The Harvest by Chuck Wendig Page B

dresses. Or they—”
    Killian reaches for the screen. “Oh, for the sake of all the sweet Saintangels, answer the damn call.”
    Luna snatches the visidex from Lane’s hands, then cancels the call. With a quick spin of her fingers she pulls up the gun cameras and command screen.
    “Shoot them down.”
    She hands it back to Lane.
    He turns to look.
    The ship is still out there, hovering. He wants to think that means they’re innocent, but Luna’s filled him with these ideas. He can’t be naive. He has a whole city to protect. One lapse of judgment brings this whole place down. Everything he’s built here is balanced on the tip of his finger. One twitch and—collapse.
    He pulls up gun controls on the visidex. The nearest cannon at the corner tower pivots, leveling a long barrel that looks not unlike the barrel of an Empyrean pistol, except built for the hands of a giant, not a man. The cannon thrums to life—
    Just as the ship begins flashing its forelights.
    Lane’s finger hovers over the fire button.
    “Oh, what now?” Luna asks, annoyed.
    Killian just scowls and watches.
    The lights flash intermittently. Not just a steady flashing, either, but in an erratic pattern: one flash, then a few seconds, then a long flash followed by a couple quick pulses and—
    Lane freezes, watches the pattern go once, twice again.
    Lord and Lady.
    Lord and Lady!
    He whoops and laughs and closes the gun camera screen.
    “Let ’em land,” he says to Luna. She starts to protest, and he just yells over her with a happy cackle: “I said, let ’em land!”

SUMMIT
    RIGO LETS OUT a moan of relief. He wipes sweat from his brow and leans forward on the skiff’s console with his elbows. “I thought we were dead.”
    “I began to worry that myself,” Pop answers. He reaches over and musses Rigo’s hair. “Using Bug Code was a good idea, Rigo.”
    He can’t help it—Rigo feels a swell of pride. He was never able to please his own father, but maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe Pop’s the only father he ever needed. The father he’d in fact had all along.
    “ You taught us Bug Code,” he says. Way back in Boxelder, when Cael first started the Big Sky Scavengers with Gwennie, Lane, and Rigo, Pop said he wanted to teach them this code—a code that could be heard or seen, a code in dashes and dots. He called it Bug Code, and for a long time Rigo thought it actually had something to do with insects—something about wing patterns or their clicks and chirps. But later on Pop told them it had to do with a Vibroplex, a little device that generated the code for you, a device that everybody called a “bug.” They learned the code to communicate with one another in situations where they couldn’t speak, either at a distance or as a cipher when others—like Boyland, that big donkey—might be watching or listening.
    So, Rigo hoped that the Lord and Lady hadn’t seen fit to steal that memory from Lane’s mind—and that Lane was out there watching them in the first place. Since nobody wanted to pick up their transmission, and since the guns all swiveled and pointed right at them, he had to think quick.
    (Here he looks down at his missing leg and at the clumsy artifice that has replaced it, and he realizes that he’d much rather be able to move quickly than to think quickly. No girl will ever want a hobbling cripple like him. Not even a young hobo girl like Beryl—who doesn’t even like boys anyway, as it turns out. He’s never gonna find a girl. Never gonna have kids. Be old and alone and legless. Even more useless than his own father. Shoot.)
    It isn’t long before ships emerge from Pegasus City. A couple sloops with low-swept sails, the sigil of the Sleeping Dogs on each.
    Again, Rigo tenses.
    Pop must sense this, though, because he says: “It’s all right. They’re not attack boats. I think we just found ourselves an escort, Mister Cozido.”
    Meeting Pop in that theater back in Curtains changed everything.
    First,