Blightborn (26 page)

“What’s that?”

“If we join up, all of us, then Killian says he can get us onto the flotilla. Long as we help him with his problems, he can help us with ours.”

Cael shifts from foot to foot. Part of him feels as if this is Old Scratch offering Jeezum Crow that famous deal, the one that forced him to be trapped in the Heartland, never again to see the sky-manse of the Lord and Lady. But the other part of him says, here it is.
Here’s
the way forward. He’s been gnawing over that problem, turning it around in his mouth again and again—
How will we ever get onto a flotilla now? Another depot? Get captured and brought there as criminals?
Now this: an opportunity.

He says the words before he realizes he’s saying them.

“I’m in,” Cael says. “You can tell your friend I’m in.”

THE CAPTIVE SEA

ON THE COUNTER
, a music box plays. It’s a small brass platform that opens like a flower. From inside, a little auto-mate emerges: a man with a swan’s long neck and lean head, dressed to the nines in a sharkskin suit and playing a little violin. Merelda tells it what song to play: “The Doggy Went A-Courtin’.” A song her mother used to sing to her when . . .

Mom used to be so pretty back then. So alive.

Merelda feels as if her mother’s spirit is in her as she dances around the kitchen of her small apartment—what they call a “ballet flat,” an apartment meant only for a mistress, many of whom were once plucked from the roving ballet troupes on the flotilla.

She whirls and twirls, pretending she was just such a dancer. She pops the top of the small, shimmering gift box and places within its depths several small gifts: a lush wine mango, a trio
of chocolate bars in their wrapping (sky-salt and marshmallow crème), a small bottle of Bentley’s Bitter Amari for her father, a bottle of Moon-Kiss Cola for Cael. And then the final component: a beautiful ostrich egg. Merelda holds it and stares at it for a while—a wondrous thing, this egg. Heavy enough that it must be held with two hands. She doesn’t know what the bird looks like that lays such a massive thing, but it must be a
tremendous
creature.

Percy assured her the birds are really quite dull. He said he knew someone who raises a small flock of them on the Utrecht Carlotta Jumala. For racing, he said. She laughed at the thought of someone racing birds.

Now she bites her lower lip and has the little swan-man play “Madam, I Have a Very Fine Farm” as she puts the music box into the package and ties the whole thing up with a shiny silver bow. The music is now muffled, but still she sings and still she dances.

Living in the sky is the most wondrous thing.

Big eggs. Sweet fruits. Strange birds.

And chocolates.

“
Cannot send
,” the Parcel-Mate says, metal jaw rattling as its speaker intones the words. Whenever it finishes speaking, it ends with a little
ding!

Merelda looks down at the box on the counter scale, the brass gears and counterweights shining in the bright overhead lights of the Parcelman’s Office. Maybe the mechanical man did not
hear her. “I want to send this to”—and here she speaks loudly and clearly and very, very slowly—“the McAvoy Farm, that’s in
Boxelder
, down below in the
Heartland
.”

“
Cannot send
,” the Parcel-Mate says again, round egg head and big, painted glass eyes turning toward Merelda anew, as if regarding her with a moment of robotic curiosity.
Ding!

“But . . . I’ve sent packages before.”

“
Cannot send. Please reclaim package. Thank you!
”

“Wh . . . why? Why can’t I send it?”

“
Provisional Depot for Boxelder has been closed. Access to Boxelder has been closed. Closed by the Empyrean Department of Zoning under order of the Initiative, authorization signed by Project Leader Parl Juniper and flotilla Praetor Ashland Garriott. Thank you.
”

Ding!

The little bell makes her heart jump.

Why would Boxelder be closed?

“This must be a mistake,” she says.

“
Parcel-Mates are not privy to mistakes
.”

Ding!

She hurries out, flustered, and suddenly afraid.

She’s back at the apartment, which sits at the top of a set of side stairs, entirely separate from the peregrine’s house. She’d only met his wife and son once. The wife had been nothing but warm hugs and handshakes and the kind of sincerity Merelda knew was as fake as the white on the woman’s teeth, but it still had been better than the reception the boy’d given her.

He’d just stared at her. As if his eyes were little knives.

Sometimes she sees him still. Peering out of his third-floor bedroom porthole at her—the chubby, squirrel cheeks doing little to diminish his hateful stare. (A sudden thought strikes her: sometimes she sees Percy give that same look. Not to her. Of course never to her.)

Right now the porthole is empty—no boy staring.

A fact for which she’s quite thankful.

She stands for a moment at the platform outside the red door that marks her apartment. They’re near to the top of the Hill of Spears. She can see farther up the massive white manse that belongs to the praetor. Farther down she sees the white homes (always white here in the Hill of Spears) of the administrators of education, of currency, of mercantile society—all men with soft hands. (Blessedly her own hands are soft, too, for her lot down below was to handle a darning needle.)

Beyond those white houses sit the other hills and skyscrapers of the flotilla, swaying, bobbing, drifting apart and easing slowly together. Everything clean. Cloud-swept. Beautiful.

Nothing like the Heartland.

She thinks about that from time to time.

How much these people have. How much
she
now has.

But the Heartland suffers. . . .

No! She won’t think that way. Just won’t do it. What good does that get her? Nothing. The Heartland is a cruel place, its people hard and unpleasant. It’s no place to dream. Those people don’t give two whits about a girl’s dreams.

Besides, the Heartland treats the hobos the same as the
Empyrean treats the Heartland. There’s always an order to things. Someone’s always on the top. Someone’s always on the bottom.

She’d rather be on the top, thank you very much.

She nods as if answering a question she asked herself. Then she opens the door to her apartment and steps inside.

She nearly screams.

Gwendolyn Shawcatch sits there at her nook table.

And she has a knife. Facing down, the heel of the hilt in her palm, the knife-tip digging into the white lacquer-top table, the blade spinning lazily as she turns it. She’s got bruises on her cheek that have started to yellow and some cuts that look to be healing up, but sometime between now and the last time they saw each other, someone worked Gwennie over good.

Merelda drops the package, startled.

Something inside the package goes
pop
. Goopy yolk begins to bleed out.

“Oops,” Gwennie says. “You, ah, dropped something.”

The egg
. She tries not to cry.

“I’ll scream.”

“That’s no way to greet an old friend.”

“I’ll do it. I’ll really scream.”

Gwennie rolls her eyes.
Such a dismissive, crass girl.
Always was. She never understood what Cael saw in her. “You go ahead and scream. Nobody’s home over there, and I think you know that. The peregrine is off doing whatever it is he does. Looking for me, probably. His family is shopping. For the festival tomorrow.”

“Festival . . .”

“The Tidings of Saranyu,” Gwennie says. “Or that’s what I’m to understand. I’m told they have a lot of festivals up here.”

Merelda gives a small nod. “They . . . they do.” So many it’s hard to keep track of them. At her feet, the yolk slowly spreads, a gift her father will never have now. “What do you want, Gwennie?”

“I want your help.”

“You can’t have it. Get out.”

“Ugh, what an attitude. Look at you. Barely recognizable as a Heartlander girl anymore. You’re so rude.”

“
You’re
rude. I always said you were rude.”

“Me? You were the one always up and running off. Leaving your family in the lurch.” Gwennie shakes her head. “It’s because of you that everything went to hell anyway.”

“What do you mean?” Merelda feels a sudden tightness in the chest.

“Oh. You don’t know. Do you?”

“Dangit, Gwennie, know what?”

“Jeezum, Mer. They got your pop. Maybe Cael, too. Proctor and the Babysitters went to the farmhouse . . . there was a shoot-out. I don’t know what happened after that. It’s been a while. Maybe they’re okay. I hope they are.”

“You’re lying.” But something itches at the back of her mind, and she hears the Parcel-Mate’s voice:
Access to Boxelder has been closed. . . .

“Believe what you want.”

“I hate you.”

“If that helps you sleep at night.”

Merelda stiffens. “I can’t help you. Even if I wanted to.”

“You can and you will. Because here’s what’s going to happen if you don’t—we’re gonna tell everybody who you really are. Merelda McAvoy. Cornpone cracker girl born from the cradle of dirt. Smell her fingernails; you can still smell the clay caught under them.”

“It won’t matter. Percy loves me.”

“Maybe he does. But it won’t change what he’ll do to you. Mistresses aren’t permanent. Did anyone tell you that? What happens when your shift is over? When the work is done, huh?”

“I’m not a whore,” Merelda says. Arms crossed.

“I don’t know what you are, Mer, or even who you are. But if you want this ride to end now, refuse to help me. Then you can be whatever it is they decide, because they own you. But if you want to keep on living your pretty little life of . . . shiny boxes and shinier ribbons, then help me.”

Panic races through her. A part of her knows that Gwennie is right. If she’s compromised, Percy would stand by her, she’s sure of it—but others may come for her. The praetor might see it differently. Might swoop her up and drop her down in the Lupercal, where she hears girls and boys have to do horrible things just to get by . . .

That’s like the Heartland, too, in a way. A place below, where folks gotta whittle themselves down to nothing just to feed their families. That’s why she had to get away from there. Why she had to try to help feed her own family with the spoils of the Empyrean.

But now, Pop, Mom, Cael . . .

“What do you need?”

“The peregrine’s visidex.”

“That’s absurd.”

“Be that as it may, I still need it.”

“I can’t . . . I can’t help you with that.”

“Sure, you can. He comes here most nights. To see you.”

“So?”

“He brings his visidex. He’s never without it.”

Merelda looks left, looks right, as if she’s going to see a door she can escape through, a door that will take her—Where? Somewhere. Anywhere. But there’s no door. No escape.

Gwennie says, “When he comes in tonight, I’m going to be here. And you’re going to distract him long enough for me to get that visidex.”

“You’re crazy. He’ll kill you.”

“And maybe you, too. So let’s play this real cool, huh?”

CHOKING LAUREL

CAEL SLEEPS
. If one can call it that. He rolls. Restless. Left to right. Leg over the edge of the cot. Back on the cot. The moth-eaten sheets make him too hot one minute, but as soon as he tosses them off: too cold, too cold.

He flits in and out of dreams, a stitching needle threading fabric.

In one dream Pop lies dead in the driveway outside a house that’s supposed to be their farmhouse but is somehow bigger, emptier, and more decrepit. He’s got one eye. His throat’s been cut.

In another dream he’s with Gwennie at the bow of his old cat-maran. Their clothes sit in a pile. Her hands sweep over him. The sun moves to stars above, light to dark, blue to black. He feels under the small of her back, fingers tracing down to the round tops of her buttocks, and he lifts her up—but he feels
something there at the base of her spine, a nub of something that ends in a soft, velvety leaf. It fills him with horror, but his body betrays him, every part of him suddenly stiffening with excitement—