Midnight City (29 page)

“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.”

“This is the leader of the faction you belonged to?” Holt asked in surprise.

“Lenore and I had a … complicated relationship,” Mira said. “In lots of ways, she was like a sister. A mentor, even. But the pressure to hold on to the Prime Movership is intense. It would probably change anyone for the worse. Eventually, when you start to run out of conventional ways to stay on top, you start looking for other alternatives.
Any
alternatives.”

“But she never found the artifact? You’re sure?” Holt asked.

“They never found it and they never will, not without me,” she said. “It’s the only reason I’m not dead. But before I escaped, Lenore came up with a new way to pressure me.”

“Ben,” Holt guessed, and Mira nodded. “Who is he?”

Mira felt a twinge of nervousness. Ben was the one thing she didn’t want to discuss with Holt, but the way she saw it, he deserved the basics at least. “Ben was …
is
a friend. A close one, a Freebooter in the Gray Devils. Lenore had him accused and found guilty of Point Fabrication, just like me. It’s the most severe crime you can commit here, and it carries a death sentence. She said if I told her where the artifact was, she would let us go. We wouldn’t have our Points anymore, we were Unmentionable, but we could live. As long as she got the artifact.”

“And you said no,” Holt said.

“I said no … and then I escaped,” Mira answered, feeling the sting of the decision all over again. “There was no way to get Ben. I … I left him here. With Lenore. I gambled she would keep him alive for leverage, but for all I know, he’s already dead. And if he is, it’s my fault.” The anguish in her voice was palpable, and Mira felt Zoey’s hand on hers.

“You know that’s not true,” Holt said softly. “You couldn’t let Lenore have that thing. If you did, you’d be responsible for a lot more than just Ben’s death. You did the only thing you could—you did the brave thing.”

“Yeah?” Mira asked. “Well, it sure doesn’t feel that way.”

Holt was silent, thinking, and she felt his eyes on her. “You’ve come all the way back here,” he said. “Risked everything to do it. But why, Mira? What do you want to do?”

Mira looked back at Holt. There was something about him that was different from everyone else in her life. She knew what it was. He’d sacrificed his own interests for hers. He was here for her when it would be much better for him to be somewhere else. Those were unheard of gestures in the world as it was now, and from what she knew of Holt, they were just as unheard of for him. Yet, here he was.…

Mira smiled at him, gently stroked his face with her hand. Then her stare hardened as she contemplated what they had to do, and she knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

“There’s someone we have to go see,” Mira said.

Holt looked back at her with more than a little trepidation. To be honest, Mira felt the same way, but she laid out her plans all the same, talking as they finished the rest of their tea.

32.
THE CESAR

WHEN HOLT AND THE OTHERS REACHED
the main gate, they were instantly stopped by Los Lobos compound guards: two big, older kids wearing auburn red, the color of their faction, the black of the Tone creeping through their eyes.

“No visitors today, we don’t want Pledges,” one of the guards said. “You can turn around and head back.”

“We’re definitely not here to Pledge,” Mira said as she lowered the hood from her head. “Tell Cesar that Mira Toombs wants to see him.”

The guards stared at Mira like she was a ghost. Zoey chuckled at the looks on their faces.

“Wait here,” one of them mumbled before running into the compound on the other side of the gate. A few minutes later, he reemerged with four other Lobos, two more boys and two girls. “The Cesar will see you. But the dog stays outside—there’s no animals in the compound.”

“I’ll stay with the Max,” Zoey said, kneeling down and wrapping her hands around the dog protectively. Holt looked up to Mira questioningly.

“She’ll be fine,” Mira said. “We’re guests under the faction’s protection. For the moment, anyway.”

Holt didn’t see that they had much choice, and he looked back at Zoey. “We’ll be back in a minute, kiddo,” Holt said, and Zoey smiled up at him. She didn’t seem worried at all.

Holt envied her.

He was in as uncharted a territory as he’d ever been, and he was following someone else’s lead on top of it. He didn’t like not being the one making the decisions. He just hoped Mira knew what she was doing.

They walked through the main gate into the compound, flanked on all sides by guards, and while they were definitely being “protected,” it didn’t do much to put Holt’s mind at ease.

Major factions in Midnight City were given caverns of their own in which to build compounds, and Los Lobos had one made of concrete and strong wood. It looked more like a fort than a clubhouse, somehow blended and bolted into the chaotic shapes of the cavern walls, which only reinforced it further. It was blocky, but it wasn’t all utilitarian. The concrete had been spray-painted graffiti style in shades of red, with swirling images and letters all centering around a huge stylistic rendering of a wolf’s head that covered the main wall.

“Los Lobos’ specialty is construction,” Mira told Holt quietly. “It’s the source of their Points. With the exception of the Gray Devils’ aqueducts, they built pretty much every structure in Midnight City, including the other faction compounds.”

Ahead of them was the main entryway, and it was an amazing sight: a giant refurbished bank vault door that had been bolted into a steel frame in the compound’s main wall. It still had the hand levers and combination lock, but they were backwards, facing toward the interior of the compound.

So it could be locked from the inside, Holt realized. He studied it appreciatively. It had been no small feat, repurposing something that big.

“How’d they get that all the way down here?” Holt asked. The door must have weighed several tons, at least.

“No one but Los Lobos knows that,” Mira said as they passed through the door. “But it involved artifacts, probably a Portal combined with half a dozen Aleves. Whatever they did, it took them only one night. Pretty impressive, and it got them a lot of Points.”

On the Scorewall, Midnight City reserved twelve spots for what were simply called “factions,” organized groups of resident survivors who lived and made their way together, not unlike the thousands of congregations that existed on the surface. The difference was, the factions were interested in Points.

A faction’s Points were determined by a complicated equation that took into account the point totals of its members, of its enemies, and of the achievements and failings of the faction as a whole. The faction that had the most Points was called the Prime Movers, a position that granted it a dominant voting percentage on the city’s supreme council. Which essentially meant, in no uncertain terms, that the Prime Movers ran Midnight City.

The current Prime Movers were the Gray Devils, Mira’s old faction, and they had held the title for more than three years.

After the main door, the concrete of the exterior gave way to yet more cavern walls. The outside was a fortified façade, Holt saw, which protected the more diverse cavern system of the compound beyond.

But it wasn’t just a cavern, either. A small “hall” opened up into an enormous room, several hundred feet in diameter. There were natural formed ledges on some of the walls, and ladders led up to them. On the ledges, Holt saw dozens of doors of all shapes and colors and origins built into nooks and crannies, leading to different parts of the compound.

But it was the huge room itself that was most impressive.

Dozens of cone-shaped stalactites dripped downward from far above, each circled with strings of Illuminators, hanging like petrified Christmas trees from the ceiling and bathing the room in a warm glow of pale white. The ceiling itself had been polished smooth, like rough wood sanded down.

And on the smooth surface, in between the stalactite formations, was an incredible collection of graffiti art. Images and symbols and shapes and writing, and not just in auburn red like the ones outside, but a myriad of colors that filled the ceiling, sparkling brightly underneath the stalactites.

Scaffolding and rope climbed up to the center of the ceiling, where a boy hung on his back, wearing goggles and a mask, and holding cans of paint in both hands. He was spraying the ceiling above him, adding to the giant canvas’s already brilliant colors, bringing to life a flowing script of writing.

The letters weaved in and out of a series of stalactites, a mix of purple and red and blue. Whatever it said, it was written in Spanish.

“Cesar!” one of the guards yelled up at the boy. He kept painting; if he’d heard the call, he showed no sign. “
Cesar!
There’s a Gray Devil in the hall.”

The spray paint in the boy’s hand shut off, but he didn’t look down. “You’re wrong,” the boy said, and he slapped a set of clamps on his chest. The ropes that held him to the ceiling dropped him toward the floor, and he rode them down easily, slapping the clamps back into place right before he hit, stopping his fall. “She’s not a Gray Devil anymore. Are you, Mira?”

The boy who stood before them was all of fifteen, Hispanic with curly black hair, wearing a red T-shirt over black cargo pants, and easily the shortest person in the room. But short or tall, the way the other kids in the hall eyed him warily suggested he had a way of commanding respect. He stepped out of the harness, keeping his gaze on Mira.

“No, Cesar,” Mira said. “Not anymore.”

Cesar handed the two cans of spray paint to one of the other boys without looking at him and removed his mask and goggles. “My Sistine Chapel,” he said, motioning to the multicolored ceiling above them and smiling proudly. “What do you think?”

“I think it took a lot of paint,” Mira said without much enthusiasm. At the dismissive comment, the other faction members tensed.