Midnight City (12 page)

Holt frowned. “
No,
Zoey, you wanna go to Midnight, you’re welcome to try, you can find a boat or something else to take you north, but it won’t be with us. To be honest, I’m tired of both of you, and the sooner I’m done with you, the better.”

Zoey’s eyes were starting to glisten. She had even stopped petting Max, and the dog was none too happy about it. He beat his tail on the ground, hoping to get her attention again.

“It’s okay, Zoey,” Mira said, staring at Holt sadly. “Holt’s just like everyone else. He decided a long time ago to stop caring about things.”

Holt turned away from them both and started packing up the camp. He shouldn’t feel this way, shouldn’t have to feel this guilt. He was
surviving.
He was doing what he had to do.

Wasn’t he?

He had pulled Zoey out of that flaming ship and transported her to safety. He should feel good about it. He should be relieved he could escape the Menagerie soon.

But he didn’t. On either count.

No one said a word as he finished breaking camp. In minutes, they were gone, moving northward through the forest once again, Max scouting ahead of them as the afternoon sun beat down through the leaves.

They walked in silence past the trees, each carrying the heavy weight of their own thoughts.

16.
ALL OF THEM

THE FOUR MOVED THROUGH THE FOREST
in mutual silence. No one had uttered a word since they left the camp. It was fine by Holt. The less they talked, the better time they could make.

Within an hour, the trees began to thin. Another hour and they stopped altogether, ending in an abrupt, arbitrary line that stretched through an overgrown meadow. The field climbed gently upward beyond the tree line, to a ridge that Holt knew overlooked the river valley just on the other side.

It would be easy travel from here to the trading posts and from there, on to Midnight City. They would move faster out of the trees for sure, but the trade-off was that they were much more visible without the canopy to shield them from the prying eyes of Vultures and Raptors.

Hopefully, ditching Zoey would get the Assembly off his back. It might even make it easier, with them concentrating their forces along the river and forest instead of the plains.

Either way, the hard part was done with. The pack on his back felt lighter than it had all day; he felt energetic and optimistic. He had made it.

The four crested the top of the rise and saw the Mississippi River Valley laid out below them. A tapestry of green interlaced with patches of red and blue wildflowers stretching to the horizon. The river itself was a thick line that curved and twisted southward, flanked by trees along its entire route. The sun glittered off it from above, making it look like a band of molten silver cutting through the grasslands.

All very beautiful. And any other time, Holt might have stopped to admire it.

But when he reached the top of the ridge, the first thing he did was instantly drop to the ground, pulling Zoey and Max with him. Mira did, too, seeing the same thing he had. Holt stared in disbelief.

Assembly patrols.

Hundreds of walkers scoured the valley below, moving in groups of six or ten, completely blanketing the landscape.

And they weren’t blue and white. The sun sparkled off crimson fuselages, making it look like the entire valley was ablaze in flame. These Assembly were a solid
red.

Max whined at Holt’s side as a flight of red Raptor gunships roared over them, flying escort for two huge Osprey dropships. They watched as the Ospreys unloaded four more red walkers onto the plains, saw them power up and activate, and begin patrolling. The Ospreys dusted off in a blast of engine noise and shot back into the air.

Holt shut his eyes tight.

He had never seen so many Assembly machines in one place, not even during the invasion. And these weren’t the blue and whites; they were another Assembly group entirely. The same one that had shot down Zoey’s ship. One or two Raptors was one thing, but this was something else; this was an
army.
And, just like the blue and whites, it must be looking for Zoey.

Holt looked down at the little girl and saw she was already looking up at him. She was frightened, uneasy. Holt understood—he felt the same way.

“See, Holt?” Zoey said. “
All
of them.”

She’d used those words before. And a spark of anger blossomed in him.

“Why didn’t you tell me we were walking into this?” Holt demanded. At the question, Mira looked at them, curious as to the answer herself. “You detected them before, why not this time?”

“I felt them. I just thought it would be good if you saw them for yourself.”

“Good?”
Holt asked in exasperation.

“So you would know why you had to take me with you.”

On the other side of him, Mira looked away. Holt sighed, his fists clenching tightly.

What was he going to do now? He needed to get to Midnight City with Mira, but that was well on the other side of the river valley below. There was no other path, and these red Assembly knew it. They had sealed off the entire avenue. To make matters worse, he was carting around the exact thing they were all looking for.

He should just leave the girl here. Tie her up with a big bow for the aliens and leave the problem behind. He looked at Zoey again. She looked back with her clear, blue eyes, and she seemed to read his thoughts. So did Mira.

“You can’t leave her,” Mira said from his right. There was a note of firmness in her voice he hadn’t heard before. It annoyed him.

“Oh, I can’t?” he snapped, looking at her. “Last time I checked, I was the one running things, not you.”

“You can’t
leave
her,” she reiterated, this time slower and pointed.

Holt looked away, sighed again. She didn’t have to tell him that. There were some lines he wouldn’t cross, even for survival’s sake. And his refusal to cross those lines had gotten him into plenty of trouble in the past. It looked like it was going to do the same thing right now.

Holt looked down to Zoey. She was still gazing up at him fearfully, the idea that he might abandon her a real possibility in her mind.

“I’m not going to leave you, don’t worry,” he said, watching the little girl visibly relax. “We just have to find another way through to the north now.”

“Thanks, Holt,” Zoey said.

“Thank you,” Mira said next to him. She said it so low, he wasn’t sure if she meant him to hear it or not.

Another way through to the north …

The problem was, there wasn’t one. They could turn around and try to go through St. Louis, but those ruins were overrun with Menagerie and even worse things. It wasn’t an option.

Plus, turning around meant heading right back toward the blue and whites.

Something occurred to him. The truth was, the river valley wasn’t the only way through to the north. There were other routes … but they were so dangerous, most people never factored them in as possibilities.

Holt pulled the binoculars from his belt and looked through them, scanning the valley.

“What are you looking for?” Mira asked.

“Plan B,” he answered.

Holt surveyed up and down the river with his optics, examining the tributaries, the smaller branches of the river that connected to and fed the main body.

He found the specific one he was looking for, followed it to where it made a path through the ground just below the ridge and disappeared out of sight toward the west, cutting through a grouping of blufflike hills.

Interestingly, the red Assembly seemed to be avoiding it completely. Which was exactly what Holt had expected, given he now knew about their mysterious fear of water. He guessed they would give that tributary a wide berth.

“What do you see?” Mira asked again, impatient. “Tell me!”

“A different route north.”

“I didn’t think there was a different route north.”

“By popular consensus, there’s not,” Holt said. “Most people, most
smart
people, avoid this way. But we are definitely not smart people—”

“True enough,” Mira said.

“—and without any other choices,” Holt finished.

“What are you thinking?” she asked with hesitation, sensing she wasn’t going to like the answer.

Holt lowered the binoculars and looked at her. “The Drowning Plains,” he said with as much confidence as he could project. It wasn’t much.

He watched Mira shudder at the words. It would probably have given him a little bit of satisfaction, if he didn’t feel the same way.

“What’s the Drowning Plains?” Zoey asked.

“No place we want to go,” Mira said.

“Used to be a floodplain downstream from a dam,” Holt said, studying the tributary through the binoculars again, verifying it was devoid of the red walkers. “Dam broke during the invasion and flooded the whole thing. There were villages there, built along the river. Now the whole place is a flooded no-man’s-land.”

“That’s the story, anyway,” Mira continued. “No one who goes in ever comes out. And no one really knows why.”

“Something in there isn’t very hospitable. Whether it’s the environment … or something else.”

Zoey looked at each of them as they spoke, her eyes widening with fear.

“Now look what you’ve done,” Mira said in disapproval. “You scared her.”

“Me?” Holt put the binoculars down. “
You
started in with the whole ‘no one who goes in ever comes out’ stuff.”

Max seemed to sense Zoey’s discomfort, too. He put a paw on her back and licked her ear. Zoey pushed his wet nose away.

“We’ll be fine, Zoey, I promise,” Mira said, trying to comfort the little girl. “Holt will get us through.
Won’t
you?” she asked him firmly.

“Yeah, sure, we’ll make it,” Holt said dismissively, concentrating on the view through his binoculars. “I’ve been plenty of times, it’s no big deal.”

“Really?” Zoey asked hopefully. “You’ve been before and come out?”

“Sure,” Holt lied, “plenty of—”

Holt cut off as Mira gasped in pain, her hands shooting to her head. He and Zoey and even Max looked at her in surprise.

Holt reached out for her, but she shoved his hands away, curling into a ball on the ground, holding herself. “Don’t…” She was absorbed in pain and discomfort. “Don’t touch me.…”

Holt guessed what was happening. Mira was eighteen or thereabouts, at the point where the Tone would start to wrestle her for control. He guessed that’s what was occurring. Before this, the Tone had probably reared its ugly head only temporarily, but now it was fighting her for control, maybe for the first time. The battle was always painful … and disturbing.

The Tone was what Earth’s survivors called the telepathic signal broadcast by the Assembly only a few hours after their invasion, and it had ended any resistance against the aliens in one fell swoop.

A mind control signal, and it worked horrifically well. Anyone who heard it instantly Succumbed to Assembly control. Soldiers left their posts. Government officials walked out of their offices. Parents left their children crying in their beds. Zombielike, Earth’s adult population began a unison march to the nearest Assembly Presidium, the massive ships stuck like huge daggers in the hearts of the human cities. They marched toward them, these millions of people … and, one by one, they disappeared inside.

To this day, no one knew what had happened to them, or where the Tone was broadcast from, or even how it worked.

What was very quickly apparent, however, was that the Tone seemed to affect the human brain only once it matured. A chemistry that added up to something around twenty years of age. Which meant that there was an entire demographic of the population that was immune to its call. At least temporarily.

Children.

It was why Holt hadn’t seen an adult in almost a decade. It was why the world was left to the devices of its youngest daughters and sons. But their time was always running out. The older they became, the more sway the ever-present Tone began to have on them.

A grim, slow, inevitable, ticking clock.

Unless they were Heedless, Holt thought bitterly. Those rare few, for whatever reason, who were immune. Like him. He would never suffer Mira’s fate. He would grow old, alone in a world where everyone else had Succumbed, one of the last “lucky” few to age beyond twenty years old, alone with an entire, empty, dead planet to call his own.

“Holt…,” Zoey said, watching Mira in alarm.

Holt watched Mira convulse and shake, her fists clenching handfuls of grass behind her back and ripping them from the ground as she fought against the signal.

Seeing it now brought the memories flooding back. It had been the same with Emily. The convulsing, the struggle to keep her mind intact, to ward off the voices and the static hiss.

Holt watched Mira in silent horror, her eyes shut tight, trying to block out the sounds. He had prayed never to see this again. And here it was.

Prisoner or not, his way to escape the Menagerie or not, Holt instinctively reached out for Mira. She tried to push him away again, but he pulled her into his lap. “Mira,” he said into her ear, listening to her sharp, painful intakes of breath. “Is this your first time to fight it?”

Mira said nothing, just shivered in his arms.

“Mira tell me, is it your first time?”

Beneath him, he noticed the briefest hint of a nod from her.

“It helps if someone talks to you, if you concentrate on their voice. It can help you push it into the background again.”

Mira shuddered beneath him. Holt exhaled, thinking of what to say. With Emily, he had played games. Memory games. They always helped bring her back.

He tried to remember them, what he used to say.

“What’s the thing you miss most about the World Before?” he asked Mira. “You’re old enough to remember it.” Mira shook silently, coping with the Tone’s attack. “You can fight it, Mira. You’re strong. Tell me.”

“The…” Mira tried to speak. The words came slowly and painfully. But they came. “The … food…”

Holt smiled. “Yeah, me, too. What kind of food?”