J. Mitchell - Midnight City

Holt looked at her as he thought back to the trading depot. He still wasn’t sure he believed it himself, but he told her what he’d seen. The shouts from the tent, Zoey alone with the two older kids, the reaction when the others saw their clear eyes, their insistence that Zoey had “cured” them of the Tone.

Mira looked at Holt with all the shock he expected. “Do you… believe that? Did that happen ?”

“If it did, I didn’t see it,” Holt answered. “But judging by the reaction of those traders, I’d say it was real. They’d have torn Zoey apart to get at her, I know that much. It’s just one more reason I’m starting to wonder how safe it is keeping her around.”

Mira stared at him, aghast.

“I’m not saying she’d hurt us,” Holt continued, “but you saw that battle back there—it was full-scale war. And all for a little girl ? She’s dangerous. The second she… did whatever the hell she did, three different groups of Assembly dropped out of the sky, Mira.”

She studied him. “Holt, have you thought that maybe the reason the Assembly wants Zoey… is because they’re afraid of her?”

“She’s eight years old.”

“If what you’re saying’s true, she can stop the Tone, Holt.”

“So what?” he said, annoyed. “What are we gonna do, line everyone up who’s left alive and have her lay hands on them? A million survivors all across the world?”

“It’s something ,” Mira said. “Everything starts from something.”

“No, it’s nothing, ” he answered. “It’s ludicrous.”

“I think Zoey is special,” Mira said with conviction. “And I trust her.”

“She’s incredibly special, there’s no doubt, but I don’t blindly trust anything,” Holt said. “I don’t believe in faith, I don’t believe in magic. I believe in myself and what I see with my eyes. You can’t just start believing for the sake of believing. Mira, it’s dangerous. It has to be about survival.”

“I think that’s a load of crap,” Mira said, holding his gaze. “I don’t think this has anything to do with survival. I think it has to do with fear. ”

Holt just stared back at her, feeling a nervous energy growing inside him.

“Who did you lose, Holt?” Mira gently asked him again.

Holt sighed and looked away. It had been a long time since he’d talked about this. In fact, he had only ever talked about it with one other person… and that person was very different from Mira. It surprised him when he heard his own voice. “My sister,” he said. “She was leaving to join the Blacksheep. This was years ago, when I was still a kid. The Tone was almost finished with her then, but she thought she could have another year, maybe two, in Chicago, fighting with them.”

No one knew why, but the Tone became weaker the closer you were to one of the base ships. In a ruin like Chicago, where the enormous Presidium towered over everything, survivors could last up to an additional year. It was no accident that the resistance groups there, like the Blacksheep Brigade, comprised primarily kids in their late teens.

As he spoke, Holt felt all the emotions coming back, feelings he’d buried and never dealt with, and to him, they still felt almost brand-new.

“I followed her even though she told me not to. When I caught her, she was furious. But I didn’t care. I just didn’t want to be alone, I didn’t want to go on without her.”

He felt Mira’s gaze on him, but he didn’t return it.

“We were attacked by Assembly inside an old truck stop, and the whole thing crashed down and trapped us inside. I was hurt and she had to scramble to keep me alive, and at the same time, she dug our way out of there all by herself. There was no water, no food either, and when we finally got out, we were so weak, we could barely stand. We were days away from any sort of help.”

As he spoke, he felt his breathing become shallow.

“It was like, once she got us out, all the strength she’d called on to save us was just spent.”

Mira sat silent, listening. “The Tone attacked her, didn’t it?”

Holt nodded. “She was too sick and tired to fight it anymore. Before it took her, with the little strength she had, she told me—” Holt gazed off with a haunted stare. “—she told me…”

Mira remained quiet, watching him, not pressing.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, forcing the memories away. “The only thing that matters is that I watched her mind drain to nothing right in front of me, watched her walk away and never look back, and it was my fault it happened. If I hadn’t gone after her, we never would have been in that stupid building, and she would have had another year of still being her.” His eyes were stinging, beginning to water, and he angrily tried to rub them dry, but that only seemed to make it worse. He didn’t want Mira to see him like this.

The only sound was the shaking of the room from outside. When Mira finally spoke, her voice was gentle and delicate. “Holt, look at me,” she said.

Holt kept his stare on the floor. He couldn’t look at her, there was just—

“ Look at me.” He felt her fingers on his chin gently raise his eyes up to hers, and he didn’t stop her. He knew they were red and full of emotion: he could feel them burning.

“What was her name?” Mira asked.

There was no sense of judgment from her, no horror or pity. There was only tenderness. In spite of everything, Mira really did care. In spite of everything…

“Emily,” he replied with a cracked voice.

Mira leaned in slowly toward him, and at the closeness of her, Holt felt a wave of relaxing heat wash over him. “Listen to me,” she said, looking into his eyes. “You loved Emily. And she loved you. She was lost no matter what you did—it was just a matter of time. She knew that, I promise you. I know she knew, because I live with the same thought every day. When she dug a way out of that truck stop, she wasn’t saving herself… she was saving you. You were Heedless, she knew you could live a long life, and it made her happy to think that. She sacrificed the little bit of time she had left to get you out of there so you could live. That’s as big a gesture as someone can make in this world.”

He tried to look away, but she stopped him, raised his chin back up, kept his eyes on hers.

“You have nothing to feel guilty about,” Mira said firmly. “And it’s not just me telling you that… it’s her, too. I can speak for her if anyone can.”

They were just words, but they shook Holt deeply. They were words that no one had ever said to him, and it was surprising how much relief he felt at hearing them.

Holt took Mira’s hand, felt her fingers wind through his. The scent of her filled him. He stared into her green eyes floating behind those black tendrils. Slowly, instinctively, magnetically almost… they leaned in toward each other….

“Are you two finally going to kiss?” Zoey asked from the doorway to their room, and Holt and Mira stopped short inches from each other. Max was next to the little girl, tongue hanging out of his mouth.

Holt sighed, reluctantly pulled away. Mira smiled up at him and shrugged.

“Captain Dresden wanted me to tell you we’re here,” Zoey said.

“Already?” Mira asked. “He made good time.”

“Captain Dresden says there’s no Landship faster than the Wind Shear, ” Zoey replied excitedly. “He said he’s outrun whole swarms of those scary metal things in the sky.”

Holt frowned. “I get the impression Dresden says a lot of things.”

Mira smiled and gently patted Holt’s face. “Come on, killer,” she said as she got to her feet. “All hands on deck.” Holt watched her and Zoey exit the room and disappear down the hall on the other side of the door. Max barked excitedly and dashed in the same direction.