The Harvest (43 page)

It feels like something is ripped out of her.

Some vital organ, a reproductive system—like an apple pulped in a crushing hand, like roots ripped out of dark earth.

Balastair is dead.

Her son’s life force winks, and then it’s gone. Gone in a sudden wave of panic and fear—and, for one small second, a kind of bliss.

But for her, that bliss is hollow: a crass facsimile, a signal ruined by transmission. All she feels is raw acid, sick bile, burning, stinking, corrosive
sap
.

My son is dead
.

Rage fills her every space.

Her body begins to shift. The flesh warps. The bones crack. Her teeth become thorns, her hands become seeking roots—she rises off the ground, her cells multiplying at an exponential rate. The air around her a whirl of golden pollen and whipping seeds, a threshing tornado of corn-leaves slicing air.

The Maize Witch—the Blight Queen now—begins to scream.

UPROOTED

THE
SOUND
OF
GUNFIRE.
Rigo pats the side of his prosthetic leg nervously.
Tap tap tap tap
. Teeth gritted. Again to Kin: “We have to go.”

“Sit tight. This is all . . . this is all normal. This has to happen.”

“Gunfire? Gunfire is normal?”

Kin says nothing. Even Rigo can see the pensive look.

Nearby, off to the side of a building, a garden box hangs; from it dangles pink and purple flowers and some kind of berry drupes.

Those plants begin to shudder.

Rigo ducks, shushes Kin, then points at them.

They watch as the flowers whip about, twitching at first, but then thrashing—suddenly dismantling their own box. Then climbing down the building like some kind of nightmare monster.

And that’s when, in the distance, the lights start going out.

“Hell with this,” Rigo says.

The Dirae runs.

Or tries to.

She dropped the gun. Her foot is hobbled. Her neck is home to a short, stubby throwing knife—and blood bubbles up over her hand holding the knife in place. She knows not to remove the knife because then she is truly dead. Behind her, the girl—Shawcatch, the Lottery winner—kneels over the dead Empyrean man. Her grief has stopped her pursuit of Enyastasia. Good. Maybe the Dirae will fight another day.

But then, while looking behind her, Enyastasia’s good foot catches on a root coming up out of the cobbled street. A root that has no place here, but she has no time to consider the proper placement of roots. All she can do is hold her hands out—palms that sting as they barely catch her fall. She cries out in rage and frustration. She looks for the remaining guards, but all she sees are dead shapes bound in tightening vines.

The air shakes and shudders around her.

A shadow descends upon her.

Leaves drift through the air. Scraping as the wind moves them about.

She looks up.

Propped up on its roots: a massive tree. Earth hanging, bits of broken stone nestled in the crooks of those roots.

Its bark splits like a monstrous mouth—splintered teeth, tongue of leaf and branch. It bellows:
You killed my son!

Then it bows toward her. She feels branches cracking over her. Stabbing into her. Something winds around her neck. Another in her mouth, down her throat. Flowers bloom inside her heart, her lungs, her stomach.

She erupts.

A garden blooms in her pieces.

The flotilla comes alive. It is a green flotilla—vineyards, trees, flowers, greenhouses. Then the greenhouses shatter. The trees become hands pulling themselves out of the ground. Vines pull bricks from bricks. Flowers twist and spit, coughing poisonous pollen.

Cael can sense it all.

Wanda must be able to as well.

Because her head lolls back on her neck.

The look on her face is one of bliss.

A horrible thought reaches him:
Maybe she’s doing this all on her own
.

No—can’t be. He can sense the Maize Witch’s shoots and tendrils. But Wanda is in there, too. She’s part of it somehow. Helping her do all this.

Pop is next to him, firing the rifle at the advancing guardsmen—

Cael has a moment. One moment to get this right.

He picks up the crate. Hauls it over to the other end of the bridge, where Gwennie is kneeling by Balastair, where Boyland has joined her and is trying to get her to come away—“Come on, Gwennie,” Boyland is saying, “we have to go, we have to get out of here—”

Cael drops in front of her. Next to Balastair—who lies still, his empty eyes looking heavenward.
Don’t think about him right now, there’s no time
.

“Gwennie,” Cael says. He yells her name, shakes her: “Gwennie!”

“Cael,” she says. “Oh, gods, Cael. What’s happening?”

“This,” he says, thrusting the crate toward her. “Take it. Get out of here. Get to the skiff—get it down to the Heartland and as far away as you can.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know! Somewhere. Anywhere.”

“The factory,” she says. “The old processing facility.”

“East of Boxelder, south of Bremerton. Yeah. There you go.” That’s where they first really came to know each other, saving her little brother from a misguided adventure in that old rat-trap. It’s way outta the way.

And then, as if on perfect cue, the hum of a skiff’s engines. Rigo pilots the skiff into the canyon between Empyrean buildings, setting it down on the far side of the bridge.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!” Boyland shouts.

He and Cael help Gwennie up.

They afford one last look at Balastair.

Cicero the bird trails after them, whistling a mournful dirge.

Boyland and Gwennie head back over the bridge, hauling the crate. Cael trails after—Pop is waving them on, hobbling toward the skiff as Rigo shouts.

Cael turns, stops, grabs Wanda, shakes her: “Wanda, we have to go. I don’t know what’s gonna happen to this place, but it’s time—”

She catches both of his wrists. Her gaze flits all over him, worry crossing her face, then bewildered rage.

“Where is the crate?” she asks.

“Don’t worry about that,” he says. “We have to fly!”

Her hands close tighter around his wrists. Pain shoots up his arms. Her mouth opens. He sees a throat spiraling with thorns, each red as fresh blood. The words that come out are not spoken so much as they are a song sung by all her cells—she a flower that is opening, petals blooming, a horrible thing awakening.
“We. Need. That. Crate.”

His gaze betrays him, and he knows it, but he’s not sure what else to do—he looks to the skiff, to the others watching this scene unfold on the bridge. He rips a hand away from Wanda’s grip, waving them on:

“Go!
Go, godsdamnit, go!
”

She takes her free hand and points it at the skiff.

No, no, no
—

Her arm ripples, becomes bark, then glistening cellulose, then a tangle of roots and vines—it extends outward, a botanical geyser of plant-flesh, reaching toward the skiff even as it rises in the air—

“Wanda, stop!
Stop!
”

But she doesn’t stop.

He knows what happens next. She’ll tear the skiff down out of the air.

She’ll have the crate. The
colonies
.

And he doesn’t know what happens then.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He says it softly, knowing that the words cannot be heard over the din by human ears, knowing, too, that despite that, Wanda will hear his words anyway—the apology there inside her mind, pleading as if it were a living dream.

Her eyes flick toward him, verdant, inhuman, enraged.

Cael tackles her off the bridge.

THE CEILING OF HEAVEN

THE
SKIFF
ROCKETS
through the darkening streets of the flotilla. Gwennie knows she should be frightened—Rigo is pushing the craft to its limit, and though he’s turning out to be a far more capable pilot than she would’ve expected, she knows that at any moment they could crash: hit a bridge, clip a building, go spinning off the edge of this thing like a top. And even then, once Rigo takes it over the edge—can he pilot this thing through the sky? Back down to the ground? Can he handle the buffeting winds, the swift descent? Are they all dead and they just don’t know it yet?

These things should terrify her, but right now, all she feels is raw. Shocked. Emptied of everything. The images flit through her head like blackbirds: Balastair, shot dead. Lane, dead back in Pegasus City. And Cael, once again high in the sky and then suddenly lost to her, plunging down to gods-know-where—crushed by the engines in the Engine Layer, or gone through to the unyielding ground below. He survived it once. Maybe he could survive it again.

But she’s not an idiot. The chances of surviving that kind of fall twice—?

A deep cold settles into her. All around her in the skiff, they’re packed like sardines: the suffering and those similarly shocked. Boyland with bloody arms and haunted eyes. Pop weeping into his hands over the son he just lost anew. Rigo piloting the ship with wide eyes and white knuckles, shell-shocked into frightening competence.

And in the middle of them: a crate.

A weapon.
Her
weapon. In their hands.

Beneath them, in the city, ants already crawl. Soon they’ll bring the city crashing down, killing the people who remain here. And enough will probably survive to breed more in the Heartland. Spreading out. Killing the technology they already have.

A triumph, however small, for the Maize Witch.

Back there, Pop said:
They’ll wipe out the Empyrean
and
the Heartland. No visidexes. No motorvators. No corn to run the engines, but no engines, either
.

Rigo rockets them toward the edge of the flotilla. On her shoulder, the catbird, Cicero, trills and tra-la-las. The ghost of Balastair watching over her.

That’s when something hits her. Something else said back there.

What was it Balastair told them?

About killing the ants.
Extreme heat. Or cold, maybe
.

She shivers.

Or cold
.

She reaches up, grabs Rigo’s shoulder, and yells:

“We need to turn around! We need to head to the control tower!”

THE BLIGHT QUEEN

CAEL GASPS.

He sits up. Everything aches.

It’s morning. Everything is quiet but for the sound of wind through the corn. Hissing and crackling. The susurrus of the field.

The wind has teeth,
he thinks—an absurd, old thought.

He stands up and almost gags.

Empyrean soldiers hang impaled on cornstalks, stalks that shouldn’t be able to support that weight but . . . so goes the powers of the Maize Witch. The ground beneath them is red with gore. Flies hum about. Whatever battle happened here, it’s now over. This is the aftermath. Which leaves the question: How did he get here?

It strikes him, then, the memory—

Falling. He and Wanda tumbling through the air. His old nightmare of falling from such a great height played out again, as if it was always his destiny to fall. As they plunged through cold, open air, Wanda changed. She became something else in those final moments of descent, as the hungry corn rushed up to greet them—her body ruptured in all directions, and she became some thrashing, horrible thing. Limbs and whip-cord vines and spiraling thorns. A hundred mouths, a thousand eyes. Even now he can smell the too-sweet stink of rotten flowers and ruptured fruit.