Under the Empyrean Sky (29 page)

It’s the tall one with the shock of dark hair. He’s got her visidex. She thinks to shoot him, but she doesn’t know if she could make the shot. Her head is vibrating. She can
only see out of her one eye. Everything else is a pulsing tide of darkness giving way to light and then again to darkness. The pistol drops from her hand, and she does the only thing she can think to do.

Proctor Simone Agrasanto runs.

Cael watches her bring her hand to her eye. An eye he ruined. When he let fly, he knew what he was doing. He knew where that steel ball would go. It wasn’t that he didn’t want her dead; in a sense, that was all he wanted. She’s an emblem of the Empyrean, a symbol of their crushing grip and callous control.

But he’s already killed one person. Someone he knew. Someone he didn’t like and, given the state of things, someone who may very well have deserved it.

But still, Cael
killed
him.

He just couldn’t do it again.

And now she stands, staggering about. She’s got the pistol raised, but she’s not even pointing it at Lane, who’s coming up on her flank.

Her eye looks like a blackened mess. Blood trickles down her cheek. She feels for it. Cups her hand over it. Makes a sound like a wounded animal.

And then it’s over. The pistol drops, and she runs.

Cael goes after her.

He can’t let her live.

He can’t let her leave on that boat.

Gwennie
.

The woman staggers around the corner of the barn just as Cael lets a metal ball fly—it chips a splintery pucker out of the wood, missing her by a hair’s breadth.

Pop calls his name. He can’t listen. Can’t care.

He hurries after her, rounds the corner, sees Agrasanto bolting for the ketch. Lines up his shot…

Two Empyrean guards appear at the base of the boat’s stairs, their rifles drawn and firing. Two sonic pulses hit the barn behind him, the wood shuddering and cracking with the weight of the blasts. Cael screams, skids to the ground, crawls behind an old thresher bar lying there in the dirt.

He gasps, desperately struggling to get another ball bearing in the pocket.

Two more pulses come shrieking forward, striking the thresher bar—Cael feels it shudder with the blast, and it’s just enough for him to drop the metal ball onto the hard earth. It rolls away.

He leaps forward, slapping his hand down on it. By the time he stands, he sees Agrasanto staggering up the steps of the ketch. The guards follow behind her.

The hover-rails glow and hum.

“No!” Cael screams. He bolts toward the ship.

But it starts to lift from the corn, the stalks shuddering and straightening.

Cael fires the ball bearing upward at the ketch-boat.

The metal marble plinks off the side and falls to the earth.

And then the boat lurches forward, shooting up over the Heartland.

Gwennie is gone.

OLD OBLIGATIONS

POP’S IN THE
kitchen on the floor, leaning up against the corner of two cabinets. He winces, clutching his side with one hand and his hip with the other.

Cael comes into the house with a bucket of cold water from the well and motions for Rigo to hand him a cloth napkin sitting on the table. Rigo pitches him the napkin, and Cael dunks it into the water and begins to wash the mask of blood off his father’s face.

“Thanks, son,” Pop says.

“How’s Mom?” Cael asks.

“Quiet.” As if she could be anything else.

“Gwennie’s gone,” Cael says.

“I know.”

“I killed a man.”

“You did what you did because you had no recourse. You’re going to have to let it go. At least for today. Let your guilt pursue you some other day, Cael.”

Cael nods, but he’s not so sure.

Pop winces as Cael runs the cloth over the wound across his temple and brow. He looks to Rigo and Lane. “I want to thank you all for your help. The way everything shook out today wasn’t the way I expected it to. I’m still here because of the three of you, and I am very grateful for that.”

“Anything, Pop,” Rigo says.

Lane says quietly, “We’re still paying you back for all the good you’ve done us.”

“Listen here,” Arthur says. “We’re not safe. Not here. Not for now. We’ve hit a juncture in this road where one path is now closed to you, to all of us. What I’m telling you is to run home. Pack a bag—a light bag, just some provisions and clothing and whatever else you’ll need out there. Then get back here as soon as you can. Race like the wind, because I can assure you, this isn’t over. The proctor’s going to send more people. The Empyrean does not brook this kind of trouble.”

Rigo and Lane share a look.

“You boys trust me?” Pop asks.

They nod, all three of them.

“Then go.”

Rigo and Lane clap Cael on the arm and give Pop’s hand a little shake. And like that, they’re gone. Off to do what needs doing.

“You okay, son?” Pop asks.

“I reckon all right.” It’s a lie, but Cael can’t see any reason to speak the truth right now.

They sit there for a while like that. Cael doesn’t even know how long. Long enough that the bucket of well water has gone from clean to pink to a little too red. But already Pop’s looking better—less like someone who got mauled by a bear. He’ll make it through okay.

“Everything’s going to be different from here on out,” Pop says.

“I’m starting to figure on that.”

“Your sister.”

“What about her?”

“She’s going to be in danger, too. This is all my fault, Cael; I know that. This isn’t over, and in fact it’s just beginning. They say the sins of the father are repaid on his children, and I know now how true that is.” He winces as he sits up straighter. “But regret doesn’t change anything. Where we are is where we are. And your sister thought she could get away from all this, but now it’s going to find her.
These people are going to track her down the way a shuck rat sniffs out a crumb in the corner. Which is why I need you to find her first.”

Pop’s words echo in Cael’s head—
I need you to find her first
—when he hears it. Upstairs, a bend in the floor, a groaning creak.

At first he doesn’t know what it is, and he sees Pop’s gaze flit toward the ceiling, too.

“I sent Bessie home,” Pop says, lowering his voice. “Can’t be your mother.…”

“It’s okay,” Cael says. “She may have fallen out of bed again. I’ll go check.”

Cael heads up the steps, taking them two at a time.

Lane looks out over his own farm and sees how dilapidated everything is. In some ways it feels as if his father’s still here, his ghost marauding about, bragging, boisterous, chest puffed out like he’s ten feet tall and made of stovepipe. And his mother, too. But her ghost is different. Standoffish. At the margins. She never was all that nurturing, was she? How could she be, to leave them like this?

Still, he decides to let it be. He’s not sure if he’s laying their ghosts to rest, or taking them with him, or condemning them to rot with this place. Right now, after all he’s seen
today, he’s not sure that he cares. He packs a bag, does like Pop McAvoy says.

And then he’s gone.

He leaves the front door open, because what does it matter anymore?

Rigo’s up in his room, packing clothes in a bag but also secreting away food he’s been hiding under his cot for those nights when his old man doesn’t let him have dinner.

A shadow falls across the bed.

Jorge Cozido stands in the doorway.

“Hell you think you’re doing, kid?”

Rigo doesn’t say anything. He just keeps pumping the duffel full of clothes.

“I said, what the—”

“I’m leaving,” Rigo blurts.

Jorge laughs. “Yeah. You’re leaving. That’s real neat, Little Rigo. You’re always full of stories.”

“I’m serious,” Rigo says in a small, quiet voice. “I have to leave. I’m in danger.”

Another laugh. Jorge comes up behind him, puts a hand on Rigo’s neck, begins to massage it.

“Uh-oh, my kid’s in danger. He’s on the run from pirates, maybe. Or the Maize Witch.”

Jorge tightens his grip on his son’s neck hard enough that pain shoots down Rigo’s arm. Rigo twists away. “Get off!”

“Oh! Oh, dang, the boy’s getting lippy. You speak to me that way with that mouth and I can split those fat lips of yours; don’t forget it.”

Rigo’s eyes glisten. He blinks back tears. “I thought you preferred to hit me on the body, so nobody else could see the bruises.”

Jorge’s fist clubs Rigo in the side of the head, and the boy tumbles. But he doesn’t stay down. He grabs the duffel and skirts around his father, heading to the door. The old man’s drunk—Rigo can smell the acrid fixy breath hanging around him like a toxic miasma—and he reaches for Rigo but misses the grab.

But he’s still faster than Rigo expects. Rigo gets through the door, and his father’s right on his tail. His father reaches out and steadies himself against the doorframe just as Rigo slams the door as hard as he can. The door closes on his father’s fingers. Rigo can hear the bones crunch. The fingers bend backward in a way he’s never seen: the old man’s hand looks like a splintered board.

It’s still not enough. Jorge shoulders open the door and he grabs his son by the throat, snarling with rage, the veins on his forehead forming a cruel topography. Rigo knows then that he’s not going anywhere. Then—

Crash
.

His mother steps out of the bedroom and breaks a ceramic pot—a pot her own mother made years before, a simple thing ringed in blue—over Jorge’s head.

The man drops, blood wetting his hair.

Rigo sees that the old man is crying. Not just crying but blubbering. He’s got his four broken fingers cradled to his chin and mouth like a baby, and he’s staring out through weepy eyes, the blood already running down his forehead in red ribbons.

“You’re a shit kid,” Jorge says, his voice trembling. “A
shitty
little prick of a kid. You want to get out, go on. Go. Nobody wants you.” He looks up at his wife. “Nobody wants you either.
Puta
. Whore.”

Rigo’s mother looks at her son with glistening eyes. Brushes hair away from his ears. “You need a haircut, Little Rigo.”

“I know.”

“You need to go.”

“I know that, too. Are you going to be okay?”

She kisses his cheek. “Go, my boy. Go.”

Rigo hurries downstairs. As he escapes out through the front door, he hears his father calling after him. “Rodrigo! Rodrigo! Wait, son, please—”

He closes the door behind him, drowning out his father’s cries.

As Cael ascends the steps, he hears another creak of the floorboards—and then it’s cut short.

He reaches his mother’s room.

Mayor Barnes stands over Cael’s mother. The window is open behind him. He’s already got her robe off, and when Cael comes in, he’s humming a song and kissing the tumors on her feet.

“Get your damn hands off her,” Cael says. “Or I swear to the Lord and Lady—”

The mayor stands. Woozy. A little drunk, maybe. He smiles. “She’s mine. I’ll give her the life she needs. Maybe get her a cure. At least make her comfortable.” He sees the incredulity in Cael’s eyes. “I
love
her. You wouldn’t understand.”

“The hell you talking about?”

“Things have changed, boy! You’re a woman-stealer like your father. Stealing that Shawcatch girl. Him stealing Filomena. You’re both a bunch of bastards, and now I’m fixing what I should’ve fixed a long time ago.” Those words all slur, but this next batch is said with an angry clarity: “She’s coming with me.”

“She’s not going anywhere. Not unless you plan on putting me in the ground.” He feels his back pocket for the slingshot—

And it’s not there. It’s downstairs on the counter. He set it down when he went to get the well water to wash Pop’s face.

He’ll just have to make do. His hands ball into fists.

The elder Barnes reaches into his coat jacket and pulls a long, jagged knife out of a sheathe.

“Put that knife down, Mayor.”

Cael takes a ginger step closer.

“I’ll stick you like a pig, you come near me,” Barnes says.

“Maybe so. Or maybe I can take that knife out of your hand before you do.”

Barnes slashes the knife inches in front of Cael’s face.

“I said back away! You want me to cut you a new smile?” Boyland the Elder offers his own smile to that. He laughs as if he’s hearing his own private joke. “You know, you could have been my son.”

The mayor’s gaze flits away from Cael suddenly, toward the doorway.

“Cael, step back.”

It’s Pop’s voice.

Then he hears it: a
chick-chack
sound.

He turns and sees his father leaning against the frame of the bedroom door, wincing in what must be miserable pain after climbing all those steps.

But what really floors Cael is that Pop is carrying a gun.

Not a sonic weapon. Not a popgun or a pellet rifle.

A genuine bullet-shooter. The kind the Empyrean outlawed long, long ago. The kind Cael’s only read about in books, books featuring cowboys and soldiers from an ancient time.

This one’s a lever-action rifle, all blued-steel and red wood, with iron sights like the devil’s teeth.