Midnight City: A Conquered Earth Novel (The Conquered Earth Series)

by J. Barton Mitchell

  “This is the leader of the faction you belonged to?” Holt asked in surprise.

  “Lenore and I had a … complicated relationship,” Mira said. “In lots of ways, she was like a sister. A mentor, even. But the pressure to hold on to the Prime Movership is intense. It would probably change anyone for the worse. Eventually, when you start to run out of conventional ways to stay on top, you start looking for other alternatives. Any alternatives.”

  “But she never found the artifact? You’re sure?” Holt asked.

  “They never found it and they never will, not without me,” she said. “It’s the only reason I’m not dead. But before I escaped, Lenore came up with a new way to pressure me.”

  “Ben,” Holt guessed, and Mira nodded. “Who is he?”

  Mira felt a twinge of nervousness. Ben was the one thing she didn’t want to discuss with Holt, but the way she saw it, he deserved the basics at least. “Ben was … is a friend. A close one, a Freebooter in the Gray Devils. Lenore had him accused and found guilty of Point Fabrication, just like me. It’s the most severe crime you can commit here, and it carries a death sentence. She said if I told her where the artifact was, she would let us go. We wouldn’t have our Points anymore, we were Unmentionable, but we could live. As long as she got the artifact.”

  “And you said no,” Holt said.

  “I said no … and then I escaped,” Mira answered, feeling the sting of the decision all over again. “There was no way to get Ben. I … I left him here. With Lenore. I gambled she would keep him alive for leverage, but for all I know, he’s already dead. And if he is, it’s my fault.” The anguish in her voice was palpable, and Mira felt Zoey’s hand on hers.

  “You know that’s not true,” Holt said softly. “You couldn’t let Lenore have that thing. If you did, you’d be responsible for a lot more than just Ben’s death. You did the only thing you could—you did the brave thing.”

  “Yeah?” Mira asked. “Well, it sure doesn’t feel that way.”

  Holt was silent, thinking, and she felt his eyes on her. “You’ve come all the way back here,” he said. “Risked everything to do it. But why, Mira? What do you want to do?”

  Mira looked back at Holt. There was something about him that was different from everyone else in her life. She knew what it was. He’d sacrificed his own interests for hers. He was here for her when it would be much better for him to be somewhere else. Those were unheard of gestures in the world as it was now, and from what she knew of Holt, they were just as unheard of for him. Yet, here he was.…

  Mira smiled at him, gently stroked his face with her hand. Then her stare hardened as she contemplated what they had to do, and she knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

  “There’s someone we have to go see,” Mira said.

  Holt looked back at her with more than a little trepidation. To be honest, Mira felt the same way, but she laid out her plans all the same, talking as they finished the rest of their tea.

  32. THE CESAR

  WHEN HOLT AND THE OTHERS REACHED the main gate, they were instantly stopped by Los Lobos compound guards: two big, older kids wearing auburn red, the color of their faction, the black of the Tone creeping through their eyes.

  “No visitors today, we don’t want Pledges,” one of the guards said. “You can turn around and head back.”

  “We’re definitely not here to Pledge,” Mira said as she lowered the hood from her head. “Tell Cesar that Mira Toombs wants to see him.”

  The guards stared at Mira like she was a ghost. Zoey chuckled at the looks on their faces.

  “Wait here,” one of them mumbled before running into the compound on the other side of the gate. A few minutes later, he reemerged with four other Lobos, two more boys and two girls. “The Cesar will see you. But the dog stays outside—there’s no animals in the compound.”

  “I’ll stay with the Max,” Zoey said, kneeling down and wrapping her hands around the dog protectively. Holt looked up to Mira questioningly.

  “She’ll be fine,” Mira said. “We’re guests under the faction’s protection. For the moment, anyway.”

  Holt didn’t see that they had much choice, and he looked back at Zoey. “We’ll be back in a minute, kiddo,” Holt said, and Zoey smiled up at him. She didn’t seem worried at all.

  Holt envied her.

  He was in as uncharted a territory as he’d ever been, and he was following someone else’s lead on top of it. He didn’t like not being the one making the decisions. He just hoped Mira knew what she was doing.

  They walked through the main gate into the compound, flanked on all sides by guards, and while they were definitely being “protected,” it didn’t do much to put Holt’s mind at ease.

  Major factions in Midnight City were given caverns of their own in which to build compounds, and Los Lobos had one made of concrete and strong wood. It looked more like a fort than a clubhouse, somehow blended and bolted into the chaotic shapes of the cavern walls, which only reinforced it further. It was blocky, but it wasn’t all utilitarian. The concrete had been spray-painted graffiti style in shades of red, with swirling images and letters all centering around a huge stylistic rendering of a wolf’s head that covered the main wall.

  “Los Lobos’ specialty is construction,” Mira told Holt quietly. “It’s the source of their Points. With the exception of the Gray Devils’ aqueducts, they built pretty much every structure in Midnight City, including the other faction compounds.”

  Ahead of them was the main entryway, and it was an amazing sight: a giant refurbished bank vault door that had been bolted into a steel frame in the compound’s main wall. It still had the hand levers and combination lock, but they were backwards, facing toward the interior of the compound.

  So it could be locked from the inside, Holt realized. He studied it appreciatively. It had been no small feat, repurposing something that big.

  “How’d they get that all the way down here?” Holt asked. The door must have weighed several tons, at least.

  “No one but Los Lobos knows that,” Mira said as they passed through the door. “But it involved artifacts, probably a Portal combined with half a dozen Aleves. Whatever they did, it took them only one night. Pretty impressive, and it got them a lot of Points.”

  On the Scorewall, Midnight City reserved twelve spots for what were simply called “factions,” organized groups of resident survivors who lived and made their way together, not unlike the thousands of congregations that existed on the surface. The difference was, the factions were interested in Points.

  A faction’s Points were determined by a complicated equation that took into account the point totals of its members, of its enemies, and of the achievements and failings of the faction as a whole. The faction that had the most Points was called the Prime Movers, a position that granted it a dominant voting percentage on the city’s supreme council. Which essentially meant, in no uncertain terms, that the Prime Movers ran Midnight City.

  The current Prime Movers were the Gray Devils, Mira’s old faction, and they had held the title for more than three years.

  After the main door, the concrete of the exterior gave way to yet more cavern walls. The outside was a fortified façade, Holt saw, which protected the more diverse cavern system of the compound beyond.

  But it wasn’t just a cavern, either. A small “hall” opened up into an enormous room, several hundred feet in diameter. There were natural formed ledges on some of the walls, and ladders led up to them. On the ledges, Holt saw dozens of doors of all shapes and colors and origins built into nooks and crannies, leading to different parts of the compound.

  But it was the huge room itself that was most impressive.

  Dozens of cone-shaped stalactites dripped downward from far above, each circled with strings of Illuminators, hanging like petrified Christmas trees from the ceiling and bathing the room in a warm glow of pale white. The ceiling itself had been polished smooth, like rough wood sanded down.

  And on the smooth surface
, in between the stalactite formations, was an incredible collection of graffiti art. Images and symbols and shapes and writing, and not just in auburn red like the ones outside, but a myriad of colors that filled the ceiling, sparkling brightly underneath the stalactites.

  Scaffolding and rope climbed up to the center of the ceiling, where a boy hung on his back, wearing goggles and a mask, and holding cans of paint in both hands. He was spraying the ceiling above him, adding to the giant canvas’s already brilliant colors, bringing to life a flowing script of writing.

  The letters weaved in and out of a series of stalactites, a mix of purple and red and blue. Whatever it said, it was written in Spanish.

  “Cesar!” one of the guards yelled up at the boy. He kept painting; if he’d heard the call, he showed no sign. “Cesar! There’s a Gray Devil in the hall.”

  The spray paint in the boy’s hand shut off, but he didn’t look down. “You’re wrong,” the boy said, and he slapped a set of clamps on his chest. The ropes that held him to the ceiling dropped him toward the floor, and he rode them down easily, slapping the clamps back into place right before he hit, stopping his fall. “She’s not a Gray Devil anymore. Are you, Mira?”

  The boy who stood before them was all of fifteen, Hispanic with curly black hair, wearing a red T-shirt over black cargo pants, and easily the shortest person in the room. But short or tall, the way the other kids in the hall eyed him warily suggested he had a way of commanding respect. He stepped out of the harness, keeping his gaze on Mira.

  “No, Cesar,” Mira said. “Not anymore.”

  Cesar handed the two cans of spray paint to one of the other boys without looking at him and removed his mask and goggles. “My Sistine Chapel,” he said, motioning to the multicolored ceiling above them and smiling proudly. “What do you think?”

  “I think it took a lot of paint,” Mira said without much enthusiasm. At the dismissive comment, the other faction members tensed.

  But Cesar only laughed out loud, long and hard—though, to Holt’s ears, the sound contained a hint of menace. “You always were difficult to impress, Mira,” the little kid said, smiling wickedly. “But I always liked that about you.”

  “The writing up there,” Holt said. “What does it say?”

  At the sound of Holt’s voice, the smile vanished from Cesar’s face. His eyes moved from Mira to Holt, and Holt felt the weight of the little kid’s stare. There was something dangerous about the way the boy held himself, an unpredictability in his eyes that Holt had seen before with youths who got too much power too quickly. When you thought no one would stand up to you, there was very little you wouldn’t do if the urge struck you.

  “It says ‘Al mal paso, darle prisa,’” Cesar said.

  “Which means—?”

  Cesar studied Holt a moment more, then looked back to Mira. “This one wears no colors—he’s an Outsider. Why bring him into my compound?”

  “He’s my friend, Outsider or not,” Mira said. “You’d be surprised, there’s lots of people worth knowing on the surface.”

  Cesar spit, moved away, gazing up at the ceiling again. “The surface is past tense. Pathetic, ragtag groups scrounging in what’s left of a dead world, just trying to survive. Here, we do more than survive: We build things. We thrive.”

  “Thriving, perhaps,” Mira replied. “But still in second place.”

  Cesar stiffened. He kept his back to them as he slowly looked down from the ceiling. “Did I ever tell you, Mira, that your name is a word in Spanish? It means ‘look.’” What little warmth was in his voice before, it vanished now. “It’s fitting, I think. You’re always looking for something, aren’t you? It’s what got you into trouble in the first place. And it’s what’s about to get you into trouble now.” He turned around, fixing her with a cold gaze. Any pretense of cordiality was gone, and the other Lobos instinctively took a step back. “What did you come here looking for, Mira Toombs? You’re either very brave or very stupid. My Points are on stupid, especially if you think I won’t hand you straight over to the council. You have any idea how much you’re worth now?”

  “Turning me over would get you Points, that’s for sure,” Mira replied. “But handing me to the council is handing me to the Gray Devils.”

  Cesar considered her as she spoke, his face unreadable.

  “I was at the Scorewall earlier,” Mira continued. “I saw the totals, saw how much further ahead they are than you. Even further than when I left. And what have you been doing about it, Cesar?” She looked up at the graffiti winding through the brightly lit stalactites, unimpressed. “Painting on a ceiling.”

  Cesar took a slow, dangerous step toward her. Holt moved forward as well, but Mira held up a hand. As much as he didn’t like it, he stopped and watched Cesar slowly inch toward her like a wolf.

  “Nowhere in any of that did I hear an answer to my question,” he said.

  “I wanna break into the Gray Devils compound,” Mira replied. “And I want your help to do it.”

  The laughter from the faction members echoed all around them in the large room. Cesar, however, did not laugh.

  “You know the caverns better than any faction,” she continued, “especially the unmapped areas. It’s a source of a lot of Points for you. I’m betting you know secret ways into pretty much every main cavern or compound in the system.”

  Cesar studied her evenly, weighing things. “Maybe. Maybe not. Even if I did, why would I risk helping a treacherous, double-dealing little Freebooter like you?”

  “Aw, Cesar,” Mira said with a slight smile. “Name calling? Really?”

  “When you’re caught,” Cesar said, ignoring her, “and word comes down how you got inside, someone’s gonna lose Points for that. And you don’t got any more Points, which means it’ll be Los Lobos who loses ’em.”

  “You’re right,” Mira said. “But only if I get caught. If I pull it off, the Gray Devils are the ones who are going to lose Points. A lot of them. Probably enough to reestablish you as the Prime Movers.”

  Murmurings from Los Lobos filled the air, ideas and calculations passing through the hall. Mira had their attention now.

  “The Gray Devils say you’re a Point Fabricator,” Cesar said.

  “The Gray Devils say a lot of things. You’re not stupid—you know that’s not true,” Mira replied. “They lied to make a problem go away.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me. Lenore’s the best liar I’ve ever seen, and she’s lied about far less,” Cesar said, musing. “But it’s the ‘problem’ you mention that I wonder about. They have something of yours, don’t they? What is it? An artifact, something you built? Whatever it is, it must be incredibly valuable or incredibly dangerous for them to go to these lengths to get rid of you.”

  “That’s my business and no one else’s,” Mira said sharply.

  Cesar shrugged and stepped away from her, pacing in the huge cavern, thinking. “So maybe you do pull it off, maybe you steal back whatever it is they took, maybe you reveal them for the lying, pathetic losers they are—that would definitely drop their total a lot. But that’s a lot of maybes, and you’re just one Freebooter and one Outsider.”

  “We have a dog and a little girl, too,” Holt said.

  Cesar ignored him. “I still don’t see why it’s worth all the risk for me to help you. Help me understand.”

  “Happy to,” Mira said, reaching into her pack. The guards around her all tensed, but Cesar waved them down in annoyance. She pulled free the glass cylinder with the brownish sliver of plutonium still floating within the clear liquid inside. The Dampener was still attached by its watchband.

  When Cesar saw it, his eyes widened. It was the first time since the conversation began that Holt had seen the Lobos leader surprised or off balance.

  “Is that … what I think it is?” Cesar asked.

  “How long have you been trying to mount a Severed Tower expedition, Cesar? Two years? Three? I wonder how many Points entering the Tower is worth these days.” Mira sa
id with a smile, “You get me into the Gray Devils compound … you can find out.”

  Cesar gazed at the plutonium lustfully a moment more, then tore his eyes away and looked at one of his boys standing nearby, a giant of a kid who towered over the others, with a black ponytail and a wicked-looking hunting knife on his belt. “Marcus, answer this Freebooter’s question. You need to check the maps?”

  “Nah,” the big kid responded. “There’s two ways into the Devils’ caverns, both side chutes that connect through the Crawlway. They’re tight, no fun pushing through ’em, but they’ll get her there.”

  “Where do they come out?” Mira asked.

  “One near the lab, the other in a hallway deeper in, near the residences, I think, by the falls.”

  “I want the one near the residences,” Mira said.

  Cesar studied her. “Guess it would be useless of me to ask for the plutonium in advance?”

  “Useless isn’t the right word.” Mira smiled.

  “Then two of my boys go with you, Marcus and someone else,” Cesar announced. “Just to make sure you feel like paying up once all’s said and done.”

  Mira shrugged. “If that’s how it needs to be, then fine.”

  Cesar’s eyes raked over her. “Either way, Mira Toombs, things go to plan, or things go to hell, you and I won’t be seeing each other again. You’re through in Midnight City. But you knew that coming in. There ain’t no coming back from Unmentionable.”

  “This place has always cramped my style anyway,” Mira replied. Holt was impressed by her composure, how she didn’t give off even a slight hint at the pain he knew she felt at the words.

  33. CRAWLWAY

  HOLT PUSHED MAX FORWARD through the unbelievably tight cavern tunnel, but the dog was less than cooperative. He struggled every few feet, whining and sometimes growling. “Max, just move!” Holt whispered roughly as he shoved on the dog’s rear. He was afraid to make too much noise. Marcus had sent word down the line that they were getting close to the Gray Devils now, and they needed to be quiet.