Winterbay (11 page)

Reiko, for her part, looked back and forth between Armitage, the giant combination in the ceiling, and Mira. She was torn, unsure.

“You were wrong, you know?” Mira spoke up. “About one thing.”

Armitage looked at her skeptically. “What’s that?”

“It wasn’t just me who beat the Machine tonight, it was
both
of us, Reiko and I. Being inside it, seeing it work up close, gives you one hell of an insight. It’s pretty clear it doesn’t just take a Freebooter to beat it. Even two Freebooters loaded with artifacts couldn’t have done what Reiko and I did. Which means the Machine needs a Freebooter …
and
a White Helix to disarm it.”

At the words, Reiko’s attention focused on Mira.

“It makes sense, actually,” Mira kept on. “An extra level of security. What are the odds you could arrange a team like that? Two natural enemies, both of whom would, under most circumstances, never enter Winterbay?” Mira forced herself to hold Armitage’s gaze. “You needed two keys to unlock this place. One of them, you could just sit and wait for it to show up. The other … you had to take a more direct approach. You found a little kid, you saved her, made her love you, then sent her off to become what you needed her to be. I have to say, you
are
shrewd.”

“Is that true?” Reiko turned to Armitage. “Did you know?”

Armitage frowned. “If I did, what does it change? I sent you off so you would be valuable to me, and being valuable to me was what you wanted.”

“Wanted?” There was a glint in Reiko’s eye now. “You think I wanted all this? You think I
wanted
to spend four years in that place, four years with
them
? I told you how they
teach
their skills, I told you about the pain. Over and over. And it was all for
you.
All with the Tone growing in my head, four years I could have—”

“Reiko!” Armitage barked … and then slowly pushed the fury back down. “This conversation, we can have it later. Now, if you don’t mind too much,
please kill the Freebooter.
”

Reiko stared at Armitage a second more, then turned to Mira. Mira looked back, sensing something behind the girl’s almost fully black eyes. “I hear Freebooters never go anywhere without an escape plan.”

Mira felt a glimmer of hope. “That’s the rumor.”

Reiko nodded. “Looks like you owe me two, then.” She touched her index and ring fingers together. A flash of purple flared around her—

“Reiko!” Armitage yelled, his hands raising the gun.

Reiko flashed in a blur of movement toward Armitage. The gun fired, but it was too late. She slammed into him, and her momentum sent them reeling away.

Mira lunged in the opposite direction. She heard more gunshots, screams, but kept moving, rolled and slid, reached up … and rammed a red button with her fist, one of the last two she and Reiko had hit, now near the floor.

It clicked inward, then lighted up, glowing red …

… and the Machine suddenly rumbled back to life.

Mira heard a yell of fury that could only have come from Armitage as the huge artifact combination retracted back into the roof, taking its mass of cables and blue, crackling lightning with it.

The walls all around Mira began to roll upward again, covering the windows, sealing the light of the city away. The giant column sealed itself … and then began to spin as the irislike floor pulled back and away into the walls.

The Machine was resetting, rearming. In seconds, it would all start again.

Mira watched what was left of the floor finally vanish under her feet, and then she was falling straight down.

From the corner of her eye, she saw Reiko and Armitage plummeting as well, wrapped in light from Reiko’s rings, somehow slowing their descent.

Mira grabbed the Lithe off her strap and broke its vial. There was a flash, a hum … and then she yanked as her rate of fall diminished. It was like a parachute when a Lithe kicked in, but while it definitely slowed her fall, it didn’t mean she came down like a feather.

She slammed to the bottom, right as Reiko and Armitage did the same.

Above, the slots were opening in the walls again, the steel ledges jutting outward.

Mira only had a few seconds.

She grabbed the last artifact she had, the triangular one, the one whose twin she’d left back in Armitage’s lab, and slammed it onto the floor, sliding down a metallic ring of dimes. There was a flash, a hum … and then the thing pulsed powerfully.

A hole of light ripped the air apart, forming into a perfect, bright, hovering circle. It was a Portal, just like the one from the machine shop back in Des Moines, but this one created a path back to Armitage’s boat.

Mira moved for it—then froze at the sound of more screams behind her.

Reiko struggled with Armitage. The big man had come out on top after their fall, and he’d pinned her to the floor as the Machine continued to throb.

Mira was running out of time. She should leave now, escape. But …

“Damn it,” Mira cursed and ran the other way, pulling off her pack and grabbing it by the straps.

She saw Armitage lift one of Reiko’s knives …

… and Mira swung the pack, hard. It was full of the artifact components she’d shoved in it earlier, and when it connected with the side of his head, it sent Armitage flying.

Mira grabbed Reiko’s hand and pulled her up. She was bleeding from a gunshot wound on her shoulder.

“Don’t … be stupid…” Reiko said as she stood.

“Shut up and
come on
!” Mira shouted again, pulling the girl toward the Portal, supporting her.

The Machine vibrated and rocked. The column in the center turned. The floor vibrated under their feet, about to open. Behind them, Armitage stirred.

Mira shoved Reiko through the Portal.

A bullet sparked next to her.
“Toombs!”
Armitage yelled in anger.

Mira turned and looked into his eyes as he groggily stood, the gun shaking in his hand.

“You were right,” Mira said. “Ideas
are
priceless.” Then she leaped through the Portal after Reiko.

Everything went red as she flew through and slammed into the metallic floor of the old fishing boat’s engine room.

From the other side, she heard Armitage’s roar over the rumbling of the Machine.

Mira lunged for the other Portal artifact on the floor and stomped on it. Once. Twice.

Without the Interfuse, the thing shattered into its component pieces—and the Portal flashed out of existence, sealing away Armitage and the Machine.

Everything went dark and quiet and strangely tranquil. Mira collapsed and lay on her back, breathing hard. There were similar sounds next to her. She turned her head … and looked into the almost black eyes of Reiko.

The girls stared at each other, exhausted.

“How about we call it even?” Mira asked.

Reiko nodded. “Works for me.”

Clinton Station

Mira and Reiko sat on a wall of old car tires and hubcaps, strung together with wire and rope, that circled Winterbay’s trade district, staring at the ebb and flow of the kids moving through the stalls and shops, and the now familiar rusted smokestacks that jutted up strangely through the wooden deck and into the open air, wrapped in their lights.

Reiko’s shoulder was bandaged. Armitage’s bullet had passed straight through, and the girl dressed her own wound while Mira watched. She still wasn’t sure what to make of Reiko. There was no doubt she’d had a conversion of sorts. She’d saved Mira’s life twice, and betrayed a man she saw as a father, but Mira wasn’t completely sure why—whether it was vengeance against someone who had used her, or because she thought of this city, and the idea it represented, as worth saving. Reiko didn’t say, and Mira didn’t ask. All she could think was that they had both found their own lines tonight.

“What are you gonna do now?” Reiko asked.

It was a good question, Mira thought. “Keep looking, I guess. Find what I need somewhere else. Unless you got more plutonium stashed away somewhere?”

“Sorry, no.” Reiko smiled. “But we can go back in and get it if you want.”

“I think one ride in the Machine was more than enough for me.”

Mira had survived, it was true, but what did she have to show for it? Even if the wanted posters had never gone up in Winterbay, they were no doubt posted in Midnight City and Currency, maybe even as far away as the Low Marshes by now. The bounty hunters would be looking, which meant the big cities were off-limits. She’d have to find someone who had what she needed at one of the smaller trade depots, as unlikely as that seemed. It was going to be a tough, lonely road for a while.

“Why’d you come back for me?” Reiko asked, and Mira could feel the girl’s eyes on her. “For all you knew, I was planning on killing you.”

Mira had to admit it was a fair point. “My dad always used to say, ‘Integrity’s doing the right thing … even when no one will ever know about it.’ You did the right thing, Reiko, and no one would have ever known. And, I got enough things to feel guilty about.”

Reiko studied her for a long moment … then frowned as if she’d come to a decision she didn’t much like. “You have a map?” she asked.

Mira’s eyes thinned questioningly.

“You have one, or don’t you?”

Mira opened her pack, grabbed the old folded map of the World Before she always carried, and handed it to Reiko. The girl opened it, found what she was looking for … then pulled out a pen.

Near the center of what was once called Illinois, Reiko drew a circle around a dot near a large lake. Next to it she wrote
Clinton Power Station.

Mira felt her heart skip. She looked up at Reiko and the girl frowned deeper, handed Mira back the map. “Don’t get all mushy on me, I swear to God.”

“Are you … sure?” Mira asked, stunned.

“Who do you think got the plutonium for Armitage? There’s plenty there, more than you can carry—assuming you can get to it.”

Mira beamed, relief flooding through her. She couldn’t believe it. Her plans and hopes were still alive, and it had all come from the most unlikely of sources.

“Thank you, Reiko,” Mira said. “I mean it.”

Reiko shook her head. “Don’t be too thrilled. You know what’s waiting in there. Trust me—it’s worse than the stories, I can personally vouch for that.”

Mira felt a slight chill, but it disappeared quickly. It was a problem for another day. She looked back at Reiko. “What are you going to do?”

Reiko shrugged. “I don’t know … it’s not like I’ve got much time left.”

She was right; she probably had less than a year until she Succumbed. What would it be like when Mira got to that point? When it began to fight her for control, when it became a daily struggle?

“Might join a resistance group,” Reiko said. “Fight the Assembly. Who knows. What is it the Wind Traders say? ‘The winds take you where they will…’”

“‘… not the other way around,’” Mira finished for her.

The girls held their look a moment more, then hopped off the wall to the ground, each one considering the other.

“I don’t know what it is you need to make up for, Mira Toombs,” Reiko said. “But don’t stop trying. When all’s said and done, all we have is what we do … and what we don’t do.”

“White Helix teach you that?” Mira asked.

Reiko shook her head. “No. Taught myself that. Just tonight.”

They stared at each other a second longer … and then turned and walked their own ways, disappearing in different directions into the crowd.

Mira reached the main thoroughfare and moved through it, toward the ferries that would take her back to the mainland. She passed one of the Memory Walls, glowing and flickering like before, dozens of kids staring at the images. St. Peter’s Basilica, glowing buildings in Shanghai, people running in a marathon, SCUBA divers floating through a shipwreck, an astronaut on the moon.

Mira forced herself to look away. The World Before was intoxicating, it sucked you in, but she had to live in the here and now. She had to keep moving. She had things to do …

Mira passed under the main gate and the giant blue and white gear that hung above it. No one looked at her as she stepped onto the ferry. The boat rocked as ropes began to pull it through the icy water and away from Winterbay.

When Mira looked back, she saw something she didn’t expect.

At the other end of the city, a tower stood taller than all the others on the eastern end. She’d seen it before, from within and without, but it was different now. It was no longer dark and lifeless. Light streamed from the windows that circled its topmost level, shining brightly outward … like a beacon.

Mira smiled and kept watching until Winterbay vanished into the haze of the early morning light. Then she turned and looked ahead, toward where she needed to go. One step at a time, she told herself. One step at a time …

Turn the page to read an excerpt from the first book in the Conquered Earth series

Available now in paperback

Copyright © 2012 by J. Barton Mitchell

1. VULTURES

Right about then, it became official: Holt Hawkins was having a bad day.