The Harvest

by Chuck Wendig

  Boom. The Engine Layer shakes. Dust and ash drift down. Balastair moves along the line of survivors, offering them water and what little food Wanda already had squirreled away here—a few apples, some pro-bars, a bag of spelt crackers. He can’t help but turn and look at the corpse underneath the quilt. Balastair did not know Lane Moreau very well, but death is death and Lane seemed like a good fellow, and he can’t help but feel dragged down by all of it.

  Forward, he tells himself. There’s work to be done, Bal.

  He stoops down by Cael and Wanda. “They’re blocking the visidex signal, but I was able to get an encrypted message to your sister.”

  Cael nods. “She okay?”

  “Sadly, it was not a two-way transmission. Just a single communiqué. Otherwise, I fear the Empyrean would’ve intercepted.”

  Cael nods.

  Balastair offers them an apple. “Only two left.”

  “I can grow more,” Wanda says.

  “Oh.” Oh.

  He suddenly feels strange. Like how he did sometimes when he was speaking to his mother. His mother would wear a warm smile but seemed otherwise alien. He used to joke that he thought she might be a spider in human skin, but that’s not really what it was. She had been losing her humanity for some time and was less a spider and more the human embodiment of a Venus flytrap—a carnivorous plant with a human mind. Or a human with the mind of a carnivorous plant? Did it even matter?

  “Thanks, Bal,” Cael says.

  All Balastair can do is nod as he moves on, zigzagging among the survivors. Until he gets to Gwennie and Boyland.

  He tries not to show what he feels for her. There’s no point in it. Not now. Perhaps not ever. But even in trying to conceal it he can feel the awkwardness, the stiffness, and when he speaks he stammers:

  “I, ahh. I’ve got apple—I’ve got another apple, one more, umm.”

  He holds up the apple and shakes it.

  Gwennie takes it. “Thanks, Bal.”

  “Of course.”

  She takes his hand. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “Yes.” He offers a stiff nod. “I’m glad the, ahh, the both of you are okay, too.” He pulls his hand away gently—though maybe not gently enough, given the way she flinches a little. Then it’s on to Rigo.

  The poor lad is hunched over, a temporary light hanging above his head. A trembling finger scans a hastily scrawled blueprint of the city.

  He doesn’t look up as Balastair approaches, but he speaks:

  “You get in touch with the Ilmatar?”

  “No—but I did talk to some of my people on the Mader-Atcha. They were able to protect the transmission from their end.” He hesitates. “I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Well, none of this is very certain is it? It’s like playing Checks in the dark.” He hears the irritation rusting the edge of every word, and he tries to scrape some of it off and soften his tone. “This is all quite up in the air, but I think the transmission went undiscovered. My people can meet us on the Ilmatar in a day. If we make it. Can we make it?”

  Rigo puffs out his cheeks in an uncertain sigh. He’s about to say something when his eyes flit to the other end of the room. Before Balastair can even turn, he hears a mournful wail rise up.

  It’s Killian Kelly. He takes hesitant steps toward the body of Lane Moreau.

  The distant booming rocks the room.

  Killian pulls his hair back and loops it with a ragged strip of cloth. His face is dusted with ash, the ash streaked with tears.

  The raider is like a man with a noose around his neck suddenly kicking the chair out from beneath him. Killian drops to his knees hard, hard enough so that the whole room shudders when he falls. He buries his face in his hands and keens like a river banshee.

  Grief, Balastair notes, is a curious thing. It can be uncomfortable to witness when it’s grief you don’t share—it’s awkward and strange, and it’s easy enough to pretend that the grief is inappropriate, or odd, or ill-fitting. That’s how the Empyrean tend to treat it—it’s something you do in private, behind closed doors. But it’s not like that here. Here, the grief is shared. Parceled out among them. These people have seen enough of it to know. They all understand.

  And he watches these Heartlanders gather themselves together. They go to Killian—a man who’s been chewed up by an old injury, who ran himself through a gauntlet of addiction (and may still be running that gauntlet even now)—and they gather around him and around Lane. They murmur words that Balastair cannot hear, but he hears the tone: sad, consoling, with a few hard spikes of anger punched through it all like bent nails. Cael hovers back with eyes of steel. Wanda doesn’t watch the raider captain or the corpse, but instead watches Cael.

  “You should go over there,” Balastair says to Rigo.

  Rigo looks up. “Not now.”

  “Your friends—”

  “Need to get out of here alive.”

  A bit of steel in the boy’s voice. Balastair warms to that. He has trouble finding his own spine sometimes, and it’s nice to see others go through that struggle and come out tougher. “Fair enough.”

  “Tell me,” Rigo says. “Why don’t we have your people just go to the Ilmatar and find the weapon?”

  “Because I can’t trust them. I can’t trust anybody who’s not here in this room right now. I’ve no idea what weapon my mother has waiting. I can’t put it in the hands of someone else. It’s ours or it’s nobody’s.”

  “So, we not only need to get out of here, we need to get to the Ilmatar.”

  He sighs. “That is woefully accurate.”

  “Then the plan is still the plan. Just . . . harder.” Rigo frowns so that the skin of his brow furrows like a freshly plowed field. “We still need to get to the trawler. No idea how safe the raider fleet is in the hangars. No idea who will even . . . captain the damn thing. But we send that out, draw their attention, pray to all the gods in the sky and the corn and the dirt that, oh, hey, the giant Doom Flotilla above our heads can’t get a shot in, and soon as we have an opening we . . . sneak away. Except I don’t like that part. Sneak away. Too vague. Still missing something.” Rigo hrrms.

  Balastair’s about to say something, but whatever it is ends up lost to the Grade A freak-out across the room. Suddenly, Killian is storming madly about, bellowing: “I’m going to go out and find her, and I’m going to kill the little Empyrean slag for robbing me of him. And then—and then!—I’ll man that one last cannon, and I swear on the grave of every Sleeping Dog that I’ll shoot that flotilla down my own damn self—”

  It’s Rigo who cuts him short. “Wait!” he says, standing up.

  Killian narrows his gaze. “What do you want?”

  “You want to pay them back?”

  “I very clearly do, boy.”

  “Then help us get out of here.” That’s when Rigo tells Killian—and the rest of them—the plan.

  Upon hearing it, Killian smiles grimly. Through teeth clenched so tight it looks like they might ground down to powder, he growls:

  “Then let’s give my man one helluva fucking funeral.”

  A GARLAND OF LAURELS

  ENYASTASIA WITNESSES the city that bears her name get pounded to rubble. Above, the Herfjotur brings screaming hell down upon the city—great night-shrieks that split the sky and hit the Saranyu like invisible boulders dropped by a callow, callous god.

  She watches the destruction unfold while nestled into a half-collapsed nook above what was once the Halcyon Balcony. The Dirae knows that at any moment, one of the Herfjotur’s cannons could point this way and end her existence—a blast of that size would vibrate her to scattered molecules. She would be reduced to a red mist.

  It’s not suicide, she tells herself. Not if they do the job for me.

  Part of her is sad that the city will suffer this fate. Another part of her is glad. This, a child’s reaction: If I can’t have my toys, neither can they!

  Between bombardments, she hears people: the citizens
of Pegasus City—some screaming, others crying. At one point she hears a man laughing: a mad, unhinged sound, as if this boisterous cackle is all he has left in the world.

  Her ankle aches. And still bleeds.

  Her head feels like she was born through a womb of glass.

  At some point, she sleeps.

  Her dreams are a dead place.

  Then: a sharp intake of breath. Light shining on her closed eyes.

  Morning.

  She awakens. Drops down out of the nook onto the remnant of the balcony. Enyastasia looks up—the Herfjotur can now be plainly seen, flying lower than any other flotilla would. Shaped as a series of smaller octagons surrounding a larger one—each chained together, each a semi-independent battle station all its own. Should it be attacked or fail to hold together, its pieces can break apart and remain buoyant—mini flotillas, each with its own measure of firepower. A genius design. Her old friend Heron Yong did well.

  She salutes him with no small measure of irony and disgust.

  Nobody up above is going to want to deal with her anymore. She can already envision what happens next:

  The sonic shelling is stopping, and the blockade will close in. The noose tightening around the neck. Until this nest of Heartlanders digs out of its hole and is killed in the unforgiving daylight. And then?

  They’ll come for her. They’ll carry her back into the sky. And they will retire her. With a garland of laurels about her head, of course, because this was still all her idea (and because she executed those who might say otherwise). She remains an Ormond and will receive preferential treatment. They’ll give her whatever she wants, and over time, people like Miranda Woodwick will distance themselves from her, and as the Heartland rebels are crushed and turned to metal men and as the flotillas continue to fly, she will feel more and more like she’s in prison. And she will forever be haunted by her failure.

  But it is then that she is afforded a new opportunity.

  Across the field of rubble, one particular pile of crumbled stone and glittering glass shudders, a warbling screech buried behind it. Then it happens again, and again, until the pile blasts forth—bricks bouncing, glass clattering down in a shimmering sun-captured rain.

  From the hole, the Sleeping Dogs fleet emerges from its hangar.

  Two vessels, then four, then another four beyond that, until finally the big beast lurches free from its prison (losing the very top of its mast in the process given its reduced clearance): the massive trawler.

  The ships power up, unfurl their red sails, and catch wind.

  Heading toward one of the many breaches in the wall.

  She grunts.

  I can still complete my mission, she thinks.

  She can still kill those she came to kill.

  And with that in mind, she drags her numb, ruined foot behind her. The hunt will commence. It may kill her, this crusade.

  It’s a thought she finds eerily comforting.

  ONE HELLUVA FUCKING FUNERAL

  KILLIAN SPINS THE WHEEL, then straightens it back out again. The trawler drifts through the ruins of Pegasus City, out over the collapsed wall with the other ships pushing ahead. And then, like that, they’re out above the endless corn once more, pushing on toward the red sun bulging up over the horizon like a blood blister about to pop—

  And toward the encroaching Empyrean fleet.

  “Well, well, well!” He claps his hands. “They’ve gathered a rather robust welcoming party for us,” he says to Lane. Lane, swaddled behind him in the crimson red of a Sleeping Dogs flag.

  Lane, who gave his life for this life.

  Lane, Killian’s love.

  Lane, who Killian failed. Again and again. “I always thought I was above reproach,” Killian said. “It was me or the door, and even when I wasn’t captain anymore I was still captain, and I knew I could get away with anything—”

  The raptor-shriek warble fills the air—

  Choom!

  A sonic blast hits just behind the trawler, sending up a column of dirt, dust, and broken corn. The trawler rocks, but keeps on keeping on.

  Killian war-whoops—a sound far angrier than triumphant. He pounds the wheel with the flat of his hand. “Stupid skybastards. Those cannons are slower than a salted slug—won’t be able to hit us, I’m afraid, my love.”

  Another screaming wail in the air. Another blast hits—this one far ahead. Killian tells himself they won’t calibrate a shot until it’s too late. He wonders if that’s a lie to make himself feel better, or an accurate assessment.

  He wonders if it even matters.

  The Empyrean fleet closes in. The noose is tightening as the blockade shrinks inward. Which means its ships are coming from every direction that he can see, except behind him—and even then, they’re coming from the other side, too, ready to swoop in and take the city. Including whoever is left alive inside the walls of the fallen flotilla.

  Chrome glinting in the morning sun. Ships above the corn. Some flying high, too—skiffs, yachts, ships not meant to do combat like those of the raiders—but beneath them, he knows that the mechanicals march forward, too. Metal monstrosities. Tinbodies with people shoved inside.

  His side aches when he thinks about them.

  “Ah, piss on it,” he growls. “Lane, I love you. And I failed you. But I’ll do my best to right things. And I suspect I’ll join you soon.”

  He lifts his boot, stomps hard on the floor underneath him.

  That’s the signal.

  Whomp whomp whomp.

  Above their heads, three stomps.

  Cicero the catbird trills a nervous song.

  Balastair shushes the bird.

  “That’s our signal,” Cael says, rifle slung over his shoulder. The vine around his arm trembles, burning like someone’s pressing a lit match to it as new tendrils push slowly up from the cut end. He can’t rely on his vine to save him, not out here.

  He and Wanda share a look, then reach down and lift the hatch on the floor. A breeze kicks in through the opened space. Corn-tops pass beneath them, firework tassels waving—as if they smell blood. And maybe they do.

  Gwennie looks to her mother. “I’ve got them.” She holds up both arms—she’s got a grip on Scooter’s and Squirrel’s hands. Then she looks to each of them: “We ready to do this?”

  Scooter nods, afraid.

  Squirrel’s eyes are shiny and alive.

  Boyland, grim-faced, pale as a grub’s belly, steps up to Cael, then offers a hand. “I got your back if you got mine.”

  “That’s a deal.” He shakes Boyland’s hand.

  “Time is wasting,” Wanda says. “We gotta move.”

  “She’s right,” Rigo says, hobbling toward the opening. “Now or never.”

  And then, one by one, they drop out into the hungry corn.

  It is in this moment that Wanda is reminded that she is a changed girl.

  Once, and not very long ago, she was the flinchiest little thing. High-strung as a housefly—quick to wince, tense up; desperate to be liked; fearful of the world around her. Uncertain of her place in all of it.

  What happens now, what unfolds around her and above her . . . it should unsettle her. The sounds of sonic cannons going off. The roar of the trawler’s engines kicking up. The thrum of dozens of hover-panels vibrating the ground so hard her teeth rattle. The clanking and stomping of mechanicals.

  But it doesn’t.

  All the people that she knew from Boxelder, they lie flat against the ground like scared children. Rigo presses his head into the dirt, hands clamped over his ears. Scooter tries not to cry, and Gwennie rolls onto her side, tucking the boy into her chest so that any sounds he does make are muffled (lest the mechanicals sense them and come to find them). Her mother, meanwhile, just weeps, the heels of her hands against her eyes as if that’ll make it all go away.

  Boyland looks lost. Like he’s overwhelmed—a motorvator whose circuits have fried and now just sits in one space, engine revving but never going anywhere.
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  Balastair focuses on the bird, the tiny creature cupped in one hand, his face a mask of heartbreak as he pets the bird’s head, cooing and whispering even though the sounds of the battle just beyond them drown it out.

  Even Cael, poor Cael. Rifle held to the dirt, his forehead pressed against the wood of the stock, his back rising and falling with measured breaths.

  The only one with Wanda’s unswerving fortitude is the little girl, Squirrel. Squirrel is as her name suggests—she holds still and steady, but everything about her is coiled like a spring. Like she’s about to leap into the fray at any moment. The girl is plainly mad. Broken at a fundamental level. The fact that Wanda relates most of all to this girl now says something about her, too.

  I am not Wanda anymore.

  The sounds going on all around her are a fascinating mystery. She finds herself listening, not just with her own ears, but through the vibrations reaching each stalk of corn. Here an unfinished joke crosses her mind, something about how corn has ears; she laughs a little, and Cael looks at her with a concerned stare as if to ask, How could you find any of this funny? and she wants to ask him in turn: Don’t you find it funny? But of course he doesn’t.

  She closes her eyes and becomes one with the corn.

  Some of it trampled under metal feet.

  Some of it darkened by the shadow of the trawler, or the other raider ships, or the Empyrean ketch-boats.

  Some of it searching, whirling, knowing there’s blood in the air somewhere and desperate for a taste. (Wanda feels desperate for a taste, then, too—an ache on the back of her tongue where she wants blood to slide down the back of her throat.)

  The raider ships aren’t moving forward, she realizes, suddenly.

  And they need to move forward if this is going to work. The line of Empyrean ships needs to be broken.

  Her eyes jolt open.

  Wanda reaches out and grabs Cael’s hand.

  He mouths the word: What?

  She doesn’t need to answer out loud. She knows that now. Instead, she lets the thought move through her—like a baby rabbit down a snake’s mouth, like blood through an artery: We need to help them.