by Chuck Wendig
“Oh, jeez, Rigo, don’t say that.”
“This is my year. Or should be. If we were back in Boxelder right now I’d be coming up on a brand-new Obligation Day and they’d hand out the names and I’d be paired with someone. Sometimes I wonder who that might’ve been and what that life might’ve been like with that person. Like, if I ended up with Haley Oakes, maybe I could’ve moved right in with her family out by the gulley. But I heard her father was a hard man, and I don’t need any more of those. Or what if I ended up with Fessie McDonald? I always used to feel bad for her because of her one leg being so much shorter than the other, but Jeezum, who am I to talk now?” He laughs a little, but it isn’t a happy sound. “Really, if I ended up with anybody, I hoped it woulda been Wyatt Sanderson’s little sister, Savannah. She was always so nice to me. Picked me up out of the dirt one day after Boyland had beat the actual snot out of me. She stayed with me for a while and acted like she didn’t realize I’d been crying. They had a cat. I don’t much like cats, but I could’ve learned.”
Lane picks a nit of tobacco from between his teeth. “Hey, now. Wouldn’t you rather be with a girl who likes you for you than a girl who got your name handed to her on a slip of paper drawn by some soulless Empyrean proctor?”
“I dunno.” Rigo shrugs. “I figure that’ll never happen so Obligation was probably my best bet. I mean, dang, look at me.” He presents his hands like he’s offering the saddest prize chicken you ever did see. Featherless, headless, covered in welts and boils. “Ta-da. Rodrigo Cozido. Got the body of a one-legged barstool—”
“And the heart of a godsdamn Saintangel, brother.”
Rigo smirks. “I don’t think the gods would damn a Saintangel.”
“Well, whatever, I’m not all that interested in horse-ass theology.” He pinches the cigarette and flings it over the wall: a pinwheel of embers in the night. “I don’t care about much of that old crap. That stuff’s meant to keep us down here, pressed into the dirt like a cigar under a boot. Like—the Obligations? I always wondered, what was the point? Why make us marry each other—and why choose for us? First I figured, you know, okay, it’s just control. They’re control freaks and they like puppeting us around. Then I thought, maybe they’re trying to give us something to do. Keep us from getting bored and restless. Like the Lottery—which turns out is rigged anyway. It’s an event, a . . . a thing to care about. A distraction, really. But then you know what I settled on? You know why I think Obligations exist?”
Rigo leans in, a big curious question mark across his face.
“Livestock,” Lane says. “You get a couple cows or goats together, first thing you wanna do is breed them so you get more of the same. Then you have more animals to milk, eat, or breed. For a long while the Empyrean needed us to do their work down here. Manage all the machines. Keep the motorvators running and the processing facilities open. But all that’s falling away. They’re killing us. They’re replacing us.” Lane pulls another cigarette out, though he doesn’t yet light it. “I don’t know what to do,” Lane says. “About . . . all this.”
“Maybe you need to sleep on it. You look rough around the edges. You lost some weight, too, and you were pretty beanpole, before.”
Lane knows he has lost some weight. He feels loose, light, airy. Like he might just slip away. And sleeping isn’t high on the list, either. He’s busy, too busy. When he has time to actually eat, he feels sick. When he has time to sleep, his thoughts run laps with long rope, tying him tight.
“I gotta prove that I can hack this,” Lane says. “That I’m not just gonna fold up like a tent, like Pop thinks I will.”
“You don’t have to prove it, that’s the thing. Let someone else have it. You got everyone this far. Maybe it’s time to back off a little.”
A part of him wants to do that. Gods, what a great sigh he’d breathe—to just be able to open his fingers and let it all fall through them. He can’t, though. Too much at stake. He’s put too much of himself in this.
This is what he’s always wanted, he tells himself.
A chance to do something. To change things.
To spit in the eye of the Empyrean.
“I can’t let go,” he says. “I just can’t.” More pacing. Like something’s chasing him. Like he’s chasing something. “I want to reach up and tear those bastards right outta the sky. They’ve had us in a noose for too long. It’s time for us to tie them in knots, you understand?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
Lane turns. Plants his hands on the wall, looks out over the moonlit corn. A new fire burns in the deep of his belly, coals stoked by this very conversation with Rigo. He suddenly feels strong again. Anger renewed.
Then, out there at the edges, at the blockade the Empyrean is forming, he sees something. Lane calls Rigo to the wall and points.
“Look at that.”
“A piss-blizzard?”
“Yeah. Small, though. Local. Like a . . . golden haze just hanging there.”
“That’s weird.”
Suddenly, the golden cloud lights up, like flashes of lightning pulsing behind a thunderhead. The distant warble of sonic weapons discharging reaches them. Lane shrugs. “Well, that’s even weirder.”
Cael and Wanda sneak past the perimeter like it’s nothing. The air suffused with yellow, a hanging miasma that hides their presence almost perfectly. One minute they’re on one side of the Empyrean blockage—the next they’re on the other, creeping through the corn. Silent, because the corn doesn’t want to touch them or be touched by them in turn.
Each can feel the other’s excitement. Like two kids that just snuck past a schoolteacher’s window, or managed to smoke a cigarette and share a bottle of fixy as their parents slept. They dart into the corn, toward the distant Saranyu. Cael whispers to her that it shouldn’t be long now, just another couple miles to walk and—
Behind them, a clamor. Shouts from a guardsman. A warning Klaxon.
And then sonic weapons going off left and right. The air filled not just with a fog of pollen but with the warbles and shrieks of sonic blasts.
Wanda, between blasts, says: “What the hell is going on?”
“I dunno.” Cael grits his teeth. Keep moving. Just keep moving.
“It doesn’t involve us, right?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s good cover.” She echoes what’s in his head: “We should keep on moving, c’mon.”
She starts to pull ahead, but he catches her hand.
“What if someone needs our help?” he asks.
“Are you crazy? We need our help.”
“It’s you who said it. We can do anything. The power we have. What good is it if we don’t use it to help? They’re damn sure not shooting at each other! Someone could be in danger.”
“It’s gonna put us in danger.”
He shrugs. “I think we ought to get used to that.”
Then he darts back through the stalks toward the perimeter.
Once more crammed into a skiff, the journey forward was silent as the vessel drifted over the corn-tops. Boyland piloted the ship. He kept throwing furtive glances to Gwennie in the back, but she wasn’t having any of it, turning her gaze away at every opportunity. She sat with her mother, Scooter, and Squirrel. Balastair and Cleo were stone-faced in the middle seats, Cleo scowling, Balastair looking mostly tired.
And then suddenly: a few strings of drifting pollen.
“Piss-blizzard,” Boyland called back. “Gonna lose viz.”
And then they were in it. The gold-shimmer haze was a wall—they went from darkness to moon-shining pollen. For a moment, all was quiet but for the hiss of pollen against the skiff and the thrum of the engines—a vibration felt in her bones, in her heart.
Then: a sonic shriek.
The side of the skiff pitched upward like a table flipped.
Next thing she knows, her mother is screaming, holding on to her as the skiff goes sideways—the belts hold them in, and suddenly the fear hits he
r that the belts are trapping them, because if the skiff flips, they’ll be pinned beneath, crushed like skeeters on a windshield—
But Boyland keeps the skiff going—not upright, but on its side.
He hollers out, “Protect your eyes!”
And then the skiff dips hard into the corn. The thrash-cracking of stalks like the sound of a motorvator. The skiff side bangs against the earth, and next up is the sound of wrenching metal—the golden air filled with the blue sparking light of hover-panels shattering. Then it’s over. The skiff plonks down back onto its bottom.
For a moment, all is still.
Gwennie looks around. Her mother is shell-shocked, trauma-blasted, mouth working soundlessly. Scooter starts to scream. Squirrel shushes him, a sound that rings not of sympathy but rather of irritation. Boyland starts to curse. Balastair turns around: “Is everyone okay?”
“Sonic blasts,” Boyland says, prying himself out of the seat, swiping away a searching frond of corn. “Empyrean. Gotta be. Get out! Get out of the boat!”
They all scrabble to pull themselves out. Gwennie’s feet land on the ground and she kicks away a broken stalk, starts helping everyone out of and away from the skiff.
She takes Cleo’s hands. The woman’s eyes search hers. “Empyrean,” Cleo says. Not a hateful word. Wistful. Longing.
“C’mon,” Gwennie says. “Let’s go, let’s go!”
“Let’s go,” Cleo says, her words almost dreamlike.
Then Cleo shoves past Gwennie and begins to scream.
“Help! Help me! I’ve been taken against my will! I’m Empyrean, like you, I’m a captive—”
A keening sonic shriek. Cleo spins like a top. Blood sprays into pollen.
Balastair screams.
Everything plunges into chaos as sonic blasts cut through the corn, shearing stalks, sending cobs spinning in the air. Gwennie shoulders hard into Boyland and yells: “We need to flip the skiff! On its side again!”
He looks confused for a moment, but then he gets it.
The skiff will protect them.
Together, they pivot the craft and lift hard—and for a moment, it’s too damn heavy. But it gets a whole lot lighter when Balastair, looking like he’s been run through a laundry wringer, presses his shoulder and helps them lift.
The skiff forms a small wall. Gwennie races out to fetch Scooter.
The corn ahead of her flattens. A shadow emerges.
She picks up Scooter, pulls him behind her.
A chain-rattle, a gear-tooth whir—the mechanical raises its sonic arm.
A knife flies free from her hand. It chips the metal man’s mirror eye—the ocular lens splits, breaks in two. With a brief shake of its boxy skull, the mirror parts fall away.
Then the sonic cannon glows bright.
Gwennie hunkers down, spreads out her body wide as she can—just as the skiff forms a shelter for the others, she acts as a shelter for Scooter.
But the blast never comes.
Instead, all she hears is a wrenching, ripping sound.
She opens her eyes in time to see a lashing shape fling the mechanical’s decapitated head into the piss-blizzard.
Cael.
Everything seems to unfold in slow motion, like delicate fingers gingerly unwrapping a gift only to find something horrible within. Wanda already felt unsettled, watching Cael run into what was suddenly a pitched battle, but then it’s like an iron weight drops through her stomach and out the bottom of it, tearing her like tissue paper. Because there is Gwendolyn Shawcatch. Cael’s first mate and first love.
And suddenly Wanda is rooted to the ground, feet planted hard as sonic blasts cut apart the cornfield around her. Her eyes fixed to Cael and Gwennie as they realize who the other is, as they hurry toward each other amid the chaos, moving nose-to-nose as her little brother hurries behind the skiff, as the two of them mouth each other’s names and turn to fight together.
The guardsmen emerge, mechanicals alongside, and Cael and Gwennie step forward to fight them. Gwennie. The Blight-vine lashes, snatches a thrum-whip from a guardman’s hand, puts it in Gwennie’s. The whip cracks. The evocati augusti goes down.
A dead woman lies nearby. The corn bends to drink the pooling blood. Wanda can feel it. Can taste the coppery tang. She wants to puke.
A mechanical lurches out of the corn, cannon pointed toward Cael—her Obligated doesn’t even see it, he’s too busy. Wanda flicks her wrist up, and a snare of roots like a crushing hand pulls the cannon-arm down. The sonic blast goes off, digging a deep shovel-hole into the earth. It’s enough of a warning—Cael spins, and the Blight-vine knocks the metal man aside like a hand batting a doll off a shelf.
It’s then Wanda thinks:
I could kill her.
An absurd thought, one that horrifies her, but the horror of the idea doesn’t make it go away. She can’t dismiss it. It would be so easy.
Wanda could choke her with a vine.
Slam a stalk across the back of her head.
Use roots to break her bones.
Pull her apart like warm bread to feed the corn.
Jeezum Crow, who am I?
Wanda, who feels guilty when she swats a fly.
Wanda, who just thought about murdering an innocent girl.
Big hands grab her, shake her from her reverie. She hears a voice, loud, booming, familiar: Boyland. “King Hell. Wanda?”
She turns, snapped out of it.
Just as a thrum-whip coils around his neck.
His eyes bug.
Boyland screams as the lash begins to vibrate. His thick fingers claw at the whip but come away smoldering at the tips. His teeth chatter so loud they sound like a woodpecker hammering on a barn wall.
At the other end of the whip is an evocati augusti, sneering beneath his helmet.
She raises a finger and points it.
Something struggles underneath the flesh of her fingertip, like a grain of rice pushing its way out of her skin.
It’s a seed.
A tiny little seed.
She flicks her finger.
The seed flies true and goes where she wants it. The guardsman’s head shudders, and suddenly his one eye is shut, his face wrinkled and wincing beneath the horsehead helmet. Because he has something in his eye.
Something that’s about to grow a great deal bigger.
It happens fast, faster than is natural—fast enough that as the seed pops and the root-tangle explodes out, it sounds like a rifle shot. His head jerks. Both eyes are gone, erased by thrusting roots, his mouth wrenched open by tendrils to make way for a stalk of corn jutting from his now-shattered jaw.
The whip uncoils from Boyland’s neck. The flesh there is seared—some of it bleeding. He looks up at her with horror. He says something, but whatever it is gets swallowed by the sudden roar of hover-panels as a massive trawler—flags of the Sleeping Dogs rippling in the winds of the pollen drift—emerges, firing sonic cannons, taking out mechanicals and evocati augusti like some kind of pirate ship savior.
She wonders suddenly who the ship is saving.
Them from the Empyrean.
Or the Empyrean from them.
VALKYRIE
HERON YONG looks nervous, but Enyastasia cannot care about him. Because she’s trying not to be nervous. Her middle is a jar of starving flies shaken up and then opened inside of her.
Together, the two of them stand atop the seventh circle of the Luzerne Garam Ilmatar—the tallest tower on any flotilla the Empyrean possess. The tower is an architectural marvel, with four sides that twist, giving it a liquid look. Even the windows warp and bend with the gentle spiral.
One floor below them is the Architect’s Aerie—a meeting place for all the Grand Architects. While each Empyrean flotilla is allowed to do as it sees fit, for the most part, each is still connected to the whole—and certain decisions must be made together, not apart. Like how to increase cornfuel production. Or how to deal with unruly Heartlanders.
Or how to deal with her.
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“They must know what you’ve done,” Heron says, voice shaking.
“Shhh,” she says. “Lower your voice.”
“The wind is catching it. Nobody can hear us.”
“Just the same.” She pauses. Heron needs to be controlled, lest he tells them what happened. And that’s not an option. “And it wasn’t what I’ve done. It’s what we have done. Together. You’re in this.”
He looks at her. Fear shines there in the mirrors of his dark eyes. She can see hers reflected back. He’s afraid. So is she.
That fear cannot be allowed to guide them. Not now.
Heron opens his mouth. She can see the thoughts rising, about to reach his lips. He’s about to say that they don’t have to be in this together.
He’s about to threaten her.
And so she does what she does best. She stares, emotionless, like one of the mechanicals: her face a cold, inert mask. The mask of a killing machine, a machine that has never known mercy and will never compute it.
“Of course,” he says, bowing his head.
Good boy, Heron.
“We’re very close now,” she says. “They have no choice but to consider what I’m saying. The Frumentarii are broken. The peregrine is done. Eldon Planck, the Initiative’s creator, is missing, somewhere down amid the Saranyu’s wreckage. Berwin Luzerne . . . had an accident. The way is paved and the door is open, and all we have to do now is walk through it with steady feet.”
“We’re not ready for this. You’re a child. I’m . . . not much more than that. I don’t even know if I believe in what we’re doing.”
She reaches for his hand and takes it.
“You don’t have to believe. You just have to trust. Have faith. Like in all the old gods, the gods of the sky, the ones we name the flotillas after. But have faith in me.”
Enyastasia squeezes his hand. Not in a loving, comforting gesture. But in a way that grinds the knuckles like iron bearings. Heron’s knees buckle.
She continues: “Don’t make the mistake of losing your faith in me. Because the gods don’t like it when you stop trusting them.”
Her grip relinquishes his hand. He yanks it away and shakes it, sucking in breath and whimpering. “You’re scary.”
