by Chuck Wendig
“You,” he says.
“Me,” she answers.
And then she hits him again.
CROSSING THE PERIMETER
AS HE WALKS through the endless corn, Cael knows he should be scared. And sad. And ashamed. Two more men, dead by his hand—well, not his hand precisely, but at this point he believes that the Blight-vine coiled around his arm is still under his command.
And yet he feels invigorated. More alive than he’s felt in a long time. It’s not the taking of lives that did it—there he admits to a pang of guilt with a thread of horror twisted around it. But rather, it’s the power.
The things he was able to do. Cutting through his own cuffs. Launching corncobs like they were dang bottle rockets.
What else can he do?
Wanda is just as cranked about it as he is. She skips around him, giggling, and at one point she stops him in the corn and grabs his collar in her hands and she kisses him so hard it feels like she’s trying to eat him or be eaten herself—swallowed up whole so that the both of them can be together.
He pulls her into an embrace, and she whispers in his ear: “We can do anything, Cael. The Heartland is ours. Together.”
Her tongue finds his ear and a shiver moves over him.
This isn’t the Wanda I knew, he thinks.
A distant, frightened thought. Strange, but then his body reacts, and he feels the heat rise to his cheeks. And once more he can feel all the little lights inside her (Blight-lights, he’s taken to calling them) twinkling like the parliament of stars that will soon be overhead as the sun sets and the moon rises. Her hand drifts to his stomach. His hand slides over the small of her back and she presses into him—
He feels it before he hears it.
The corn, disturbed. Aware in its own way—and that awareness shared with him. Thrust upon him.
Someone’s coming.
That’s when he hears the snap.
And the voice that follows.
“Thought I saw something out here.”
Cael pulls Wanda to the ground. He urges her against the earth and flattens himself there, too. In the sunlight that shines at a slant, pooling there like rainwater, he can see Wanda’s face—it’s bright, electric, alive, her eyes dancing, her mouth twisted in a strange smile.
Out there, a shape. Thirty feet away. Barely seen through the stalks.
A voice crackles over a radio: “If you don’t see anything, come back. Need help with the perimeter.”
The other voice, not on the radio: “Mm-hmm, yeah, yeah.”
And then the body retreats through the corn.
Once more, Cael and Wanda are left alone.
“We can take them,” she says.
“You’re awfully eager.”
“We have power they don’t understand.”
“They don’t need to understand it to get in a lucky shot. We’re still just two cornpone yokels to them. And they’re the Empyrean. Two of them out there now, but not sure how many others might be there.”
“So let’s go find out. And if they mess with us—”
He sucks air through his teeth: “Dang, you gotta relax for a minute. One of us can go. If we both go, that gives them a better chance of spotting us.”
Wanda smiles, changes the conversation suddenly. “The corn doesn’t touch us. Have you noticed that? It tries to bleed anyone else who goes through it, but us . . . it stays away.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I noticed.”
“We can use that. We can be quiet.”
“One of us can use that. I’ll go.”
“Are you going because you think I’m not capable?” Her chin is lifted up, and the smirk on her face suggests a challenge. That, too, is unusual for her. The Wanda he once knew was a leaf in a stream, going whatever way the water wanted. But now she seems to be planting herself in the current like a rock. He can’t help but admit: he kinda likes it.
“I’m going because one of us has to, and if someone’s gonna get hurt I’d rather it be me than you.”
She smiles sweetly. “My hero.”
“Heh. Yeah. All right. You good here?”
“How will you find me again in all this corn?”
“I can feel you. I can find you.”
Her smile shines like a mad beam of light.
I can feel you. I can find you.
Wanda’s burning up. She’s like a field on fire. Her brow feels cool, but inside she’s got this bonfire crackling, fingers of flames reaching for the heavens and threatening to pull everything down upon her.
The Blight—no, she thinks, the Gift—is inside her. Like a hundred little roots, a thousand tiny tendrils pushing their way into every inch of her, just underneath the skin, beneath her tongue, at the ends of each finger. Like flower buds straining to bloom, like eyes waiting to open.
She feels different.
Part of her thinks: I am different. Like she’s not even Wanda.
Another part says: You’re just getting smarter. More sure of yourself! Cael seems to want her more now that she’s confident. Owning who she is.
And here a voice of doubt creeps up from her deepest places:
Who are you, though, really?
What are you becoming?
Are you even human anymore?
She tries to let those questions go. She concentrates very hard to tamp them down, shove them back into the dark from whence they came.
Instead, she just breathes.
Feels the corn out there, swaying. Feels its thirst for water, for blood, feels its need to spread out and consume everything. Roots pressing into earth like greedy, grabby fingers, drinking everything up.
It’s a magnificent creature, the corn. She adores it and hates it in equal measure. Wanda marvels at its power and its design. And fears and loathes what it’s done to everyone and everything around her.
Mother Esther wants to kill it. That’s all right by Wanda.
Fact is, Mother Esther gave her everything. She gave her this Gift. With two warm hands she held Wanda’s face. Craned her head back. Forced her mouth open. Told her to close her eyes . . .
The vine choked her. She gagged and tried to bend forward to puke, but the woman held her fast, and soon it was like the vine was a part of her. She felt it inside her like a snake slithering around in her belly. Then heat rose. The fires began. She fell asleep for three days. She dreamed of Esther. Felt the woman inside her, crawling underneath her skin like shoots and runners threading through dirt.
Then Wanda awoke, transformed. It was scary at first. But soon it felt natural. Beyond natural. She felt gifted, special, different in a way she never had before. Used to be she was boring old Wanda. She can see now that she was needy. A scaredy-cat. Afraid of being alone and lost, desperate to let others stand for her, happy to hide in their shadows. That’s not her. Not anymore.
Now, she has power.
A part of Esther, given to her.
Cael is coming.
Like he said: he can feel her, he can find her.
And she can do the same with him.
He shines like sun through a prism. A hundred beams, fractured. In her mind’s eye he’s almost blinding.
Her awareness picks him up when he’s still way out there.
She loves him.
She knows that.
She no longer needs him. Not like she used to. The need is gone, and it’s replaced with something so much more interesting:
Want.
Her desire for him radiates like a house on fire.
He comes through the corn, then—it eases aside for him, as if the thatch of stalks is a door that opens in his presence. He comes alongside her. It’s only now that she notices it’s nighttime—the moon already at its peak. How long was she sitting there? How much time was lost?
Cael says, “All right, here’s the bad news. The wreckage of the Saranyu is that way—” He points to the direction they were headed. “We were going around, but it turns out it wouldn’t much matter. They’re setting u
p a damn perimeter. Empyrean soldiers and a whole lot more of those . . . mechanicals.” He hesitates on this, and Wanda suspects he’s thinking the same thing she is: There might be Heartlanders encased in those metal bodies. “I don’t know how far it goes, but I went up and down the line, and it keeps on far as I can see it. Seems like they’re starting to close off access to the Saranyu. Surprised they didn’t do it before now. Something must’ve triggered it.”
“Us, maybe.”
“Could be.”
“So,” she says, interlacing her fingers into his. “Is there good news?”
“There is, yeah.”
“Well?”
“I think I have an idea on how to get past. But I’m gonna need your help because I’m not sure I can do this alone.”
Her heart does a somersault inside her chest. Like all of her life has been building to this one moment. They’re going to go out there and do something together, because that’s the only way it can be done. He needs me. And suddenly she rethinks it: Maybe I do need him. Maybe we need each other.
“Name it,” she says.
He tells her what they’re gonna do.
Then he adds: “Like you said: we can do anything.”
She smiles so hard, it’s almost painful.
Jezmin Reese is a guardsman of the evocati augusti. He stands at the base of the ketch-boat’s gangplank, his horsehead helmet tucked under his arm. He’s a young man, just nineteen, already past his final Name Day. Been a guardsman for a year now, and in that year, things have gone topsy-turvy.
He joined the guard thinking that his job would be, well, to guard people. That’s what the evocati did. They wore their helmets and stood vigil by anything that needed the protection. They guarded city squares. They walked the flotillas, looking for the rare few hopheads or Pheen addicts. They sometimes came down here, to the dust bowl, accompanying those who needed the attachment: proctors, praetors, assayers, whoever.
But all that changed when the Saranyu fell. Now the evocati are troops more than anything, soldiers who were never trained to be soldiers.
His friend Seena, she says that really, their job is to be escorts. Escorts for the mechanicals.
That’s new, too.
The flotillas have always had their metal men. Elevators. Bartenders. Gutter-sweeps and nanny-cams and fruit-pickers. Anything to take the burden off the men and women of the flotillas. But this is different.
One of the mechanicals nearby stands stock-still. Inert, like there’s nothing there, nobody home, no mind or computations at work. Staring out over the corn with all the stillness and concentration of a light-post.
Empty.
But Jezmin knows that isn’t exactly right. It isn’t empty. It isn’t even just a mechanical anymore.
Because there’s someone in there.
A human being. A Heartlander.
He represses a chill even though the night air is warm.
Everything’s changed. The failures of the peregrine and Frumentarii have left them scattered and toothless. Rumors of something new keep rising like whispers on the wind: a new flotilla constructed out there in the mountains. And a new group of soldiers, too. Girls. Young girls. Trained as killers. Insanity, he thinks. Who would let young girls be soldiers like that?
The mechanical’s head suddenly lifts with a clockwork tick and turns with a flywheel whir. The round mirror eyes pivot with little vvzzt vvzzt sounds. Its flat jaw opens and from within its metal throat a speaker buzzes.
“A pollen drift is incoming,” the metal man says.
“I doubt that,” Jezmin says. “We’d know. We’d have seen it on the scans.” He feels strange, suddenly, for even speaking to this thing. It’s not the talking to it that’s the problem. It’s communicating with it as if it’s his equal. As if he’s just having a conversation rather than telling it to polish his boots or hang up his thrum-whip for him. “The perimeter has been formed.” Again he says, now as if he’s arguing with the thing: “We’d know.”
The perimeter: a wide circle of guardsmen and mechanicals formed around Pegasus City to prevent anything coming in or going out. Most importantly: to keep the Heartlanders from harvesting corn, gathering fuel.
Then, when the time’s right, they’ll close in, crush the city.
The perimeter stretches on for miles.
If a pollen drift—what the Heartlanders call a “piss-blizzard,” though that’s a term a bit too profane for him—was incoming, they’d know.
“It’s local,” the mechanical says, bulky metal chin lifted as if it’s sniffing the air. “They would not have detected it on their sensors.”
Jezmin is about to protest one last time and tell this clanking mechanical idiot that it’s clearly broken and will have to get sent back to the flotilla for readjustment—
But then a few streamers of golden pollen cascade down.
As if out of nowhere.
The pollen whispers against the helmet in his hand.
Well. The mechanical isn’t broken after all.
He’s not allergic, not like some of the men. Sometimes, the pollen really gets to folks. Eyes go puffy, noses run like faucets. Still, it’ll limit visibility. But where’d the storm come from? How could it be local?
Then he understands. Because all around him, the corn shudders like a frightened mouse. Tassels like fingers tickle the air, and from them he watches faint shimmering ribbons of gold cough up from the stalk-tops without a sound and catch on the faintest wind. Strands of pollen, as insubstantial as spirits, rising and lifting in concert. After only a few moments the sky glows golden, the gilded curtain swallowing the night.
What’s frightening is how it takes almost no effort at all.
Wanda and him, holding hands there in the corn under the fat-bellied moon. Together, fingers meshed, vines braiding, they glow bright. Not so that anyone can see but so that each of them can feel it.
They reach out and they find the corn. A thousand spears of light thrust up out of the dry, dead ground. Hiram’s Golden Prolific.
Together, they become one with the corn.
He can feel them getting lost to it. A chorus of whispers—corn-leaves hissing against corn-leaves, a faint hum of blood-hunger, a thirst to drink up what little is left in the ground. Just as the corn wants to taste their blood he feels like it wants to swallow them up, just slurp them up out of their bodies.
But he thinks:
We’re in control here.
And then he hears Wanda’s voice inside his head:
I know.
She heard his thought. And responded to it.
Terror and bliss hold hands inside his heart.
They command the corn as one.
They tell it to shake and shudder. To spread itself, to cast its genes out to the world. A display of botanical lust, tassels shaking, pollen growing, unmooring, flying free on the wind. First from just a few stalks, and then from a dozen more, and then from ten dozen.
The pollen drifts.
They just made a piss-blizzard.
He opens his eyes, and there it is. A curtain of gold washing out the moon and brightening the night. He hears Wanda inside his head: We did it. He feels her happiness. Her lust. Her love.
Cael pulls his hand away. She casts a look at him, wounded, and he tries not to show the relief he feels at her not being inside his head—and not being inside hers. He can’t handle that right now. Instead, he gives her a smile and echoes the sentiment: “We did it.” But then he adds: “We have to move.”
She nods. “Right. Yeah. Of course.”
He waves her on. Into the corn. Toward Pegasus City. Hidden under the guise of the storm they made.
BLOCKADE RUNNERS
LANE WALKS THE SHELL.
He paces like a shuck rat along the outside of a barn, desperate for a way in. He feels like a rat slinking along. Feels, too, like he’s got rats in his belly, chewing up his insides to make a nest.
For a while there, everything felt right on. Like a
ll the stars were lining up in the sky for him, easy-breezy—all he had to do was draw a finger between them and connect the dots. He built this place out of wreckage. Secured a fuel source and started the motorvators harvesting, got the facility back up and running. But now things are creeping in at the edges, the way a slurry river pulls apart the earth, eroding the dirt and carving a channel for its filth.
So many things feel wrong.
He killed those people.
Killian still isn’t right.
Arthur McAvoy showed up, made him feel like a fool-child.
And he almost killed his mother. A woman he hasn’t spoken to or seen in years. A woman who cozied up to the Empyrean and who now sits—awake, or so he’s heard—under the care of their doctor, Nika Vellington.
Now, as a hawked-up loogey atop the shit sundae he’s been served, the Empyrean is out there, circling the wagons. Trapping him in a fence made of men, ships, and, worst of all, mechanicals. Already they’ve been cut off from the harvesters and the facility of Fort Calhoun. The Saranyu doesn’t have the capabilities to process corn into fuel because—oh, what a shock—the Empyrean didn’t want that to poison their precious air. So they stuck all the facilities down on the ground. Let the Heartlanders deal with it: the skyborn motto, it seems.
Out there, he can see the shimmer-haze of the Empyrean ships. They’re out of gun range. The sonic shots would dissipate and never reach the targets.
They know that, surely.
The one thing he has right now, the one person he can count on, is Rigo. He looks toward the lift door, where Rigo leans. Poor kid occasionally winces and shifts his weight, trying to get comfortable on his one leg.
“You know, Obligations have stopped,” Lane says. He means it as small talk, but as soon as the words land he’s pretty sure it’s the opposite of that.
“What?” Rigo asks.
“Yep. Used to be a proctor would come down, like Agrasanto, and facilitate. But that’s done. The Empyrean have shut all that down because they’re clearing house. Town by town. List as long as my arm now—towns I’ve never even heard of. Some I have. Like ours. Boxelder is gone.”
Rigo hesitates. In a quiet, mouse-fart voice he says, “I heard.” He suddenly blurts out: “Now I’m never gonna get a woman.”
