Winterbay (10 page)

A Gravitron mixed with an Aleve rattled your equilibrium in a major way, but Mira didn’t have much choice. Fortunately, dodging through the maze of cables as the artifact forced her upward was enough to make her forget.

Above, Reiko reached the highest cable in the room and perched on it, staring down at Mira impatiently.

Mira pushed in and out of the cables, flying upward, until she rammed unceremoniously into the metallic ceiling. She let the Gravitron go, and it floated up to the top, trying to push itself through. Mira didn’t have to touch the artifact for its effect to manipulate her gravity, just stay close to it, and it kept her pinned, upside down, on the ceiling.

“Ready?” Reiko asked, her eyes on the red buttons.

Mira nodded. “Do it!” Reiko leaped from her cable toward one button. Mira reached for another …

… but something flared in a half-circle of blackish light around each one. The girls’ hands bounced harmlessly off the black fields.

Mira tried again. So did Reiko, but the black energy was still there, and it was impenetrable. It was like trying to push through a wall.

Mira studied it in disbelief. She’d seen protective fields like that, lots of them, in fact—but it didn’t make sense at all. Not in
this
place.

Reiko dropped and perched on another cable as the walls kept closing in.

“They’re Barriers!” Mira yelled down to her. She couldn’t believe it. “Force fields … from
artifact combinations
!”

Reiko’s eyes widened. “That’s … that’s not possible.” True enough. The whole point of Winterbay was that artifacts were banned. So why did the Machine have
two
of them protecting its buttons?

The walls rumbled around them, kept pushing in, creeping closer. They had seconds now.

“What do we do?” Reiko shouted, a note of panic in her voice.

“I can deactivate them. Maybe…” She grabbed her pack and started digging through it in midair, praying she had what she needed, but the odds weren’t good …

Her hands burrowed through all the artifacts and combinations inside, searching by feel, looking.

“Freebooter!”
Reiko shouted in alarm. The walls were just feet away, creeping closer, threatening to crush them against the spinning gear in the center of what remained of the room.

Mira’s hands found something. It felt right. Her heart beat wildly as she yanked it out.

Another combination, made of a double-A battery, four dimes, a hexagon nut, a length of aluminum wire, and a small lightbulb that stuck out between layers of duct tape.

Mira exhaled in relief. It was a Rectifier. It was what she needed.

The walls moved closer …

Mira held the thing up toward the two buttons, shoving the Gravitron protectively out of the way. The air shimmered and wavered as she did, like water rippling after a stone’s throw. The black energy fields flared again—and then began to
dim
.

A Rectifier did just one thing: It canceled out the effects of artifacts and their combinations, and this one was nullifying the Barriers. Mira watched as both energy fields continued to fade, slowly, too slowly.

The walls kept pushing in, almost on them; she could feel them just to the side, could feel the spinning gear just feet away now.

The barriers dimmed a little more … and then burst apart in sparkles of dark light.

They were down. They could hit the buttons.

“Reiko!” Mira yelled. The girl shot up through the ever tightening shaft of the Machine.

Mira drove one of the red buttons home as Reiko slammed into hers.

Another air horn blast, this one longer and louder.

The Machine shook violently. The walls kept pushing in, shoving Reiko and Mira toward the huge spinning gear, about to grind them to pieces …

Everything stopped.

The Machine whined mournfully as its mechanics slowed and died. The walls began to retract, the cables unwinding from around the central gear. The floor, far below, snapped back into place, sealing away the dead drop. The portholes all around the room were closing.

Then a new floor appeared directly underneath the girls, as blades of metal closed around the central gear like the shutter of a camera, sealing off the view of the room below.

Reiko landed on it in a crouch, staring around cautiously. Mira dragged herself outside the sphere of the Gravitron and fell to the floor, too. It made a small, cramped chamber at the top of the Machine. The ceiling was only a foot or two above them.

The girls looked at one another, breathing heavily. They were scratched and banged up, exhausted … but that was all. They had done it. They had beaten the Machine. A Freebooter and a rogue White Helix.

In spite of everything, Mira smiled at Reiko. Reiko smiled back—

The tiny room shook as the central column vibrated … and then half of it rotated in on itself like a revolving door, revealing a ladder that scaled downward. Mira and Reiko stared at it curiously. Most likely, it would take them back to the bottom, where the door they’d entered through was probably open again.

Mira, though, had a feeling they weren’t supposed to go back down.

“Now what?” Reiko asked.

“Good question.”

Above them, the ceiling began to rattle and shake; rust fell from it like snow. It was made of separate panels, and it all suddenly began to retract, pulling away from the center. There was something on the other side, a larger room, and Mira and Reiko braced themselves for whatever was to come.

Id

The ceiling panels slid down, and as they did, the last two red buttons, now dark, moved and settled near the floor on opposite ends of a new, larger room. Dim illumination came from the walls, and looking around showed why. They were made of glass, large windows that curved in a circle around the entire interior. The twinkling, cold lights of Winterbay stretched out beyond and below, surrounded by the encroaching darkness of the lake.

They were in the Id’s tower, just as Reiko had guessed, and the realization was a strange one. Mira remembered, not quite two days ago, looking out at this place with Reiko from the top of the trade district. She had no way of knowing then that she was looking at exactly where she would end up.

Reiko moved to the windows, and Mira followed her. From this height, the view was serene. Mira saw people moving in the streets, the hustle and bustle of the trade district, and, in certain places, flashing banks of lights that could only have been the Memory Walls.

“It’s almost pretty,” Reiko mused.

Both girls jumped as more panels opened in the new ceiling, and rumbling hydraulics lowered something down from inside, something big, hanging from a metallic gridwork of steel beams.

Fingers of blue lightninglike energy crackled around the thing, and thick black cables, hundreds of them, ran from it and disappeared into the walls. Mira and Reiko stared up at it, and as they did, it became clear it actually wasn’t just one thing, it was
many.
Dozens of random objects, all assembled together into a big cubic shape.

Mira could see giant coils of copper wire, circuit boards, rows of D batteries, two door handles, springs, a bowling ball, eight old car batteries, and a railroad tie, just to name a few. Dozens more were buried inside the mass of objects, and it was all wrapped and bound with lengths of gold and silver chain and red rope, interweaving in intricate patterns, one around the other.

There was something else, too. A ring of brass, with coins inset into it, moved in and out of the items, touching certain ones, some heads out, others tails.

They were silver dollars.

“What … the hell…?” Reiko’s voice was stunned.

The hairs on Mira’s arms stood up as she stared at the giant collection of parts hanging from the ceiling. It could only be one thing … impossible as it seemed. “It has to be the most complicated artifact combination I’ve ever seen. It must be twelve or thirteen tiers,” Mira said in a low voice. “It uses silver dollars. Most combinations can’t handle that kind of power; they won’t Interfuse. But … if you could make it work, with this many of them, a combination would last for…” Mira trailed off, doing the math in her head.

“How long?” Reiko asked.

“Decades,” Mira finally said, studying the object in amazement, trying to make sense of the complicated combination of Essences and Focuses in front of her. Even for her, it was difficult. Whoever had made this artifact had been incredibly skilled.

Then Mira looked at the mass of cables hanging from it, the ones that disappeared into the walls and ceiling.

Reiko studied them, too. “Oh my God,” she said as she figured it out.

“It’s powering the city.” Mira’s voice was barely audible.

It all came crashing home then. As eccentric and ludicrous as the Machine was, it suddenly seemed fitting. You’d need something like that to protect such a dangerous secret—the secret that Winterbay was not what it seemed. It wasn’t a last bastion of the old world at all. Winterbay relied on Strange Lands artifacts as much as any other place.

Or, in this case … one
giant
one.

“You see?” an aged masculine voice asked from behind them. “An idea
can
be tangible.”

Armitage stood next to the ladder. In his right hand was the metallic black case that held Mira’s plutonium. His eyes were locked on the artifact combination. He must have waited outside, then come in when the Machine was disarmed and climbed up after Mira and Reiko.

“Winterbay was the first city built after the Assembly, but we’re still the smallest.” Armitage didn’t look at the girls; his stare bore into the huge combination with fervor. “While Midnight City and Faust and Currency and all the others have grown, we’ve stayed strapped down because of an
idea.
But not anymore, not after tonight.”

Mira felt sick as she figured out what he intended. “You’re going to … shut it down.”

“Not me, Mira.” Armitage’s gaze finally moved to her. “
You.
It’s why you were hired.”

“I thought I was hired to beat the Machine.”

“That
is
the Machine!” Armitage yelled. “It’s the Id! It’s all that’s left of them! They built this place right after the Underworks, because they knew those rusting hulks underneath the deck weren’t gonna be enough, and they were right. So they made this in secret and sealed it away behind a death trap so mean and bad no one would ever come looking.”

“But why?” Mira demanded. “Why not just tell the truth?”

“Because they made a promise they couldn’t keep,” Armitage spat. “They promised the old world could still exist, and that
idea
was the source of their power. If anyone had ever known, they’d have lost everything. So they buried the truth.”

“Then why build the Machine like they did?” Reiko asked next. Clearly she was just as surprised by what it had been guarding as Mira. “Why make it so only a Freebooter could beat it?”

“Because they weren’t stupid. They knew they might need to get back up here someday,” Armitage answered. “They made a Machine that could only be opened by the one person who could never enter the city without their say-so.”

Mira looked around the empty tower. There was only dust now; nothing remained of whoever once had inhabited this place. It was sad.

“Shut it down, Mira,” Armitage told her. “Shut it down and you can leave this place behind.”

Mira looked back at the older man, unsure, conflicted.

“I know you saw that chair,” he continued. “You’re thinking that’s where you’re gonna end up, once this is all said and done, but I told you before, being vindictive is bad for business. I might be a thief and a killer, I might even be a monster, but one thing I’m not is a liar. You did right by me, and I’ll do right by you. Shut off that
thing
up there, and you can pick up this case and leave. You have my word.”

Mira stared down at the case at his feet. She could almost see inside it, to the plutonium nestled there. The one thing she needed, the only thing that mattered, the thing she’d sacrificed and bled for. It was in her grasp, all of it, right now.

Mira turned back to the combination, watching the blue lightning crackling over it. She saw that the band of silver dollars could move; it was on a track. Sliding the coins out of place would break the power connection.

When she did that … Winterbay would go dark.

Instinctively, she looked past the artifact to the windows around the room. She could see the lights from one of the Memory Walls below. They would die once she did this, and once the people down there learned the truth, those walls would never return. What would be the point, after all? It had all been a lie. It would mean the World Before was gone … and it wasn’t coming back.

Lie or no lie, if she shut this combination down, she’d be the one taking that away—and that bothered her. Mira almost surprised herself when she stepped back. “I won’t do it,” she said.

Armitage blinked. “What?”

“I won’t do it,” she repeated. A knot formed in her stomach. “I think you’re wrong. I don’t think the Id built the Machine as some desperate attempt to hold on to power. That’s what someone like
you
would do. I think they knew the idea they’d created here was more powerful than anything. It didn’t just keep the city running, it gave it hope, gave it something to believe in. And there’s nothing more important than that, not these days.” She looked at the case on the floor again. She knew what she was giving up, and it hurt. Oddly, she realized that Olive had been right. People
did
have their lines. “It’s not worth it. And I won’t do it.”

Armitage’s blue eyes became cold steel. “That is … unfortunate. You
do
know what comes next, then?”

Mira nodded. “What comes next is you try to kill me.”

Armitage shook his head in disappointment, and as he did he slowly pulled a big silver revolver from a holster inside his coat. Mira’s breath quickened at the sight. “Gotta say, when it comes to those sorts of things … there’s no ‘try’ to it.”