Under the Empyrean Sky (2 page)

ABOVE AND BELOW

CAEL MCAVOY DREAMS
of flying.

It’s the same dream every night. He flies low over the endless corn, the stalks swaying not with the wind but because that’s how the corn is: it drifts and shifts and twitches, leaves whispering against leaves, tassels like reaching hands. The sky above is a blue so pale it looks as though someone squeezed the color out of it, like a rag sitting too long in the sun, bleached by the light.

Cael has no hover-pads beneath his feet, no skiff beneath him, no wings. His body is unadorned; it flies free, without cause, without reason.

He wears no shoes in the dream. His toes can feel the wind prying between them like cold fingers.

Down below, a motorvator as big as a barn churns a diagonal line through the corn. It’s an older model—a Straw-Walker 909—and it’s gone off its program, the program that keeps it on the grid. But nobody’s watching as it slices a hard line from corner to corner, its toothy metal maw chewing up the cornstalks. Cael can hear the growling of the rasp bars, the grinding of the augur, the loud
bangs
as cobs of corn punch into the back of the open box-bed.

Behind the motorvator lies a wake of dead straw.

Cael flies over it, past it. He opens his mouth, lets the air inflate his cheeks like balloons, and he tucks his arms flat against his body as he speeds up. The air stings his eyes, makes them tear up, and he blinks it away.
Higher,
he thinks.
We can always go higher.

A shadow passes over him, a vulture’s darkness.

Above, one of the Empyrean flotillas drifts out of the harsh light of the white sun. It’s too far up to see which one it is—not that Cael would ever know that, but dream logic is a logic all its own.
Maybe it’s the
Woodwick Miranda Mader-Atcha, he thinks,
or the
Gravenost Ernesto Oshadagea. The flotilla—a never-ending series of ships and homes and platforms strung together with chains fatter and rounder than the average grain elevator, comprising an area as big as a hundred towns—bobs lazily across the sky. Cael turns his head just so and can hear the hum of
the engines, can see the contrails of white smoke.

He looks away, tucks his chin to his chest, and keeps flying. Up there they don’t give a rat’s right foot about him. They don’t even know he exists. So he offers them the same courtesy and pretends they’re not even there. But he wonders what it’s like to live up on one of those great floating beasts among the lucky and the privileged. He tries to imagine winning the Lottery.

At that moment he hates everyone on the flotillas. Hates how much they have. Hates how they always fly above the Heartland—as if they’re so much better.

But then in the next moment he wants to
be
one of them. Rich. Superior. Impossible.

Cael flies like this for a while. Sky above. Corn below. Always and forever.

But it doesn’t last. He hears a
pop
, and across the flat plain of cornstalks the loud report tumbles over the rows and fields. Something hits him; it feels like a ball bearing cracking him in the breastbone. He touches his hand to his chest, and it comes away wet and sticky—his blood bright red,
too
red—and a surge of anger and regret churns through him.

He’s angry because now he remembers;
now
it hits him: He remembers that the dream always begins and ends the same way.

It begins with him flying.

And it ends with him falling.

Cael falls.

Toward the reaching corn.

The endless corn.

The everything corn.

Cael dies, and with him the dream.

GODSDAMN YOU, BOYLAND BARNES, JR.

CAEL THINKS,
I’m flying! Holy shit, I’m actually flying!

Then he hits the ground, his ass coming up over his head. He crashes through the cornstalks, the razor edges of the leaves slicing his skin like a dozen paper cuts. His back smashes flat against the hard earth. The air escapes his lungs in a gasp.

His ears are ringing:
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeooooeeeee
.

His first attempt to get up fails. Cael can’t get a breath. Instead, he rolls over on his side, curling up around himself, trying to figure out what the hell just happened.

All around him, the cornstalks twitch and shift. Bending toward him. Shuddering suddenly, as though excited.

Somewhere, he hears Rigo moaning. But Lane, Lane doesn’t make a peep.

Cael’s pancaked lungs suddenly inflate, sucking in a reflexive draw of air. He coughs. Rolls over on his hands and knees.

When he lifts his head, he sees the wreckage.

Betty
is stuck in the ground, her aft thrust up in the air like a big middle finger. The mast is snapped, the sails barely attached—and as Cael watches, one pale sail blows free and drifts over the corn-tops, billowing out of sight.

But the worst is the hover-panels. Those two panels—round and big like the lids of an old trash bin—now sit skewered on the rusty blades of a thresher bar likely stolen from a busted motorvator. A thresher bar that looks to be rigged up on a pair of remotely triggered hydraulic jacks.

A trap. A trap set by the Boxelder Butchers.

Shit.
Shit!

Cael spent every last ace note they had on those panels. An investment, he told the others, to give them the edge on the Butchers.

And now here he stands. Arms slick with blood from tiny cuts. Ears still ringing.

Whatever edge they had, gone with the sail, dead in the dirt.

For a moment Cael feels a twist of hope. One of the
panels is hopelessly borked, its tempered glass bottom shattered, the coils crumpled. But the other still glows and pulses with faint power. But then—
bzzt
—the panel flashes with purple light that leaves a seared spiral swirl in Cael’s vision, and the panel shatters in a spray of sparks.

Godsdamnit!

Cael wipes blood off his arms and swats away a stalk of corn that has bent down toward him. They say the corn can’t smell blood, but Cael doesn’t buy it. He kicks past stalks heavy and pregnant with cobs. He zeroes in on Rigo’s moans and finds his pudgy buddy lying on his back. Rigo’s got a knee pulled up to his belly, and he’s holding it.

“What happened?” Rigo asks, wincing.

“Boyland happened,” Cael says, and spits. More corn drifts down toward him, like a nag’s head dipping toward a puddle of water. He swats it away, careful not to get another cut. “He borked us. Rigged a trap, that sonofabitch.”

“That means he knew. About the panels.”

“Damn right he knew.”

“The maven.”

Cael cranes his head back, looks into the bright sun. Growls.
Of course
the maven. She’s in the mayor’s pocket. Boyland is the mayor’s son. It adds up to such an easy equation, he’s pissed at himself for missing it. Maybe he didn’t miss it. Maybe he just didn’t want to admit it.

Rigo sits up, jerking his head away from a leaf of corn that’s seeking out his ear hole.

“You know what I’m going to do?” Rigo’s eyes narrow. “I’m gonna kick Boyland’s crap-can. I’ll break bad on him. I’ll break bad on him; on that girl, Felicity; and that little rigger rat-bastard they got running around with them. What’s his name? Mouse?”

“Mole.”

“Mole! I don’t care that he’s a little kid. I’ll fight him. They gotta learn respect, Cael. That whole crew, every last Boxelder Butcher, is going down. I’m going to punch them so hard, they’ll piss their pants. Way I hit ’em, they can’t
not
piss their pants.”

Rigo. Imagining him “break bad” on Boyland’s crew is like picturing a feed-stuffed squealer fighting a starving dog. He tries to stand, but as soon as he puts pressure on his left leg—the one with the knee he’s been rubbing—he yelps and goes down on his butt.

“Just… stay there for a minute,” Cael says. “I’ll go find Lane. And don’t go to sleep! That corn will be all over you by the time I get back, and I don’t feel like cutting you free.”

Cael heads off to find Lane. He passes the wreckage of
Betty
again. It breaks his heart.

He finds Lane on the opposite side of the cat-maran. His friend’s just sitting there. Lane has a cob of corn in
his hands, one he’s wrenched off the nearest stalk. With nimble fingers and long nails, he pops kernels out of their mooring and thumb-flicks them away.

“Lane,” Cael says. “You okay?”

Lane turns. He’s got a cut across his brow. Not a serious one, and it’s already crusting over. But a grim trickle has frosted his right eyelid with a rime of darkening blood. “Oh,
sure
.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“I’m just tired of it,” he says, screwing a stubby cigarette between his lips and lighting it with a red-top match. “This is how they get you, Cael. This is how they keep us down.”

“The Butchers?”

“
The Empyrean
. They make us fight each other over scavenged scraps while they…” His voice trails off. “Whatever. Assholes.”

“Rigo’s hurt,” Cael says.

“Yeah. I heard him moaning.”

“Long walk back to town. We better get him.”

“Guess we better.”

It’s then they hear the sounds that crawl inside Cael’s ears like a family of weevils: the hiss of the corn-tops, the buzz of propellers in their wire cages, the cocky piggish laugh.

The Butchers’ yacht slides up over the corn about ten yards off.

Boyland fake-pouts. “Uh-oh. Did widdle Cael’s boat fall down and go
boom
?”

Cael sneers. “You did this, you dirty shit-britches.”

Mole clings to the mast like a possum, giggling. Along the back, Felicity just stands, arms crossed, mean scowl plastered across her mug.

“Such accusations really hurt me,” Boyland says, and then the other two in his crew whoop with laughter. But Boyland keeps a straight face. “I’d never do that to you. It’s just—you’re reckless, McAvoy. One day, if you’re not careful, you’re gonna get yourself killed.”

“That a threat, buckethead?”

Boyland just laughs.

In a flash Cael has his slingshot in his hand, a ball bearing palmed into the pocket. But Lane’s got a steady hand on Cael’s chest and a look in his eye that says,
You really want to go stirring up that soup pot right now?

Boyland winks, says, “That’s right, McAvoy, listen to your girlfriend.” Then the captain of the Butchers makes a lasso motion with his index finger. Mole turns the sails toward the wind, and Felicity cranks up the props—the land-yacht goes drifting off, faster and faster, until all they can see again is the wall of corn before them.

As they walk side by side, Rigo limping between the other two, Cael watches a pair of pink-brown moths—corn borers by the look of the wings—flirt and frolic in midair, a mad dance as they circle ever closer to the corn. Bad idea. A nearby stalk shudders suddenly, and a leaf uncurls and lashes out, slicing one of the moths in half. Two wings separate from the body and drift down to the ground. The other moth, still alive, hightails it the hell out of there.

A corn leaf tickles Cael’s ear, and he pulls away. “I hate this shit. Stupid plant. Stupid crop. Damnit.”

Rigo shrugs. “I dunno. Been like this long as I can remember.” He hobbles along on his one good leg.

“Corn’s how they control us,” Lane says. “It’s like your pop says, Cael. Corn wasn’t like this back when he was a kid. Used to be you plant the seed, that’s where it grew. Now it goes everywhere. Got a mind of its own.”

Way Pop told it, the Empyrean crossbred the corn with a handful of other plants: kudzu, flytraps, some kind of nightshade. Called it Hiram’s Golden Prolific. Right now, Cael couldn’t give a whit about any of that.

“We’re out of money!” Cael says. “Guys, we don’t have anything left. Spent all our damn ace notes on those hover-panels. Now they’re just a pile of junk.”
Like the stuff we scavenge.

Cael swats at a corn leaf, but it doesn’t seem to care. It
twists toward him, and he grabs it and rips it off. The stalk recoils as though in pain.

“We’ll figure it out,” Rigo says. “We always do.”

Cael’s not so sure. But it’s his
job
to figure it out. He’s the captain of this crew. He’s out here every day earning ace notes—or trying to—for his brat sister, for Pop, for his poor, bed-ridden mother. Responsibility, he decided long ago, sucks. It sucks the shine off a brand-new motorvator. If only they got lucky, just
one time
…

“Those hover-panels were our ticket,” he says. “Our way to beat the Butchers. To find that one big haul and set us up for life.”

Lane makes a
pssh
sound. “It doesn’t work like that. I told you. You have to put it out of your mind, Cael. Out here it’s all just different shades of brown. You’re like those people who count on the Lottery year after year.”

“Hey, shut up,” Rigo says. “The Lottery’s the real deal.”

“The Lottery’s bullshit,” Cael says. “But my plan isn’t. Whoever has the ace notes has the edge. The mayor’s on the Empyrean’s teat, and that means he gets the biggest mouthful of milk—and that means Boyland’s got a taste, too. But how do you think Boyland the Elder got to be mayor? I bet he bought his way in. And if we had enough money—”