by Chuck Wendig
Cael feels lost to it all. A part of his mind still wants to do the human thing and think about what is happening. Him and Wanda? What about Gwennie? But it feels good, it feels right, and he can’t help his attraction to Wanda now. At first he thinks it must be due to the Blight, but then he remembers seeing her back in the corn outside the Empyrean depot—her with the rifle, her seeing his Blight and still having love in her eyes—and she seemed strong and confident in a way she hadn’t before. . . .
But then all those thoughts get buried underneath a more primal urge. A tide of feeling that isn’t human and maybe not even animal. It’s all colors and textures. Memory stirred by smells and tastes. The heady floral scent; the spoor of sweat; the taste of that sweat mixed with the sweetness of something else; the feeling of skin too smooth to be skin—
He gives in to that. Reeling. Reveling. Wanda moans against him. She moves to get comfortable, nuzzles into the curve of his outstretched neck, hand draped on his thigh like a resting butterfly.
The ground is soft. Welcoming.
Sleep takes him swiftly.
He dreams of being swallowed up into the earth. Roots pulling him down. Black, churned earth opening up. Teeth of rock and broken stalk. A hellsmouth of the mad, hungry world.
Then: a vibration through it.
A thrumming. He draws a sharp breath through his nose.
A ship.
His eyes snap open.
A shadow moves in front of the light above. Streaks of white go to wincing black. Cael thinks: Is it morning? Past morning? Already? How did that happen? How did time slip away so dang quick?
Someone stands over him.
A tall shape. Broad. Blotting out the sky.
He reaches up, starts to protest—
“Hey, who in King Hell—”
Something cracks him hard in the face.
Wanda screams as consciousness threatens to slip away. Blackness bleeds in at the edges of his vision, and he sees his attacker—just some Heartlander, he thinks at first, but then he sees. The skin isn’t skin—it’s some kind of rubber casing, flesh-colored but not actually flesh. The material bunches up around the joints, and when the thing moves, he hears the servos whine and metal grind on metal. He sees not human eyes but blue glass disks bulging from a peach-pink face.
It raises an arm, and a sonic cannon roars to life.
THE BRUTAL GIRL
SPARKS RAIN DOWN off the mountain like a waterfall made of fire, bright embers leaving streaks through mist.
Enyastasia Ormond, seventeen years old, stares down off a steel grate platform at the sight. From time to time a small black shape emerges from behind the cascade of sparks, coming through it and catching fire—fluttering and jerking about, clearly in pain, trying to rise higher before falling. A burning star.
They’re bats. Here the Empyrean is constructing the new flotilla in the mountains of the Workman’s Spine, the various peaks serving as assembly sites for the new flying city. And here, where they’re constructing the control tower, sits a cave for juniper bats. Little black mousy things. Creatures who love the little pale berries on the everblue trees that grow in the gorges below. If the bats were smart, they’d stay in their bat cave. But they don’t. The construction disturbs them. And so about every half hour, one decides to be brave—or perhaps it just can’t deal anymore with the anxiety of all this light and sound, all this clamor and brightness—and it flits out into the mountain air, flying like a poppet on a string.
And it flies right through a curtain of fire.
The bat burns, and it dies.
Enyastasia thinks this is very funny.
Not ha-ha-out-loud funny. But quietly, internally hilarious.
It lifts her spirits because, as a metaphor, it works. These bats are an emblem of the Heartlanders. They’re animals. Animals who don’t know how to remain content and cling to their cave spires like good little beasties. The Heartlanders are trying to escape the cavern. They want to fly. But when they do, they will be met with a shower of sparks and a rain of fire.
They will be met by Enyastasia Ormond.
Wind whips. The cataract of fire is moved by it, embers cast wide.
A few bats flit free and escape, squeaking as they seek freedom.
The girl grunts. Irrational rage rises inside her. But she stills herself and remembers that the bats are fundamentally stupid. Occasionally lucky, but always dumb. The bats will come back to their cave.
And when they do, they will catch fire.
Behind her, a voice.
A girl like her. A year younger. She has a name, or had one. Bettina. Her face is a labyrinth of fresh scar tissue, healed but pink. The puffy ridges sporting delicate black lines cresting each tiny hill of skin. It’s a living mask. A reminder of what the girl has lost. A reminder of what the girl can never be again. And in this, she is no longer Bettina.
She is only Harpy. One of many.
“Dirae,” the Harpy says. “It’s time.”
The cylindrical chamber wraps around one of the peaks of the mountain—this peak called Zebulon’s Finger for reasons Enyastasia does not know. (Nor, frankly, does she give even a single damn; history is of no interest or value to her. The future, on the other hand, is hers to own.)
Two men sit in chairs the color and shape of blood orange halves. Red cushions, burnt umber exteriors.
The one man is old, long, and livery. Flesh hanging off him like a rag tossed over the peg on a coatrack. He’s tall, thin, and knobby as a coatrack, too, and sitting there in the chair he looks kinked-up, given over to discomfort.
The other man is younger. Not as young as she is, certainly—Enyastasia knows that ultimately she is just a girl, and he is no boy. But compared with the ancient spirit sitting across from him, Heron Yong looks fresh-faced and innocent. Naive, even. Mouth pressed to a flat line, hair bound in a small knot behind his head, above the base of his skull. He looks nervous.
The old man speaks. His body appears ancient—shaking like a broom in the hands of a palsied maid—but his voice is strong as a horse’s hoof stomping dirt with its iron shoe. Deep, resolute, unwavering.
“Enyastasia Ormond,” the old man says. “It seems that we have heaped a great deal of trust—or, rather, faith—upon your shoulders. Looking at you now I question if you have the frame to support this burden.”
Fuck you, old man.
She sniffs and forces a stiff smile. “As this burden is not a literal physical one, I don’t think my stature or frame hold a great deal of relevance, Master Architect.”
Master Architect Berwin Luzerne makes a face like he just took a bite out of a rotten apple. A horse apple, maybe. He stands. She thinks he’ll walk the way he shakes, a doddering, juggling step. But his stride is fast and swift—equal more to his voice than to the shudder in his hands.
One of those hands lashes out, grips her jaw tight. She can feel the pinch of his arthritic claw. Her teeth grind and pop.
“Look at you,” he says. “Your grandfather would be disappointed in you. Such potential wasted. All that schooling. All that time spent grooming you for great things. And for what?” He runs a thumb over the scars she cut into her own cheek. “You’ve marked yourself like a savage.”
“A savage girl to fight savage people.” She thinks but doesn’t say: And my grandfather was a pipe-addled half-wit. Smart in architecture and design. Dumb in everything else. That old wisp of a man, living by the urges he felt in his pants, discarding wife after wife—as her grandfather got older, his wives got younger. And he still wanted the children to call them “grandmother.”
Puke.
“Let us walk back outside,” he says, relinquishing his grip on her jaw.
As he turns and points that long stride toward the door, she rubs her jaw, and Heron gives her a look. She scowls, turns away, a red rage rising to her cheeks. Heron hurries after the Master Architect, waving her on.
The Master Architect: overseer of all new flotilla construction and of all the
Grand Architects beneath him. He, like they, is master of his own flotilla, too: the Luzerne Garam Ilmatar, built by—who was it? Luzerne’s great-grandfather? Great-great? Whatever. That, again, is history and she can no longer peer too deep in the past lest she overlook those events in recent memory. She is the hand of vengeance. She is the one who will reclaim the honor and might of the Empyrean. It is with her spear that she will remind the Heartlanders that their place is either kneeling in the dust or hanging on the end of a godsdamned pike.
She scowls and follows after. Why come inside if they were just going to go back outside?
Wind whips.
The Harpy nods her head as they all pass.
Luzerne walks to the edge, gazes out on the construction spanning miles of mountain peaks, some connected with walkways and cables, others independent. Not far, welding skiffs hover and bob as they approach, firing mooring cables into the mountain rock to hold steady. It’s a dangerous job. Fire the anchoring piton into the wrong spot and boom:
Avalanche.
“We would usually build this flotilla in the sky,” he says, stating something both she and Heron already know. “But the Yong Heron Herfjotur is valuable enough to warrant hiding it from the . . . raider scum below.”
“I agree,” she says.
“It is not your place to agree,” he chides her. “Agreement from you sounds as if you are also afforded the chance to disagree.”
I am. This was all my design. All of this. You think I’m just some dumb little girl and you hold my mooncalf grandfather in the highest regard, but all this is happening because I was smart enough and angry enough to demand that all the Grand Architects listen.
And listen they did.
Over the last year, she’s been working tirelessly. Losing sleep training an army of young girls like herself—children orphaned by the fall of the Saranyu, children whose parents were on the flotilla when it fell but who were themselves studying on other flotillas (as is the Empyrean way these days). They scarred their faces and marked them with ash and ink to ensure they will always be seen as the Harpies that they are. Creatures of vengeance.
It was her idea, too, to construct a new flotilla to replace the Saranyu—and not just another floating city. Not some island of pretty buildings and vineyards and scholarly white towers. This would be a warship, a city built to tame those animals scrabbling in the dust bowl below. A flotilla designed with one goal: to punish the terrorists for thinking they could tear down the sky.
Herfjotur. All her idea.
Just a girl.
“The flotilla will fly in a matter of months,” he says. “Perhaps sooner?”
“Yes,” Heron offers. “Sooner is the goal.”
“But,” Enyastasia says, jumping in, “the Harpies are ready. It’s time to enact Project Raven. The Initiative is in full swing, but the mechanicals can only do so much. Their use as soldiers is valuable but ill-fitting and incapable of the finesse necessary—”
“Project Raven is dead.”
“Wh-what?”
“It is over. I have found it unbecoming of a young girl in our care—the granddaughter of one of our own architects, no less—to be carving up her face and the faces of other Empyrean children to serve as assassins. It is ludicrous.”
She makes a sound somewhere between a laugh and a howl of rage. “You’re kidding. You’re seriously godsdamned kidding. I’ve worked for a year to train these girls. We’re ready! The . . . the Heartlander menace is spreading. But we can end it. We don’t do it by killing them all, we don’t do it by going to war, we do it by going down there, finding the ones with their hands on the leashes of all the dust-eating dogs, and cutting off their heads. It’s a targeted—”
“We will have the war-city Herfjotur. We will not need you.”
“The war-city is a symbol!” she cries. Heron watches the two of them argue, fear flashing in his eyes. “A reminder that we maintain supremacy in the sky. It’s a weapon of last resort. The architects voted for this!” They voted for me.
He shrugs. “They were bewildered and desperate. The fall of the Saranyu left many reeling. They grabbed the first solution put before them—they were starving children willing to eat filth to satisfy their hunger. Tonight I will be holding a new vote, and they will overwhelmingly agree that your plan is not one of Empyrean favor. I’ve already canvassed them. They’re convinced to let this field go fallow at my urging. All we need is the vote.”
It’s like a gut-punch. “The Harpies and I . . .” But the words rot in her mouth. All she can say is: “You’re an idiot.”
Heron gasps.
The Master Architect wheels on her. Again he grabs her face, hard enough this time that she knows bruises will form in the wake of his grip. “You are a strange, vile girl. Likely a psychopath. Certainly deluded. You had opportunity well and beyond what others already had and yet you wasted it. A violent girl. An ugly girl.” Her teeth grind together. Her eyes begin to water. “I am only glad that I stepped in before your delusions took us all for a—”
His eyes go wide. He continues speaking—or, rather, his lips continue moving, but no sound comes out. Just a squeal like a stuck pig.
He looks down as she draws the knife out of his middle.
Blood drips onto his shoes. Pat, pat, pat.
“What’s wrong?” Heron asks, stepping toward them before crying out, “Oh, by the gods. Lord and Lady, Lord and Lady. Enya, what did you do?”
“Shut up,” she hisses. “Shut. Up. I got you this job.” She points the bloody knife at him. “I named you to this. You’re not a Grand Architect, Heron, not yet. You . . .” But she doesn’t know what to say. She’s losing the thread. Berwin Luzerne is standing a foot away from her, clutching his middle, face bloodless as a rag wrung of its water.
“You . . .” the old man wheezes.
Mercy of the gods. A knife-hole in his gut is a death sentence for him—and for her. That won’t do.
But.
But.
She meets his eyes. Hateful embers like the sparks raining down.
Enyastasia tries to transmit her own hate right back at him.
Then she gives him a gentle shove off the platform.
The Master Architect reaches for her, but it’s too late. His arms pinwheel, as if he’s a bird trying to fly. A bird with clipped, broken wings.
A bat on fire trying not to die.
He falls through the mist to the jagged peaks below.
For a moment, she just stands there, breathing the cold, thin air. Snake-tails of steam leave her mouth with every exhale. I just killed the Master Architect. She tells herself it was the right thing. He was a throwback, the last of his breed—a breed whose extinction she hastened but did not create. A little voice reminds her: You are a strange girl. Other girls your age have taken lovers by now. Other girls, other boys. They’ve begun their studies. They travel to other flotillas to learn. And what have you done? Scarred your face. Trained other girls to be violent like you. She was always violent—even when her father didn’t keep her in a box. A biter in proto-school. A scrapper after that. Claws out, teeth bared. Her grandmother said something was wrong with her, that she didn’t come with the part of the brain that everyone else must’ve come with. Her father called her a “brutal girl.”
Heron bleats like a throat-cut sheep, startling her.
He saw what she did. Did anyone else?
She looks up.
There. The welding skiffs.
Two of them.
Men looking. Pointing. They’re too far away to know for sure, but . . .
She turns to the Harpy. The one who was once Bettina.
“You,” she barks. The girl, to her credit, snaps right to attention—unlike Heron, she isn’t standing there, staring at the space where Berwin Luzerne once stood. She stands tall and stiff, shoulders back, feet together.
“Yes, Dirae.”
“Go. Take two of your sisters. Kill the men on those skiffs. Make it look like an accident. U
nderstand?”
A short, clipped nod from the girl, then she’s moving inside, to the elevator. To the other Harpies, a few pods below.
Breathe. Breathe. Steady your heartbeat. This is good.
This is what progress looks like.
Heron stammers: “Wh-what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to keep going” is her answer. “Nothing changes.”
“He’s dead! That’s a change.”
“He fell,” she corrects. “He was old. And careless. And he fell. The other architects will gather and take control for a time. Eventually they will name a new Master Architect.”
“And if that Master Architect disagrees with your plan?”
“He won’t,” she says. “Or she won’t. And you won’t tell anyone what really happened here, because if you do, then by the gods . . .”
He stiffens, swallowing hard.
Enyastasia says no more than that. Instead, she just stands at the edge of the platform, breathing in, breathing out. Not sure if she should laugh or cry. Eventually, she sees shadowy shapes running along the anchor cables, spears in their hands. Soon after, the screams of men dying. Bodies thrown overboard. Then both skiffs explode, and fire rains down.
THROWING KNIVES
A KNIFE FLIES FAST, embedding in the man’s head. It rocks back on its mooring, coming loose, and rolls off onto the ground. The skull breaks apart, and dry corn scatters like a cupful of loose teeth.
The cob man is dispatched.
“Finally learning how to throw those things,” Squirrel says in her squeaky voice. She swings her arms and claps her hands. The girl can never seem to stay still. She’s a bundle of energy vibrating on a whole other frequency.
“I learned from the best,” Gwennie says, walking over and reclaiming the throwing knives from the body of the corncob man: a dummy they built together for target practice, cobs strung together under a ratty burlap shirt. She boots the head into the hungry corn.
