by Chuck Wendig
Luna’s jaw drops, then everything tightens up as if she’s preparing to attack them both. “I let . . . whatever this is between you go on. Your little relationship? I don’t judge. I don’t care who sticks what in who. I care that things get done right. That we keep everyone safe and that we collectively stick it to the skybastards any chance we get. Now, Killian—”
“Think before you speak,” the pale raider says.
“I appreciate your service to our people. I do. You were a helluva captain once upon a time, and Daddy admired you because you got things done. But now, you’re a flower gone to seed. Drunk on the Empyrean’s left-behinds: wine and Pheen from what I hear. And that means you’re fuzzy around the edges. But I’m sharp. And Lane needs sharp to keep this city—”
The visidex beeps.
Lane looks down as the others both give him—or, at least, the screen—an irritated look. Holy hell.
“They’re hailing us,” Lane says, surprised. “They want to communicate.”
“So talk to them,” Killian says.
“It’s a trap,” Luna says.
Lane cocks an eyebrow. “How could it be a trap?”
“They send a virus over to corrupt all the visidexes and that jumps to what few computer systems we’ve managed to get running. Or they hone in on our frequency and fire a homespun rocket right up our dresses. Or they—”
Killian reaches for the screen. “Oh, for the sake of all the sweet Saintangels, answer the damn call.”
Luna snatches the visidex from Lane’s hands, then cancels the call. With a quick spin of her fingers she pulls up the gun cameras and command screen.
“Shoot them down.”
She hands it back to Lane.
He turns to look.
The ship is still out there, hovering. He wants to think that means they’re innocent, but Luna’s filled him with these ideas. He can’t be naive. He has a whole city to protect. One lapse of judgment brings this whole place down. Everything he’s built here is balanced on the tip of his finger. One twitch and—collapse.
He pulls up gun controls on the visidex. The nearest cannon at the corner tower pivots, leveling a long barrel that looks not unlike the barrel of an Empyrean pistol, except built for the hands of a giant, not a man. The cannon thrums to life—
Just as the ship begins flashing its forelights.
Lane’s finger hovers over the fire button.
“Oh, what now?” Luna asks, annoyed.
Killian just scowls and watches.
The lights flash intermittently. Not just a steady flashing, either, but in an erratic pattern: one flash, then a few seconds, then a long flash followed by a couple quick pulses and—
Lane freezes, watches the pattern go once, twice again.
Lord and Lady.
Lord and Lady!
He whoops and laughs and closes the gun camera screen.
“Let ’em land,” he says to Luna. She starts to protest, and he just yells over her with a happy cackle: “I said, let ’em land!”
SUMMIT
RIGO LETS OUT a moan of relief. He wipes sweat from his brow and leans forward on the skiff’s console with his elbows. “I thought we were dead.”
“I began to worry that myself,” Pop answers. He reaches over and musses Rigo’s hair. “Using Bug Code was a good idea, Rigo.”
He can’t help it—Rigo feels a swell of pride. He was never able to please his own father, but maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe Pop’s the only father he ever needed. The father he’d in fact had all along.
“You taught us Bug Code,” he says. Way back in Boxelder, when Cael first started the Big Sky Scavengers with Gwennie, Lane, and Rigo, Pop said he wanted to teach them this code—a code that could be heard or seen, a code in dashes and dots. He called it Bug Code, and for a long time Rigo thought it actually had something to do with insects—something about wing patterns or their clicks and chirps. But later on Pop told them it had to do with a Vibroplex, a little device that generated the code for you, a device that everybody called a “bug.” They learned the code to communicate with one another in situations where they couldn’t speak, either at a distance or as a cipher when others—like Boyland, that big donkey—might be watching or listening.
So, Rigo hoped that the Lord and Lady hadn’t seen fit to steal that memory from Lane’s mind—and that Lane was out there watching them in the first place. Since nobody wanted to pick up their transmission, and since the guns all swiveled and pointed right at them, he had to think quick.
(Here he looks down at his missing leg and at the clumsy artifice that has replaced it, and he realizes that he’d much rather be able to move quickly than to think quickly. No girl will ever want a hobbling cripple like him. Not even a young hobo girl like Beryl—who doesn’t even like boys anyway, as it turns out. He’s never gonna find a girl. Never gonna have kids. Be old and alone and legless. Even more useless than his own father. Shoot.)
It isn’t long before ships emerge from Pegasus City. A couple sloops with low-swept sails, the sigil of the Sleeping Dogs on each.
Again, Rigo tenses.
Pop must sense this, though, because he says: “It’s all right. They’re not attack boats. I think we just found ourselves an escort, Mister Cozido.”
Meeting Pop in that theater back in Curtains changed everything.
First, well—first, Rigo thought he was dead. Thought maybe that those two bullies had beaten him to death in the alleyway with his own foot and that his fever dream before finally dying was to see Arthur McAvoy. Pop, like one of the guiding Saintangels to help him leave the dusty, corn-cracked earth and ascend to the sky to take his place in the manse of the Lady and the Lord.
But then he saw: Pop had changed. This was no idealized version, no heavenly illusion. The man had a scruffy half-beard. His face, even in the dim light of the old theater, showed lines deeper than Rigo remembered. Like he had aged more than just a year. Like he had aged ten years.
The man looked like a hobo—appropriate, as it would turn out.
Pop embraced Rigo and they hugged like that for a while. Arthur’s voice cracked as he told Rigo how glad he was to see him, how seeing a friendly face from Boxelder meant the world. How he didn’t expect it here at the far-flung fringe of the Heartland, but how it had helped him.
Neither of them spoke of Cael at that moment.
Instead, Pop showed Rigo what he’d been working on.
It was Martha’s Bend all over again, except bigger. Below Curtains was a whole network of tunnels—many of which Pop hadn’t dug out because they already existed. He said they once used these tunnels to smuggle people in and out of the Heartland, into the murky, swampy jungle beyond: a place Pop called Bleakmarsh. He said they seized on the original tunnels and built more, too. He didn’t do it alone, of course.
He had help.
Jeezum Crow, Pop had a whole dang army.
Hobos and Blighters. Just like in Martha’s Bend. But others, too—simple folk. Regular Heartlanders gone hobo. If Pop had dozens of folk with him in Martha’s Bend, here he had hundreds. And the tunnels beneath the town went well beyond the borders of Curtains, stretching out a couple miles into the dirt beneath the Heartland. Pop said they even had a few tunnels that ran to other towns, too, and they planned on digging more.
It was a small society.
They were growing food.
They were building things: radios, water purifiers, corn-boats, motorvators repurposed to dig underground.
And they were stockpiling weapons.
A few sonic shooters. Couple thrum-whips. And a lot of bladed weapons: sharpened shovels, corn scythes, moon sickles, machetes, knives.
Pop didn’t say much about that.
Instead, he took Rigo down a long, narrow dirt-wall passage.
He took him to a room at the end with a simple cot at the far wall.
On the bed lay Filomena McAvoy. Cael’s mother. A body besieged by tumors. Worse than before, by the look of them—her
face was lost to them entirely. The tumors across her flesh were like sandbags stacked upon her.
Sitting by the bed was a woman—
A woman who turned toward Rigo and Pop as they entered, a woman who Rigo saw with no small surprise was Merelda, Cael’s sister.
She was never particularly nice to him—nor was she mean, really. Mostly she just ignored Rigo, treated him as if he were a minor irritation, like a slobbery dog or something. But here, he saw the tears brimming in her eyes, and next thing he knew she was up and hugging him. And the moment was like a cork popped out of a bottle, letting out old, stale air so they could breathe again.
Because suddenly they were all gathering around the bed and sitting down and talking about . . . everything. About how Pop came to the edges of the world, where the Empyrean’s gaze was weakest. About how Merelda found her way here after hearing about a man named Arthur who was recruiting hobos—“scooping them up,” she said. About how everything has changed, how the Empyrean have gone on the offensive after the Saranyu fell (and how that was more of an excuse to continue what they had already begun with the Initiative, to turn Heartlander men and women into mechanicals), how the Sleeping Dogs have staked out Pegasus City, how the Maize Witch is real and drawing the Blighted to her as if she were the flame and they were the moths.
Rigo told them how he came to leave Pegasus City—“Every day for weeks the Empyrean kept sending new ships, new soldiers, and we just kept shooting them down. We were living in ruins. Folks were trickling in, sick, injured. We started hearing those stories about more towns like Tuttle’s Church: people turned to . . .” There he let his voice trail off. “I just had to go away.” I couldn’t stomach it.
And it was then that Merelda talked about Cael.
She told the story of them on the Saranyu. She and Gwennie and Scooter and a couple others Rigo didn’t know. She said how Cael and Boyland (together!) showed up, and how Cael saved Gwennie’s little brother. And then, as everything fell to hell, Cael fell with it.
There it was.
The truth of the thing.
Cael was dead.
Merelda’s brother. Pop’s boy. And Rigo’s captain. Dead.
It crushed Rigo. Crushed him right into the dirt, like one of Lane’s cigarettes smashed by the toe of his twisting boot. He tried not to cry, but dangit he was never really good at stoppering that bottle, and the tears came and so did the snot, and the weight hit him all at once. All the things he’d lost: his home, his leg, his family, his friends. His future, even.
Pop patted his back. Told him that grief was okay.
But that it would have to come later. And Rigo looked up, confused and, for a moment, angry. Because Pop had had time with the news about Cael. Pop was allowed to grieve, so why should that be robbed from Rigo?
Then Pop said, “We’ll have time to mourn, but for now, we’ve work to do. Are you ready to work, Rigo?”
Gamely, numbly, Rigo nodded.
“Good. Because we need to pay a visit to our old friend Lane Moreau.”
Lane sees Rigo hobble down out of the skiff and his face erupts in a big smile, and he claps his hands and begins a long stride to meet his old friend—
But when Pop comes down after, Lane stops, breathless for a moment. Then the whoop that comes out of him is loud enough and happy enough, you’d think he just found out the Empyrean took off into outer space with plans to never come back. He breaks into a swift run and collides into Pop so hard his own legs kick back and catch air, and Pop has to steady himself against the door, wincing. But he laughs, too, and hugs back.
“You’re alive,” Lane says, smile so big it looks like half his head’s on a hinge. “Old Scratch and King Hell, Pop! You’re alive!”
Pop laughs again, but this time it’s the laugh of someone who’s been through it all and come out the other side: a laugh with the paint worn off, a laugh with rust on it. “Guess you found me out, then.”
And then it’s on to Rigo, picking him up and shaking him like he’s full of money or candy. Lane squeezes him so hard Rigo thinks he might pop.
All around, onlookers stare. A young girl stands nearby, pouting. Near to her is someone Rigo almost doesn’t recognize: Killian Kelly. Once one of the captains, he now looks almost like a ghost. As if something vital has been sucked out of him. Sallow, thin, more a bedsheet twisted up than a man.
Rigo can sympathize.
Others stare from the decks of the two sloops that escorted them in. Above, on catwalks and balconies, other Heartlanders watch. They don’t look suspicious, but they damn sure aren’t welcoming, either. If Rigo had to describe them, he’d say they look weary. Maybe a little scared. A whole lot burned out.
And he can sympathize with that, too.
“C’mon, c’mon,” Lane says, finally pulling away. He claps his hands. “Welcome to Pegasus City, gents. Who wants a tour?”
Nightfall. Rigo’s tired and sore. He feels the skin around his prosthesis is chafing, raw as a corn husk. Pop must be feeling it, too. His hobble had gotten worse as the afternoon went on, as Lane took them through the shattered streets and crooked buildings of Pegasus City. The whole thing has changed since Rigo left it, since he walked away from this place knowing that he couldn’t be a part of whatever would happen here. Lane and the other raiders have made strides he couldn’t have imagined. It looks like a proper city, almost, like one of their own towns given a high-grade fertilizer—everything grown up and out, towering over him.
Even ruined, he understands now the majesty of the Empyrean. What they have up there truly is the Seventh Heaven.
It’s just that they think they deserve it.
And that the Heartlanders don’t.
Lane showed them everything he could: the tortoiseshell wall, the massive sonic cannons (Rigo takes special pride that it was his idea to put those there), the housing district (repurposed apartments from the Empyrean), the machine shop, the greenhouses (all the glass shattered, but plants growing), the docks and hangars where they stow their corn-ships and skyboats, and finally, what Lane says is the most important thing: the engines. He told them that the engines failed and fell separate, and most of the Engine Layer was just scrap. But, he said, the engines themselves—the humongous hover-panels in particular—were reparable. Now fixed, they wait only for the fuel necessary to power the generators. Fuel that will come from the corn.
Now they sit around a white crooked table in a tall white tower—inside what looks to be a big damn birdcage, iron-wrought with an emerald patina.
“Used to be one of their jail cells, I’m told,” Lane says, getting out a decanter of a liquid so red it’s almost black. With one hand he manages to claw-grab three glasses and he plunks them on the table, starts messily pouring. “This is wine. Like, actual wine made from actual grapes. They grew all kinds of stuff up here. Potatoes and grapes and funny fruits like rangpurs and bloodberries and papa-yuzus. Like I always figured they gave us their scraps as rations. Worse than scraps. Food pastes in tubes and mechanically separated meat goop. Just eyeballs and buttholes mashed up. Poison, basically. But this stuff”—he swills the bottle and it goes gloonk gloonk gloonk—“this really is the top of the pops, the uppermost level of heaven itself.”
Three glasses, one going to each of them. He lifts a glass and walks around, clinking it to each.
Lane finally sits.
He laughs. “I think you’re supposed to, like, smell the wine or something. . . .” He pauses, shrugs, then takes a big long gulp.
“Pegasus City is one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen,” Pop says. “I’m proud of you for what you did here.”
Rigo watches Lane stiffen. His old friend tenses up, like he’s suddenly uncomfortable in his own clothes, in the chair, like maybe the wine tastes bad, too. The smile that arrives looks forced. “Thanks, Pop.”
“I bet the Empyrean are hungry to get their hands back on the fallen flotilla. They made attacks?”
“A few in the beginning. The
first wasn’t an attack—it was a salvage mission.” Another gulp of wine, finishing the glass. “They thought they’d be hauling the city back up into the sky, but they were shit outta luck.”
Pop leans forward. “Were there Empyrean folk alive after that? After any of the attacks or even when it fell?”
“There were some.” Lane smacks his lips now, looking guilty, like a child being interrogated by a teacher. Or a parent.
“What’d you do with those people?”
“Some of them are in prisons like these,” Lane says, gesturing with the empty glass to the prison bars all around them. “Some of them didn’t . . .” He clears his throat. “Some of them didn’t quite make it.”
Pop nods. “I see. Lane, it’s time maybe to talk about why I’m here.”
“Sure, sure, okay.”
“Remember what I was doing in Martha’s Bend?”
Lane leans forward, eyes narrowed. “I do. Hobos and Blighters. A fresh garden. That was something special.”
“I’m doing it again.”
Blink, blink. Like a silent bomb going off—all concussion, no sound. Rigo detects—well, he doesn’t know what it is. It’s tension, but possibility, too. Lane’s got gears turning behind his eyes as he thinks this over. He pours himself another glass of wine and drinks it.
“How many?” Lane asks. “People, I mean.”
“Two hundred and fifty-six.”
“That’s a big number.”
“Big enough. What do you have here?”
“Not quite two thousand.”
“My people would add to that. In a big way.”
Lane nods. “We have the infrastructure. To support them, I mean. The Saranyu has resources out the wazoo.”
“I could bring my people here.”
“That would be . . .” Lane laughs. “That would be incredible.”
“But there’s a catch.”
“Okay . . . ?”
“I need you to step down.”
Lane smiles like it’s a joke, but he fast figures out that nobody else is joining him. “I don’t understand. Step down from . . .”
“Being mayor of this place. I respect what you’ve done here. But you’re still a boy, Lane. The world can’t rest on your shoulders for long, or it’ll flatten you like a tin can under a motorvator tread.”
