Blightborn (47 page)

Then it happens again. She brightens and takes off and gets way ahead of them once more.

Gwennie’s mother moves with hesitation, her legs trembling, her hands shaking as she frequently does what Gwennie advises her not to do: look down.

Scooter, for his part, seems emboldened by Squirrel. As if he wants to be her. As if her recklessness suits him. Gwennie has to time and again stop him from trying to leap too far ahead, too fast.

They walk along fat, rusted pipes.

They climb down one ladder and up another.

They cross rickety, squeaking walkways.

And as they do, the sun slowly drips down from its place above their heads, easing toward the horizon, ready to melt into it as evening calls.

Then a small but present triumph awaits.

They edge past a sharp corner and see ahead a scalloped bay carved out of the side of the flotilla: a shipping dock of massive proportions with silver cranes lifting pallets and containers into scowbarges. Everything is automated. Mechanical arms moving boxes and barrels. Human-shaped auto-mates whirring about on wheels and textured treads. No people at all.

She says as much out loud.

Merelda nods. “They don’t like to work. So they make the machines do it for them.”

“Then why do they need us?” Gwennie says.

It’s her mother who speaks up now. “Maybe one day they won’t.” A sad look crosses her face, as if being needed is at least
something
to count on in this world. She lifts her chin toward the dock.

Now’s not the time to worry about it.

“We have to get over there. How?”

“I think that question’s about to be answered for us,” Merelda says, and points. Several ships suddenly appear from the center
of the flotilla, ketch-boats hovering over the docking bay. Cranes move out of their way as they slowly ease forward. One of the ships looks different from the others: the front end looks like the beak of a falcon. “Percy’s ship. The
Osprey
.”

Shit!
He’s already ahead of them.

“We have to go back,” Gwennie says, but then Squirrel appears from around the corner (did anyone even realize she’d gone?) and clucks her tongue.

“Nope,” Squirrel says. “Big ships thattaway, too.”

Gwennie slides past the corner, leaning out and giving a quick look.

Double shit!
Sure enough, another pair of ketch-boats hover a quarter mile back.

They’re trapped.

The
Osprey
slides away from the other ships, easing slowly across the bay, threading the needle between a pair of scowbarges.

It’s coming right for them.

EXPOSED

THE RAIDERS HUNKER DOWN
by the overturned hull of a scrapped pinnace—the mast gone to splinters, the sail a tattered blanket falling over the gravel lot out back of the shipman’s garage.

The sail has handprints on it.

Dark brown. Rusty. Lane shudders when he realizes it’s not dirt. It’s blood. Old blood.
What happened to the people of Tuttle’s Church?

Over the boat they have a vantage point—

There, in the street, a rusty hatch in the asphalt, exposed by a cutout in the plasto-sheen.

A mechanical stands there, as silent and still as a scarecrow. It wears a simple farmer’s shirt that ripples in the faint stirring of air. Its arm-cannon is already exposed—the other arm dead-ends in a machine hand of little pistons and pulleys and flywheels. The whole thing is plastered with a rime of corn pollen.

“One mechanical,” Killian says, his voice a whisper. In the distance the sounds of the battle rage on. Sonic screams. Men yelling.

“I don’t get it,” Lane says, his words hushed. “Why here? Why a data bank in the middle of nowhere? What the hell is going on here?”

Shiree answers, “It’s about distance.”

Killian explains in a low voice. “These data banks have the codes to the control towers of all the flotillas up there in the big blue. Why do they keep them here? If I had to wager, I’d put smart money on what Shiree just said: it’s all about distance. Only a few folks on the flotillas actually have the codes. Praetors, peregrines, maybe a few others. But they don’t want those codes up on the flotillas where they can do harm if somebody finds them. So they shuffle them off-ship to somewhere nobody would ever think to look for them—at the edge of the Heartland in a town where no one lives. But they didn’t count on us.”

“We ain’t got a shot,” Tammar Conley growls, his voice a rotten rumble in the back of his throat. “That mechanical will tear us apart.”

“It’s just one,” Mayhew says. “One of us distracts it. The rest open the door, head below.” He pauses. “Relax. I’ll do it. I’ll distract.”

He’s afraid, though. Lane can see it. For a master hunter and big sonofabitch, Mayhew’s scared. But that’s telling, too—because being scared isn’t stopping him. He’s still willing to do it. Because he believes.

Am I really a believer?
Lane asks.

Does it matter now?

The plan is the plan, and suddenly, like that, it’s in action.

Mayhew slings his bow over his shoulder, then climbs quickly atop the hull of the overturned boat. Above him is a broken window leading into the garage—he hoists himself up and in, as silent as a bird in flight.

Then: nothing. For what feels like forever. Time yawns and stretches, pulled like taffy. Lane feels impatience gnawing at his gut. Fear, too. It makes him feel alive in a way he doesn’t much like.

He’s about to say something to Killian when an arrow launches out of nowhere and pops the machine man square in the center of his sensor eye. The eye pops, cracks, sparks.

A voice from out of sight—Mayhew’s. “Come on, you metal bastard! Come hunt the hunter!”

And then the mechanical is on the move, sprinting forward with that unnatural hitch in its gait.

“Clear,” Shiree says.

“Godsdamnit, here we go,” Tammar growls.

Killian grins the maddest, most unhinged grin Lane’s seen yet.

Then he bolts forward toward the middle of the street.

Suddenly they’re out. They’re
exposed
. As Killian dives to his knees, skidding to the rusted hatch in the middle of main street, Lane looks around and sees at the far end of the street the metal citizens of Tuttle’s Church waging their war against the massive trawler. Already the trawler looks riddled with holes, pieces of wood hanging off, sails torn asunder, a few dead raiders draped over the edge like rugs bent for dusting. And the mechanicals are
moving forward now, easing toward the fleet in what Lane suddenly fears is an act of slow-motion extermination.

Here, though, their own mechanical man is crashing through the doorway to the local saloon, where a big, crooked sign up top reads
WILEY
’
S PLACE
.
Mayhew must’ve run in there,
Lane thinks.

Killian, meanwhile, wipes a sheen of rust free from the hatch, revealing a small screen that lights up with a muddy, blurry image as if from a visidex. On the screen a series of concentric green circles radiates outward, as if the device is waiting for input.

The raider captain takes the visidex and presses it down against the screen.

It’s like a key opening a lock.

The rusty hatch
ding
s.

Then the street rumbles. From far below, Lane hears the sound of gears turning. And something rising toward them.

For a moment that’s all there is—the calm before anything else happens, the seconds ticking down.

Then:
crash
.

The mechanical tumbles out of the second floor, metal arms flailing. It lands on its back, shattering the asphalt beneath the plasto-sheen coating. Mayhew leaps out after it like a man possessed by demons, an arrow in his hand like a knife. He lands on the mechanical, straddling its chest, and he stabs the arrow into its eye again and again, turning his face away from a shower of sparks—

Below them, a
ding
.

The rusty platform springs open.

A smooth-sculpted elevator pod rises from the street—

Mayhew gasps. He rears back, staring down at the mechanical in horror. Lane calls out to him to see what’s wrong, and all Mayhew can do is look at Lane with shock-struck eyes.

The machine man beneath him wrenches an arm free and fires a sonic blast up into Mayhew’s gut. A spray of red. Mayhew screaming. And then he’s down on his back, clutching at his guts as they threaten to spill out of him—

The elevator doors slide open.

Another mechanical awaits inside. This one is designed as a woman, with a long dress on her lean, metal body and red and blue wires for hair. Instantly the mechanical arm goes up; the hand spins off, bounces on the plastic; the gun pops out—

It begins firing.

A sonic blast tears through Shiree’s chest—a splinter of white bone through red—and she spins like a top, falling to the ground. Tammar ducks another blast and raises his own pistol, firing a series of shots into the thing’s face. But sonic blasts do a lot better against flesh than metal, and though the thing’s skull vibrates and dents with each hit, it keeps on coming.

One more shot and Tammar’s gun-arm disappears. One minute it’s there—the next his face is flecked with his own blood, and his hand and forearm have been all but erased.

Killian gets low and slams into the mechanical from the side. Lane sees his chance and lunges for the thing from the other side, grabbing at the gun arm and giving it a hard yank—

Like a cow tipping, the metal figure falls hard and fast. Lane has to backpedal out of the way so as not to be caught beneath it.

Before he even knows what’s happening, Killian is grabbing him by the arm and hauling him into the elevator—

Killian stabs the single black button on a faux-wood panel.

The elevator makes a
ding
—

Beneath them is the sound of gears turning.

But the doors do not yet close.

In the street, the first mechanical is standing.

And turning toward them.

Lane gets it now. He gets what Mayhew was so horrified to see. Because he feels that horror, too.

He knows suddenly where the people of Tuttle’s Church went to. They didn’t go anywhere.

They’re still here.

Half of the mechanical’s face has fallen away. A pale human face hides behind the metal carapace. The cheeks are lined with bruises. The one eye revealed stares off at nothing—wires thrust up under the lids.

They’ve been turned into these metal monstrosities.

The elevator doors start to close.

The mechanical raises its arm and fires.

The shot strikes Killian. Lane tastes the copper spray of blood as the elevator
ding
s one last time and the doors close.

THE BLACK HORSE

THE SKIFF JUMPS
over the corn as Boyland punches it forward. Eben Henry kneels in the middle seat and turns toward Cael. He draws a knife, held firmly in dark, tight fingers, a white-toothed grin spreading between the folds of his pink-stained swaddling.

“Little Mouse,” Eben says with a throaty chuckle. “You hurt me. Now I hurt you.”

Cael launches forth with his vine. This time his prey is close enough, and the vine wraps around Eben’s face, tightening against the wound gauze. The man screams in pain, the pink stains of the bandages turning red where the vine has cinched.

A flick of the knife upward cuts the vine in twain. Cael feels it—a cold rush that travels back through the Blight-vine to his arm and shoots deep into the chambers of his heart. He cries out.

Boyland yells, “Leave him be, godsadamnit! He’s
mine
.” He leans back and reaches for the vagrant—

Eben plunges the knife into the meat of Boyland’s shoulder.

The knife raises again, wet with red—

The skiff suddenly dives toward the corn. Before Cael knows what’s happening, the boat lifts, then shoulders hard into the ground, ripping through stalks of dead corn, the ass-end of the skiff tilting left—

We’re gonna flip,
Cael thinks.

And when that happens, he’s gonna lose his arm, which remains tethered to the boat.