Blightborn (37 page)

Comes . . . down?

“Some of our own,” Billy adds.

“Like you said, Billy Cross,
Is what it is
. You ever hear the story about how one of the Sawtooth Seven got caught after the gunfight at Tarryall? Some folks say it was Iron-Red Ned, but Mayhew says he doesn’t think so. Way it’s been told to me, it was Bellflower. Story says they caught her, had her bound up in those whip-cord wrist-cuffs. She took her teeth, bit into the skin around her hands and wrists. So the blood could
lubricate
her flesh. That’s how she was able to wriggle free, steal one of their sonic pistols, and shoot her way out. Sometimes blood lubricates the gears, Billy Cross. Revolution doesn’t come with a kiss and a tickle.”

A floorboard creaks just behind him.

Cael whirls.

“You again,” Brank growls.

“
This
again,” Cael slurs.

Brank grabs him, throws him through the door.

Cael lands hard on his shoulder in the captain’s chambers.

He tries to stand, but Brank’s fast like a falling tree—suddenly his shadow blankets Cael, and a hard boot catches Cael in his side.

He curls up around the rifle. Moaning. Pain radiates from his balls up to his sternum. The stem-and-leaves tightens and twitches.

Killian kneels. “How much did your little ears hear, Cael?”

“Enough,” he groans.

“Time to present a very serious question then. Is this going to be a problem? We’re just on the edge of this thing, and you and I had such a nice talk before, and I’d like to think you’re with me on this.”

“Way Lane was
with
you?” he coughs.

Killian clucks his tongue. “Your friend had designs on me that were admirable and flattering but that I was regrettably unable to return thanks to the way the Lord and Lady made me. I enjoy the company of women.”

“You didn’t tell me,” Cael croaks.

“Tell you what?”

“About the rifle. You said it was a raider’s rifle. You never said it belonged to one of the Sawtooth Seven.”

“Didn’t want you to get a big head about it.”

“What else aren’t you telling us?”

Killian just grins.

“The flotilla,” Cael grunts. “You’re gonna bring it down. The . . . Saranyu?”

“The very same.”

“All those people on board . . .”

“As you may have heard, they will not all make it, I suspect.”

“And the other raiders. My girl, Gwennie . . .”

The grin stretches tighter, like skin pulled across a tanner’s horse. “She’ll be safe. I’ll make sure of it.”

But there’s a hesitation just before he says it. As if the widening smile is covering, compensating, trying to spackle over all the fear and all that doubt. It’s then Cael realizes: everything
this man says is a lie. Or worse, some unsteady, unpredictable mix of lies and truth, blended so perfectly together that the distinctions have been lost.

“I think you might be selling me a story,” Cael says. “
Sometimes blood lubricates the gears.
”

The raider’s smile fades. His nostrils flare. “Seems you will be a problem, then. Brank?”

Cael feels another boot, this time in his kidneys. Pain blooms like a field of poppies. His head swims. He fumbles for the gun—

Killian pulls it away.

My gun—That’s Pop’s—

Brank drops down onto Cael, presses a meaty arm against Cael’s throat to pin him to the floor. Brank stares down over that crooked, still-puffy nose.

“Whaddya want me to do?” Brank asks.

Killian pops his lips. “Shit. Kill him, I guess.”

Brank lifts Cael and hurls him backward into the wall. A nearby table rattles. A bottle spins off it—doesn’t shatter but rolls away.

One hand closes around his throat.

With Brank, only one hand is needed.

Cael’s vision warps. One world becomes two. His head pulses. His tongue feels fat. He kicks out—driving a boot-tip into Brank’s crotch, or so he hopes, but Brank turns, takes the kick on the inside of his thigh, and retaliates by slamming Cael against the wall anew.

The world pulses,
badoom badoom badoom
.

The stem-and-leaves beneath his shirt twitches and stretches.

His chest begins to burn like someone’s pressing the tip of
a cigarette there. Brank makes a sound, stares down at Cael’s chest. He must see something moving there because he scowls and says, “The hell’s that?”

And that’s when it’s all over for him.

Cael’s shirt splits—the fabric rips.

The Blight thrusts outward, no longer only a few inches long but now several feet of braided vine—Cael sees dozens of leaves flitting and twitching as the vine springs like a snake out of a hole, coiling suddenly around the thick, gristly arm holding Cael by the neck.

It cinches tight.

The sound of breaking bone splits the air like a thundercrack—

The arm bends opposite to how it should. Brank makes a sound like wind howling through a broken window.

Billy Cross yells, “Blight!”

The pressure is gone. Cael drops to the floor, heels skidding so that he barely remains standing.

Everything goes to King Hell.

Billy lunges, his fat-bladed Bowie already up out of its sheath. On the other side, Killian is raising the rifle—Cael’s own godsdamn rifle!—and jacking the lever action to load a round into the chamber.

It’s then that Cael feels it, really feels it—the Blight. Part of it is in him, but part of him is in it, too. He wills it to act.

It lashes to the right. Then coils around the rifle. Yanks the barrel to the side just as Killian pulls the trigger.
Bang!

Billy
oof
s, staggers backward—the knife thuds to the floor. Blood flecks the wall behind the first mate. A black-red stain spreads between his heart and his belly.

Billy Cross falls, clutching his gut and gasping.

Killian calls his first mate’s name—

Just as the gun is yanked out of his hand by the whipping Blight-vine.

Cael catches the rifle.

But Killian’s fast.

He’s already got a sonic shooter in hand—

Long, lean barrel pointed at Cael.

Killian fires.

Cael holds up his own rifle, sideways across his chest—

The sonic blast snaps the rifle in twain. Splinters spray his face. The two halves of the rifle—
Pop’s gun!
—drop to the floor.

Killian raises the pistol again—

Fight turns to flight.

Run, godsdamnit, run
.

The Blight-vine acts on its own—it coils around a chair leg, whips it hard into Killian’s temple, knocking the raider captain onto his bed.

Outside the door: footsteps. Marching belowdecks, sounding like a herd of cattle stampeding—

Only one way out then. The window at the aft of the ship. The one that looks and hangs out over the corn. Two dozen panes of warped glass, the dead corn, and the long night waiting just outside.

Cael charges—

The vine coils around his own arm. Like a whip, a lasso.

Killian is already up, gun pointed, firing another shot—

Good fortune. The sonic blast lances through the air. Strikes
the window. It shatters outward in a tumbling hailstorm of glass shards—

Cael joins the storm of glass, leaping out—

Out over nothing. Legs pinwheeling. Arms like broken wings flapping, trying to help him fly.

Suddenly he’s in the corn, legs hitting hard, rolling forward.

Sonic blasts pepper the air with shrieks and warbles. Stalks and leaves pop and slice and hop like a rabbit bitten by a rattler.

But then the fleet keeps going.

Out over the corn and away.

Cael is alone. He rolls onto his back and weeps.

SCAR TISSUE

GWENNIE WAKES
to the vision of her father scrabbling to stay on the gangplank, then sliding, then falling. Her mother follows him over, kicked in the gut by the peregrine, who has great gray wings thrusting up out of his back. As Gwennie’s mother falls, the peregrine’s wings stretch and spread, majestic and cruel with raptor-like grace. Finally, her brother: Percy grabs him. Scooter kicks and screams.

Percy tosses him over the edge. Like someone throwing a feed sack.

Their screams are loud, then soft . . . then gone.

All that’s left is the wind.

And the sound of her weeping.

She’s in a small cell. In the corner. On the floor.

Whatever chemical was in that cloth has her feeling muzzy headed—as if her brain is wrapped in a layer of soggy sponge.

“You’re awake” comes a voice. She gasps. Startled. A hard boot of adrenaline. She squeezes some of those sponges dry.

Davies. He’s sitting on her cot. Looking somber and sober, hands across his knees, hunched over. He runs a hand across his scalp, drums his fingers there. “I’m sorry I had to do that to you.”

“May Old Scratch take you. May he take you and work the forges until your hands burn; may he force you into the mines of King Hell, where you work your hands bloody and down to white bone; may he rake you over the coals; may he crush your body underneath his howling steam engine!”

“You were inconsolable.”

“I wonder why.” She hears her own voice, like gravel rattling in a tin cup. She knows she’s still young, but she suddenly feels so old.

“I can’t imagine what that’s like. To watch your father—”

“If you came here to relive the memory, don’t bother.”
Already playing again and again in my head like some flickering projection. Like a stage show for ghosts
. “Just go away.”

“Mary Salton—”

“Can also go to hell.”

“—has determined that now is not the time to make ourselves vulnerable by rescuing your mother and your brother.”

Like a sickle blade piercing her heart. She knew that would be the answer, but it kills her to hear it aloud. It elicits from her a loud, gulping sob. She quickly quiets herself, shoves the sorrow down into a hole, blinks away any tears that want to come. She sniffs. Wipes her eyes. Stares hot coals through Davies, hoping that he can feel it: a hot poker through his heart.

“I’ve decided otherwise” is all she says.

“Then I’ll help you.”

Wait, what?
“Wait, what?”

“I . . . lost my wife just after Squirrel was born. Squirrel was born on a Tuesday, and Retta died on Wednesday. The birth . . . tore something open inside my wife. Doc Misery said wasn’t much we could do; she didn’t have any Annie pills or the training to sew her up. But then someone—I don’t even remember who—said,
Well, they got those pills at the depot, and maybe even one of them fancy mechanical Doctor-Bots
.

“See, I lived in a town, Quarrel’s Bridge—but there was no bridge and so we just called it Quarrels—and we had a depot nearby. I was just a field shepherd tending the motorvators, so I stole the Tallyman’s boat—and off we went to the depot, not even a half-day’s ride away.”

He stares off at an unfixed point—a point that in his mind must be somewhere in the Heartland, a point found backward in time.

“I got her there, and her thighs were just . . . they were blackened with blood, her legs looking like they were covered in roofing tar, and I thought,
The people here at the depot are going to help me. They’re Heartlanders even if they work for the skybastards above.

“So I went to the door. My wife across my arms, blood . . . dripping into the dirt. And I pounded on that door. Knocking so hard I thought I might punch it off its hinges. Eventually a little voice came up over the speaker and the voice belonged to . . . well, it was a provisionist’s voice, small and mousy, and he told me to go home.
Go home
, he said,
and bury your wife
.”

His jaw tenses. Gwennie can hear his teeth grind like a millstone.

“He said that because Retta was dead. In my arms, just dead. And I was mad, and I took that boat and rammed it into the depot, which broke the boat and didn’t do squat to the depot. Men came out in face shields, peppered me with sonic shots. Knocked me out cold, and I woke up in a cell. Just as you did now. And I broke out of that cell with the help of some of the townsfolk who knew I had a baby girl I had to tend to, and then I took that baby girl of mine, and I named her Retta after my wife, but that was too painful to say so I just called her what I thought she looked like, which was a little squirrel. I ran. Escaped town. We lived as hobos for a couple years until I found the Sleeping Dogs—or until they found me. And here we are.”

Gwennie leans back against the wall. The rusted metal is cool against her scalp and her neck. “I’m sorry” is all she can say.

“Nothing for you to apologize about. That’s life in the—”

“That’s life
everywhere
,” she says.

“Well. It doesn’t have to be. We’re trying to make a difference. But Salton can be singularly focused, and she doesn’t have the . . . unique perspective I have on losing our loved ones. We’re scarred, you and I. But maybe we can save you a pair of scars if we do this right.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying, dearest Ballcutter, that we leave just before morning, when the guards shift. I’ve got a plan to rescue your mother and your brother. So, steady yourself for the fight ahead. I hope you truly are ready to cut some balls, because we’re not
going to salvage what’s left of your family unless you’re willing to get mean.”