Blightborn (52 page)

TITAN FALL

“YOU’LL NEED TO HIT ME HARD,”
Agrasanto says.

Busser looks nervous. “I don’t know about this.” He’s got his fist cocked, and he’s bobbing on his hips a little as if he’s ready to throw a punch, but he’s hesitating.

Behind him, a few Boxelder folks sit at the bar, staring from the edges of their half-barrel stools.

“This is the way forward,” she says. Then sticks out her chin.

“You’re a girl.”

“I’m a woman.”

“I don’t hit women.”

“I’ve got bigger stones than you, hick. So throw that fist already—”

Wham
.

A glitter of starburst behind her good eye. A cascade of light falling. Her head rocks with the hit, and she tries not to show
how much it hurt. Instead, she says: “Again. Nose this time. Hit me in the nose.”

Busser winces, hauls back, and pops her in the nose.

She feels the dull crunch go into her head, and that does the trick. She’s staggering. Trying not to cry out but she hears the
nnnngh
come up out of her. Blood crawls across her upper lip. She tastes it at the back of her throat, too, just as her eye starts to water.

The proctor dabs at it with a handkerchief. “Good. Good.” She clears her throat. “Now, someone’s gonna have to tie me up—”

Suddenly, the doors to the tavern open up. Devon, with his snapped-twig arm, hurries in, saying, “Proctor, you need to see—” He freezes. Eyes wide. “What’s . . . what’s happening here?”

Moments of silence, hesitation, uncertainty.

Then—

Agrasanto draws her sonic pistol and shoots him in the chest. Right above his broken wing. The hole in his breastbone dribbles blood, and he makes a bubbling sound in his throat before dropping.

“King Hell!” Busser says. Behind him, the other townsfolk goggle.

Guilt prickles her flesh.
I had to do that,
she tells herself. Devon was a snitch. He’d send this story up the flagpole lickety-quick. And at this point that is not an option. Plus, as she tells the men: “It furthers the illusion. I’ll give you the pistol. One of you shot him, congratulations.”

“I didn’t shoot anybody—” Busser says.

“You did,” she asserts. “You did because that’s how they’re going to believe you overpowered me. And took my visidex. And found out the truth about what’s about to happen to your little town. This is your way out. Your way forward into life and not something very close to death. You don’t want to be metal men? You want to run for your lives? Then this is the way.”

They stand there in silence for a little while.

Again the tavern doors open. A field shepherd—some screwhead named Horchaw—comes in, sees the body on the floor, and almost trips over it. “Eh. Ah. Oh, Crow. You all oughta come out here and, ahhh, see this.”

She gives a subtle nod, and they all head toward the doors and filter out into the street.

There, on Main Street, most of the town has gathered. And in the distance, she sees it. A flotilla. Bright against the night. Its light scattered like a crumbling mantle of stars. Which means—

Oh, by the gods, no
.

“Is that a flotilla?” she hears Doc Leonard ask.

It is,
she thinks, but does not say.

Somehow, one of the flotillas is falling.

“This doesn’t change anything,” she says to Busser. “Except we better move faster. So let’s get this done. Go get the rope.”

The elevator won’t take them up, what with the electronics being all borked and all. Lane and the pirate captain take a while to try to get it going again, but it’s a no-go, especially since Killian has gone the color of a bleached bedsheet and is leaking blood like a speared squealer.

So instead, they work to pop the top off the elevator. Killian’s got a small multitool in his pocket, and it takes a long time to get the bolts off, but eventually they manage. The top comes off, and the tunnel back up to the town of Tuttle’s Church shows the blue-black of darkness pinpricked with starlight. A ladder lies faintly illuminated against the shaft wall.

They climb up. Lane beneath Killian, catching clumsy boots to the head and shoulders as the wounded captain inelegantly ascends with one arm and trembling, weakened legs.

As they get closer, Lane says what he’s thinking: “I don’t hear anything. No more fighting. No more of anything.”

Killian sniffs. And murmurs, “That’s because we lost, my boy. No way we snatched victory from the jaws of the metal men of Tuttle’s Church. Our fight was always down here. In the room beneath us.”

Lane stops. “Wait, so why are we going up?”

“Because we’re going to make our last stand. Or run like cowards, I can’t be sure yet. But I do know we’ll pop our heads out of the hole like a pair of bewildered whistle-pigs and—well, probably have them sliced off by a pair of whirring blades or sonic blasts posthaste.”

“Then I think I’m inclined to go back down.”

“Nonsense,” Killian says. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

And the captain continues his wobbly ascent.

Lane curses under his breath and keeps climbing. The journey feels like half-a-mile from forever. As he ascends, the thought dogs him:
What did I do by transmitting that code?

They emerge into silence. The smell of smoke in the air, carrying an odor like that from melted plastic, or burned electronics.

Everything is shadow. The silhouettes of the storefronts and houses line the street ahead. All around are the shattered wrecks of robot men and mechanical women. A distant sound surprises: down the way, a mechanical without legs lies on the street, bashing its face into the plasto-sheen. Again and again,
bang
,
bang
,
bang
.

Far off, they see the crumpled mound of the trawler. It doesn’t float—its husk lies ruined against the earth.

Together the two walk down the street, Lane helping Killian hobble along. They head toward the trawler.

“It looks like nobody won,” Lane says.

Killian says nothing. Stunned into silence? Curtailed by pain? Lane doesn’t know and sees no reason to press.

Then Killian raises his one good arm, points a crooked, trembling finger. “There. The fruits of our labors.”

In the sky:

Starshine and scattered line. Like a firework in slow motion.

“The flotilla,” Lane says.

“It was a success.”

“It doesn’t feel like success. People are dying up there.”

“They woke the sleeping dog. No surprise that the dog has chosen to bite.” Killian offers a grim smile in the moonlight. Almost skeletal. Lane pulls away, and Killian almost falls.

“Keep your platitudes to yourself. I have to find Rigo.”

“You helped me do this!” Killian calls after.

But Lane shoves that thought out of his mind. He has to. To stay sane. Now his only thought is his friend: a friend who saved him, a friend who—

Oh no.

He sees it. The sonic cannon Rigo once manned.

It’s twisted into slag. A body sits slumped in the chair.

Lane curses, blinks back tears, and leaps for the trawler. He finds a rope, begins to climb it, swings over to a ladder, and then climbs
that
all the way to the deck—a deck tilted hard toward the dry earth. He grips the railing and hauls himself up, up, up, to the gun where the body sits.

Rigo.

“No, no, c’mon,” Lane says, panicking. He could still be alive. He has to be. Lane reaches in, scrapes his arm across a sharpened curl of ruined metal—the sonic cannon’s barrel peeled back like the leathered skin of a sun-baked rat—but he ignores the pain and the blood and reaches for Rigo’s head and pulls it back—

But it’s not Rigo’s face.

It’s—Who is that? Jeezum Crow, it’s Hezzie Orden. Her hair matted against her crushed brow. A spike of guilt lances through Lane’s heart—he felt jealous of her, jealous of Killian’s attention. And now she’s dead. Lane feels responsible, an absurd notion that offers no evidence but whose sting is keenly felt just the same.

Then: floodlights click on, find him. The pulse-whine of hover-panels. He thinks:
The mechanicals. Or the Empyrean. And that’s all she wrote
.

He awaits the shower of sonic blasts. He’ll be torn apart.

But then he hears Rigo’s voice.

“There! There he is! Lane!
Lane!
”

Lane almost weeps.

Wanda stands outside on the front porch of the tall, white house, shivering. It’s not cold. The wind is warm. But she feels it inside: a septic chill. She can’t seem to stop shaking.

I hit him,
she thinks.

She hit Cael. Her beloved. Her chosen. Her Obligated.

He was going to hurt Boyland. And she has no love for that thick-as-a-brick mayor’s son, but at the time she couldn’t just stand by and let Cael and his Blight hurt him. Or kill him.

But now she’s not so sure. Everything feels all tangled up. Like the vines braided around Cael’s arm.

She’s scared. And confused. And worst of all, alone.

The Maize Witch—because that’s who she is, Wanda realizes—freed herself from the mess made of her house looking no worse for wear. And she hurried past, saying to Wanda:
Things are in motion. I have work to do
.

Then she was gone. Down through the garden—a garden!—and storming off into the dead corn in the distance. A cabal of Blighted hurrying behind her, loping like starving dogs.

So now, Wanda stands. The wreckage of the yacht behind her, smashed into the front of the house. She misses her parents. She misses Hazelnut. And she misses Cael and hopes like heck he’s still alive.

Up in the sky, then, she sees it. Lights like a shower of sparks. Shapes darker than the night breaking, falling. A flotilla. But that’s not possible, is it? How could it be?

Then, behind her, a sound—

A small sound, like the squeak of a mouse. Coming from the boat.

No. Not a mouse.

Like the squeak of a Mole.

Oh gods, Mole!

She hurries to the boat, moves a buoy, lifts a tarp—

And there’s the boy. Ashen face. It brightens when he sees her.

“I love you, Wanda Macklin,” he says.

“Mecklin,” she correct in a small voice.

And then he passes out with a smile on his face.

Behind them, it all falls.

The skiff rockets away from the Saranyu as the flotilla breaks apart. Some pieces float, buoyed by balloons drifting slowly to earth. Most of it just crumbles, leaving streaks of light or gray shadows plunging to the Heartland in the long dark.

Gwennie wants to cry, wants to weep and tear out her hair, but she can’t muster anything but empty shock. All of them, crammed into this little boat, heading down toward the corn, the cold air whipping. Her mother strokes her hair as Scooter whimpers across their laps.

Balastair behind her. Boyland in front of her.

And all she feels is emptiness.

And blame.

And the conspicuous absence of her captain, Cael McAvoy.

ABOVE TO BELOW

CAEL MCAVOY DREAMS OF FLYING
.

In his mind he’s aloft on hot vectors of air. The night around him. The stars watching, vigilant. The moon protecting him. The wind keeping him. He has no Blight. He has no fear.

Sometimes the dream is interrupted by the reality of falling.

There the air is cold. Rushing up to meet him. Pieces of concrete around him. Wind howling. His body battered.

Something hits him—
wham
, a piece of metal across the back of his head. He sees blue, red, black, a whirl of colors, a smear of dark—

But then the dream is back. Softening his fall in the sweet embrace of illusion. Pillows of clouds against the matte-black sky. Arms outstretched. Going up, not down. Laughing. The tears in his eyes not because he knows he’s going to die but because he’s flying up toward the embrace of the Lord and Lady. Toward their manse in the sky. Toward their front gates, gates of
bronze and silver, gates sculpted to look like winged lions sleeping underneath rays of gauzy light. Beyond those gates, Gwennie waits, and Pop, and Merelda, and Rigo, and Lane, and . . .

The dream, as it always does, turns dark.

He flies—until he is allowed to fly no more.

Tendrils of green lash out from below. Coils of thorny vine. Stalks of battering corn. The stalks knock him out of the sky, a stick hitting a bird. The tendrils curl around him. They drag him down, down, down, faster and faster, and he screams, but his screams are lost, and suddenly he’s back through the clouds, and the ground rushes up to meet him, and he sees miles of dead corn and a tall, white house, and he no longer knows what’s dream or what’s reality; he only knows that in both, he falls.

He loses everything, and he falls.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR