Read Under the Empyrean Sky for Free Online

jobs. The Barnes clan has had it in for the McAvoys for a long time now.
    “Got back an hour ago. Will be heading back there soon.”
    Cael nods.
    Pop sucks air through his teeth.
    Another yawning silence. Another uncomfortable void.
    Pop holds up the rat. “I’m going to go skin this andstart on dinner. We got a new box of provisions in from up above—even ended up with a couple of knobby apples and a bundle of worm-eaten collards. Can you head out and milk Nancy?”
    “No.” Cael says the word and realizes too late that it comes out harsh, like a hammer-blow. It’s just that Cael doesn’t want to waste any time. He hurries to say, “I need to get to the Mercado, after I visit with Mom. Can I get Mer to milk the goat?”
    Pop’s smile is sad and strained, but it’s there just the same. “Sure, Cael. Sure.”
    Her room is always kept dim. Curtains drawn so that only a glowing frame of daylight creeps in around the edges. The room smells heady. Verdant. Fungal, even. It doesn’t make sense, really, given that his mother doesn’t suffer from the Blight. Still, when Cael smells the air in her room, he can’t help but think of Pop’s old textbooks, of pictures of faraway jungles and rain forests.
    The first thing he does in the room is listen for her breathing, because he fears that one day he’ll come in and she won’t be breathing at all. (And he hates himself for thinking that day will be a relief, in a way.) But he hears it: a slow, whistling wheeze as she inhales, thena small puff of air as she exhales.
    She’s just a dark shape on the bed. Never moving.
    It’s the tumors, in part. Her whole body is covered with them, and they lie against and atop one another like tar paper shingles on an uneven roof. They remind Cael of calves’ livers. A heaping mess of them. They’re heavy—a burden on skin, muscle, and bone. Because of them, her arms and legs and back have all atrophied. She cannot stand; she can’t even sit up.
    Maybe the tumors are also inside her body and her brain, or maybe the weight of the growths is more than skin-deep. Maybe it pulls on her mind above all else. Maybe there’s not much mind left.
    Cael can’t think about that too long: On the one hand, he hopes her mind
is
ruined, because then maybe she’s away from the prison that is her body. Trapped in a place of dreams or even nothing… that has to be better than here and now. On the other hand, this is his mother. He can’t abide thinking about her not being
in there
. Somewhere.
    She knows he’s here, at least. That speaks something for her mind. He knows she knows, because when he sits, she makes a sound—it’s like the way the wind whispers through the corn.
    “Hey, Mom,” he says.
    His mother keens a raspy breath to greet him.
    He goes about the ritual: He’s gotten a short bucket of water from the well-pump outside, and he sets that by the bed. Then he opens the side table drawer and pulls out all the accoutrements. He dampens a hard, dark sponge that softens with water, and he dabs it against the layer of tumors that comprise her brow, washing the top and underside of each. She doesn’t have much regular skin anymore; it’s almost all taken over by the bulging bladder-like tumors.
    When he’s done there, he lifts the flaps from around her eyes and deposits a couple of wetting drops into her eyes. The eyes don’t focus on him, not really; he’s not even sure how good her vision is anymore, what with how the tumors keep her in the dark most times.
    He wets her lips. Cleans her ears. Brushes back her hair. Her hair is the color and consistency of corn silk—thin and soft—and in this light an almost golden green. Her scalp is the one place the tumors never manifested. He doesn’t know why. Nobody does.
    Nobody really seems to know anything anymore. Maybe they never did.
    Normally he’d talk to her. Light, polite conversation:
Heard a twister hit Guster’s Grove couple days ago, piss-blizzard’s coming, Lane and