The Harvest

by Chuck Wendig

  Amrita takes a long breath, is about to say something when—

  Wham wham wham.

  A fist on the door.

  A muffled command: “Open up. By order of the peregrine, Lirong Yau. Open up!” Wham wham wham.

  “The Frumentarii,” Kin says.

  Balastair makes a frightened sound in the back of his throat.

  “We can sneak you out the back,” Amrita says, waving them on.

  But then Wanda marches over to the door.

  Cael hisses to her: “Wanda, wait—”

  She flings open the door.

  A squat man and a tall woman stand there, both clad in dark leathers—the man with a sparking baton, the woman looking down at a visidex.

  The woman, lean and lithe with high-shelf cheekbones and purple eyes, is muttering: “No cameras in this area, but the Goddessheads have harbored refugees in the past—”

  She looks up and gasps when the man’s neck snaps.

  From each of Wanda’s fingers grows a cirrus of dark green—five strangling appendages, like tentacles searching the air. They slide silently away from the man’s head and neck. The woman’s about to cry out—but she never manages the sound. The finger-tendrils grab the visidex she’s holding and smash the screen hard against her face. Blood squirts. The woman falls back.

  Wanda never moved anything but her right hand.

  Cael gently steps in, eases her back. Her eyes are a turbulent storm of colors—the green of leaves, the red of rose-bloom, the black of rot, the amber of sap—all swirling there. Hypnotic, almost. He wants to be lost in them. But when Cael holds her face between his hands and kisses her cheek, the eyes clear. Human once more.

  “Now they’ll know we’re here,” Amrita says.

  Wanda wheels on her. “I don’t care. Let them know. I will tear this place apart at the seams and fling each piece to the dirt if you don’t give us what we came to get. Unless you don’t have it?” She extends her right hand—the vines squirm and twist in the air like snakes.

  “Wanda—” Cael cautions.

  “No,” Gwennie says, to Cael’s surprise. “Let her. I’m tired of waiting, too. And don’t mourn those corpses.” She gestures toward the bodies as Kin and Balastair drag them through the door. “I don’t know who this peregrine is, but the last one was a monster.” To Amrita: “Give us what we want. Or we’ll let her go all . . . angry tree-girl on you.”

  Amrita nods stiffly, then reaches into the folds of her sari. She produces a clear glass key—long as her palm and toothy. “This is the key to the Palladium Tower. I had to spend a great deal of . . . capital to get this. I hope what you’re looking for is worth it.”

  “I suppose we’ll find out,” Balastair says, reaching over and taking the key. “Thank you, Amrita.”

  “There’s one more thing,” she says.

  “Amrita . . .” Kin warns.

  Amrita then turns to Cael: “Your father is Arthur McAvoy?”

  That name sends a sharp shock to his heart. “Wh-what? Yeah, why?”

  “Your father is here. On the Ilmatar.”

  THE PALLADIUM

  “I DON’T THINK they should’ve gone off on their own,” Cael says.

  Above them: a massive bleach-white tower that looks like a bone spur, jagged and curved—a crooked talon. Two statues frame a pair of golden doors—two winged women, each with one wing pointed to the ground and a second wing pointed over the door, meeting in the middle.

  Boyland laughs: a bitter, dry sound. “You’re just upset because your two girls are off by themselves saying who knows what about you.”

  It was Wanda’s idea to go off and find his father. She had good reasons: he would be well guarded, and if anyone was prepared to deal with that kind of threat, it was her. It was a thought that both disturbed him and filled him with pride in equal measure: this girl, once gawky and awkward and uncertain about every breath she took, is now a confident killing machine.

  He told her no way, no how, that wasn’t gonna work for him.

  Gwennie stepped in and said she’d go, too. That she’d keep Wanda safe. Wanda bristled at that, of course, said, “I’ll be the one keeping you safe,” but she consented just the same. Cael gave Gwennie his rifle. Said to give that to Pop—and, if she needed it, to use it. After getting directions from Amrita—the birdcage cells were nearby, just one bridge over—the two girls went off.

  Rigo chose to stay behind with the other two Empyrean, Kin and Amrita. Not just because of his leg (which slows him down considerably when they need no such delay), but also because he can keep an eye on them. Make sure nothing hinky is going on.

  Balastair steps up to the doors. He starts looking around. “There’s no . . . there’s no lock here!” Frustrated, he begins to slide his hands over the metal.

  Boyland continues: “They’ll be all like, Oh, I think Cael loves me, and then the other would be all like, Cael doesn’t love you like he loves me. And meanwhile you sit back, arms crossed, picking and choosing which one you wanna make kissy-kissy with when they get back.”

  “It’s not like that,” Cael protests. Then, to Balastair: “Look, here—there’s a mechanism in the middle.”

  “Uh-huh. Sure it ain’t,” Boyland says. “You’re like a spider in the middle of a web, McAvoy. Are you good for anything?”

  Cael wheels on him: “Wanda’s pregnant, you ass!”

  As he blurts that out, Balastair’s hand touches the center of the doors, and a seamless panel hisses suddenly, sliding away to reveal a keyhole.

  “Can we talk about this later?” Balastair says.

  Cael wets his lips—lips dry from the air up here—and says, “Sure, yeah, whatever.”

  As the doors groan open and they step inside, Boyland shakes his head and says, “Well, heck-a-dang. Cael McAvoy, a father. We’re gonna save the Heartland just to doom it again when your spawn gets here.”

  The auto-mate inside the elevator extends up from its pillar, waking the way a wooden fortune teller inside a carnival game might suddenly stir—lights flicker behind its eyes, and as its arms move, the wispy cobwebs strung between its elbows and its bell-shaped torso stretch and then break and then drift.

  Folks haven’t been inside this tower for a good while, Balastair thinks.

  The Palladium Tower: a place where the Empyrean puts its odds and ends. Things that don’t belong out among the populace, yet must remain kept and cataloged: old experiments, forgotten books, artifacts from the other parts of the world. When someone dies, if nobody is around to receive their estate, it goes here. Sealed away, like a tomb.

  (Appropriate, given that just past the Palladium Tower is the Obol’s Coin Tower—a needlelike structure that houses all the cremated ashes of the dead Empyrean citizens, each urn pressed with a coin minted to the family.)

  Here, the auto-mate’s speaker-mouth grinds and sparks and then comes to life with tinny, scratchy words: “Hello . . . Balastair Ha-ring-ton!”

  “Jeezum Crow!” Boyland barks, startled. “Kill that thing with fire.”

  “Calm down, it’s just a dang robot,” Cael says, though he feels the anxiety, too. Up here, they might not have human brains, but down in the dust, those metal bodies are melded with Heartlander flesh and blood.

  Balastair says: “I’m looking for the property of Esther Harrington.”

  “Esss-tur Ha-ring-ton. Thirtteenth floor.”

  The elevator suddenly clangs and shudders. Gears squeal as it begins to ascend. Balastair watches the two young men with him—Boyland’s still pale as an unmoored soul, and Balastair can see the striations of red peeking past the bandages. Infection may be setting in. Hopefully the antibacterial unguent that Amrita applied will save those arms. (At the very least, it smells pleasant, redolent with unusual spices: black tea, karak, khashamur pods, rose petal.) Cael just looks anxious, shifting from foot to foot.

  At least, he thinks, Rigo didn’t come. Nice lad, smarter than he gives himself credit for. But he’s slower than they need
right now.

  “You all right?” Balastair asks Cael.

  “Peachy,” he says.

  Cicero the catbird whistles a rough mimic of the tone of that word—Whee-chee! Whee-chee!

  “A lot to take in.”

  “You think?”

  “Are you ready for whatever awaits?”

  Cael makes an incredulous sound. “Ready? I got a baby on the way that may or may not be human, with a mother who is cagier than a snake-bit hobo. Then I’m on a flotilla where I just found out they have my own father imprisoned for who knows why or for how damn long, and meanwhile I’m about to ignore all that and try to find some secret weapon for the Maize Witch—another mother whose humanity is wonky as hell—and for all I know we’re waltzing into a trap that might end up being a recipe for her Heartland-renowned shoo-fly pie. That about cover it?”

  The elevator bangs to a stop, jostling them all.

  “I suppose it does,” Balastair answers. “Let’s see what surprise my mother has in store for us, shall we?”

  The door opens to darkness.

  And then a series of sharp clicks before bright fluorescent bulbs turn on one by one across the length of the room, illuminating an oblong space many times the size of Cael’s own Boxelder home.

  Ahead: plastic crates stacked high. Shapes that might be furniture (or, Cael thinks with a shudder, that might be metal men waiting to reach out and crush them with steel claws) hide under heavy tarps. Aisles radiate out from the center elevator, like the rays of a hand-drawn sun.

  “Where do we start?” Cael asks.

  “Where don’t we start?” Boyland asks.

  Balastair arches his eyebrows. “Mister Barnes Jr. is right. Start anywhere. We’ll split up—cover more ground that way. And I choose”—he leans his head forward like a certain gravity is pulling him—“this direction.”

  The Empyrean man ducks down an aisle. Cicero hops off his shoulder and flies after him.

  “Well,” Cael says, “I’ll go this way.”

  He heads down an aisle. He quickly notices that each box, covering, or bundle has a tag associated with it. Plastic tag on a little beaded metal chain. He lifts one up and peers down at it, and as he reads it, he calls out: “Hey, these tags tell you what’s under the bundle. And where it came from. Look at the tags!”

  He stands, and there’s Boyland, all up in his orbit.

  “We’re splitting up,” Cael says.

  “I’m following you.”

  “That ain’t the plan.”

  “It is the plan, farm boy. I don’t wanna lift up some plastic blankie and catch a face full of some stomping mechanical, or end up breathing in a whiff of some weird experiment. I’m staying with you.”

  “Which means you ain’t doing squat.”

  “By the Lord and Lady, Cael, I don’t feel so hot, okay?” Cael gives Boyland a good long look and sees that his old rival is the color of a sun-bleached gravestone. Covered in a shining sheen of sweat, too. His tongue is pinkish gray and smacks as he speaks. “I think I got a fever.”

  “You look like something that came out of a goat’s ass.”

  “Thanks, McAvoy.”

  Cael rolls his eyes. “All right, Barnes, sorry. Just hang with me. I figure that goop the priestess spread on your arms will take hold soon enough. Meanwhile, just . . .” Hover there, like a skeeter. “C’mon.”

  He heads down one aisle, then another, peeking under tarps—he sees bookshelves and lamps and, sure enough, an old auto-mate with ragged mop-head hands and giant suction cups on its knees and elbows. Boyland mumbles: “What in King Hell is that?” And Cael answers: “I think this thing washes windows. Look—climbs up using the cups. Arms got a couple extra joints in ’em, and those mop-hands look like they spin—”

  He touches one, and the thing suddenly lurches to life—thrashing about, mop-hands whirring fast, too fast, smoke coming off them.

  “Quik-kleen window! Gleam-shine spray!” Its jaw unhinges, and a mist spritzes from a hole inside its mouth, catching Cael right in the face. Cael flails, tastes chemicals, eyes burning—he trips over something, tumbling backward. “Window-bot do a squeaky-sparkly job! You have a squeaky-sparkly day, Mister—”

  Cael blinks away the chemicals and opens his eyes just in time to see Boyland behead the thing with an old book. Dust flies from the book. More of the noxious chemical geysers from the thing’s black-tube neck-stump.

  Ffffpppssssst—then it sputters and goes dry.

  “I hate these things,” Boyland says.

  “I’m not an admirer, either,” Cael says, wiping his eyes again and spitting the chemical taste onto the floor. It’s then he sees a glimpse of something just over his shoulder. A tag, dangling.

  He picks it up.

  He reads: Harrington, Esther.

  Beneath it, the words: Reclaimed goods from Palace Hill home; Ormond Stirling Saranyu.

  “Whoa-dang, here we go,” Cael says, and he cracks the lid of a box. He calls to Balastair: “Hey, Bal—I got your mother’s stuff here!”

  He hears Cael calling. Faintly. And he calls back, “I . . . I’ve found some of her stuff, too.” He feels a tightness in his throat and chest as he stares down at a gilded frame. Inside the frame: a picture of himself, his mother, and his grandfather Hiram.

  In the photo, he’s just a little kid. Ten, maybe twelve years old. Which means this isn’t long before Hiram passed, before Mother began her . . . change.

  He’s holding a macro-oculus in the picture—they don’t make them anymore, now it’s just a lens that fits over the eye (uncomfortably, he adds), but as a child, this was his favorite thing. He decorated it with paint and stickers. Used it again and again to stare at the microscopic world and marvel at it. It was his first step on the road toward manipulating that tiny, unseen world—twisting helical forms and ushering forth replication and mutation.

  Those days are gone, he thinks. Aren’t they? The closest he got to doing any kind of science down in the Heartland was growing those vegetables at their little house. When Cleo was still alive. When everything had only just started to fall to pieces—he lies to himself, suddenly, pretends that he was happy then, but he wasn’t. He knows it. He wanted things he couldn’t have: a life back on the flotilla, a laboratory to do work, and Gwennie.

  He takes the photo, then smashes the glass on the corner of an old desk. With a circular movement he removes the rest of the glass using that corner, and once it’s all gone, he reaches in, plucks the photo from inside the frame.

  His mother looks young and happy.

  Hiram looks magnanimous. A glow about him. Forked beard, proud smile, big and eager eyes. Balastair looked up to that man. Spent a lot of time with him, too—Hiram had retired, and Mother was always so busy.

  Inside one of the desk drawers, Balastair hears something rolling.

  He pops the drawer.

  His oculus has rolled to the front.

  Haha! He grabs at it. It feels so small in his long-fingered hands. But there, at the end, the dome shape with the crystal lens. He feels around, finds the switch, pops it—

  A tiny blue laser emits from the front end.

  He points it at a little tumbleweed of dust rolling across the desk, then presses his eye against the viewer—

  The microscopic world made massive, blooming bright against his eye. Spherical, spiny shapes mingle with rods that look like shattered crystals. A dust mite, monstrous when seen so big, clambers across the tangle as if drunk.

  He removes the oculus. Wonderful. Wonderful!

  What other treasures await? His youth, contained in these boxes and drawers, suddenly laid bare and—

  “I found it!” Cael calls from across the room.

  “What?”

  “Get over here! I think I found it!”

  Balastair longs to remain with the nostalgia of his life on the Saranyu, but for now, duty calls. He hurries down the radial aisle, reaches the center, then follows Cael’s voice and finds him and Boyland standing
over a crate wreathed in drifting steam—no.

  Not steam. Dry ice sublimating to a gas.

  Cael says, “Found this crate. Was wrapped up in all this red and black tape.” Sure enough, next to the crate is a wad of the binding. Balastair sees DO NOT OPEN and lots of exclamation points contained inside triangles.

  Icons of warning. That’s promising.

  And the crate’s a good size—three feet by three feet.

  What could be in there?

  Cael waves him over. Down in the box: forty-nine cylinders, each glass capped with gleaming metal.

  With ginger fingers, Balastair slides one out of its socket and places it atop the crate’s lid. Inside the glass is—

  “I don’t know what that is,” he says. And he doesn’t. It’s packed tight with something—some kind of material. Tiny little white orbs. Like tapioca blobs, though significantly smaller. In fact, they look like . . . “Eggs.”

  “From the world’s tiniest chicken,” Boyland mumbles.

  Balastair shakes his head. “No, no, insect eggs.”

  It dawns on him.

  No, it couldn’t be.

  Could it?

  He takes the oculus, shines the laser against the side of the glass, and—

  Yes. The cylinder is packed with tiny white eggs. He does some quick calculations in his head—the volume of the cylinder, the size of each egg. That means—a half million eggs in each cylinder. Nearly fifty cylinders. And if these are what he thinks they are . . .

  “Don’t open these,” he says suddenly.

  But even as he finishes those words, he hears the click-hiss.

  He pulls away from the oculus, eyes wide.

  Boyland stands over a cylinder, the metal cap in his hand. The open cylinder in front of him.

  “Why not?” Boyland asks.

  The cylinder starts to hiss and vibrate.

  “Oh, gods,” Balastair says. “What have you done?”

  POPCORN

  ARTHUR DOES WHAT he can to exercise his body. He stands and plants his hands against the wall and lifts his heels up again and again—his legs are wobbly, and they feel like they’re on fire. He sobs doing it. But he needs to do it. If he has any chance of escaping the gallows, he can’t be limp—can’t flee on atrophied legs or with rubbery arms. While he works his body, he also works his mind: He thinks of his wife, his son, his daughter. He does math problems in his mind. Old problems from when he was just a student—hard ones, too, ones that took him months to solve. Symbols on a chalkboard. Sketches on paper.