The Harvest by Chuck Wendig

thought. She was dead, maybe. Or just so far from here that I didn’t have to think about her.”
    Lane pats his side, finds the small cigarette case he has there—sterling silver, though tarnished, with an enamel Pegasus inlaid in the center. One of the many treasures given up by this ruined place. He pops the lid, finds a twisted cigarette—this isn’t ditchweed, this is something they grow, or grew, here on the flotilla. It smells piquant. Fresh earth and dry cherry. He wraps his lips around it, doesn’t light it. Just fiddles with it, waggling it about with his tongue, tasting the dry paper.
    The door down the hall moves—all the angles are wrong since the buildings fell, and it sticks in the frame, has to be shouldered open.
    The doc comes out. Nika Vellington. Broad-shouldered woman, looks like she could pull a motorvator through the corn all on her own. Skin darker than any Lane has seen—rumor is, she has blood of the Shattered Coast folk in her. A year ago, Lane hadn’t even heard of the Shattered Coast, didn’t even know that there existed a world beyond the corn.
    He expects an absurd scenario—her emerging with hands slick with blood—but the only sign of her work is the line of sweat on her brow and her sleeves rolled up over her thick forearms and knotty elbows.
    “She’ll live,” she says.
    A sigh of relief escapes Lane’s lips. And swiftly after, a match tip of anger pressed to the back of his mind sets the whole thing aflame, burning up any shame or guilt he had there. How dare that woman. His mother . Showing up here. Showing up now . “Thanks, Doc.”
    “That’s your mother?” she asks. The ghost of an accent haunting her words: Dat’s your muthah?
    “Yeah. Yes. In name anyway.” He fumbles for a lighter but can’t find one and winces. “She awake?”
    “The sonic did a number on her. The pills I gave her got teeth, and she’ll be out cold rest of the day, maybe a week or more.”
    Killian perks up. “What, ahhh, what pills are those?”
    But he swallows the question soon as Lane shoots him a look.
    “But she’ll live?” Lane asks.
    “She’ll live,” the doc says.
    Lane offers a hand. The doc shakes it. He says to her, “I know you weren’t one of us before, but your services are . . .” He’s looking for the word, but he’s frazzled. He tries to sound leaderly , tries to conjure the tone and the words to sound properly mayoral . “Valuable. In valuable. And I just want to say, also—” Here, suddenly, whatever he was going to say has gone out of his head like a sheet blowing off a clothesline, caught on a wind, poof , whoosh —
    Behind the doc, he sees his salvation:
    Luna Dorado, striding up with purpose.
    She pushes past the doc because—well, because that’s Luna. “There’s a sitch,” she says to Lane. Ignoring everyone else in the room, as is her habit. “You need to deal with it.”
    Killian says: “We’re a bit busy here—”
    “Lane,” Luna says. “Situation.”
    And then she pivots heel-to-toe and storms off. Like a hard wind blowing in one direction, unwilling or unable to be deterred.
    They stand on the wall. It wasn’t there when the Saranyu floated, but it’s here now because Killian had the idea to build it: He said they were going to need protection beyond just the guns, and so he set all the ships and motorvators they could muster to dragging the rest of the flotilla wreckage back to Pegasus City so that the barrier could be cobbled from the remains. It’s a patchwork wall of varying colors and building materials, giving it the look of a brock-turtle’s mottled shell. That is in fact what some folks call it: the Shell.
    Up here, a hundred feet above the Heartland, the wind whips. The corn looks like little blades of grass, gently swaying.
    Lane thinks how far he’s come from Betty the cat-maran.
    He misses those days, in a way.
    “What am I looking at?” he asks.
    Luna points. Out over the wide-open green, a small ship hovers. A