Under the Empyrean Sky by Chuck Wendig Read Free Book Online

garage at the stump—the remains of a tree struck by lightning when Cael was very young. Now it’s a kind of butcher’s block. Pop does a lot of cooking right there next to the stump, puts a kettle or a skillet over the fire pit only a few yards off.
    By the time Cael walks up, the old man’s just finished “shucking the shuck rat.” The skin’s off. Next to the grayish-pink carcass sits a little tray of blood, feet, and entrails. Some of that will go into tomorrow night’s soup, and it’s already expected that Cael will have Lane and Rigo come to share in that evening’s meal.
    Cael’s about to hold up the note, tell Pop what his sister did
again
, when he sees that the two sacks he brought home are sitting on the ground. Empty.
    And just past the stump is an old wooden tray of vegetables.
    All of them cut up. Diced pepper. Chopped tomatoes. Green beans destemmed and broken in two. Cael feels the blood pound at his temples.
    “Lord and Lady, Pop!” he cries out, hands balling into fists. “What did you do?”
    Pop gives him a sideways glance. “Just cooking dinner, son.”
    “The rat, yeah! But those vegetables. I told you not to look in those sacks.”
    “What you
told
me was that the sacks contained motorvator parts. Which I found curious, what with the way the sacks were not clanking together. Decided I’d take a peek. Discovered that you lied to me and figured that you were just trying to surprise me by bringing home dinner.”
    Cael’s mouth twists up. “That wasn’t what you figured, and you damn well know it. You
stole
something from me. I was planning on taking that to the Mercado, to the maven—”
    “And then what?” Pop wheels, the skinning knife in his hand. “Get a bundle of ace notes? Live high on the hog for a couple weeks? Maybe rub it in Boyland’s face?” Cael tries to answer, but Pop doesn’t let him. “Food like this isn’t
legal
, son. And the maven is no friend to the McAvoys. She’s in the mayor’s corner, and you damn well know it. You walk in with a bounty like that, and it’s like handing her a gun. A gun she’ll point at your head and use to take you down, making sure that Boyland Barnes Jr. never has to contend with the likes of the Big Sky Scavengers again.”
    “Just the same, you had no right.
No right
. That was my choice to make.”
    The tip of the skinning knife punctuates each of his father’s words. “And plainly you are not yet mature enough to make that kind of choice.”
    “You treat us like kids,” Cael says.
    “You and your little sister
are
kids.”
    “Yeah, well, maybe she feels like you should trust her more, too. And you don’t. Maybe that’s why she ran away again.” And with that Cael flips the note toward his father. It flutters to the ground as Cael storms off.
    He doesn’t bother to see what his father thinks about it.
    At the very edge of the horizon, Cael can see a faint golden hue intruding on the late-afternoon sky. It means one thing: the piss-blizzard is on its way. Maybe it’ll come and swallow Obligation Day whole. Gobble it right up.
    Cael is standing out back by the silo when Pop finds him. Staring up at the sky. Watching a pair of Empyrean flotillas way off in the distance pass by each other, silent and steady.
    “She’ll be back,” Pop says, quiet. “She always comes back.”
    “What? That’s it? She’ll be back?”
    “Way I figure it, yes.”
    Maybe the old man is right
, Cael thinks. But he’s not so sure. Mer and Pop have been fighting more and more. She stopped showing up at Molly Goggin’s, where she works as a seamstress—a day like today could have earned her more than a few ace notes, what with the Obligation Day dresses needed.
    On the one hand, Cael gets it. If he could run away, hewould. But the family has debts. And each member of each family is responsible for carrying that burden. Merelda runs away like that, she’s no longer contributing. She doesn’t want to end up marrying someone she