Under the Empyrean Sky (28 page)

The Overseer who looks like a bulldog steps forward, says, “Might be time to ease up on the stick and try a little carrot.”

She wheels on him. “Overseer, this is a criminal whose only intent is to undo the Empyrean’s good work. We do not negotiate with terrorists.”

He offers up both hands and steps back. The other Overseer, still standing in the stomped wreckage of the last of the plants dragged out of McAvoy’s workshop, appears gleeful. Grinning ear-to-ear through a beard that looks as if it would better serve as a nest for birds.

You get the hand you’re dealt
, she thinks.

Oh well.

Time to employ another trick.

They come through the corn to the back of the farmhouse. Cael, Lane, and Rigo hug the walls and sneak up along the side, ducking down by the set of cellar doors and peering around the corner to the gravel lot in front of the house.

Cael sees his father, still on his knees but now swaying. The side of his face is wet with blood. The proctor snaps her fingers and points to Pally Varrin. Right then, Cael wishes he’d taken that sonofabitch out on the road when he had the chance. It’s the look of glee on the bully’s face that gets him—Varrin is
enjoying
this.

From behind Cael, Rigo and Lane start talking about a plan.

But Cael can’t help but watch.

“You know what to do,” Agrasanto says to Varrin.

The Babysitter hunkers down next to Cael’s father and pulls aside the waist of Pop’s pants, exposing the cluster of bone spurs jutting out of his hip. Even that simplest of motions causes Pop to moan in pain, his whole body tightening.

“Your daughter,” Agrasanto says. “Tell me about her.
Where did she go? I heard a rumor that she’s on one of our flotillas. Which one?”

“I don’t know” comes Pop’s ragged answer.

Cael hears Rigo saying, “I’ll distract ’em. Lane, you go inside the house from around back—”

“Is she connected to all this?” Agrasanto asks with a sweep of her arm. “Is she carrying your terrorist agenda onto our ships, into our homes?”

“I don’t even know… what you’re… talking about.…”

She nods to Pally, who takes the tip of his shooter and jams it hard against Pop’s bone spurs. Cael doesn’t know how it feels, but he can see his father twist up as if he was just shot with a crackling bolt of lightning. Hearing his father scream…

Lane whispers, “From inside the house I can get on the roof—”

“Is that still your answer?” Agrasanto says.

Pop nods, and Varrin again thrusts the gun barrel against his hip. Another scream.

“Just tell her something,” Grey says, wincing.

Pop spits a gob of bloody spit on Agrasanto’s uniform.

She barks to Varrin, “Again!”

Pally hauls back and kicks Pop in the hip with his boot. The cry that rises from the old man’s throat is a warbling shriek, a sound Cael’s never heard another man make before.

Cael hears the drumbeat of his pulse. A dull thumping in his neck, his temples, all the way down to his feet and his fingertips.

Rigo has his hand on Cael’s shoulder. He’s saying something about a plan. Lane is asking him again about the roof. But all Cael can really hear is the sound of his father in pain.

Varrin hauls back again with his foot. Pop topples over, and Varrin kicks him in the side.

They’re killing him
.

Agrasanto is yelling for Varrin to stop.

Cael pulls away from Rigo.

As he rounds the corner of the house, the slingshot is already in his hand. A steel ball bearing in the pouch, pinched there so hard it hurts Cael’s fingers.

He screams as he runs toward them.

“Honey, please,” Richard is begging her.

But Gwennie wants none of that. Her father’s wrong. Plain and simple. This is not the time to be a docile little lamb. To roll over and let the shears take what’s yours.

She flips the stubby couch leg in her hands. Hears the footsteps outside the door.

It’s time
.

The door opens, and one of the guards steps through. Gwennie rears back with her makeshift weapon—and a hand catches her.

It’s her father.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He gets his hands under her and holds her fast. “We need this. I can’t have you doing this to the family.”

“Dad!” she cries, thrashing, kicking out.

“Help me!” he says, and at first she doesn’t know who he’s talking to; but then the grim realization hits her: he’s talking to the guards. The horse-faced soldiers grab at her legs. They produce plastic cords and fix them to her ankles, and then spin her over and bind them to her wrists. She screams. One of them drops her to the floor while the other dials back the power setting on his rifle.

He lances a muted sonic pulse into her back.

Gwennie’s chin hits the floor and she tries to cry out, but she can’t. Her words are lost as she begins to drool and dry heave. She looks up through bleary eyes and sees her father—face stricken with grief and guilt—sit down next to her now-weeping mother. Scooter, crying, crawls into Mom’s lap.

Cael can’t make a good shot while running, so he skids to a stop. He squints his eye over his hand.

Pally sees him.

Agrasanto sees him, too.

Aim straight, aim true
.

Both of them draw their pistols on him.

Agrasanto reaches down to dial up the power. Pally just fires.

The shot misses Cael.

He lets fly with the ball bearing.

The sonic pistol drops from Varrin’s grip as the ball bearing strikes him right in the throat. It collapses his windpipe. He staggers backward, clawing at his throat as though his wildly searching fingers can somehow put it all back together again. The only sound he makes is a wet gurgle.

The small man behind Agrasanto—her attaché—bolts for the barn, head down.

Agrasanto points the pistol, and Cael knows it’s over. Maybe she has it on lethal. Maybe she’ll just knock him flat. But he knows what’s coming next.

Except he’s wrong.

Suddenly Grey Franklin is behind her—his rifle against her throat, choking her. The pistol fires, and the air ripples as a warbling sound rushes by Cael’s head. The shot hits
one of the shutters on the farmhouse windows and blasts it to splinters.

Varrin drops to the ground. His legs start kicking, then stop.

I just killed a man
.

He runs to Pop and begins dragging him toward the house.

She blames herself, of course, even as she fires off a shot that misses the kid by a scant few inches, even as her own throat starts to close as Franklin presses the rifle tighter against her neck.

She should have clamped down. Should have made a better effort to control this herself. Instead, she let these fool-headed Heartlanders get in the way.

Her fault or no, this won’t do.

It’s time to take control.

She stabs her elbow backward, catching the Overseer in the ribs. Then she pivots her hips and ducks forward, throwing the traitor over her shoulder. Franklin hits the ground on his ass bone, and the rifle goes clattering away into the dust and gravel.

Simone has to give it to him. By the time she’s leveling her pistol at him, he’s already rolled over and got his feet
underneath of him, charging forward like a bull.

The thing is, he only knows how to fight like a Heartlander. The Overseers get a little training—mostly how to disarm some rowdy hick with a broken bottle or a sharp stick. But they don’t learn the Heavenly Stance. Nobody teaches them how to fight like a proper Empyrean.

He comes at her, and she uses his momentum to throw his own body past her. Once more he loses his footing, and he face-plants into the driveway.

She takes a shot. The sonic blast hits empty earth as he rolls out of the way and kicks up a pocket of stone and dirt. Again Franklin’s on his feet, but this time he’s adapted. He doesn’t charge in blindly. He comes at her from the side and hugs her like a circus bear—close enough that she can’t get off a shot.

This is a distraction she can no longer abide.

With her empty hand she claps his ear and then rabbit punches him in the kidneys. When she hears his grunt and feels the air go out of him, she knows the job is done. Punch the kidneys and the liver, and the fight goes right out of a person.

He staggers back, and she snaps a kick into his jaw. His teeth slam down on his tongue, and blood wells instantly at the corners of his mouth.

“Betrayer,” she hisses.

Then she shoots him in the face.

Grey tumbles backward. Blood erupting out of his nose. Eyes bulging. The back of his head hits the driveway hard, and a greasy froth oozes from his lips like soapsuds. The body twitches for a few seconds. And then it stops.

Now to finish this
.

The boy with the slingshot—clearly the McAvoy heir, a rogue element she should have known was
not
buttoned up and taken care of,
thank you, Mr. Mayor and your ineffectual Babysitters
—is dragging his father toward the stoop and the steps of the farmhouse.

Easy pickings.

She levels the pistol and pulls the trigger.

Rigo doesn’t know what happened. One minute there they were, ducked down behind the cellar doors, and he was acting as master strategist—and then Pop was screaming, Cael was gone, and the whole thing went to hell in a husk-bucket.

He stumbles out into the middle of the driveway, eyes wide, unable to parse what’s going on. Is that Pally Varrin over there, his body jumping like it has an electrical current running through it? Why the hell is Grey Franklin fighting with the proctor? Cael’s got his pop and is dragging him over to the house. Where did Mayor Barnes go?

Rigo turns to Lane. “What the hell should we—”

But Lane’s already gone. His gangly legs are pumping, and he’s taken off like a bottle rocket.

It’s then that Rigo sees Grey Franklin’s head fountain twin jets of blood from the nose. Just like that, the proctor points her pistol and Grey Franklin is dead.

Rigo feels his bowels go to ice. He thinks,
Run, just run, just get out of here, don’t piss your pants, you might piss your pants, she’s going to hurt you kill you run stupid run.
His head’s like a switchboard of flight over fight, and yet his feet remain fixed to the Heartland earth.

Agrasanto points her gun. Not at him but past him.

At Cael. At Pop.

And before Rigo can think twice, he
is
running, bolting forward like a fat pony with a swarm of hornets stinging his ass. Except he’s not running away from anything. Instead, he’s leaping forward and making a sound like he’s never heard himself make.

He barrels into the proctor just as she pulls the trigger.

The visidex
.

Lane knows what that thing can do. It’s not just a computer. It’s a communication device. It can call the flotilla. It can bring reinforcements down on their heads like a
hailstorm of hot coals. So when Agrasanto’s attaché flees down the driveway with the visidex tucked under his arm, Lane knows he has to get that damn computer.

So he runs.

Agrasanto’s pet has probably never run this far in his life—not from bullies calling you a sissy, not from Babysitters who caught you out after curfew, not after a fruit cart so you can get the sweet taste of a half-rotten apple. But if there’s one thing Lane can do, it’s run.

Privileged prick
, he thinks.
Never had to work for anything.

The lackey cries out as Lane flings himself forward, tackling the man to the ground. The visidex spins away. The man squirms from beneath him, and his face is a contorted mask of terror.

He’s scared of me
, Lane thinks as he raises his fist.
He thinks I’m some kind of damn savage. Like I might start eating his face off.

All Lane can feel is contempt.

And then Lane hears the sound of the proctor’s pistol, and his heart damn near quits.

Rigo thinks,
I’ve been shot
.

His ears ring. His head is like a bell someone just struck with a carpenter’s hammer. He hits the ground, but his feet
won’t hold him and he tumbles over like a stack of milk bottles hit by a rotten apple.

Even his vision isn’t working right. Two images—same but different—swim toward each other and then apart again, as though trying desperately to become one. In both he sees Agrasanto slowly walking toward him, pressing the back of her wrist against her lips—a wrist that comes away red with blood—wearing an incredulous look on her dour face.

He expects his stomach to roil. He figures any moment blood will come boiling out from inside his skin—but he just blinks as the charge of adrenalin surges through him.

No blood. No death. Nothing.

“I’m not shot,” he says, but his words are lost in the dull roar of blood and bell ringing going on in the echo chamber of his head.

Then Simone Agrasanto says something to him.

Again she raises the pistol.

“You little shit,” she says.

She had a clean bead on Cael McAvoy. Until this little melonhead connected with her own head, and before she knew it, her teeth were cutting through her lower lip. The tang of iron and copper fast filled her mouth as the gun went off right next to the kid’s ear.

The pudgy bastard looks up at her with pleading eyes. He feels his chest as though he’s been shot.

She can oblige.

She licks blood from her lip and raises the pistol.

And her head snaps back. All she sees for a moment is half a starburst, a white field of flash that explodes in her vision. She screams and she thinks,
My eye! My fucking eye—it’s gone!

She brings her hand to her face and knows it’s absurd. It’s not her eye, everything’s fine; it’s just the madness of the moment.

But then she sees Cael McAvoy standing over his father, the slingshot held firmly in his hand, the tubing and pocket dangling slack. And when she pulls her hand away from her face, it comes away wet. Wet with blood.

Frantically, she feels for her eye.

It’s there. But it’s just a mushy bubble—it gives way to her finger like a stepped-on grape.

She cries out. This can’t be. This won’t do. McAvoy just stands there, jaw agape, looking horrified at her, as if she’s some kind of freak. She senses somebody behind her, and she wheels on them, pointing the pistol—