Winterbay

by J. Barton Mitchell

  She shoved the first combination in her pack and went to work on the second, stringing together a mixture of batteries, paper clips, pieces of mirror, coils of copper wire, dimes, quarters, and vials of silvery dust. It was a three-tier artifact, three separate combinations merged into one, and she finished the first just as she heard the door at the top of the stairwell open.

  Mira’s heart beat frantically; her hands shook. She’d never made such a complicated artifact so quickly, but she didn’t have a choice. She had to concentrate. The hum filled the air as the second tier Interfused.

  The door to the room shook … but it didn’t open.

  Mira had shoved the dead bolt home right after she closed the door. It should keep them out long enough for her to make the third tier and finish the—

  She heard the metallic sound of a key fitting into the lock from the other side.

  Mira’s eyes widened. The simple idea that Armitage might have a key had never even occurred to her. She’d bought herself seconds only, not minutes.

  She forced her hands to move, placing one component after the other in a mass with the previous two tiers, blending them together, making sure the alignment was right and the polarity of the coins was correct and doing it all at breakneck speed.

  The lock clicked. The door began to groan open.

  Mira wrapped the components with green thread into a roughly triangular shape. The air flashed, and there was a hum as the artifact Interfused. She shoved it into her pocket and, at the last minute, grabbed her pack from the workbench and flung it toward the corner of the room.

  Her heart pounded as the door opened.

  “Time’s up. Pencils down.” Armitage stepped in, followed by Reiko. He was carrying the heavy black case with the radiation symbol, and the sight of it was almost enough to make Mira forget her anxiety. It was a reminder of why she was taking all the risk.

  “Why’d you lock the door?” Reiko asked, her eyes finding Mira the moment she stepped inside. Her daggers hung from their sheaths on her chest.

  Mira shrugged. “Room full of artifacts in Winterbay. Guess I’m paranoid.”

  “Paranoia’s a very good trait,” Armitage replied. “Keeps you alive. It’s what I would have expected from a Freebooter.”

  The three stared at one another in silence. If they had any suspicions about what she’d been doing down here or what she might have seen, Mira couldn’t tell. She told herself to stay alert nonetheless.

  Reiko had a coil of thick rope wrapped crosswise around her Bowie tee, and she threw two thick leather straps with clips onto the workbench. Mira slipped them both around her shoulders, crisscrossing her chest, and buttoned them together. Then she reached for the artifacts on the bench and started clipping them to the straps, trying not to let her shaking hands show.

  “You know, the reward for you is higher than any bounty I’ve ever seen,” Armitage said casually.

  Mira looked up at him warily, but Armitage stared back with an almost insulted look. “May be lucrative for a bounty hunter, but it’s spare change to me, girl. I’m a lot more interested in our arrangement. Makes me curious, though. What’d you do to earn that kind of attention from the Gray Devils?”

  Mira looked down. This wasn’t her favorite subject. “I used to be one of them,” she said. Armitage raised an eyebrow in interest. “I … made something I shouldn’t have. Something they wanted.”

  “Wanted pretty bad, looks like,” Armitage replied. “Artifact combination, I’d guess.”

  Mira just kept gearing up, clipping the artifacts she’d made to the straps. “Could be.”

  Armitage smiled. “Like I said, only thing I’m interested in is our arrangement.”

  “And I still don’t know what that arrangement really is. You still haven’t told me what this Machine’s protecting.” Mira tried to look nonchalant as she moved toward her pack in the corner where she’d thrown it.

  “Are you sure you really wanna know?” Armitage asked from behind. “Odds are you won’t like the answer.”

  “I think I’d like to know what I’m risking my life for, yeah,” Mira said. She slowly knelt down to her pack, and as she did, she pulled the triangular combination she’d made a moment ago out of her pocket.

  “But you do know.” Mira heard Armitage pat the black case. “You’re risking your life for this. Only one risking anything for the Machine is me.”

  “What are you risking, exactly?”

  “Lots of things.” Armitage looked at Reiko. “A valuable associate. Respect topside. All these artifacts I’ve collected over the years. You’re a Freebooter, you know better than most that risk comes with the game.”

  In a smooth motion she hoped was blocked by her back, Mira set the combination upright in the corner, making sure to face the business end toward the center of the room. No one behind her seemed to notice. “Are you gonna tell me or not?”

  Armitage paused. “An idea.”

  Mira grabbed her pack and slung it over her shoulder, looking at Armitage dubiously as she did. “The Machine is guarding … an idea?”

  “Told you you wouldn’t like it.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  Armitage studied her a moment. “Might not guess it now, but I grew up in a pretty unintimidating environment; nice, cushy, cardboard cutout neighborhood in Jersey. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t scary. All places have their scary parts, and mine was school. I didn’t fit in real well, and when people don’t fit in they usually end up adopting the same strategy: keep a low profile, stay off the radar. There was one kid, though, name was Max. Big brute of a kid, looked about ten years older than he was, and he was a tyrant. Sent more than one kid to the hospital, did a stint in juvenile, the usual, and it seemed no matter how low I tried to keep, he always spotted me. I took four beatings by Max before I finally got tired of it.”

  Mira reached the workbench again and leaned against it, trying to keep herself in between Armitage, Reiko, and the combination she’d left in the corner. Everything depended on them not seeing it sitting there.

  “I had this real nice bike my dad got me,” he kept on. “It was a Schwinn racer, red and silver, I still remember it. Everyone at school dug that bike, including Max. He told me lots of times he was going to take it, take it and hurt me real bad. So every day after school for a week I deflated my front tire and got my air pump out. I waited for Max, kept my back to the yard, let him see me, alone, with the bike. One day, eventually, he took the bait.”

  Armitage’s gaze lost its softness, and he stared into Mira in a disconcerting way. However old this story was, it still had a certain power over him. It had been formative, this experience.

  “Back then air pumps were solid and heavy, felt like two crowbars in your hand, one inside the other. He came up from behind, overconfident, loud … and I spun and clipped his right knee with the pump, dislocated it, I think. Then I beat him. Bad. Broke his nose, knocked some teeth loose, fractured his skull, cracked a rib, I’m pretty sure, and when it was done I left him lying there, bleeding. Funny thing was, he never told anyone. Probably because he was too busy. Every day after that, some new kid jumped him and got his own revenge. It was like watching sharks in a feeding frenzy.” He smiled slightly then. “I realized I hadn’t actually been scared of Max at all. I’d been scared of the idea of Max. Everyone in that place had been told Max was the baddest kid there, so they believed it, until the reality was shown to them, and then things changed pretty damn fast. I learned from that. I learned it’s people’s perception that matters, it’s what they believe. And belief always comes from ideas, Mira, and the takeaway is, those ideas don’t have to be anything close to the truth for people to accept them. A single idea, the right kind, can inspire incredible things … or incite horrors beyond description. Wars, crusades, miracles, inventions, they all started as ideas. They’re the world’s real currency, before the Assembly and now. Maybe now more than ever.”

  Mira studied him back, things
not entirely lining up. “But from the way you describe the Machine, it sounds like a vault,” Mira said. “An idea isn’t something tangible. You can’t just lock one up.”

  “Can’t you?” Armitage asked, his cold, crystal-clear eyes focusing on Mira’s, a hint of amusement in them.

  It sounded insane. Armitage wasn’t crazy, though, Mira was sure of it. He was ambitious and dangerous, but he was sane. Which meant there was something to what he was saying, she just didn’t know what.

  “Suppose we’ll find out. After tonight, my guess is Winterbay’s gonna be a very different place,” Armitage said. Nearby, Reiko smiled. He nodded to her and looked at the door out of the room. “Time to go, girls. Make me proud.”

  Mira started for the door and found the relief she felt ironic. So far, she had pulled everything off. No one seemed to know she had planted that last combination. No one seemed to know she had seen what was in the room across the hall. Those were victories … but she had a feeling she hadn’t faced the worst of what Winterbay—or Armitage, for that matter—had in store for her.

  Then again, it didn’t matter, did it? She was past the point of no return now, and she’d see it through. She had to. The plutonium was worth all the risk.

  Needs

  The two girls stood at the bow of an old tanker in the rumbling Underworks, staring into the shadows ahead of them. “I’m guessing that’s it,” Mira said, trying not to sound amazed but fairly sure she wasn’t pulling it off.

  “I think it’s a safe bet, yeah,” Reiko replied, not pulling it off either.

  They’d been moving for over an hour through the Underworks. It was no bigger a place than the city above, but the haphazard way you had to navigate it meant it took much longer than it should. There were no straight paths here in the dark; you had to jump between the various boats and platforms, and sometimes you had to go the complete opposite direction of where you wanted. Even so, eventually, they got there, watching the boats thin out until there was nothing left but black water and a giant round shape looming out of the darkness ahead of them, like some kind of rusted monolith.

  Their flashlights revealed it was the beginning of a massive steel cylinder, its sides stretching out of sight in both directions. Shining their lights upward showed where it pushed through the “roof” of the Underworks about ten feet above them. A single bridge connected it to the tanker, ending in a steel door set into its exterior.

  The girls stared at the bridge hesitantly, the reality starting to sink in. Before, the Machine had been an intangible, arbitrary goal, maybe something that didn’t even really exist, and Mira’s anxiety had been reserved for her fear of Armitage, but now, staring at it in the dark, taking in the size and scope of … whatever it was, things were feeling much more immediate. And ominous. What the hell had she gotten herself into?

  “You were in the room, you saw the chair,” Reiko casually stated next to her. “Left the door cracked, must have run out of there pretty fast.” Her voice was calm and level, holding no indication of threat or malice, but Mira felt her blood turn to ice regardless. She had no way to know what Reiko’s intentions might be. Mira was still valuable to her boss—she had his artifacts, and according to him she was the one person who could get him what he wanted—but still, she’d seen a lot more than she should have. “You must really need that plutonium.”

  Mira swallowed. “Why do you say that?”

  “You had a chance to leave. You didn’t take it. Even though you saw what you saw.”

  “Is that what you would have done?” Mira asked back, trying to keep the shakiness out of her voice.

  Reiko shrugged in the dark. “Don’t know. Not sure what it is you need it for, but whatever the reason, simple truth is you want it too bad. You’re gonna screw it up.”

  “So I’ve been told.” Mira felt a tiny sliver of desperation under her fear. It was more or less exactly what Olive had said. She looked at Reiko, and Reiko looked back. “Don’t suppose you’d let me slip out the back door, then?”

  Reiko smiled and shook her head.

  Mira nodded. It didn’t matter; she’d made her choice an hour ago. “It doesn’t bother you? Working for someone like him?”

  Reiko’s stare turned dark. “You don’t know who’s been in that chair or why. Sometimes you have to make hard choices. Sometimes people need encouragement to do the right thing.”

  “Is that what he tells you? Is that how you justify dumping bodies into the lake?”

  “You don’t know me. And you don’t know him.”

  “I know enough. I know you think of him as a father, but the truth is, he stole what little youth you had, sent you away to a brutal place where you learned brutal things and came back like some sort of tool for him to use. And you know what else? I know if you hadn’t have gone to the White Helix, if you’d told him no, you would’ve ended up right back with those same kids your brother gave—”

  Reiko’s knife flashed so quick and smooth from her sheath, the only thing that registered in Mira’s senses was the sudden feel of the cold blade against her throat. She didn’t say anything else, just tried to keep her eyes on Reiko’s.

  The Asian girl studied her with an unreadable look. “You don’t know me. And you don’t know him,” she reiterated slowly. Only the fire in her soft voice gave away that the girl was feeling any emotion at all under the surface. She stared at Mira a second more, then nodded toward the bridge. “We got things to do.”

  The knife flashed back into its sheath, and Mira turned, feeling her heart beating wildly. What else was new? Ever since leaving Midnight City, Mira had been holding on by a thread, trying to keep everything from falling apart. The feeling the ground was about to give out beneath her was a constant sensation now. Everything she did was one desperate gamble or another, and the worst part was, she didn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. Not yet.

  If she could get that plutonium …

  Maybe Reiko and Olive were right, maybe she did want it too badly, but it didn’t change anything. It was what she needed, what she had to have, and she would keep going until she did … or until the end.

  Trust

  The bridge swayed dangerously as Mira stepped onto it, followed by Reiko, and walked toward the door inset in the giant cylinder. Even this close, the huge contraption still stretched out of sight, disappearing into the dark beyond the reach of their lights. Yet the door itself was anticlimactic at best. It was just a door, a big, thick one, but that was all. Somehow, though, it made the other side all the more ominous …

  Both girls stared at the door warily. “After you,” Reiko intoned.

  Mira frowned and grabbed the latch, yanked it down, and started pushing the giant hatch inward.

  It was so heavy, it barely moved. Reiko joined in, pushing along with Mira, and old, rusted hinges groaned as the whole thing yawned backward, revealing absolute, pure blackness beyond.

  The girls hesitated, staring into the shadows. Then, together, they stepped into the interior of the Machine.

  The darkness was thick and tangible. Their footsteps echoed strangely as they moved.

  Mira jumped at a series of sudden loud thuds. With each sound, a different circular swath of fluorescent lights flickered to life, one after the other, rising up and filling the huge cylinder all the way to the top. Some of them sparked and died. Others remained dark, long since dead, but most worked, and they filled the interior with the hum of electricity.

  Mira tensed, expecting explosions, or lasers, or a giant bladed pendulum for all she knew … but there was nothing.

  Just the hum of the lights.

  The walls were circular, a combination of bare metal and rust, and there was something else, Mira noticed. The interior of the Machine was smaller than the outside. There was a gap between the interior walls and the exterior. A big one. It was probably where the Machine’s hydraulics rested.

  The floor was metal like the walls, and, most strikingly, in the center of the room was a giant
grooved column, like a huge cog, that rose up from the floor and stretched all the way to the top of the shaft, two hundred feet or more above them.

  Other than that, the giant room was completely empty. Mira wasn’t sure what to think.

  Reiko moved farther in, and Mira slipped off her pack and dropped it in front of the door. It groaned as it began to shut, wedging against the pack, unable to close. Reiko turned back to Mira and studied her curiously.

  “I’m guessing the door’s the trigger,” Mira explained. “When it shuts, whatever’s gonna happen … is probably gonna happen.”

  Reiko thought about it, nodded in agreement, then turned back around. Mira crept cautiously forward, her eyes scanning the walls. They weren’t as smooth as she had first thought. They were individual panels of metal, and she could see the seams between them. There was something else, too: the faint outlines of rectangular slots in the walls, all different sizes and lengths. It looked like they could open—but there was no indication what might come out.

  “Look,” Reiko said behind her. The girl was studying the giant grooved column in the center of the room. She pointed to something up and down its length. More slots that could open and shut, but, unlike the ones on the walls, these were all circular. Seeing them made Mira’s nervousness begin to rise.

  “There’s more on the walls,” Mira replied. “Whatever it is, it’s gonna come at us sideways.”

  “Yeah,” Reiko replied.

  Mira studied the room more closely. Something was wrong about it all, her instincts told her. Something about the environment itself didn’t make sense. She tried to force her mind to make the connection, to figure out what it was. It only took a second.

  “If this place has really killed dozens of people,” she slowly said, “where are all the bodies?”