane asks. “This isn’t why we’re out here.”

Cael shrugs. “
You
want to turn down the ace notes?” The look on Lane’s face answers that question. “Me neither. Besides, this might belong to someone from town.” If so, the paperwork inside the cabin—which is generally unmanned,
but still a place a field shepherd could sit if he wanted to ride along—should tell them.

They use the oar-poles to nudge the pinnace closer. Cael’s about to take the leap across when Rigo mans the light and again shines the beam—

Something moves inside the motorvator.

A shadow passes by the window. And then it’s gone.

Cael is so startled he almost tumbles over the side. Wanda grabs at his arm, stopping him from teetering over into the corn below. His eyes dart back to the motorvator. Nothing moves.

“Maybe it’s a shuck rat,” Rigo says.

Lane shakes his head. “Too big for a rat.”

Cael’s seen some damn big shuck rats. Almost the size of Wanda’s mutt, Hazelnut. But Lane’s right: the shadow within the harvester’s cabin is too big.

Maybe they’re just seeing things.

Or maybe there’s someone in there.

“Give me the beatdown stick,” Cael says, snapping his fingers at Rigo. The beatdown stick is an old baseball bat—from the days when the Empyrean still let them play that old game—studded with rusty nails, points sticking outward.

“This isn’t
Betsy
,” Rigo says. “No
Betsy
, no beatdown stick.”

“Damn,” Cael says. “Give me something, then. Wanda, what kind of weapons you have on board?”

Her blank stare answers the question.

“Seriously? No knives? No truncheons? Not even a damn mop handle?” He snatches up the oar-pole. To Rigo and Lane he says, “Stabilize the boat, will you?”

Then he uses the oar-pole to tap on the glass.
Thwack thwack thwack.

“Hey!” Cael yells. “Someone in there? Show yourself!” He says to Lane: “You think there’s a hobo in there?”

If there’s a hobo in here, I hope like hell he’s not one of the crazy, violent ones.

Cael yells over the motorvator engine: “Come on out, you damn hobo! I’ll break that window!”

Nothing. Just wind and pollen and the rumbling of the harvester.

But then—

The window rattles. Everyone jumps.

Click!
The glass frame unlatches. It slides open.

A face emerges.

Cael hears Wanda gasp.

“
Poltroon?
” Cael asks. Sure enough, staring back at him is the lean, haggard face of Earl Poltroon. He’s got a few days’ worth of beard stubble on his face, as white as salt on his otherwise dark skin. He blinks away a gust of pollen, wipes his nose across his forearm.

“You best get out of here, Cael McAvoy!” he yells. His
voice has a ragged edge to it, like a jagged-toothed saw running through hardwood. “You don’t want any part of this.”

Cael shares a What-the-hell? look with the others on the boat. Rigo mimes drinking from a bottle.

“Part of
what
?” Cael calls back.

“This! Me! All of it!” Poltroon snarls. “Go on. Get the hell gone.”

“Poltroon, you look drunk as a skunk in a big blue funk. Why don’t you come up on out of there? Come on over to the boat. We’ll get you home so you can clean yourself up.”
Plus, maybe he knows where the heck we are
, Cael thinks. He waves Poltroon forward.

Something moves behind Poltroon. Inside the cab.