Blightborn (38 page)

“I can be mean. I’ll do anything.” She nods. “Thanks, Davies.”

He nods. “See you in about five hours, Ballcutter.”

Davies steps into Salton’s office. She stands by a chalkboard that’s not hung but rather propped against the wall. Coordinating raiders and ship schedules. Escape vectors.

“It’s done,” he says. He hears the disappointment in his own voice.

“Good to hear.”

“Good to hear? I could use a little more than that, you know. A clap on the back. A shot of whiskey. A freakin’ parade would actually be all right for the shit-awful thing I just did to that girl.”

Salton turns. He can tell she’s trying to make a softer, more compassionate face, but she can’t hide her eye-rolling in disdain.

She says, “This aligns perfectly. The peregrine has done precisely what he did not want to do—he wanted to anesthetize us. But we’re riled up. Enraged. The saying goes to never wake a sleeping dog, and that’s what he’s gone and done, Davies. This is necessary. Shawcatch has the drive and the willingness to put herself out there—”

“Only if we’re lying to her.”

“Don’t think of it as a lie. It may not be. Maybe your actions will still save her mother and brother.”

“But that’s not our goal,” he says, realizing that he, too, isn’t able to hide his disdain.

“Should it be? To save two people when we’re trying to save thousands?”

“That’s mercenary.”

“That’s reality. Do the deal. Get her to the control tower.”

“We’ll have support?”

“All you need.”

“And we have the codes?”

“Already in hand.”

But there he hears a hesitation. She’s lying, isn’t she?

“Good,” he says. “And we’re all guaranteed a way off this when the heavens start to fall?”

“Of course.”

“Even the girl?”

“Even the girl.”

THE DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF BALASTAIR HARRINGTON

BALASTAIR GASPS AND SITS UP SHARPLY
.

His head cracks into the plastic molding of a bunk above him.

Wham
.

He drops back down.

He looks around. Starts to shiver. Then sweat.

He rolls off the edge of the bed and pukes.

Or rather dry heaves. The most he manages to produce is a string of thick, foamy saliva dangling from his lips and chin.

Ptoo
. He spits. Crawls over the edge of the bed.

A very small bunk room. Cramped. Coffin-like.
But I’m not dead,
he thinks.
Dead men don’t shiver and sweat and spit
. Or do they? He was dead. He took the pill. Maybe he’s crossed a threshold, some tenebrous membrane separating what is known of life into what is unknown about death—

Below him, the ground begins to hum.

Hover-panels. He’s on a ship.

He stumbles to the small door, crouches, and steps through.

A woman sits at a control panel. She presses a set of linked levers forward. The humming sound below grows.

She’s pretty. Young. Almond-shaped eyes. Lips painted red: all sharp peaks and dagger-tips. She sees him. She smiles.

“You’re awake,” she says.

“I’m
alive
.”

“Yes.”

“Who are you?”

A twinge of her red lips. A smile? A scowl? “A friend.”

“A friend. The Sleeping Dogs. Did Kin Sage—”

She says nothing.

But as she reaches up above her head with her other hand to flip a few switches, he sees her hand.

At first he thinks it’s a glove. It’s not. It’s plant matter. The hand isn’t even human. Those aren’t fingers. They’re
vines
. Leaves whispering against one another as they flick the switches and press buttons. When the task is completed, the vines braid back together and curl inward. Like a fiddlehead fern spiraling in reverse.

“My mother,” he says, struck with sudden horror.

“She wants you safe. She heard tell of your plight.”

“I won’t go.”

“You will. If only out of gratitude for us saving you from that cage and whatever grim execution was to happen next.”

“I . . . you made me kill myself. I thought I . . .”

“Easiest way to get your body out. The pill simulated death.”

He spots a sonic shooter sitting on the dash.

Two feet from her right hand. Her
human
hand.

She turns back toward the console. Presses a flight stick forward. The ship begins to lift.

Above Balastair’s head: a hatch.

It’s now or never.

He reaches in, grabs for the gun—but she sees him coming. She snatches it first, cracks him across the forehead with it.

He falls into the copilot’s chair, head pounding.

She levels the pistol at him. She says, not without a hint of anger, “Just sit back and enjoy the ride.”

The ship drifts upward. The thrum of the hover-panels grows louder.

Balastair looks at the viewscreen in the center of the console. Small, black and white, but a clear enough picture: this boat, maybe a Mackinaw, isn’t moored like some. It’s small enough to sit on a landing pad.

“You won’t shoot me,” he says. “My mother wouldn’t like that.”

“I can stun you into unconsciousness.”

He shrugs. The woman has a point.

He darts his eyes once more to the viewscreen—this time feigning shock and horror at what he sees there. He lies: “We’re under attack!”

Her gaze follows his.

It’s the only moment he’ll get. He jams his foot up and then brings his heel down on the elevator levers—

Suddenly the ship shudders and jerks downward.

He doesn’t know how far up they are—twenty, thirty feet?—but it’s enough. The Mackinaw pitches forward and crashes hard
into the dock. The woman’s head hammers forward into the steering column, and the gun drops out of her hand.

Balastair is thrown off the seat, slamming hard against the floor between the two chairs.

He sees the sonic shooter. Snatches it up.

The woman moans. Tries to lift her head off the console. Blood gushes from a gash above her eyebrows.

Balastair utters a small apology, drops the telescoping ladder, and clambers out of the hatch before the Blighted woman fully rouses.

THE PATH OPENS

CAEL SITS FOR A WHILE
, surrounded by a forest of withered cornstalks. Above, fat, phlegmy clouds block the moon. A wind kicks up; dry leaves hiss as it sweeps over and through.

He looks down at his Blight—three vines now plaited together as one, emerging from the hole in his ripped shirt, thrust up from a crater of red, raw skin right over his heart. He can hear his heartbeat pulse through the vine and to the ends of each small, thumbprint-sized leaf. The vine now sits coiled around his arm from shoulder down to wrist.

It’s quiet. As if, for now, its work is done.

He’s not sure what happened back there. He was drunk. He’s not now. Everything is as clear as the tolling of a bell. Crisp. Awake. Aware.

Painfully so.

He attacked. He was attacked. The Blight reacted. Billy Cross is dead. What will happen to Rigo and Lane?

But then another thought:
They’re going to bring down the flotilla.

Not just any flotilla. The one with Gwennie on it. And his sister.

The thought sucker punches him.

He has to stop it. Somehow. But it’s an absurd notion. He’s alone in a dead zone of Hiram’s Golden Prolific, the raider fleet fast moving toward its destination of Tuttle’s Church, wherever that is. He has nothing. No way forward. No way back.

It occurs to him:
I’m going to die out here
.

Death. It haunts the Heartland. Stillborns and cancer victims and those who fall into the processing vats or get mowed down by some malfunctioning motorvator. Cael’s seen it his whole life. Ghosts of it in his father and mother: Pop’s bone spur hip, Mom’s tumors all over her body. Corruption and ruin and
Oh hey, welcome to the Heartland
.

Just the same, he never really figured it would happen to him. He felt young and immortal. His life was always ahead of him. Obligated to Gwennie—or when reality had intervened, Wanda. Maybe some kids. Inherit the farm. He knew he couldn’t be a scavenger forever, and one day he’d go and work the line or do some other job the Empyrean assigned to him, but everything
else
still seemed like forever. And now, standing here in the wide-open nowhere, forever seems as if it’s been cut woefully short.

I’m dead. Dead as these cornstalks. Dead as Mayor Barnes, or Grey Franklin, or Pally Varrin. Is Pop dead? Mom? Will Gwennie and Merelda die, too? Lane and Rigo? Is Wanda still alive, or has she gone skip-to-the-loo off this mortal coil?

All because I couldn’t do what I was supposed to.

All because of that garden. Because of the choices he’s made.

He stands up.

Dusts himself off.

Tries to figure out where to go.

His eyes adjust to the darkness.

And he sees something. Something impossible. Out there beyond the stalks. Hidden among them. A shape.

Like somebody standing there. Still and silent.

Just a trick of the eye,
he thinks.

But then his eyes drift.

He sees another shape just like it to the left. And another to the left of that one. He lets his eyes drift, slowly spinning himself around, the dry ground cracking and complaining beneath his turning feet—

People. Standing out there. In the corn.
All around him
. Watching.

Waiting.

Can’t be. Impossible. Nobody out here. Nobody.

Over the corn, a lilting, lyrical voice—

“
Caaaaaaeeeel
. . .”

Not a whisper. Not in his head. But real.

It’s the voice he heard during that twister. As if the whirling winds had captured the voice. As if the funnel cloud was a message just for him.

The bodies all take one step forward. In unison.

Rustling corn.

Lord and Lady. He has a horrible, absurd thought:
the Maize Witch
. The devil’s own daughter. With her army of demons.

Again that singsongy voice, “
Caaaaaeeel . . . Cael, we’re waiting.
. . .”

He thinks,
Run.

The shapes take another step forward. Then another. And one after that. They’re coming now. Slowly. But damn surely.

He looks down at the Blight-vine coiled around his arm—he wills it to move, to lash out, to twitch or shift or something or
anything
, but it just hugs his arm tight—

Each of the dark shapes suddenly glows bright.

At first he thinks,
Some trick of the witch, some awful magic
—but then he sees the way the light dances, reflected up and out, and he realizes they’re carrying lamps. Oil lamps with tall, glass chimneys.

He can smell the oil burning now.

They’re coming.

“Go on!” he shouts. “Get out of here!”

He reaches for his back pocket—

His slingshot is still there.

He pulls it. Feels in his other pocket for—

Dangit, no ammo
.

Cael quickly drops to a knee, feels around the ground for anything, anything—but it’s just hard, broken dirt and crusty brace roots.

But then: one stone. He palms it. Pops it into the slingshot pocket—

When he stands, he sees they’re upon him.

The horror of it stays his hand. His fingers slacken. The stone drops from the slingshot pocket.

Blighted.

They’re all horribly, unavoidably Blighted.

Men and women. Some of them have thorns instead of teeth. Eyes yellow like pollen. Limbs of vine, stalk, and bark. Leaves thrust up out of necks and chins and cheeks. Collarbones of knotty branch. Hair like flowery filaments or green grass—Cael hasn’t seen a patch of grass since he was a kid, and here it is, growing up out of a Blighter’s scalp.

They open their mouths.

Their jaws creak and pop.

They collectively speak his name.

“
Cael.
”

“Get the hell away from me!” he yells. He waves the slingshot around—it bashes into the corn, shaking and rattling the dead stalks. “You leave me alone!”