“You think I’m here for something important,” Zoey said, and it wasn’t a question.
The old man considered her. “If you are what I think you are … then yes. I would believe that. I’d believe it’s no coincidence that you’re here, Zoey. In this place, at this time. In fact, where you’re concerned … I’d wager that coincidences cease to exist altogether.”
Zoey looked away from the curtain and back at the Librarian, confused.
“It doesn’t make sense, I know. But it will, Zoey. And sooner than you might think.” They held each other’s gaze a long time before he finally spoke again. “Set the artifacts down—you can finish it later,” he told her, and Zoey set the last of the artifacts on the shelves. “To the side of the curtain is a small chest on a shelf, made of golden wood. Open it and take one of the coins inside. They are Strange Lands coins, so use caution—don’t remove it from the plastic sleeve until it’s time.”
“How will I know when?” Zoey asked.
“You will know, little one,” the old man answered. “I have no doubt of that. Go now.”
Zoey hesitated; then she motioned Max to follow her. He jumped to his feet and padded ahead of her up the steps that led past the rows of desks and chairs of the study area, toward the red and blue curtain. When they reached it, Zoey looked at a row of shelves to the left side and saw a small antique chest, which had been brushed a long time ago with a dry, gold substance that flaked off it like old leaves.
Zoey opened the chest, and inside lay dozens of quarters, tarnished and faded, each in separate plastic sleeves. She grabbed one of them in her hand. It was the first time she’d ever held a Strange Lands coin, and she felt it subtly vibrate and pulse, moving around in her palm. She gripped it tighter to stop it from squirming out.
Zoey looked at the thick curtain in front of her.
She couldn’t see past it; there was no indication of what was on the other side. Whatever was there apparently was the reason she’d come all this way, why she had traversed such a dangerous path. Now that she was faced with the truth of it all, an ending of sorts, it was suddenly not the easiest thing to draw open that curtain.
She did as she always did now when faced with difficult moments like this. She asked herself what Holt and Mira would do, and the answer was always the same: They would be brave, she told herself. They would do what they had to do.
Zoey reached for the curtain and pulled it open.
Nothing but darkness waited for her beyond. The entrance to another tunnel stretched out of sight and into the shadows far ahead. Max whined apprehensively next to her. She knew how the dog felt. Zoey exhaled a long, slow breath, and together, they stepped past the curtain.
* * *
THE LIFT JARRED AS IT lurched to a halt directly in front of one of the Vault’s many ledges. The initial plummet had been so steep, Holt had thought he was going to fly up into the ceiling, and when it stopped, his stomach felt like it had dropped into his shoes. He’d been sure the entire contraption was going to come apart in midair and send them hurtling to the cavern floor below.
But the lift had held, and it had stopped. He looked at Mira, and she was smiling back at him, seemingly unfazed by the experience. “What?” he asked, frowning.
“I don’t know why,” she said with an amused look, “but it’s very cute seeing you scared.”
“I’m not scared,” Holt insisted, even though his heart was still pounding.
Mira took his hand as she moved past him. “Come on,” she said, and her arm brushed against his. The quick, soft feel of her and the scent of her hair helped to slow his pulse.
Holt let her pull him out of the lift, and as she did, he took in the sight of the Vault up close. At the top, it had been deceiving to look at—the rows of hung shelves and cabinets that spiraled down the walls looked like they had somehow been bolted or attached to the rock—but from here, it was clear that the architecture was much more complicated.
Just outside the lift was a rocky outcrop that had been cut into the cavern’s walls, one of many Holt could see: a man-made ledge that stretched probably a hundred feet in either direction, and another twenty feet or so into the cavern wall. It was on this ledge that the cabinets sat, two rows deep. The pattern continued all around him, up and down the circular cavern’s walls, stretching out of sight in every direction. Ledges, cut into the rock, containing hundreds of cabinets and shelves, and within them, thousands of artifacts.
Holt stepped out of the lift onto the ledge and made the mistake of looking down. In spite of how far the lift had unceremoniously dropped them, they were still very, very far from the bottom of the chasm. He quickly moved forward, out of sight of the drop below. As he did so, he noticed the cabinets were all labeled, and the labels placed inside etchings of the δ symbol.
Mira walked to a specific cabinet, pulling Holt gently along, and turned down its row. “What does that symbol mean, anyway?” Holt asked, watching the way her red hair brushed the turn of her neck.
“Which one?” Mira asked back.
“The one you guys put everywhere, the one that means ‘artifact.’ The one on these shelves, the upside-down Q thing.”
“It’s called the Feigenbaum constant,” she said absently, scanning the artifacts on the shelf. “In the World Before, it was a number that appeared everywhere in nature, in things that were supposed to be random but really weren’t. Dripping faucets, falling leaves, blooming flowers. It was one of the main numbers in chaos theory.”
“But why choose it to mean artifacts?”
“Ask the Librarian—he’s the one who picked it,” she answered. “But I’d guess it’s because the artifacts themselves are pretty much pure natural chaos.”
Holt followed her progress through the shelves. “Who was the old man before the invasion?”
“A scientist, a famous one, but that’s all I know,” she said. “He doesn’t talk much about the past. But he was the first one to travel the Strange Lands, the first to see the core. No one knows more about that place than him. Hell, no one probably knows more about anything than him now.”
Mira kept examining the shelves, and it was then that Holt finally looked at them himself. His stomach tightened as he realized he was surrounded by not just artifacts, but major ones as well. Potent artifacts from deep inside the Strange Lands, things that didn’t need to be combined with other pieces in order to do frightening things. These were powerful enough on their own.
Next to him, a bright, prismatic, laserlike beam shot out from the lens of an old microscope. What Holt would see if he looked through it, he had no desire to know. On the other side of him, the two pieces of an old, faded slide rule floated and rotated around each other, like a planet and a moon, inside a large cork-sealed glass jar. On the right, a small clock stood ticking away time, but its hands were moving backwards, not forward, and they glowed with a dim yellow light. And there were more, many more, all around him, stretching to the end of the row, lining the shelves and filling the ledge with colors and flickering light and strange sounds.
Ahead of him, Mira came to a stop, looking at something specific on the second shelf of a cabinet. “Here,” she said, and Holt didn’t need to be Zoey to read the apprehension in her expression. He looked to see what all the fuss was about.
Admittedly, it didn’t seem all that threatening. It was an abacus, Holt knew, an ancient counting device, with little red beads that slid across tiny wires in a wooden frame. It wasn’t glowing or moving; it didn’t pulse or float or make strange sounds. It just sat there, silent and unassuming.
It made Holt all the more wary.
“You’ll have to carry it,” Mira said, looking away from the artifact to stare at him now. “I can’t hold it with my artifact. They might not affect one each other, but then again, they might, and as dangerous as they both are, I don’t want to risk it.”
Holt looked at the simple abacus, sitting serene on its shelf. He wanted to argue the issue, but what was the point
? It was their only way out of here, wasn’t it? He forced himself to reach out and take the thing.
Nothing happened. It sat cold in his hand, feeling no different from any other item. He studied it cautiously nonetheless. “How does it work?” Holt asked, keeping his eyes on the thing. “You know, so I know how not to activate it.”
Mira held him in a skeptical look. “I think it’s safer not answering that,” she said.
43. ORACLE
ZOEY AND MAX MOVED DOWN the dark tunnel that lay behind the curtain. The little girl was scared, but she pushed forward regardless, holding the slightly vibrating quarter in her hand, reminding herself to be like Holt and Mira. Max padded along silently behind her, and whenever she stopped, he bumped his fuzzy head into the backs of her knees.
She didn’t get the sense that the tunnel was all that long, but it was moving in a curve, and since she had started down it, a glowing red light had been building ahead of her, becoming brighter and brighter. The light didn’t flicker or waver: it was constant, providing the only real illumination inside the dark tunnel. Whatever it was, it was just around the end of the curve.
A few more steps, and Zoey came face-to-face with it … and it was nothing like she expected.
In front of her sat a machine about as big as a refrigerator, with a base of wood and the top half encircled in a square of glass. It was once painted in colorful colors, but now it was faded and old. Along the top, the words DORINA THE DIVINER were written in an elaborate script whose paint had mostly worn away from years of weathering.
She stepped closer, finally able to see what sat inside the glass box at the top of the machine. When she did, Zoey jumped back in fright, almost tripping over Max.
Inside the glass, the slumped, lifeless body of an old lady stared back at her through the glowing red light. Around her head was a sparkling, jewel-encrusted cloth. Dozens of chipped and broken gold necklaces draped down her neck. Zoey tensed, staring at the figure inside, expecting her to leap straight through the glass … but the old woman just lay there completely still, her eyes open and staring sightlessly, blankly ahead. Max growled low behind Zoey, apparently not liking the figure much either.
It took a moment for the truth to connect in Zoey’s mind. The woman was not—nor ever had been—real. Looking closer, Zoey saw that the woman was actually made of wood. There was only half of her, the top half. One of her wooden arms had fallen off, and Zoey could see the mechanical parts and gears that had once probably made her move and gesture and maybe even speak. The machine looked like something you would find in an old carnival, and it had definitely seen better days.
Zoey moved closer, staring into the blank eyes of the gypsy. Red light bled out from the machine in spite of the fact that there was no way it could be plugged in and working here. A slight rumbling emanated from the box, which Zoey could hear when she was close enough, deep and low but muted, like the crashing of a waterfall from someplace far away. Still, those things were the only indications the machine was anything other than what it appeared to be.
Zoey’s eyes traveled down the front of it … then stopped as she noticed the slot on the bottom half, inside the ring of the faded question mark. A rusted, metallic one, just the right size for a quarter.
She knew she had come to her moment. A decision point. There were no feelings to guide her here, nothing to tell her what to do. But she knew anyway.
Zoey carefully unwrapped the coin in her hand and held it over the slot. The far-off rumbling seemed to grow louder now. Behind her, Max whined uneasily, watching Zoey, reading her intentions.
“It’ll be okay,” she said, trying to assure herself as much as the dog. “I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but it’ll all be okay.” Max looked at her, unconvinced.
Zoey looked back to the coin that hovered over the slot, and sighed. As always, going back wasn’t a real choice. Pushing forward was her only option.
With forced courage, Zoey shoved the coin into the slot.
* * *
IT WAS LIKE ZOEY had been sucked into space. Light receded and swirled away until everything around her was an impossibly dense field of pitch black, completely absent of anything resembling light, and Zoey floated through it all in a delirium of senses, none of which worked the way she was used to. Touch, sound, sight, smell—they all morphed and bled into one another, and she couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began.
As Zoey floated, she felt the rumbling again, growing and building and rushing toward her like the footfalls of a thousand horses, but she couldn’t see it coming, whatever it was. She tried to duck or spin, to twist out of the way, but in that solid haze of blackness, there was no way to tell if she was even moving at all.
The sound grew louder and stronger until it roared over her, filling her fractured, disjointed senses with an intense surge of noise and heat. Zoey tried to scream, but nothing came. In this place, she had no mouth, no lungs, nothing physical to her at all … and the realization was frightening.
The rumbling went on, roaring around her, sweeping her down and away toward a place that felt both solid and intangible, a nowhere place. But a place nonetheless. When she reached it, her consciousness, such as it was, filled with imagery.…
* * *
ZOEY SAW A GIRL.
This girl was younger. Much younger. So young, she hadn’t yet learned to speak.
The little girl was in a crowd, with her mother. It was dark, and stars filled a clear black sky.
The girl had never been allowed to stay up this late, but tonight was special. Tonight was the meteor shower her mother had told her about.
They were gathered with dozens of other people on top of an overlook, where the lights of a city flashed in the distance.
The girl’s mother hoisted the giggling child up onto her shoulders. It was one of her favorite things, Zoey somehow knew, seeing the world from her mother’s vantage, being so high up.
Zoey didn’t wonder where the girl’s father was. She simply knew he had never been there. For as long as the little girl had been aware, there had only been her mother. And that had always been enough.
Zoey heard the mother’s voice tell the girl to look up, and saw her finger pointing to the stars.
The little girl followed the gesture excitedly, and gasped. Above them, the stars were moving. They were falling. Streaking through the sky in pinpricks of light.
But something seemed wrong. They weren’t as far away as she would have thought.
In fact, they seemed very close. Too close. And they were coming closer still.
As Zoey and the little girl watched, the falling stars transformed before her eyes into trails of fire, raining through the sky all around them, stretching from horizon to horizon, hundreds of them. Maybe thousands …
It became clear one of the “stars” was directly above them, falling toward the city in the distance. It was huge, they could tell, even from this far. The little girl never would have guessed stars could be so big.
Screams erupted in the crowd. Zoey and the little girl watched as the people around them began to run. They slammed into the mother, and the woman struggled to keep a grip on the girl.
The woman turned to run herself … and then stopped, as above them, the sky suddenly ripped itself apart in a maelstrom of sound and color.
Zoey and the little girl looked up in time to see the air all around the falling “star” waver in a strange way … and then, impossibly, watched the huge shape begin to slow as it fell, as if it were somehow freezing in place in the air.
A wave of clear, rippling energy erupted from the huge thing, flaring powerfully outward.
The mother screamed, pulled the little girl from her shoulders, held her tight …
… and then the wave hit and everything went white.
Zoey was there when the little girl awoke, watched her groggily come to. She was alone, they both realized at the same time. The mother was gone. So was the crowd of people. She was the only one le
ft, and there was no explanation why.…
It was early morning now. Dim, yellowish light was everywhere, but the sun was hidden. Where was it? The sky above her was a strange, sickly shade of orange, like nothing she had ever seen.
The little girl looked around in fear. Where had everyone gone? Why was she alone? Where was her mother?
Zoey watched the girl slowly pull herself forward, toward the edge of the high point they had been standing on earlier. When she saw where she was, her eyes widened.
The city was burning ruins now. But that was the least of what she and Zoey saw.
What was in front of them was almost beyond description.
Amid the fractured landscape, they saw huge tornadoes of swirling black energy. Lightning that flashed in bright streaks of purple and red. They saw rolling waves of energy, glittering spheres of light and dark … and something like a tower in the distance, split in half, frozen in the air, spanning high above what remained of the city.
And then something roared above the little girl.
They looked up, and the sky was filled with machines painted blue and white, listing and turning in the crazy currents of wind and energy that swept through everything.
One of them hovered over her, descending down, closer and closer, the sound of its engines whining loudly.
There was a flash as a metallic claw attached to a long length of cable shot down toward her.
The moment it fired, Zoey realized she wasn’t watching the little girl anymore; she was no longer an outside observer.
Zoey was the little girl, looking through her eyes as the Vulture claw raced toward her.
The girl was her, Zoey now knew. This was who she used to be.
And then the claw slammed into her, and everything went black.
* * *
THE DARKNESS ENVELOPED ZOEY again, a solid, unmoving pitch black of nothingness.
The rumbling swarmed around her still, furious and loud and unknowable. To Zoey, it felt like she was swept upward now, through the dark, but there was no real way to know. Here, there was no up or down, no true direction at all.
Midnight City: A Conquered Earth Novel (The Conquered Earth Series) Page 32