J. Mitchell - Midnight City

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.