The Harvest

by Chuck Wendig

  The memory of his mother following him. The ghosts of all who died when this place fell. Cleo, too. Manifesting as a whisper.

  Who is he? What’s his point? He’s helping these people with their infrastructure. Helping them with the visidexes and with the greenhouses so they understand how to actually grow food instead of just consume it. (At first he blamed them for being so stupid, which he realized was rather judgmental given how the Empyrean have helped to ensure that this knowledge was kept as far from the Heartlanders as the moon, sun, and stars.) Even still, he feels like a hanger-on. An Empyrean freak. Was this what Gwennie felt like on the flotilla?

  People wave as he passes—friendly enough. They smile, too. Though it’s not the same treatment that other Heartlanders get. They get hugs and handshakes and good-natured insults and angry arguments that end in a night of drinking and laughing and, sometimes, crying. He gets the polite nods, the toodle-oo of the fingers, the short, crisp language.

  He waves back. Smiles back. Keeps walking, hoping they don’t see how upset he is. Upset over . . .

  Over a little bird.

  Over little Cicero. Tiny catbird fledgling.

  He curses himself. It was too soon. The bird should’ve biologically been able to fly—but it had no mother, it had only him, a man who thought he could do for this bird what he did for a little grackle named Erasmus. Of course the bird wasn’t ready to fly. He pushed it off the ledge and—

  No! No. Thinking about it is about to push him off a ledge.

  There. Dead ahead. A prison tower that Mayor Lane Moreau has taken as his office. It’s where they meet for their so-called council, an advisory group to which he knows he doesn’t belong. They, the Heartlanders from a small town. He, an Empyrean man a world apart.

  He sighs.

  Begins to walk toward the door.

  Then—a surprising thing.

  A little sound in the air. A warble-woo.

  He turns, shields his eyes from the sun with the flat of his hand. And then something lands on that hand. Little feet. A flutter of something soft.

  Balastair brings the hand down.

  The bird, Cicero, shrugs its wings and shakes them. Then it chirps a strange, discordant song.

  The bird never died.

  Cicero is alive!

  Balastair laughs and nuzzles the little bird. It jumps up onto his head and he strides toward the elevator, feeling suddenly alive, buoyant, and bewildered.

  THE BOXELDER SEVEN

  THE MEETING STARTS. Five of them sit around the table underneath the ornate human-sized birdcage. Lane stands at the head of the table, leaning forward, hands flat. Rigo sits to his right with a visidex—the boy has changed since taking on the right-hand-man role to Lane. He’s leaner, sharper, seems more confident. His new leg doesn’t hurt, either; Balastair found a proper replacement in the crumbling wing of the old hospital. This leg is strong, metal, with bold scrollwork and real leather straps. It’s as much a thing of beauty as it is a thing of function, and it appears to have given Rigo renewed purpose.

  Balastair also seems to have brightened up. He’s looked so sad, so lost, for so long that Cael half expected to find the man hanging from a rope somewhere one day. But now? Cael watches him across the table—a little bird hops from the back of one hand to the back of another, then to a finger, then to his wrist, occasionally interrupting the proceedings with a little song. When it does, Balastair chuckles and shushes the creature.

  The real surprise is that Boyland showed up. Drunk as a skunk in a funk, his lower lip hanging open like the mouth of a broken mailbox. Occasionally he seems to focus, then he snorts loud through his nose, smacks his lips, and goes back to staring off at nothing.

  Though sometimes he straight up stares at Gwennie.

  A sad, hard glare.

  Cael doesn’t much like that look.

  Underneath the table, Gwennie bumps her knee into his. At first he thinks it’s a mistake, but it’s not—she presses up on him harder, moving her leg against his, knee sliding up and down, then in circles. Just that small touch sends heat to his brow and sweat to his palms.

  “Tonight is Harvest Home,” Lane says. “Rigo had the right idea, I think—I know it’s not the right time of the year, but people are already perking up about it. We’ve got boxes of whiskey, gin, ’shine. Got a chicha beer stand set up and a few games going, plus a band calling themselves—”

  “Itself,” Rigo corrects. “Not themselves.”

  Lane rolls his eyes. “Calling itself the Pegasus City Irregulars—they’re actually a bit all right. Got a banjo, washboard, keytar, accordion. Shit, what else? Rigo, what am I missing?”

  Rigo goes on: “I think it’s pretty well covered. Dancing. Drinking. A lottery—a real lottery, like, folks don’t win a trip to the sky where they get treated like freaks and animals.”

  Gwennie laughs, but Cael feels her tense up at the mention of it.

  “Don’t forget drinking,” Boyland mutters.

  Everyone shares a look.

  But Cael notices that Balastair and Gwennie are sharing their own look. A long gaze, too. He thinks, okay, maybe they’re each reliving a memory from when they were both on the flotilla. Gwennie doesn’t like to talk much about what happened up there, but Bal probably already knows. They shared something there.

  Suddenly Cael is wondering: Just how much did they share?

  Jealousy sinks its teeth in—a rat-bite looking for blood.

  But he doesn’t have long to think about his own jealousy, because the elevator dings, and the door opens.

  Wanda steps into the room.

  Underneath the table, Gwennie’s leg suddenly pulls away from his own.

  Everyone turns. The looks of shock are obvious—eyes wide, jaws slack. She hasn’t come to a meeting since the beginning. Some haven’t even seen her since then. Wanda’s changed. She seems . . . taller. Thinner in her limbs, her neck, even her fingers. Cael can’t put his finger on it, but she even moves differently, like she’s a praying mantis considering its next meal. The Blight has taken her. The undersides of her forearms are ridged and textured like tree bark. Red flowers thrust up from behind her ears—not stuck there, but grown there, out of her hair or from the back of her neck. The whites of her eyes are shot through with green, her fingers tipped with thorns.

  She stands there for a moment, regarding all the eyes upon her.

  “Sorry,” she says.

  Wanda closes her eyes.

  And her flesh changes.

  Thorns shrink into fingers. Her eyes clear. The flowers bloom in reverse, shrinking, imploding, disappearing. The bark on her arms shudders, ripples, then becomes a stretch of pale pink flesh—raw, as if it had been abraded.

  Jeezum Crow, Cael thinks. She can reverse it at will?

  She looks more like Wanda used to.

  But every inch of movement remains calculated and considered with an eerily confident certainty. She comes around the side of the table and stands behind Cael. She puts her hand on the empty chair next to him.

  “Can I sit here?” she asks.

  Cael looks up. He smiles sheepishly, moves to pull out the chair.

  She sits, turns her head toward him, and smiles. “Hi, Cael.” She leans forward and gives him a kiss on the cheek. Just that small connection sends up a fireworks display of lights behind his eyes—and again he is reminded of her presence, thrumming with life that is both hers and the Blight’s. It’s stronger now. No longer is she just a field of fireflies or a spread of stars across the sky—now she’s bright as a hundred moons.

  He swallows hard. “Hi, Wanda.”

  Wanda looks past him.

  “Hey, Gwennie.” She utters a gawky, awkward laugh—the one Cael knows from back in Boxelder, the one that sounds like Wanda. But Cael fears it’s an act—like she’s trying to convince them that’s who she is. “Aw, jeez. Sorry, everybody, didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “Godsdamn, Wanda,” Boyland says, breathy with awe. “You know how
to”—he urps into his hand—“command a room.”

  “Nice to see you, too, Boyland.”

  Silence breeds. Everyone shares uncomfortable looks.

  Lane says, “Uhhhh. Whh-where were we, Rigo?”

  “Well.” Rigo clears his throat. “We were talking about Harvest Home tonight and all the—”

  “I saw Luna Dorado,” Wanda says, interrupting.

  Lane, suddenly flummoxed, asks, “What did you say?”

  “I saw her. Not an hour ago. North end of the city, by the Engine Layer. Well, to be more accurate, I heard her, I guess. Talking to someone on a visidex. Not sure what it was about—I came in a little late to the conversation.” Then she gives another of her gawky laughs, like she’s really playing it up. “Sorry?”

  Rigo hands Lane a visidex, and Lane puts out a call to his security team to go search the Engine Layer for Luna.

  “We had to assume she remained in the city,” Balastair says. The bird bounces up his arm to an elbow he’s extended. “It was never much of a possibility that she could get past the blockade.” A blockade that everyone knows has only grown in the last few months.

  Cael speaks, finds his voice a bit croaky—he’s nervous sitting between Gwennie and Wanda, as if all of a sudden the two of them might start pulling him apart like they’re dismantling a malfunctioning motorvator. “That blockade is like a noose around our necks. They’ve pushed in again. Upped their numbers again. Gonna be a point they make a move, and when they do, I’m not sure the cannons will be able to stop them all.”

  “Cael’s right,” Gwennie says. “The blockade is killing us. We can’t get new people in. Can’t send new people out. We can’t access Fort Calhoun.”

  Rigo stands. “We’re working on bolstering defenses. Training people with weapons. Setting up an emergency network through the visidexes. If they push in, if they attack, I’ve run the numbers—I think we can push them back.”

  Wanda seems to watch it all with rapt fascination. Again she gives off the vibe that she’s a visitor from the outside, from above them. Or worse, a raptor studying a rat as it scurries to and fro.

  “We need an edge,” Gwennie says. “We need a plan.”

  “If only we had my mother’s weapon,” Balastair says.

  Cael shrugs. “Whatever that even was.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Lane says. “We don’t know what it was, or more importantly, where the damn thing has gone—”

  Boyland says something, something quiet. Everyone keeps talking past him, because they all probably assume he just mumbled something grumpy and drunk—some mush-mouthed insult, some half-witted half-ass commentary. But Cael thinks it was something else. He shushes the room and says:

  “What’d you say, Boyland?”

  “Oh, lookit that. Captain Cael wants to hear what I have to say.”

  “Crow on a cracker, Boyland, just spit it out.”

  “Yes, Cap’n, yessir. Shit. This is the first time y’all have paid attention to me in months. Forget I was here, didja? Don’t mind me babysitting your kids long as I stay out of your hair, but soon as I speak up and have something you want, then suddenly you all remember I’m alive—”

  Rigo’s brow furrows so deep you could plant seeds in it. “Boyland, if you have something to say, just say it.”

  “The Luzerne Garam Ilmatar,” Boyland says. “Happy?”

  “What the hell’s that?” Cael asks. “Another flotilla?”

  “Yes,” Balastair says. “First in the fleet.”

  “ ’S’where the . . . weapon is, the one you’re looking for. The one the kooky Blight-bitch sent you digging for like a well-heeled doggy.”

  Cael feels his Blight-vine twitch at that. He wills it to calm. “The weapon is there, on that flotilla? How do you know?”

  “Because I gotta lotta free time. Didn’t take me long to find enough booze to keep me brined till the world falls apart, so I had to occupy myself in . . . other ways. Turns out, didja know there’s a whole series of administrative offices? Files and folders full of paper. Paper! You believe that? Shit that’s not on the visidexes but is handwritten on godsdamn paper.” He guffaws, suddenly. “Empyrean savages!” He wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “Anyway. I got to reading and found a whole cache of notes about the Blight-bitch—Esther Harrington and her darling boy, Balastair. Whole folders on the witch. One of them was about the contents of her home after a search by someone called the ‘peregrine.’ They took everything they had out of that place and sent it to the Ilmatar flotilla. Including one ‘package’ marked as ‘cylinders—purpose unknown.’ A package that the notes said was dug up out of the terrace after it was found via something called a ‘bio-scan.’”

  He burps again.

  Once again, the room is stunned to shocked looks and stammering silence.

  “I never thought of that,” Rigo says. “They kept paper records.”

  “Not so smart now,” Boyland mutters. “Huh, Rodrigo? Shoot. I should be mayor of this place.”

  “Your father made a helluva mayor,” Lane says, scowling. “A drunken baboon falling asleep at the Harvest Home podium—”

  “Hey!” Boyland says, standing up so fast he knocks his chair out. “Godsdamnit! I figured this shit out with the . . . with the Ilmatar and none of you did, so maybe you wanna gimme a little rope, huh, Mayor McFaggot—”

  What happens next surprises everyone. A visidex flies across the room, beans him in the head. Boyland yelps, bats it away, and by the time he’s turning back around it’s Rigo who’s all over him like moths on lamp-glass. He hobbles fast, hits Boyland like a cannonball in the chest, knocking him back over his own fallen chair. Boyland yelps and tumbles. Rigo gives a twist to his hip and, faster than anybody figures, has his fake leg in his hand, raised above his head like a club—

  A whipcord of vine lashes around the leg and holds it steady.

  The vine, emergent from the middle of Wanda’s palm.

  “Let him go,” she commands, a surprising amount of steel in her voice. “He’s drunk. He helped us. End of story, way I figure it.” Then with a cold smirk she adds: “Besides, you wouldn’t wanna get blood on that pretty leg.”

  Rigo, looking suddenly embarrassed, pulls away.

  The vine uncoils from the leg, disappears back into Wanda’s outstretched hand as if it never existed in the first place.

  Cael thinks: Okay, she’s scary.

  Boyland stands, dusting himself off. He rubs the side of his arm and then laughs. “Damn, Rodrigo. You got more stones in that pouch than I remember.” Rigo scowls, then retreats. Boyland holds up his hands: “Sorry about that, folks. That was just the liquor talking. Lane, you do what you like, ain’t no business of mine or anybody’s. Rigo, thanks for straightening me out, Wanda, thanks for . . . whatever it is you just did. I’m gonna sit now and go back to not doing shit. Okay? Okay.”

  He sniffs, straightens his chair, then sits back in it. Arms behind his head, he leans back, closes his eyes.

  Thirty seconds later, he’s snoring.

  “Uhhh,” Cael says.

  “All of that was rather unexpected,” Balastair says.

  The bird chirp-warbles and pecks at his hair.

  Lane presses the heels of his hands into his temples. “All right. Let’s get the wheels back on this cart. We know the flotilla. We just gotta get there.”

  “The Ilmatar isn’t far,” Balastair says. “It tends to hover in what is roughly the center of the Heartland. The problem is the blockade. They have ground and sky supremacy. Efforts to get past them . . .”

  Cael says: “We use the trawler.”

  “Huh.” Lane perks up. “Huh.”

  Cael goes on: “That thing’s built like a fist, man, so let’s use it like one. Haul it back and—” He punches a fist into his open palm. The Blight-vine shudders with the hit. “Boom. Knock a hole right through it.”

  “The problem,” Gwennie says, “is that soon as we do that, we’ll bring the whole blockade after
us. They’ll break the line and trail us like flies after a dung-wagon. We may get through them initially, but that can’t last. They’ll take pieces out of us until we keel over.”

  They all pause. Cael feels the hope sucked out of the room once more. Like sails without wind, hanging limp and lifeless.

  That is, until Rigo claps his hands.

  “That’s exactly right,” he says, suddenly excited. “The trawler will draw them all out. They’ll break the line and leave a big-ass, no-fooling hole—and when the trawler kicks that door open—”

  Cael snaps his fingers. “We sneak through after.”

  “That’s genius,” Lane whoops. “Big Sky Scavengers, at it again!”

  Boyland’s voice drunkenly booms: “You all better hope it’s worth it. Could be a hot bucket of goat shit”—he coughs and burps—“dummies.”

  Once more, an awkward, uncomfortable silence. Cael—and he figures this is true for everyone—wrestles with that question. He’s pissed at Boyland for even bringing it up, but the lunk-headed thug is right. They take this shot, that’s it. If it’s the wrong one, it’s wrong in a big, big way.

  “We have to try something,” Wanda says.

  They all nod.

  It’s Lane who speaks up: “We’ll go over it again tomorrow. Chop this thing up into little bitty pieces, make sure we have it right. For now: may Old Scratch piss on all this, it’s time to get ready for Harvest Home!”

  GIFTED

  CAEL’S ON THE WAY OUT of the room when Lane hooks him by the elbow.

  “Hey, Captain,” Lane says. “Hang back a sec.”

  Both Gwennie and Wanda turn and give him looks.

  Then they walk out together.

  Lane whistles. “That was something.”

  “Yeah, I think maybe I dicked up real good.”

  Lane winces. “I can’t help you with that—my own romantic track record is hardly exemplary. But I might be able to brighten your day just the same.”

  “How’s that?”

  Lane reaches under the table, pulls out a long wooden case. Freshly oiled. Golden clasps like paws closing it. Cael sizes up the mystery box, and Lane eggs him on. “Go ahead. Open it. It’s a gift. Sorta.”