J. Mitchell - Midnight City

She studied the entire platform with a mixture of emotions. It felt so comfortable here, and part of her expected Ben to swing down onto her dais as he always used to. But the rest of her knew things had changed beyond repair, and that those times were gone forever.

Mira focused on each individual object in her old space, wondering which one Lenore had chosen. It would be something meaningful, something Mira would absolutely take, but there were several choices that fit that criteria.

Mira hesitated. She was about to move past the point of no return, and by doing so, she would put others at risk—people she cared about, maybe even loved. She could always leave now, go back to the secret tunnel, forfeit the plutonium she had worked so hard to get. But this was what she’d come here for. And she had to go forward. She had to make things right… as much as she could.

Mira exhaled and moved for the small chest at the bottom of the shelf. She pulled out the second Skeleton Key and shoved it into the lock. The lock was made for a much smaller key, but that made no difference. When the artifact hit the keyhole, there was a spark and a hum, and it somehow reorganized its shape to fit inside the smaller lock.

She turned the key, and it flashed as it unlocked the chest, then dissolved away into a small pile of metallic dust that fell through her fingers onto the floor when she removed it.

Mira lifted the top half of the chest with trepidation… but nothing unexpected happened; it simply opened. Inside rested a tarnished but well taken care of brass stopwatch, a circular mirror with a frame of silver, and a magnet about the size of a silver dollar attached to a very long length of gold chain.

Mira smiled at the sight of her tools. With just these three items, she could survive 80 percent of Strange Lands anomalies, and these specific ones had gotten her all the way to the fourth ring. When she had escaped Midnight City, there wasn’t enough time to grab these on her way out, and she had always regretted it.

Mira reached into the chest and pulled the items out one at a time. Each time, she expected the worst… but still, nothing alarming happened.

Mira contemplated the tools in her hand, thinking. If it wasn’t them, then what was it?

She stuffed the three items in a pocket. It was good to feel their familiar weight and shape again. Their absence had felt like she was missing an arm or a hand.

Mira reached up and touched the purple crystal remnant on the shelf. Nothing. She touched the Polaroid. Nothing. She ran her hands over the books, picked up her old tea jar, touched the candles one at a time.

Nothing.

Mira was becoming worried. Had she been wrong about everything? If so, then her plan wasn’t going to work… and she was in a lot of trouble.

Quickly, she looked around the rest of her space. There wasn’t much else; she had always kept it fairly minimal. There was just the hammock, and…

Mira stopped, staring at something on the cavern wall behind the hammock. A small, faded, black-and-white photograph. Slowly, Mira stood up and moved to the item, staring down at it with a haunted look. It was a picture of a man leaning against an old station wagon, holding a small girl on his shoulders. Behind them, the ocean stretched to the horizon.

The girl was Mira, years ago, and the man was her father. It was the only picture she had of him, taken by her mother during one of their summer visits to Portland.

It was a long time since she had seen his face, and the sight of it here filled her with sudden sadness. Another part of her life that was over and would never come again, and one that had even less chance of being set right.

It was the one thing still left from that time, the thing she’d had the longest of any of her possessions, and anyone who knew her knew how much that photograph meant.

Mira scrutinized it a moment more, then slowly, carefully, she reached toward it…

…and everything around her flashed, bright and forceful.

The world spun crazily as Mira’s feet were ripped off the floor of the platform and she was flung through the air toward the center of the giant room. When she reached it, she hung there, immobile, spinning around in a cocoon of light and inertia a hundred feet above the cavern floor, the result of some sort of artifact trap.

Of course it had been the picture, Mira thought. Her first instinct was to feel a small bit of relief. But as the Illuminators on the cavern ceiling far above lit up and filled the room with brightness, and the kids on the platforms began to stir from their sleep, the feeling quickly vanished.

All around her, the members of the Gray Devils looked up at the person trapped and spinning helplessly in the Gravity Void in the center of their residence hall. As they did, they all came to realize who she was. The trap that had been sprung was designed to catch one specific person, and it had done its job well.

Throughout the giant cylindrical cavern, a cheer sprang up, repeated over and over, echoing back and forth in the air around Mira.

“ Gray!… Gray!… Gray!… Gray!… Gray!…” The more people who joined the shout, the more hostile it seemed. Mira felt a surge of heat in her face as she spun and stared at her former fellow faction members. She recognized most of them. The faction’s top Information Peddlers, Johnny Ringo and Sam Smythe. Another salvage expert, like Daniel, named Oscar. Two young Freebooters named Summer and Meadow, girls who had always looked up to her, girls she had mentored. The Devils’ main enforcers, big, scary kids named Hawke and Waylan. And many more. Some had been friends, others acquaintances, and a few had been competitors, but now they were all her enemies, and they glared up at her maliciously.

“ Gray!… Gray!… Gray!… Gray!…” The hostile shouts continued, bouncing everywhere around her.

There was definitely no going back now.

THEY HAD LEFT MIRA’S LEGS UNBOUND, but her hands were tied behind her back. She stood alone in a cavern that rose to a smooth roof where blue and white Illuminators floated. It had been a long time since she’d been here, but it didn’t look like Lenore had changed it all that much.

At the back of the room was the “balcony,” a cliff ledge that looked out over the rest of the compound’s residence hall below. The sounds of the thundering waterfall filtered up and into the room from outside.

A large four-poster bed sat in the back draped with gray curtains, and a big Victorian armoire stood next to it. One wall was lined with shelves full of books, and there was a reading area nearby with chairs and a sofa. In a corner, a few workbenches held photographic equipment. It was all old, but it was clear that it had been meticulously taken care of.

The room was clean and neat and feminine, and the older furniture blended well with the dark walls of the cavern, but it was not at all lavish, which wasn’t surprising. Like any powerful faction leader in Midnight City, Lenore was obsessed with Points, and she spent much more time at the Scorewall than she did in her own room.

One indulgence, however, was apparent: All along the walls hung large framed black-and-white photographs from the World Before, famous ones. Prints by Adams, Strand, and Cartier-Bresson, all mounted throughout the room. It would have been a priceless collection in another time, but now it had only sentimental value.

Still, Lenore had spent a lot of resources to get these prints, Mira knew. To her, photographs were memories made physical, almost like freezing time. Mira didn’t disagree, and the thoughts made her remember the photograph of her father.

There was a click as the room’s large double doors were unlocked. Ornate and worn, they were still beautiful, and had been taken from an old Spanish mission somewhere down south and installed into the cavern room’s opening. As they parted, Mira caught a glimpse of two burly Gray Devil guards outside as another figure passed by them and entered.