The buildings stood tall above them as they moved. There were makeshift windows all through them, but no glass. You didn’t really need glass down here, Holt figured: there was no rain or wind to keep out. Inside, he could see other lanterns, people shuffling about, survivors at work in shops.
Hanging from the ceiling, far above, were twelve huge banners that draped heavily downward and hung motionless. Each had an Illuminator trained on it, lighting up the details. Each was a different set of colors, with some kind of unique symbol on it.
One was auburn red with a huge white wolf’s head stitched on the front. Another was green and showed a yellow sword. A third was orange and had a red shield sewn onto its center. In the middle hung the largest banner of them all. It was deep gray and white, and embossed onto both sides was a laughing devil’s face with a forked tongue snaking out of its mouth and horns on its head.
They were the banners of Midnight City’s factions, Holt knew, though he didn’t know which one was which. Mira certainly did, though. And he thought he saw her shiver at the sight of the imposing gray one.
As they walked, they passed underneath the arches of a large concrete and brick structure that stretched from one end of the cavern to the other, where it disappeared into smaller tunnels. Channels were built into its sides and top, and clear, sparkling water flowed through them, and Holt could hear it rippling as it drifted by. People were lined up along the channels, filling up bottles and jugs, hauling them back to their houses or workshops.
“It’s an aqueduct,” Mira said. “The city has almost twenty of them, and they’re all run by the Gray Devils.” She motioned to the same logo from the large banner above them, a horned white devil on a background of gray, which was also painted onto the walls of the archway.
“Where does the water come from?” Holt asked.
“From the Gray Devils’ cavern. There’s an underground river there,” Mira replied. “When they discovered it, they mined it all out and built the aqueducts. A year later, they were the most powerful faction in the city. Everyone needs water … so everyone needs the Gray Devils.”
They passed under the huge aqueduct and kept moving through the crowds and winding through the “streets” until they reached the city’s business district, an area formed inside a chutelike tunnel. The walls here were spaced only about forty feet apart, and the ceiling was less than twenty high. It was still big, but nothing like the main hall they had just come from.
Dozens and dozens of trading stalls were set up along the business district’s walls, selling everything from general supplies to jewelry, first aid kits to still-functional electronics, even luxury items like junk food, toys, crayons, skin moisturizer, and dusty bottles of soft drinks. Anything that there was a demand for and still existed in some quantity in the world you could find for trade here. Holt stared at it all. There was no other place he knew of where you could find so much trade merchandise and it was always surreal seeing this much product.
Holt noticed a lot of stalls bore the same δ symbol Mira wore on her pack.
It meant those stalls sold artifacts, and as Holt looked up and down the rows, he saw as many with the symbol as without. The wares at these stalls did fantastical things as they passed. Objects hovered or circled in the air, jars and bags glowed strange colors or flashed lights, things disappeared and reappeared, and cabinets lay full of minor artifacts ready for use in combinations, all of which seemed to somehow writhe and push away from one another … or maybe it was just a trick of the eye, Holt wasn’t sure. The sight of it all sent a chill down his spine.
“Why are there so many artifacts?” Zoey asked.
“Because Midnight City is right on the border of the Strange Lands,” Mira responded, staring at it all with lustful eyes. “It’s the first place Freebooters come to sell what they bring back.”
Holt glanced to his left and noticed a group of four kids standing at one of the artifact stalls, haggling with the Freebooter there. They looked like any other survivors, but there was something rough about them, a malicious energy that Holt recognized. He looked to the wrist of one … and saw a green snake etched there.
It was a tattoo. They were Menagerie.
Holt quickly turned his back to them, hiding his face. His left hand covered the glove on his right wrist. He could sense the pirates behind him, watched out of the corner of his eye carefully as they turned and left the stall. He waited until they disappeared into the crowd before he let himself relax.
His survival instincts roared like fire. He knew he shouldn’t have come here. This was Midnight City, after all—he was undoubtedly going to run into Menagerie, but he’d made a choice, and he had known the risks when he did so. In spite of the danger … he wasn’t ready to leave. He just hoped it wouldn’t be his last mistake.
“What is it?” Mira asked next to him.
His alarm must have been written all over his face, and he quickly wiped it away as best he could. “Nothing,” Holt replied. “Everything’s good.”
Mira studied him curiously, the wheels turning behind her eyes.
“I promise,” Holt said, trying to assure her. Mira was smart: she would know something was up, maybe even guess what it was. But she’d also know that right now, in the middle of the crowd, wasn’t the best place for the discussion. She considered him another moment … then took Zoey’s hand. The four moved on, blending in with the surging crowd, moving toward a new room on the other side of the stalls.
When they entered it, Holt saw that it was in every way almost as big as the main hall. Which was a good thing, because it was also the busiest, and Holt pulled Max close as they moved inside.
The bulk of Midnight City’s population seemed to be crammed into this huge oval-shaped cavern, throbbing and pulsing like waves trapped inside a jetty, staring and shouting at the room’s one dominating feature.
The cavern’s back wall was a hundred feet high and stretched to the sides for hundreds more. It had been laboriously polished to a smooth, flat, black surface, almost like a gargantuan chalkboard. Which was exactly how it was being used.
It was the Scorewall, Holt knew, and it was the single most important object in Midnight City.
Midnight City politics were a complicated and multifaceted ordeal that really made sense only to the people who lived there. Everything revolved around a complicated scoring system, where both individuals and groups were given (or penalized) Points based on who they were, whom they knew, what they had done, their position in their faction, their position in the city’s hierarchies, and hundreds of other requirements and rules. These Points could also be traded like currency between individuals and factions, which made earning them even more valuable.
The number of Points you had determined your standing in the city and the amount of power you could wield over those around you. Those with the highest Points got the first choice of food, the best living locations, more voice in the forums, higher ranks in the vocations. Shopkeepers with enough Points could shut down their competitors’ businesses. Freebooters with high Point totals could bring more profitable artifacts into the city, and traders could more easily corner a market on individual commodities. The gathering of Points was the central motivating force for everything that happened in Midnight City, and the Scorewall displayed a current, up-to-date representation of the totals for every faction, resident, and visitor in the city.
Faction names stood out on the right side of the wall. The farther you looked left, the more individuals you began to see, hundreds and hundreds of names, stretching out of sight in a blur of colored chalk toward the far edge of the wall, each with its own chalk-line box and number and the occasional footnote. To Holt, it looked like an impossible collection of information and data to manage, and the logistical implications made his head hurt.
Floating above the Scorewall were large, bright lights that lit up the giant surface along its entire length. The lights hovered in the air somehow, and when someone got in between them and t
he wall, they automatically shifted, up, down, left, right, in order to keep shining on the information. More artifacts, Holt guessed.
In front of the bright, floating lights, dozens of kids hung from ropes and pulleys attached to the cavern ceiling, allowing them not only to hover in front of the Scorewall, but also float up and down its length and height. They were called Scorekeepers, and they constantly moved around the wall, changing score totals based on the official information they received, writing in different colors of chalk, changing numbers, raising and lowering them, adding the occasional name.
The denizens of the city packed inside the giant chamber yelled up at the Scorekeepers as they did their jobs, shuffling back and forth. Everything was chaotic, energetic, ludicrous … and very weighted.
“Been here twice,” Holt said. “But never came in this room. Always heard about it, but … wow…”
“It’s hard to understand until you see it,” Mira said, taking it all in like it was the first time.
Holt watched the churning crowd, watched it shout and yell and celebrate and curse, all depending on the numbers that cycled this way and that as fast as the Scorekeepers could write them. “Everyone acts like this thing is life or death.”
“In Midnight City … it is.” She looked at him, held his gaze. “Want to see something?” She moved left, pushing through the crowd, and Holt and Zoey and Max followed after her.
At the very end of the Scorewall, where the list of residents ended, past the anonymous visitors and the frozen point totals of Freebooters who had gone missing in the Strange Lands, was a section of the wall with about thirty names on it. Each of the names had one thing in common: They were written in red chalk, and the number of Points next to them was 0.
“What is it?” Holt asked, gazing up at the names.
“It’s the part of the Scorewall that tracks the Unmentionables,” Mira said, “people who have had all their Points removed.”
She nodded to the topmost name in the section, almost in the far left corner. The box there was owned by MIRA TOOMBS. And next to the name was a single, lonely 0.
Mira glared up at it a long time, the emotions on her face switching between anger and bitterness and sadness. Holt let her look, said nothing while she did so. He had no idea what to say, anyway. He barely understood any of this, so how could he even begin to understand what she was feeling?
Eventually, she looked back at him. “Let’s get out of here,” she said crisply, and then began pushing back through the churning madness of people, as if the environment had suddenly turned toxic.
31. REVELATIONS
MIRA MOVED AS QUICKLY as she could out of the Scorewall room and leaned against a cavern wall, out of breath and shaking.
Seeing her name among the Unmentionables had way more of an effect than she’d expected. She knew it would be there—where else would it be? But, still, seeing it with the rest and that zero in the box, a zero that at one time had been more than ten thousand …
She shuddered at the loss; it felt like she’d been physically struck.
And there was something else: The Unmentionables box was kept in order of the names added. Which meant another name should have been right above hers. But it wasn’t.
Ben’s.
The person she’d come all this way to save. Mira didn’t know what that meant. Was he still on the main board? Or was he dead and they had moved it off completely?
Mira shook the thoughts from her head. None of them were helpful. That part of her life was over now, no matter what she did. But she had come here for something specific. She had a plan, and she would carry it out. She could still salvage some of the mess she’d made of everything.
Mira felt Holt’s hand gently touch her back. She wanted to turn and hug him, to feel his arms around her … but that wouldn’t help anything either. It would feel good, certainly, but it wouldn’t help.
She wiped away the beginning traces of tears from her eyes and turned around. “I’m okay,” she said, feeling Zoey’s hand slip into hers.
Holt studied her. “You know, if you want me to help,” he began, “it’d be good if I knew what was going on here.”
Mira stared back at him. He was right, of course: he probably should know. But she still wasn’t sure about having him help. This was her mess, and the idea of risking the lives of people she cared about to fix it didn’t sit well with her.
Mira took in the new room they’d entered. It was in the market district, which was different from the business district in that the wares sold here were mainly for residents. The smells of all types of food filled the air, sizzling on grills and hot plates. Items in bulk gleamed on shelves, either refurbished, salvaged, or newly made. The room was lined with people, plodding in between the stalls, trading for supplies.
Mira moved for a hut made out of an old, green Volkswagen van someone had found a way to get inside, with tables and a counter attached to it. A lone girl wearing the orange color of the Lost Knights stood behind the counter, and she smiled as Mira ordered three cups of tea. The shop had a good stockpile of tea bags on a shelf behind her, still in their dusty packaging.
When it was brewed, Mira offered the girl a small sewing and repair kit she’d picked up somewhere as trade. It was enough. Normally she would have traded Points, but as she’d just personally witnessed, she didn’t have those anymore. She, Holt, and Zoey sat down at a makeshift table attached to the doorframe of the old van, while Max curled up at Holt’s feet, gently chewing on his boot heel.
“I don’t like this,” Zoey said as she sipped her tea and crinkled her nose. “It’s not sweet.”
“It’s tea, sweetheart. Try some of this in it.” Mira pushed a tube of honey on the table toward the little girl.
Mira watched the crowd as it seethed past them, churning among the stalls and booths. They were completely surrounded by people who might recognize Mira, but she knew that wasn’t likely. If there was one thing certain about Midnight City, it was that it had a short attention span.
“Making artifact combinations always came easy to me,” Mira finally said. “The more complicated it was, the more I liked it. Portals. Chinooks. Magnatrons. But the best was when someone asked for something new, something that had never been made before. A new artifact, with new properties and powers.” She smiled as she remembered the feelings. “Making an established artifact can still be challenging, but there’s no sense of danger. It’s like putting a puzzle together you’ve done a dozen times before. But … a new combination? Starting from nothing, trying to figure out the right mix of components, the right Focusers, the right Essences? There’s nothing like it.”
Next to her, Zoey was still pouring the honey into her tea from the plastic squeeze bottle, and Mira took it from her with a frown. “That’s enough, Zoey, you’ll make yourself sick.”
The little girl sipped her tea, then looked up at Mira and smiled.
“So, you were making something new,” Holt guessed.
Mira nodded. “Something I’d experimented with for years, and as I got closer to finding the right pairings, I started passing over paid commissions to work on it. My Points started declining, the rest of the faction wondered what I was doing, why I kept making trips into the Strange Lands.”
Zoey looked up from her tea curiously. “What were you making, Mira?”
Mira ran a hand through the girl’s hair, straightening it. “An artifact that would slow down the Tone.” She felt Holt’s stare refocus on her. “And after a few dozen tries, I thought I had it, too. But I was wrong.”
“It didn’t work?” Holt asked.
“No, it worked,” she answered. “Just not the way I intended. I did something wrong—I still don’t know what, I never got to analyze it. But the artifact didn’t slow down the Tone. It did the opposite. It accelerated it, made it spread faster.
Holt shifted in his seat uncomfortably. “How much faster?” he asked.
“Less than a minute of exposure, and you’d Succumb,
no matter how young you were,” Mira said, looking back up at him. “Even if you were Heedless.”
“Wait a second…” Holt was trying to put the pieces together, and it wasn’t easy. “How could you know that’s what this thing would do?”
“Because I tested it,” Mira replied. “I tested it on myself.”
“Mira…” Holt’s voice dropped low.
“It was my creation, it was my responsibility, who else would I test it on?” she said before he could finish. “I probably lost six months to the Tone in the few seconds I used it. It was … awful. Like how the Tone is now, only worse, much worse. It felt like … things crawling around in my head…” Mira trailed off, not wanting to remember.
She could see the horror in Holt’s eyes. “God, anyone who had that could…” He paused as he processed the realization.
“Quietly get rid of anyone they wanted, for starters,” Mira said. “And if you were good enough, you could use that combination as the essence in a new one, extend and focus the ability, make it into a weapon you could project at dozens of people at the same time.”
“That has to be destroyed,” Holt said. Mira could hear the tightness in his voice, and it was a tightness reserved for people who had experienced the true horror of the Tone, who had watched the minds of people they knew be replaced with … nothing at all. Mira knew about his sister now, and she didn’t blame him.
“I tried to destroy it,” Mira said. “But the Interfusion had already sealed it. Which meant it could only be destroyed in the Strange Lands. Ben and I were going to take it back, make sure it was dismantled, but Lenore somehow found out about it.”
“Who’s Lenore?” Holt asked, but Mira could tell Lenore wasn’t the one he wanted to ask about.
“The leader of the Gray Devils,” Mira said. “Which means she has the most Points of any single individual in Midnight City. She is a very, very powerful person here, and she’s Heedless, like you. I still don’t know how she found out about it, but when she did, she came with all her guards to stop us from leaving. I did the only thing I could think of. I hid the artifact so Lenore couldn’t have it. For a Heedless, the power to wield the Tone like a weapon would be a horrible thing. She hasn’t faced the realities like you have, and she doesn’t care to.”
Midnight City: A Conquered Earth Novel (The Conquered Earth Series) Page 22