Winterbay (6 page)

“Well, they’re not strictly artifacts, are they? Besides…” Reiko looked back at Mira. “No one’s stupid enough to try and take ’em away.”

Mira believed her. The White Helix was a cult, for lack of a better description. No one knew much about them; they kept to themselves, deep back in the far reaches of the Strange Lands. What everyone did know was that they were incredibly dangerous. They were well trained in fighting, and the rings they wore were made from the crystalline remnants of Antimatter Lightning strikes. Touching them together with their fingers, in various combinations, allowed them to do amazing things: leap incredibly high, flip through the air, accelerate their movements, all by somehow manipulating gravity, inertia, or momentum.

Mira had only seen them a few times, but watching them move had always been amazing. Beautiful, even. As far as Mira knew, the group never left the Strange Lands. It made Reiko’s presence here even more mysterious. “I didn’t think ‘unjoining’ the White Helix was an option.”

“It isn’t,” Reiko answered. “They’re a private bunch, I’m sure you know. They expect their secrets to die with their members. Sano-kai is the White Helix name for abandoning your oaths. They hunt you down for it, kill you when they find you.”

“But
you
abandoned the oaths.”

“Nah,” Reiko shook her head. “Way I see it, I never really took them. There’s a difference.”

“Fingers crossed behind your back?”

“Something like that.”

“What about the White Helix?” Mira asked. “Did
they
buy that distinction?”

“They came looking, if that’s what you’re asking.” Mira heard a smile in Reiko’s voice. “But the ones that did didn’t go back home. Winterbay is no more friendly to White Helix than it is to Freebooters, and Armitage is a bad man to cross.”

Mira’s eyes narrowed curiously. “Did Armitage … make you go to the White Helix?” It wasn’t a bad idea, Mira thought to herself. Having your own personal White Helix henchman would be very valuable. Still, given that most didn’t survive the journey or the training to become one, it was a particularly brutal thing to force a child to do.

“
Make
me?” The tone of contempt was back in Reiko’s voice. “When I first came here, I was twelve years old. My brother, Jason, he was eighteen. First month we slept in the streets, over in the lower residential ward. One day I woke up and Jason was gone. Just like that. I looked everywhere, asked everyone, but he’d vanished. He had debts, big bad ones to big bad people, and I found out what happened to him after the scumbags he owed money to grabbed me. He’d hopped a Landship to Currency, they said, told them they could have
me
as payment, use me however they needed until they felt the debt was paid. They made it clear it would be a hell of a long time before that happened.”

Mira could hear Reiko slowly becoming emotional, but it wasn’t with sadness or regret or fear; there were no tears, Mira was sure. Instead, there was a growing rage. Mira could understand. Reiko had been abandoned by someone close to her. Betrayals like that left scars, deep ones. Instinctively, Mira’s thoughts turned back to the person
she’d
left at Midnight City, presumably trapped in a Gray Devils cell. She wondered if Ben felt the same way now as Reiko did then.

“One day they used me as a messenger to Armitage,” Reiko continued as they pushed through the streets. “Had me bring him his cut of their trade action. It was weird, seeing him. A full-grown man, his face aged and lined, just sitting there, head buried in some ledger. I’d tried to escape the night before, for the fifth time, so I was pretty banged up. When I came in, he looked up, glanced me over, then looked right back down without saying anything. I set his cut on his desk and started backing out, but he stopped me, asked about my bruises, asked if they hurt. It was funny. Wasn’t until right then I realized I’d stopped noticing the pain. It didn’t have the same effect it used to. I’m still not sure why really, but I told him that. Armitage looked back up and studied me again, and then he wrote something on a piece of paper, gave me back the cut I’d brought him, and told me to give it and the note to the ones who’d sent me. An hour later … I was eating a meal, a
real
meal, back in that office with him.”

“He told the kids to leave you alone?” Mira guessed.

Reiko shook her head. “He paid off Jason’s debts, all of them, gave them back their cut. We’ve been together ever since. So to answer your question, no. He didn’t
make
me go to the Helix. He
asked
me. And I said yes. Because I’d do anything for him. He was there when no one else was, even when he didn’t even know me. Wait here.” Reiko moved abruptly to the side and left Mira in the street alone to ponder the story. It certainly explained a lot—her devotion to Armitage, her fierceness, her cunning—but as rosy as she tried to paint it, it was still a sad tale.

Mira watched Reiko walk to a huge freestanding wall made from the timbers of what used to be an old basketball court. Lights flashed there in a strangely hypnotic way, and groups of kids stood around it and stared. It was probably twelve feet high, and mounted to it, in various ways, were dozens of old televisions and computer monitors. Large screens, small screens, old tube sets with rabbit ears, monitors …

One after the other, every few seconds, each screen flashed something new: images from the World Before. Pictures of landmarks, famous ones even Mira could remember. The Statue of Liberty. The Lincoln Memorial. Big Ben. The Eiffel Tower.

There was more mundane imagery, too. Highways jammed full of automobiles. Airplanes flying in formation. Sporting events Mira couldn’t recall the names of. People in line at a movie theater.

The images flashed, one after the other, and Mira couldn’t look away. The weight of each picture hit her in the same affecting way. She moved closer, letting the lights and the memories flash over her in the cold night air, standing and watching it all.

Mira saw Reiko talking to a kid standing by the wall, where a line of cables from the screens met at a junction box. She handed him something Mira recognized. A memory stick, the kind people used to put in old digital cameras. A relic that had no meaning or use anymore … except in Winterbay, right here, at this wall. If Mira had to guess, she’d say that memory stick was full of additional images, just like the ones flashing there now.

The kid took it and handed Reiko something in return, a payment or trade probably, but she shook her head, said something, and moved off before the kid could reply. It was a puzzling exchange.

“Let’s go,” Reiko said as she brushed past Mira, continuing on down the street. “No more talking.”

Mira looked back over her shoulder at the images again. The Washington Monument, the Space Needle, men riding horses on some kind of track, doctors in an emergency room.

She’d always thought of Winterbay as a place where the world hadn’t moved on. She’d considered it backward, naive, futile even. This wall of imagery, of reminders of how things once were, should have confirmed all that, but somehow it didn’t. Seeing the effort it took to make the wall, knowing it was continually growing like some kind of joint historical consciousness …

Mira wasn’t sure she could dismiss this place so quickly anymore.

She walked after Reiko silently, staring behind her until the screens were buried and lost in the crowd.

Underworks

Mira followed Reiko’s flashlight through a thick, swaying darkness that smelled of fish and stale water and oil. The light revealed the jagged shadows of the almost one hundred aging, rusted boats that rested in this huge floating mausoleum.

This was the Underworks, the original Winterbay, before it had been built over, the famous support base for the city above—and it was
not
a serene place. Everywhere, the rumbling and shaking of engines echoed, what was left of them churning the water through the dark, providing power for the city.

The air was thick with gasoline fumes. There were vents somewhere, sucking it all out, but Mira still blinked away tears. Reiko, for her part, was much more comfortable; the foul air didn’t seem to affect her. The girl came here often, Mira figured, and that by itself was interesting.

They’d entered the Underworks through a secret entrance at the back of a closed repair shop. A hatch in the floor had dropped them down into the bridge of an old tugboat, and they’d set off into the dark. All Mira knew was that they were headed to where Armitage kept his contraband. If you were going to hide something dangerous, the Underworks seemed like a pretty good spot to do it, and there was nothing more dangerous to possess in this city than Strange Lands artifacts.

Mira followed Reiko over an old, moldy bridge that connected two barges. As they moved, she studied the Asian girl again. Even in the dark, her pantherlike strides were apparent; smooth, no wasted effort or energy, controlled. It wasn’t flashy, her walk. It was utilitarian, but it hinted at untapped agility. The girl was an enigma, in all kinds of ways.

“That wall, back there,” Mira asked. “What was it?”

“A Memory Wall.”

Given what it was showing, that seemed like a pretty good name. “Is it the only one?”

“No, there are five in Winterbay. Kids keep adding to them, whenever they find new images. That’s why everyone gathers around, to see what’s new.”

“You gave them more, didn’t you?” Mira asked. “That’s what was on that memory stick.”

Reiko was silent a moment. “Sometimes I find pictures for them, out in the world, yeah. It can be profitable. They’re getting harder to come by. More rare.”

“But you didn’t trade for it,” Mira observed. “You gave them the stick for free.”

Reiko stiffened. “Stop trying to figure me out, Freebooter. We don’t need to be girlfriends to work together.”

“Just saying, it must mean something to you, the World Before.”

“It’s not about the World Before,” Reiko answered.

“What’s it about, then?”

Reiko didn’t answer. Ahead of them, a boat emerged out of the dark. Mira couldn’t completely make it out, but it looked like an old fishing vessel. Unlike the other ships, there was no bridge connecting this one. The black, icy water stretched between it and the old ferry they were on now. It was too far to jump.

“Wait here,” Reiko said, then touched the rings on her index and middle fingers together. There was a flash of yellow as she leaped gracefully forward into the air.

Mira watched as she flew toward the fishing boat, covering far more ground than any normal person could, tucking her body, flipping … and disappearing into the dark. If there had been any question as to the truth of Reiko’s rings and training, there was none now.

Seconds later, something began to crank, and a shadow lowered toward Mira. Another bridge, arcing slowly down until it touched the edge of the boat she was standing on.

“Coming?” Reiko’s voice asked impatiently from the darkness ahead.

Mira sighed and stepped onto the bridge. When she crossed and jumped onto the deck of the new boat, Reiko was already moving toward a door.

They passed through it, went down a flight of stairs into the bowels of the old ship, and finally stepped into a large, open space. Reiko’s flashlight was off, everything was dark, and Mira heard a thick door shut behind her. Inside wherever they were, the deep humming sound of something mechanical and aging filled the blankness.

“This might sting,” Reiko said. New light flashed on and Mira shut her eyes. After almost an hour in the pitch black, it did more than sting. Eventually, her vision adjusted enough to show her where she was.

It was the ship’s engine room, its turbines and gears all sat in the center, rusting in place, but still working. That wasn’t what Mira’s eyes locked onto, though.

In between the two engine blocks, there was an old workbench. All around it, resting in cabinets and shelves that circled the room, were dozens and dozens of seemingly mundane objects that Mira knew were anything but.

There were batteries, coins wrapped in individual sheets of plastic, magnets, coils and strands of wire, pencils, paper clips, nails and screws, springs, circuit boards, vials of various powdery substances, marbles, lightbulbs, and all kinds of other items. The hair on Mira’s arms stood up. It was a side effect of being in the Strange Lands … or of being in a room with a large accumulation of its artifacts.

Mira stared at it all lustfully. Armitage had acquired quite a collection, and the fact that it sat underneath Winterbay, a place where it was all illegal, made it even more impressive.

“Think you can do something with this?” Reiko asked.

“Yeah,” Mira replied softly. “I believe I can.”

Hole

Time lost meaning as Mira worked. Even the deep humming from the boat’s old engines faded into the background. It wasn’t because she had so much to do, it was more that it had been a month since she’d been able to make artifact combinations with quality components.

She was exceptionally talented at it, maybe the best, and that wasn’t pride or arrogance, just the simple truth. She took to it easier than others, it came more naturally, and she prided herself not only on the ingenuity of the artifacts she created but on their aesthetic virtues as well. Sadly, since leaving Midnight City, it seemed she was always making combinations frantically and quickly. She didn’t have the luxury to take her time anymore. Now her artifacts were hastily created lumps of duct tape or rubber bands, without form or artistry. It was one more thing she’d lost when she fled, something she missed terribly, and it felt amazing to make artifacts with attention to detail again.

Mira placed the last component into position on the combination she was working on. There was a flash and then a humming sound, like something electrical powering up, as the Interfuse took hold. The individual artifacts had been blended into something called an Aleve, which reduced the weight of anything it touched.

It was made of a group of strange parts. In between two quarters was a lead fishing sinker, which served as the Essence, and a small washer for the Focus. It was all tied together with blue yarn into a pendant that hung from a silver chain.