J. Mitchell - Midnight City

The line kept moving. Holt and Max joined one line, Mira and Zoey another, but she nervously kept watching the boy in front of Holt.

Right as the kid reached the green-clad guard… smoke began funneling up and out from his pack, wafting into the air.

Shouts rang up from all three guards, and they automatically moved for the boy with the smoking pack. As they did, the line in front of Mira was suddenly devoid of guards.

She saw what Holt had planned, grabbed Zoey’s hand, and walked quickly forward, past the distracted guards and into the tunnel ahead of her.

Behind her, Holt and Max did the same thing, moving fast for—

“Hey! You! ” one of the guards shouted. Mira shut her eyes tight… and then realized the guards weren’t yelling at her at all. They were moving instead toward Holt.

“You just gonna walk through the main hall carrying those guns?” the guard asked him in annoyance.

Holt looked back, unsure.

“Your guns, nimrod,” the guard said. “Gotta check ’em before you go in, no firearms allowed. No slings or crossbows either. Unless they’re for trade, then you need a trader’s permit to carry, and they have to be empty. You trading?”

“Uh… no,” Holt managed. “No, these are mine.”

“Check them over here, then,” the guard said impatiently, moving toward a group of lockers set into the wall near the entrance. Mira moved farther inside and watched as Holt hesitantly handed over his weapons to the Cavalier guard. He sealed them in a locker, handed the key to Holt, and he and Max started walking toward her and Zoey again.

Behind him, the other guards were roughly searching the kid Holt had planted the smoke bomb on, and he loudly complained that it wasn’t his. The green-clad boys didn’t seem to be buying it.

When Holt and Max reached Mira and Zoey, they all started down the tunnel again.

“So far, so good, I guess,” Mira said, pulling her hood tighter around her head.

“Yeah,” Holt replied. “But I don’t like not having my guns.”

They kept moving amid the mass of survivors trailing down the tunnel, which gradually descended into an ever-thickening darkness, toward whatever awaited them at the other end.

THE TUNNEL GREW GRADUALLY DARKER as they moved down it, so much so that eventually Holt had to reach out for Mira in front of him to keep from falling. In what was left of the light, Holt saw Max scamper ahead of them, darting playfully through the people.

“Max!” he yelled, trying to stop him, but he was gone, and Holt shook his head.

They passed through more of the heavy steel gates, all yawning open where they stood. They were formidable, with multiple gun ports. Further defenses, he figured. In case of an attack.

But formidable or not, if the Assembly wanted inside Midnight City, Holt had a feeling they would get in, gates or no gates.

Holt had been here only twice before, and both times he’d come in through the Lower Berth entrance, and he hadn’t stayed long. Which was fine with Holt. There was just something about the city, all the people, more people than he would normally see in a whole year, crammed together in these caverns.

It was unsettling. He preferred open spaces where you could see the horizon. And he preferred a lot fewer people, too. People were untrustworthy, and the more of them you got in one place, the more fuel there was for something bad to happen.

Lights appeared ahead, dim blue and red ones along the concrete tunnel’s ceiling that marked where the tunnel ended. Well, the part of it they were moving through, anyway. The man-made, concrete tunnel continued to the right, where it met a large sealed metal door. But where it forked, a hole had been punched into the wall.

Beyond it was another tunnel, but this one was natural, made of jagged rock walls, and it continued downward. The line of people moved into it, and disappeared beyond.

As Holt and the others followed after them, he finally felt the floor level out and stop its descent. There was a chill in the air, and a wetness, like fog almost, and he could taste it whenever he breathed.

And then they stepped out into somewhere amazing.

In spite of Holt’s misgivings about the place, it never failed to impress him, and coming into it like this, through the darkened tunnel, only made the reveal that much more dramatic.

They stood in an enormous underground cavern system that had formed behind the dam who knew how many millions of years ago. The walls in this chamber stretched out of sight in every direction, and the ceiling soared several hundred feet above them.

All throughout the cavern, a city had been constructed. There was no other word for it. Holt twisted the bracelet on his left wrist as he took it all in. Structures made out of wood and metal and plastic, repurposed buildings from other parts of the world hammered and welded together, and refurbished components from all kinds of devices and objects climbed up the cavern walls, sometimes as high as six or seven stories off the rock floor.

Lights of all shapes and colors were strung up along the ceiling far above, in huge numbers. Because there were so many of them, and because they were so high up, they looked at first glance like stars in a night sky, bathing everything below them in flickering light. It was no mystery where the place got its name. Midnight City was a city in perpetual night.

The buildings and natural flow of the cavern created large streetlike pathways outlined with lanterns on top of poles that glowed in different colors and intensities, stretching away into the distance toward other parts of the cavern city.

The black rock made everything feel shadowy and mysterious, and the bright, colored lights seemed even more striking contrasted against it. It was as Mira had told Zoey: The city was both dark and bright at the same time.

Zoey stared in awe, her mouth hanging open. Holt watched Mira smile and kneel down to her.

“This is where you live?” Zoey asked.

Holt saw a note of sadness play on Mira’s face, before she replied. “Yes,” she said. “This is the main hall—it’s where everyone lives, except for the larger factions. They have their own caverns.”

Mira examined the city with a melancholy look. Holt had never really felt he had a “home,” as he was always on the move. Even when he’d been with the Menagerie, he didn’t spend all that much time in Faust. But if he had a home, someplace he felt he belonged, and it were taken from him, he thought he could imagine how that would feel.

Hundreds of survivors moved in and out of the city’s buildings, going about their business, walking in a crowd through the lantern-lit streets.

“Where do the lights come from?” Zoey asked.

Good question, now that Holt thought about it. “Electrical?” he asked. “Do they have the dam’s generators working?”

Mira shook her head. “No, the dam hasn’t worked in years, and no one knows how to fix it. The lights are artifact combinations, simple ones called Illuminators. Depending on the components, you never know what color you’ll get. That’s why they’re all different.”

“I like the colors,” Zoey said, craning her neck to stare straight up at the cavern ceiling.

They started walking again, through the glittering city, and as they did, Max reappeared, dodging through the crowd on his way back, tongue hanging out of his mouth. “The Max!” Zoey yelled, grabbing one of the dog’s ears and walking with it like it was someone’s hand.

The buildings stood tall above them as they moved. There were makeshift windows all through them, but no glass. You didn’t really need glass down here, Holt figured: there was no rain or wind to keep out. Inside, he could see other lanterns, people shuffling about, survivors at work in shops.