The Harvest (24 page)

And yet, many of the homes remain. Half collapsed, some partly imploded, a few entirely sound in terms of structure and shape—but if you squint hard in the light of the night sky you can see the shape of what the homes once were, manses of some expanse, born of craft and skill and looking like nothing Cael has ever seen before. The Heartland doesn’t have homes like these, shattered or no.

This area: cordoned off. Daily the Sleeping Dogs work through the space, rebuilding. But no one sleeps here. Not yet. It hasn’t been declared safe—not a lot of value in populating an area if it’s just going to kill those who stay here. Pegasus City needs its people alive, not mashed to a red mess under a crushing wave of broken stone.

“I don’t get it,” Cael says in a low voice. “I fell with this city. Most of this stuff shouldn’t be here. How the hell does a floating city fall from that height and stay together? Hell, some of the buildings back toward the city center are still tall towers—I’m not my father, I’m not smart like he is, but that don’t seem to make a lick of sense.”

Balastair sighs as if he doesn’t feel like talking about it, as if remembering it all is a chore. “It’s a combination of factors. Part of it is the engineering. Many structures are designed to absorb all kinds of shock—a flotilla isn’t so much a single city as it is a series of buildings and areas chained together and allowed to float, and they constantly push and pull on one another. Once in a very rare while, a chain snaps—no small feat, given the size of these chains—and the buildings smash into one another. And yet they remain whole. Foamcore walls behind the stone. Nano-width web-mesh infusing the building material. Everything tested for tension and tremor. The other part of it is, half the city didn’t completely
fall
. Parts were protected by massive inflatable buoys—balloons, really. Not strong enough to keep buildings afloat, but enough to make their descent gradual rather than . . .
apocalyptic
.” He sighs suddenly. “This was my home once.”

“The flotilla.”

“This area of the flotilla. I grew up here. With my mother.”

“What was that like, having her as your mama?”

Balastair groans as they push on through the ruins of Palace Hill. “It was something I don’t really want to discuss.” And yet here he goes, discussing it: “She was a strange woman, consumed by her work. I never knew my father—she didn’t deem it
vital
information, didn’t think him necessary at all. I believe her phrasing was ‘vestigial.’ Like a tail or one’s far-standing teeth.” Cael is nimble enough to make it through the wreckage, but Balastair keeps almost losing his footing on scree and broken stone. “Oof. Walking this hill made me tired enough then. Now, it’s downright torture.”

“You think that house is still here?”

“I cannot say. If it is, we’ll find it.”

“And if it ain’t?”

Balastair shrugs. “Then we do not find what my mother hopes you’ll find. And whatever plan B is, she will enact it.”

“You think she’s got a plan B, huh?”

“I think she has plans A through Z, and then one through a hundred, and several more lined up after that.” He picks up a cracked, chipped balustrade—part of two horses, each winged, one Pegasus with its nose against the tail of the other. He groans again and tosses it to the cobble, where it snaps in half like a clod of dried mud. “The way she told it, the Blight—strictly speaking, Brunfels Molecular Mutation Syndrome—was an accident, an unexpected hazard of the work she was doing. She blamed the Empyrean, said they were pushing too hard too fast, ignoring risks for the sake of progress. But one night, while wreathed in poppy-smoke, an assistant of hers—a woman named Ursula Aldrovandi—said that it was intentional. A design by my mother and tested on herself first above others, probably because she wanted to be as powerful as the Grand Architects, but no one would allow her that. Or maybe just because she had seen something in the skies of the Seventh Heaven that she didn’t like. I don’t know. Whatever it was, she didn’t share it with me. One day she was my mother, the next she was taken into custody, and the next after that she had escaped, thanks to the help of a small cabal of Blighted agents.”

“Can I trust her?”

“Esther?” Balastair moans, pinches the flesh above his hawk’s-beak nose. “I honestly don’t know, Cael. I myself cannot decide if she’s a noble martyr, a brave academic, or a villainous monster. Or some strange helical twist of all three.” He pulls his hand away from his face, and Cael sees his gaze narrow. “I suppose we’re about to find out, though, because . . .”

He points toward a half-collapsed house of beige brick, a house enrobed in a mesh of dead, withered vines. Desiccated flowers dangle from trellises snapped like broken bones.

“That’s it?” Cael asks.

“That’s it,” Balastair answers. “Shall we?”

The ghost of home haunts him. This place was his, long ago—his and his mother’s, though since lived in by someone else. (He recalls, just now, passing by the window the day he visited the Lupercal and seeing a small boy standing there behind the glass, looking out.) Still—the specter of this place, of their lives here, is an almost tangible presence. There: the mantel on which sat a silver brazier in which she burned incense. In the corner of the room he no longer sees, the birdcage that once sat there, but the memory of it is so powerful he feels like if he were to reach out he’d be able to touch it—maybe even hear the chirps and burbles of Erasmus not long after hatching.

Oh, Erasmus
.

He suspects this Heartlander—Cael, who seems a bit . . . well, not
simple
, but
straightforward
—wouldn’t find much sympathy in the bird’s death. So Balastair bites back his grief the way one swallows bile.

Images of his mother dance like wraiths behind his eyes.

Esther, passing through, always passing through, rarely stopping to eat dinner, never cooking a meal, sometimes tending to the lilacs that lined the windows or the wishful-bashfuls hanging off the trellis. Her corn-silk hair, her pale eyes with too much knowledge dancing in them, a mouth ever twisted up in a small smile or down in a scrutinizing scowl. Early on, in her lab coat, always in her lab coat. But as time went on, her dress changed—gone was the coat, in came a diaphanous dress. Her hair ceased to be pulled up around her head and ears and flowed over her shoulders: golden, like sunlight striking waterfalls. She changed, then. Became obsessed with plants. With lineage and legacy.

With mutation.

He shudders, remembering the first sign of her Blight—they were out back, in the small garden terrace. He with the young Erasmus (no longer a hatchling but not far past it), training the bird not to speak, not yet, but to modify its sounds for a different purpose—a chirp for food, a shrill trill for warning, a fluty warble for play. She was moving white bricks, making a new planter and—

He still remembers the tiny snap.

Her fingernail broke off. Clattered on the bone-bleach pavers beneath them.

He looked over in horror as she held her finger aloft—the index finger on her right hand. The nail was gone altogether.

In its place, a small puckered pink hole.

A pea-shoot tendril rose from that hole.

It uncoiled, twirled in the air, testing it the way an inchworm does before taking an uncertain step. Balastair yelled out, a moment of weakness he still recalls. And he recalls that she did
not
cry out.

All she said was a small, curious
“Oh.”

“What’re we looking for?” Cael asks, interrupting Balastair’s reverie of memory. “This place looks like a picked-over corpse. Can’t even get upstairs.”

Sure enough, the stairway up is so collapsed it’s unusable.

“We’ll still have to check up there,” Balastair says. “Which means finding our way to climb out and up.”

“I’m game for that.”

Cael stretches out his right arm, and the vine coiled there relaxes, like a snake lazily removing itself from a tree branch. Balastair realizes he watched his mother take to her own mutation that way—any fear that Cael may have once had over what had happened to his body was fading away. Now, it’s becoming a tool. And soon, Balastair suspects, it will become part of him rather than something outside him. A transition that should come with fear, but won’t.

McAvoy steps out the front door once more. From inside, Balastair watches as the young man does a few stretches, cranes his neck a few times, then reaches his hand to the sky.

The Blight-vine follows the line created by the arm. It extends upward, and Balastair can’t see what happens to it—but he can see the look of surprise and glee on Cael’s face.

“Well, King Hell and Old Scratch, look at that!” Cael calls, then grits his teeth and disappears as the vine pulls him upward.

This is the boy Gwennie was pining over?

He supposes he gets it. Cael is—how to put it? A creature of action. Impulse and impetus. He
does
things. Balastair was always more internal, living an intellectual life, one of imagination and infinite possibility. Making a choice changes the nature of possibility, doesn’t it? Before acting, a thousand options remain open.

Act, and your options winnow to one.

That’s what Cleo always hated about him. She said he was too afraid to do anything, too afraid to take a step for fear of how the ground would move when he did.

Cleo, gone from him now.

Her death leaves a hole in his life. He knows that abstractly he’s good to be shut of her—she was a vain creature. Not a monster, but eminently selfish. Like too many of his fellow Empyrean citizens. A traitor to him in so many ways and yet he hoped to rekindle something with her. Though here a small voice reminds:
You wanted to rekindle that only to make Gwendolyn Shawcatch jealous, isn’t that right?
And it is right, though he’d never admit it out loud.

A vision again of Cleo spinning around, killed by what she hoped would be her own saviors. Spun body. Blood.

He shudders, tries not to cry out. A hand over his mouth to prevent it.

A quick shake of his head to clear out the spiders that have nested there, and then he’s out the door, looking up. Cael waves down, extends his hand, and the vine reaches for him. Balastair has to repress the feeling of discomfort watching this braided, veiny vine slide through the air silently toward him. Cael calls down: “Take it, I’ll pull you up.”

Balastair begins to reach upward—

Something moves behind Cael.

A shape taller than he is.

McAvoy hears it. The vine starts to retract. Balastair calls out a warning—but it’s too late.

The mechanical man steps out from the shadows of the room above and knocks Cael backward with a hard metal hand. Then a sonic shriek cuts the air, and suddenly he’s tumbling out of the second-floor window, catching the lip with the Blight-vine—a save that doesn’t last long as Cael spits blood and falls two stories, cracking hard against his shoulder, head snapping against shattered cobblestone. Balastair yells, runs toward him—

But a shadow emerges from the side.

He catches the glint of a pistol. It clips him in the side of the head—his heel skids out from under him, and before he even realizes it, the ground is rushing up to meet his tailbone. A sudden flashback hits him—coming out of the Lupercal, the falcon tearing into Erasmus, turning the little bird into a red pulp. The peregrine descending, shooting him, leaving him wrecked.

Even as the shock travels up his spine and he rolls over onto his side, a sharp, angry thought cuts through everything:
But I showed him, didn’t I?
Percy the peregrine, dead by mechanical Pegasus.

And yet, some fear haunts him, some fear that the person walking toward him now out of shadow, out of night,
is
Percy—the peregrine returned from death, vicious and vengeful—

But it’s not.

It’s just a girl.

A wild-eyed, sharp-faced girl with a sonic pistol. He doesn’t recognize her at first—though then he remembers seeing her when they first landed here, rescued from the blockade and brought to the wreckage of the Saranyu.

Luna is her name, isn’t it?

“You’ve got to—I don’t—” he stammers, trying to find words. A trickle of blood crawls down his temple, clinging to his jawline.

“I don’t have to do anything,” she says.

And then she shoots him.

The front of Balastair’s shirt is gummy with vomit. A few feet away, pressed up against the wall, sits Cael—cradling his shoulder, his nose rimed with dry mucus, eyes red. McAvoy looks unhinged: teeth bared in a feral gesture, flinty eyes darting from Luna to the two metal men that attend her.

Balastair recognizes the mechanicals. One is a Bartender-Bot. The other, a Constructor: meant for building things, fixing things, and demolishing them in turn. Both repurposed. Each with sonic shooters fitted to the arms.

The young girl twirls her pistol and chews on a stick.

“You naughty little princes,” she says.

Cael spits. His lips and tongue smack drily. “I hope you’re Obligated to Old Scratch, you little brat.”

“Ooooh,” she says, then whistles. “Little brat. Big words for a Blighter.” Balastair watches Cael tense up. The vine seems to tense with him. Luna points the pistol at him. “Oh no, no, no. Keep that abomination tucked tight, or I’ll find cause to pull this trigger again.”

“This was once my house,” Balastair says. His words are mushy, muddy—the results of having been hit by a sonic blast. One that was thankfully set to be nonlethal. “I have a right to be here.”

“You have no right except what I say is right. This house is property of the Sleeping Dogs, Harrington. And, see, that’s how I
beat you idiots here
. I do my research. I learned pretty fast how to use those visidexes. Didn’t take long to search your name, find the places here you once called home. Killian is at the other location in case you showed up there.”

Other location?
Then he realizes: his home. The one before everything went to ruin. He hadn’t even thought of it still existing, that’s how distant that life seems to be now.