Winterbay

by J. Barton Mitchell

  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.”

  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.

  Abov
e, 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.