Under the Empyrean Sky (The Heartland Trilogy)

by Wendig, Chuck

  Translation: We’ve got our own smart people now, and we don’t need you.

  Temporarily. What a joke. That’s what they said when they closed the schools, too.

  “Oh, right. I do remember now. You know what else I remember? I remember you taking off like a shot.” The mayor whistles low and slow, slaps his hands together. “Like a cat with chiggers biting his tail. And you went and took Filomena with you.”

  Filomena. His wife. Of course it would come back to this.

  “You stole her from me,” Barnes says.

  So, there it is, then.

  “She made her choice.”

  The tendons stand out in the mayor’s neck as he leans across the table.

  “It wasn’t about choice,” he spits. “We don’t get choice in these matters. We don’t follow our godsdamn hearts like a… a butterfly chasing flower petals on the wind, Arthur. She got the envelope. She got the letter. She was Obligated to me.”

  “And yet she chose me,” Arthur says.

  “You left. You left town. And don’t think we don’t know why you went, or where you went, or who you went with. You took her from me, off on your little adventure. You have any idea what that put me through? My Obligated bride, snatched away from me by some anarchist… some godsdamned anarchist punk?” He slams the metal cup down on the table, collapsing it with the flat of his hand. “You took her! You sonofabitch.”

  The mayor’s nostrils flare like a bull’s.

  Which is what Filomena called Barnes, wasn’t it? A snorting bull. She thought he was crass. Thick and dumb. Common in all the worst ways and none of the best. All reasons why she chose the mayor’s opposite in Arthur.

  “Your fault she’s sick. Taking her out of town to the far-flung corners of the Heartland.”

  And beyond, Arthur thinks. His mouth forms a tight and bitter line. “That’s all ancient history. Go and appreciate the wife you have.”

  “And what a wife she is! Got an ass like two hogs wrestling under a quilt. A sour face like she’s always smelling an updraft of shit somewhere. My son’s mother is not my wife. Legally, yes. In the eyes of the Empyrean, yes. But in my heart?” He angrily thumps his chest. Then he foregoes the cups, takes a long pull of whiskey straight from the flask, swallowing it with a growl. He wipes his mouth and says, “In my heart, it’s Filomena.”

  For a little while the mayor just stares. First at Arthur, and his eyes drift as he looks off at an unfixed point in the distance.

  Behind Mayor Barnes, two of the Empyrean soldiers come from separate corners and meet in the middle. They face away from the Heartlanders, but Arthur can still hear the taller of the two say after taking off his horse helmet that he found another Blighter hiding in the garden and pulsed her with the sonic rifle. He says they’ll need to bring in something to “take care of” the garden. A flame-tosser, maybe. Or a couple of boom-cube explosives that’ll collapse the whole burrow, bring down the town above with it.

  Outside, someone yells.

  A cry of alarm by the sound of it.

  Barnes doesn’t seem to notice. Just keeps staring. Licking and sucking his teeth as he does. The mayor mutters, “You had your shot, Arthur. Now I’m bringing you down.”

  Then Pop hears it: the sound of footsteps. Coming fast. The ground even shakes a little.

  The two guards have just enough time to give each other a look before Homer—bruised, bloodied, the whites of his eyes gone entirely red—barrels into the room like a wild horse fresh from branding. The guards react—but they’re too slow.

  Homer snatches the sonic rifle off the back of one guard and pushes him forward with a hard knee. Then he takes aim and lets fly with a pair of sonic blasts—the one without the helmet takes it to the face. He cries out and gurgles at the fluids fast accumulating in his throat. The other drops to the ground, given over to a shuddering seizure.

  The mayor spins, standing up so fast he almost falls backward. From down the other hall, Arthur hears voices—more guards, alerted by the blasts.

  Barnes is no fool. He shrieks like a barn owl and dives behind a cot as Homer raises the rifle.

  “Go!” Homer yells to Arthur. “Run!”

  Arthur hops up. He can’t move fast—the spurs in his hip shoot a lightning bolt of misery all the way down to the tips of each toe—but he hobbles along toward the escape tunnel.

  Voices rise behind him. A commotion. He throws a look over his shoulder and sees Homer kick over a table. The huge hobo staggers behind it and starts taking shots over the edge. Four more guards emerge from different tunnels. A thrum-whip catches the table and starts vibrating with the telltale high-pitched frequency and—vzzzt!—cuts the whole table in half.

  No time now.

  Arthur limps toward the tunnel opening.

  Homer stands.

  A thrum-whip catches the big vagrant around the middle. He screams. Pivots. Points the sonic rifle at Arthur, and for a moment Arthur doesn’t understand—

  But then a sonic blast hits the earthen frame of the tunnel gateway, collapsing it with a pulse of shrieking sound. Clods of dirt fall. Dust kicks up.

  There, leaning against the wall, is a rail-raft.

  Arthur, with a grunt, turns it over and places it upon the rails. The magna-cruxes buoy the raft, letting it bob atop the tracks.

  As he throws himself on it, he hears Homer scream one last time and then—

  Nothing.

  Oh, Homer.

  Arthur blinks back tears, snatches an oar-pole off the wall, and begins pushing the raft forward—left side, right side, left side, right side—until he’s firing like a bullet down a barrel.

  The Boxelder jail isn’t much to look at. A square room, all cinder block and mud. Its one window is just above the too-small plywood door at the fore. The whole place sits at the south end of town down a footpath that leads up a small, dusty berm where the corn doesn’t grow.

  The jail has two cells separated by sheets of plasto-sheen, the plastic perforated by a series of little holes so the “guest” doesn’t suffocate while waiting for justice to be delivered by the Empyrean. The plastic cells don’t have doors, exactly—they have hatches at the bottom where you crawl in and out like a dog on his belly.

  Because that’s how it happens. A Heartlander does something wrong, gets tossed in here. Small offenses—and most of them are—get one a sentence of a few days or until the Babysitters grow tired of sitting in this hot box. Anything bigger than that gets reported upstairs. Then the proctor comes. And then the offender disappears.

  Cael’s never been in here before. Lane has. He got caught stealing some ditchweed from Doc’s cabinet. Lane was in here less than a day before the Babysitters threw him back out with a proclamation that he was to pay Doc twice what was owed.

  Which is bad news for Cael.

  Pally roves into view. His face is distorted by the plasto-sheen. His breath fogs the plastic.

  “Hey, McAvoy,” Pally says. “How you doing in there?”

  Cael doesn’t say anything. Gwennie’s name is still perched on the edge of his lips. If he could, he’d punch a pair of holes through the plastic, grab Pally by the neck, and choke Varrin till the sonofabitch passed out.

  “You know, I’m gonna leave you dangling out by your heel on this one. The Empyrean doesn’t like little wannabe murderers. Who knows what they’ll do to you? March you up to one of them flotillas. Maybe experiment on you. Or you know what I hear? Sometimes they make you walk the plank. You go out on this platform high above the Heartland, and there you stand—wind whipping past, britches filled with the stink of sweat and piss. Then they hit a button or pull a lever and—zip! The platform shrinks back. Leaving you out there in the great big nothing.” Pally claps his hands, makes a loud whistle. “And down to the ground you go! Probably exploding like a blood sausage soon as you hit. Blood makes the corn grow. Isn’t that what they say?”

  “I didn’t murder Boyland.”

  “You tried.”

  “I did not.
” Cael sighs. “He attacked me.”

  “That’s not what I saw. I saw him just standing there. Then I saw you go over there and hit him in the face with a two-by-four. Start beating on him something fierce. He fought back, almost had you, but then you tried to kill him. That’s what my report’s gonna say.”

  “You’re a damn liar.”

  “Maybe. But between you, me, and the mouse in the corner? I kinda want to see you hang for this, Cael McAvoy.”

  Cael sits back on the wooden bench. Thunks his head dully against the concrete. Kicks at the tin tray sitting there on the floor.

  All the while wondering just how in King Hell he’s gonna get out of here.

  It’s been hours. Morning won’t be long in the coming.

  Gwennie and her family sit in a lounge area aboard the ketch. They all sit on plush sofas that are a cerulean blue that Gwennie’s never seen before except smudged around the eyes of Empyrean ladies. They have small porthole windows—each rimmed with an elaborate scrollwork of gold—and occasionally Gwennie goes to the porthole and peers out.

  “Everything’s fine,” Richard says. He’s been all smiles, but now Gwennie can see that his excitement is starting to wear down like a ground tooth.

  Her mother adds, “I’m sure it’s all just administrative.”

  “I heard them talking about Arthur McAvoy,” Scooter says.

  Gwennie nods. “I did, too.”

  She doesn’t know what any of this means. She only knows that they packed up her family and shoved them in here, and the door closed and won’t open again. The mayor took off with some guards after they bandied around the McAvoy name—and not in a good way. If Arthur is in trouble, that means Cael could be, too. And Gwennie cannot abide the thought of that.

  Things had been going so well.

  But now Proctor Simone Agrasanto is still here, standing on this dust-caked, pollen-choked dung-ball. Five hours later. Five excruciating, miserable, soul-crushing hours.

  Her only pleasure was finding that the mayor and the guards had things in order. And Barnes was right—which galls her somewhat, as she looked forward to humiliating him for his falsehood. But they found the town, found the terrorist, and cleaned house. Most surprising was the extent of the treachery: a veritable jungle in the dead town of Martha’s Bend. Still, everything looked as though it had been handled.…

  But now she’s holding her visidex in her trembling hand. Devon flits around her like a nervous titmouse. Evocati augusti Parl Refn has just told her something she can’t even imagine:

  Arthur McAvoy has escaped.

  His file says he’s crippled. Like half of the mutants down here.

  And yet he escaped.

  By the gods, how?

  Ugh.

  She looks into the visidex screen and speaks to the guardsman. “Do we know where he’s going?”

  The guardsman—a fair-haired gent, maybe in his late forties—shakes his head. “No, Proctor. We’re digging out the tunnel now. Then we plan to—”

  The visidex camera shakes; everything goes blurry.

  Then the mayor’s haggard face appears. Bloodshot eyes. Lips curled into a grimace.

  “Go to his house,” the mayor says. “His wife is there. Bedridden with tumors. He’ll go to her. To check on her. To save her. That’s where he’ll be. But you need to go now.”

  He sends the proctor a pair of coordinates. They appear on the screen.

  Agrasanto hands the visidex back to Devon. “Program the pilot. Prep the ketch. The coordinates are on the visidex.”

  “Proctor, about the Shawcatches—”

  “Just keep them locked up on the ship and we’ll be fine. Now move, before I leave you behind to rot in this godsforsaken mud hole.”

  Devon nods, as scared as a rabbit, and disappears into the ketch.

  She waits for the ship to thrum to life, to rise and take them to the McAvoy house, but then—

  A voice calls from the corn.

  At first the proctor thinks she’s imagining it. This place is getting to me. They say the corn moves of its own volition, but she knows it doesn’t have thought. It can’t communicate.

  She hurries to enter the ketch but then she hears it again:

  “Wait!”

  Alongside the thrashing of corn.

  Someone Agrasanto does not recognize comes crashing through the corn. The proctor sticks two fingers in her mouth and gives a long whistle. Two evocati augusti emerge from within the ship, weapons drawn and pointed at this new interloper.

  Then recognition strikes her. Really? Another one? She tells the guards to stand down. “It’s the mayor’s son.”

  He looks like hell. Cut up from the corn. Beat up from… some scuffle or another? She doesn’t even know. It appears as if he went toe-to-toe with a Korybantic dancer—of course, they don’t have the Korybantes here in the Heartland. They don’t even have the Cybele rites. Primitives, with their simplistic mythologies and… well, no matter.

  The teen—Boyland Jr., if she recalls—gasps for air and drops to his knees before her.

  “Please,” he says between great gulps of breath. “It’s my bride. My Obligated. I don’t want her to go. Take her family, but for the love of the Lord and Lady and the”—another gasping breath—“and the salvation of Jeezum Crow and the trials of Old Scratch and King Hell, please don’t take her.”

  Gwennie presses against the porthole.

  Boyland Barnes Jr. has come for her.

  She’s not sure how she feels about that.

  He’s thick. He’s a bully. He’s arrogant. He’s ignorant.

  But she sees how the mayor treats him. She sees how it trickles down.

  She doesn’t love Boyland. But she can see that he loves her. Gwennie doesn’t know if that love blossomed on the day of their Obligation or if it’s been simmering long on the stove, but it’s there now when she looks in his eyes. His touch is gentle with her. Not as gentle as Cael’s, and certainly far clumsier, but he tries.

  He was protective of her.

  He loves her.

  And that’s something.

  Scooter laughs. “Boyland and Gwendolyn sittin’ in a field,” he sings. “K-I-S-S—”

  “It’s tree,” she corrects him. “Not field. Tree.”

  “That don’t make any sense. We don’t have any trees around our house!”

  She ignores her little brother, sees Boyland making some kind of heartfelt plea to the proctor. She thumps on the porthole glass to get his attention, to give him a smile.

  He turns and sees her, a big, dumb smile plastered on his face.

  Agrasanto makes a motion with her hand, and one of the guards steps toward Boyland and cracks him in the temple with the butt of the sonic rifle.

  Barnes goes down, curling into a fetal ball, his hand coming away red.

  Gwennie yells and pounds on the glass. She hates it—hates that her reaction is to want to reach out and grab him and pull him close and hold him tight. Boyland. That thug. Always making her life hell when she was with Cael’s crew. But now there’s a twinge, a little twist of something inside her like a fish taking the bait on a long line and—

  Don’t go there, not now, not ever; you don’t love him.

  Right?

  By the time she snaps back to reality, the guards and the proctor are all gone, leaving Boyland alone. Soon she can feel the droning purr of the hover-rails beneath her feet—and the shift of the ship as the ketch lifts up in the air. Boyland doesn’t look up. He just cradles his bleeding head.

  Gwennie thinks he’s weeping.

  And she can’t help it. She weeps a little, too.

  Gwennie’s gone. Gone to one of the flotillas—and how many flotillas even exist, Cael doesn’t know. A dozen at least. Maybe twice that. Three times that. The Empyrean doesn’t share numbers like that and so Cael can only guess.

  With Gwennie up there, what are the chances he’ll ever see her again? Even if Pop’s garden takes root and spreads like a fire across the H
eartland, even if everything falls to pieces and the Empyrean loses its grip, what are the chances Cael will ever smell her scent again, or kiss her neck, or just hold her hand?

  About as much chance as winning the Lottery, he thinks.

  He sits in his jail cell with that thought twisting in his mind like a worm trying to tie itself in knots.

  Cael imagines a life with Wanda. She’s awkward and strange and seems to love him—or at least appreciate him—in a way he cannot return. But she’s not the one he wants.

  But then it strikes him—

  The chances of winning the Lottery were one in a million.

  And Gwennie won.

  Which means a chance is still a chance. Small as a speck of pollen caught on an eyelash, maybe, but there just the same.

  And then he realizes that his life with Wanda isn’t going to happen. Pally’s going to send him to the Empyrean. To the flotilla. Up in the sky, same as Gwennie. He’ll be sent for punishment, not as a reward, but that doesn’t matter. He’ll formulate an escape plan as soon as he knows what he’s dealing with. Then it’ll be time to rescue Gwennie, steal a skiff, and get the hell back to the ground.

  It’s a plan.

  A crummy plan hanging its hat on a wobbly hook, sure.

  But it’s a plan.

  It’s then that the plywood door into the jail creaks open.

  Cael can’t see who it is—but he hears the low murmur of voices and recognizes the timbre of the other Babysitter, Grey Franklin. The plasto-sheen walls do a pretty good job muffling sound, but he does make out two words:

  “McAvoy farm.”

  Maybe they want to take him home? Maybe Pop is on his way.

  Grey raises his voice. “Let me at least give him another tray of food. We’re gonna be gone for a while.”

  “Aw, hell, let the mongrel starve, Grey!”

  “Pally, you pulsed him. He needs to eat. Empyrean’s not gonna cater to you torturing a boy. He’s locked up fair and square, and you’re the hero. Don’t turn it the other way.”