J. Mitchell - Midnight City

Hanging from the ceiling, far above, were twelve huge banners that draped heavily downward and hung motionless. Each had an Illuminator trained on it, lighting up the details. Each was a different set of colors, with some kind of unique symbol on it.

One was auburn red with a huge white wolf’s head stitched on the front. Another was green and showed a yellow sword. A third was orange and had a red shield sewn onto its center. In the middle hung the largest banner of them all. It was deep gray and white, and embossed onto both sides was a laughing devil’s face with a forked tongue snaking out of its mouth and horns on its head.

They were the banners of Midnight City’s factions, Holt knew, though he didn’t know which one was which. Mira certainly did, though. And he thought he saw her shiver at the sight of the imposing gray one.

As they walked, they passed underneath the arches of a large concrete and brick structure that stretched from one end of the cavern to the other, where it disappeared into smaller tunnels. Channels were built into its sides and top, and clear, sparkling water flowed through them, and Holt could hear it rippling as it drifted by. People were lined up along the channels, filling up bottles and jugs, hauling them back to their houses or workshops.

“It’s an aqueduct,” Mira said. “The city has almost twenty of them, and they’re all run by the Gray Devils.” She motioned to the same logo from the large banner above them, a horned white devil on a background of gray, which was also painted onto the walls of the archway.

“Where does the water come from?” Holt asked.

“From the Gray Devils’ cavern. There’s an underground river there,” Mira replied. “When they discovered it, they mined it all out and built the aqueducts. A year later, they were the most powerful faction in the city. Everyone needs water… so everyone needs the Gray Devils.”

They passed under the huge aqueduct and kept moving through the crowds and winding through the “streets” until they reached the city’s business district, an area formed inside a chutelike tunnel. The walls here were spaced only about forty feet apart, and the ceiling was less than twenty high. It was still big, but nothing like the main hall they had just come from.

Dozens and dozens of trading stalls were set up along the business district’s walls, selling everything from general supplies to jewelry, first aid kits to still-functional electronics, even luxury items like junk food, toys, crayons, skin moisturizer, and dusty bottles of soft drinks. Anything that there was a demand for and still existed in some quantity in the world you could find for trade here. Holt stared at it all. There was no other place he knew of where you could find so much trade merchandise and it was always surreal seeing this much product.

Holt noticed a lot of stalls bore the same δ symbol Mira wore on her pack.

It meant those stalls sold artifacts, and as Holt looked up and down the rows, he saw as many with the symbol as without. The wares at these stalls did fantastical things as they passed. Objects hovered or circled in the air, jars and bags glowed strange colors or flashed lights, things disappeared and reappeared, and cabinets lay full of minor artifacts ready for use in combinations, all of which seemed to somehow writhe and push away from one another… or maybe it was just a trick of the eye, Holt wasn’t sure. The sight of it all sent a chill down his spine.

“Why are there so many artifacts?” Zoey asked.

“Because Midnight City is right on the border of the Strange Lands,” Mira responded, staring at it all with lustful eyes. “It’s the first place Freebooters come to sell what they bring back.”

Holt glanced to his left and noticed a group of four kids standing at one of the artifact stalls, haggling with the Freebooter there. They looked like any other survivors, but there was something rough about them, a malicious energy that Holt recognized. He looked to the wrist of one… and saw a green snake etched there.

It was a tattoo. They were Menagerie.

Holt quickly turned his back to them, hiding his face. His left hand covered the glove on his right wrist. He could sense the pirates behind him, watched out of the corner of his eye carefully as they turned and left the stall. He waited until they disappeared into the crowd before he let himself relax.

His survival instincts roared like fire. He knew he shouldn’t have come here. This was Midnight City, after all—he was undoubtedly going to run into Menagerie, but he’d made a choice, and he had known the risks when he did so. In spite of the danger… he wasn’t ready to leave. He just hoped it wouldn’t be his last mistake.

“What is it?” Mira asked next to him.

His alarm must have been written all over his face, and he quickly wiped it away as best he could. “Nothing,” Holt replied. “Everything’s good.”

Mira studied him curiously, the wheels turning behind her eyes.

“I promise,” Holt said, trying to assure her. Mira was smart: she would know something was up, maybe even guess what it was. But she’d also know that right now, in the middle of the crowd, wasn’t the best place for the discussion. She considered him another moment… then took Zoey’s hand. The four moved on, blending in with the surging crowd, moving toward a new room on the other side of the stalls.

When they entered it, Holt saw that it was in every way almost as big as the main hall. Which was a good thing, because it was also the busiest, and Holt pulled Max close as they moved inside.

The bulk of Midnight City’s population seemed to be crammed into this huge oval-shaped cavern, throbbing and pulsing like waves trapped inside a jetty, staring and shouting at the room’s one dominating feature.

The cavern’s back wall was a hundred feet high and stretched to the sides for hundreds more. It had been laboriously polished to a smooth, flat, black surface, almost like a gargantuan chalkboard. Which was exactly how it was being used.

It was the Scorewall, Holt knew, and it was the single most important object in Midnight City.

Midnight City politics were a complicated and multifaceted ordeal that really made sense only to the people who lived there. Everything revolved around a complicated scoring system, where both individuals and groups were given (or penalized) Points based on who they were, whom they knew, what they had done, their position in their faction, their position in the city’s hierarchies, and hundreds of other requirements and rules. These Points could also be traded like currency between individuals and factions, which made earning them even more valuable.

The number of Points you had determined your standing in the city and the amount of power you could wield over those around you. Those with the highest Points got the first choice of food, the best living locations, more voice in the forums, higher ranks in the vocations. Shopkeepers with enough Points could shut down their competitors’ businesses. Freebooters with high Point totals could bring more profitable artifacts into the city, and traders could more easily corner a market on individual commodities. The gathering of Points was the central motivating force for everything that happened in Midnight City, and the Scorewall displayed a current, up-to-date representation of the totals for every faction, resident, and visitor in the city.

Faction names stood out on the right side of the wall. The farther you looked left, the more individuals you began to see, hundreds and hundreds of names, stretching out of sight in a blur of colored chalk toward the far edge of the wall, each with its own chalk-line box and number and the occasional footnote. To Holt, it looked like an impossible collection of information and data to manage, and the logistical implications made his head hurt.