Under the Empyrean Sky (14 page)

Pop leans against the counter, wincing and rubbing his hip. Cael knows what the processing facilities are like. He was in one of them once. Bright. Sterile. Steel everything. The people there are like parts of a machine. You stand for ten hours in one spot, sort through a fast-moving hover-belt of corn, the yellow kernels shooting down the line in a gravity-defying stream. Those who work the line have to move fast to pull the tainted product—black fungal corn, kernels sprouting strange growths, shriveled bits—before it goes into processing.

People are always getting hurt on the line. Or dying. Dangers aplenty no matter how careful you are. The lights are so bright they’re blinding. Picking corn for ten hours
leaves your fingers numb. One of the pulverizing machines hanging above your head might bust a bolt and come down. Or spray hot fructose. Or catch fire. Just moving through the facility reveals a host of dangers: crushing machines and slick floors and chemical baths.

Pop applied to be in the field—one of the men who stands and watches the motorvators work the grid, makes sure nothing has gone sideways. But the mayor denied the application. Said Pop wasn’t fast enough on his feet.

And he’s not. Not really. The growth on his hip makes sure of that.

Pop—nostrils flaring, eyes wide—lifts up his shirt and pulls down the waist of his trousers on the right side. What resides there is the growth that plagues him—not a tumor like the ones suffocating Cael’s mother but rather a cluster of bone spurs sticking up out of the dry, puckered skin. Cael hasn’t seen the nodule in a while, and it’s grown. It’s as big as the fat end of a man’s thumb, and it looks like a small formation of osseous crystals.

“Hurts?” Cael asks.

Pop nods. “Mm. Today it does. Not every day.”

“You on shift soon?”

“Shift?” Pop asks. Then he says, “Oh, at the facility. Ayup. Heading there soon, as a matter of fact. So, two days till the Lottery. Excited?”

“I’m going to make my own Lottery.”

“Are you, now?”

“Mm-hmm,” Cael says. “We’re gonna be rolling in the ace notes, Pop.” A new seed is planted in the fertile seedbed of Cael’s mind—not only will Pop stop working the line, but they’ll get some of those fancy Empyrean unguents to apply to his hip. Ease the pain. Maybe even shrink the bone spurs a little bit.

“It’s good to have fantasies, Cael. Just don’t get too carried away.”

Cael’s mouth forms a straight, angry line. “It’s not a fantasy.”

“Don’t start, Cael.”

“Start what? I’m going to take care of this family if you’re not.”

Pop launches forward, shoves his finger in Cael’s face. Red roses of anger bloom on the man’s cheeks. “You think I like this? You think I don’t want to reach up into the sky and pull down the Empyrean ships with my bare hands? I do! This isn’t our fault. We didn’t ask for any of this. But it is what it is. I made a choice. So did your mother. That choice was to settle down and have two kids, and by the Lord and Lady, that’s what we did. And now our job is to play it smart and play it safe, you understand? Bad enough we have to protect you from the world outside our doorstep, but here it
turns out we have to protect you two from yourselves. You think that makes me a coward? So be it. Call me a coward. But what I do, I do to keep this family together.”

He goes silent. Rubbing his hip. Leans back against the counter.

“Go on,” Pop says, voice soft. All the anger’s gone out of it. Cael feels oddly disappointed. “Get out of here. Your crew’s outside looking for you.” Pop thumbs toward the cracked glass of the kitchen window.

Cael says nothing as he leaves.

“
Doris
sucks,” Cael says. Sitting there in the barn on a mat of straw and dried corn husks is the Mecklin family’s pinnace. “Ain’t no good way around that.”

Rigo kicks a stone. “Lucky Wanda’s not here to hear you say that.”

“That’s why I didn’t invite her.”

“She cries at everything,” Lane says, blowing twin plumes of ditchweed smoke from his nose. Inside the collar of his shirt is the expansive bruise—now fading to a pale eggplant hue—from where Poltroon threw him against the boxes. “It’s actually pretty weird.
She’s
weird.”

Cael bucks at that—to his own surprise. “Shut your mouth. In a year she’ll be my wife.”

Wanda hasn’t poked her head around much. Not after the night in the piss-blizzard. Not after Poltroon died. Cael hopes that’s what it is. That she’s just traumatized over what she saw that night.
And not traumatized over what she saw in
you
that night?
asks that nagging voice again.

Cael changes the subject. “Can’t go get the rest of that garden with
Doris
, not in her condition. We need to do some repair work. First, the tear in that sail has to get mended. We’ll use the tarp from on board; and, Lane, you’re pretty good with a needle and thread, right?”

Lane narrows his eyes. “What are you trying to say?”

“I’m not saying anything, Jeezum Crow. I’m just saying you’re good with it.”

“That’s woman’s work.”

“Oh, hell, it is not. You’ve done sail mends before. You, not Gwennie.”

“Gwennie wouldn’t have us working on this shit-wagon of a boat. She’d think this whole thing was harebrained, just another Cael McAvoy special. Gwennie would—”

“Gwennie’s not here!”
Lord and Lady
, Cael thinks,
what crawled up Lane’s hind-end, laid eggs, and died?
“I am. And we’re doing this. Can you fix the godsdamn sail or not?”

“… I can.”

“Good. Then fix it! Rigo, I’ll get you a clamp from Pop’s workshop inside the stable. I’ll need you to tighten
up that mast. She’s splintering bad in a few spots, and a clamp will keep her from breaking like a toothpick. Any problems with that?”

“Yes. I mean, no. I mean, yes, I have no problems with that.”

“Whatever, Rigo. I’ll get you the clamp.”

Pop’s got a workbench set up in the old stable. Spare parts and hunks of scrap lie everywhere—it looks like junk; but Cael’s got an eye for what each thing is, what it does, and how much it sells for at the Mercado. It’s an eye he inherited from his father and Pop’s own love of stuff like this. Over there is a star-socket driver-wrench. Hanging on the pinboard are telescoping spray nozzles—same nozzles Pop uses on his weed-killer tanks. Pop’s got artifacts from the old world, too: baseball cards once worth a lot of money but now not worth the paper they’re printed on, a jar of buttons and copper-zinc coins, disks for those ancient computers that predate anything the Empyean uses.

Under the workbench Cael finds an old cardboard box. He roots around with a clang and clamor, finally finds what he’s looking for: an old iron clamp that’ll fit nice and snug around the worn mast of the Mecklin family’s pinnace. He tucks it under his arm.

But then, just as he’s about to shove the box under the desk, he hears something at the far end of the stable. A scuff. Like hay under a boot.

Couldn’t be Nancy. She’s in her pen in the other direction. Unless she got out…

Just then Nancy bleats. From the proper end of the stable.

Pop, maybe…

It’s dark in here—the stable doesn’t get much light—and so Cael eases around the workbench, works his way along the rusty milking stalls that have long fallen to disuse. He rounds the end of the stalls and sees someone standing there, digging through a big pile of hay and corn husks.

It’s a hobo.

Cael’s hand drifts to his back pocket, feels for his slingshot. The hobo—a pot-bellied fellow with thin lips and small, pebble-like teeth—turns and sees Cael. He holds up both hands. The moth-eaten rags around his arms sway, and bits of straw fall from what pass for his sleeves. He quickly pulls the ratty red cap off his head—again, more straw taking flight—and holds the hat between them.

“I don’t want any trouble,” the hobo says.

“What
do
you want, hobo?”

The hobo shoots a suspicious look toward the hay. Then back to Cael. A pink tongue slides along his dirty mouth—Cael can hear it rasp against the unshorn stubble of his chin. “Just a… uh, looking for a place to sleep is all. Hard to find a comfortable bed. Don’t want to sleep in the corn.”

“Your type ain’t welcome around here.”

“My type.”

“We don’t truck with vagrants.”

“Vagrants.” The hobo chuckles. “You don’t get it, kid.”

Cael eases the slingshot out of his back pocket. “Oh, I get it. You’re here looking to take something that isn’t yours. Place to sleep. Maybe our goat. It won’t happen. You best get gone.”

“I’ll leave. But you better believe me, kid; you and every other dumb sum-bitch out here in the Heartland is a hair’s breadth away from being me. We’re all rats in the corn.”

“We
work
for a living.” Cael feels a sudden spike of anger. “If we’re the rats, then what are you? Fleas and ticks on our backs is what.”

Cael moves fast. Draws the slingshot, tucks a pebble in the pocket. The hobo sees what’s happening and tries to duck out the back door of the stable, but Cael’s faster. He lets fly, and the pebble clips the vagrant right in the ear. The man yowls in pain and busts out into the sunlight. Cael hurries after with another pebble loaded to fire.

But the wanderer is already bolting toward the corn, one hand cupped to his stung ear.

Having heard the commotion, Lane and Rigo come hurrying up and catch sight of the hobo just as he ducks into the carnivorous corn.

“The hell was that?” Lane asks.

“Damn hobo rooting around our stable. Looking for another free lunch.”

“Don’t you feel bad for them?” Rigo asks.

“Hell, no. I work. We all work. They can work, too.”

“But they got other problems—Remittance Orders and no families and—”

Lane interrupts, says to Cael, “Isn’t your sister basically a hobo?”

“Jeezum Crow, what the hell is your problem today? You having your period or something?”

Lane rolls his eyes. “You think I’m some girl?” He balls up his fists. “You want to have a go, McAvoy? I’ll make you swallow your teeth, pretty boy.”

Cael’s about to step up, but Rigo gets between them.

“Hold on, let’s get back to what really matters,” Rigo says.

They give him a quizzical look.

“The bounty?” he reminds them.

“What of it?” Cael asks.

“What are we gonna do with it once we have it?” Rigo shifts his gaze from Lane to Cael. “Vegetables and fruits rot. We can’t go selling it to the maven.”

With a scowl Lane says, “It’s a good question, Captain.”

Cael shoots a glance sideways, makes sure Pop is still inside and the hobo is nowhere around. “It’s not the veggies
that matter. It’s their
seeds
. Don’t you get it? The produce we’ll just eat. The important thing is, the Empyrean doesn’t let anybody have proper seeds anymore—what few seeds they do parcel out are good for one planting and one planting only.” Terminator seeds, they’re called. Because the genetic heritage of the plant is terminated from the get-go. “But we’ve got the real deal. We can sit on those till we find the right buyer. Someone from another town, maybe. From another mercado—someone whose nose isn’t brown with the mayor’s stink.”

“So.” Lane leans in. “We’re sticking it to the Empyrean.”

“Yep. And we’re sticking it to the mayor. And anybody else who ever tried to put their boots on our necks.” Cael smiles. “Thought that might get your attention.”

Lane chuckles, and the mood shifts.

“Still,” Cael says, “we’re not sticking it to anyone right now except ourselves as long as we’ve got the Mecklins’ boat in such a state.” He points over to the stable door, where just inside lies the clamp from when he pulled the slingshot. “Rigo—there’s the clamp. We still need one more hover-rail to balance out the other one.” He rubs his eyes. He’s been dreading this, but it seems like they don’t have any other way to do it. “Means I best hit the Mercado.”

The maven of the Mercado is Pesha Cartwright. She’s built like a spinning top: thin and narrow up top, hamhock hips flared out wide and broad, and then stubby legs with ankles so thick they look like you could cut rashers of bacon off them.

She moves likes a spinning top, too: always frittering about, whirling from one rickety metal shelf to another, rearranging rusted items on a wooden table, moving a cabinet three inches to the right, then four inches to the left. She can’t stop moving. Can’t stop touching things. It’s as if she’s got an image in her head as to how things must look, but that image changes every five minutes.

The Mercado—tucked in a pocket of corn on an old farmstead at the northernmost point in Boxelder—is a crazy person’s flea market, a hoarder’s paradise. Rust. Glass. Electronics. Plastics. Weird fluids in old jars. As Cael enters the market, he brushes past a set of wind chimes somebody’s made out of a dozen forks and spoons.

“Mr. McAvoy,” Pesha says, her voice wet and guttural, the sound of a knife sliding kernels of corn off the cob. The way she says it creeps him out:
Missssster McAvooooy
. “How’s the life of a scavenger?”

She’s well aware of the score. She’s just needling him.

“You know how it’s going,” he says. His elbow clips some kind of rickety birdcage. Who around here has birds for pets? That seems like an Empyrean thing. Then again,
the Heartland is the dumping ground for the oldest and weirdest Empyrean trash, and that trash often finds its way to the Mercado.

He steps over a cardboard box of wires and conduits. “I’m using a temporary boat. Bet you thought I didn’t have a boat at all. But I do. The Mecklins’ boat.”

Her eyes, pressed between folds of skin that look like pinching fingers, twinkle. “A fine boat for a fine captain.” She’s messing with him. She probably knows it’s a piece of shit.

“I need something for it.”

“Sorry, Mr. McAvoy, I do not have any…
off-the-books
hover-panels for sale.”

Truth is, Pesha Cartwright doesn’t just deal in stuff. She deals in information. But
that
always comes with a price too high to pay.

“No, Maven, I need a single hover-rail, if you please.” He can feel the tendons in his neck pulled tight as he strains to be polite. But it behooves you to remember your manners with the maven, because it’s amazing what she can perceive as a slight. And she’s one to hold grudges till the world’s end. “Regulation is fine. If not a strip, then maybe a cage-prop. Something for the back of the boat.”