J. Mitchell - Midnight City

Mira took his hand as she moved past him. “Come on,” she said, and her arm brushed against his. The quick, soft feel of her and the scent of her hair helped to slow his pulse.

Holt let her pull him out of the lift, and as she did, he took in the sight of the Vault up close. At the top, it had been deceiving to look at—the rows of hung shelves and cabinets that spiraled down the walls looked like they had somehow been bolted or attached to the rock—but from here, it was clear that the architecture was much more complicated.

Just outside the lift was a rocky outcrop that had been cut into the cavern’s walls, one of many Holt could see: a man-made ledge that stretched probably a hundred feet in either direction, and another twenty feet or so into the cavern wall. It was on this ledge that the cabinets sat, two rows deep. The pattern continued all around him, up and down the circular cavern’s walls, stretching out of sight in every direction. Ledges, cut into the rock, containing hundreds of cabinets and shelves, and within them, thousands of artifacts.

Holt stepped out of the lift onto the ledge and made the mistake of looking down. In spite of how far the lift had unceremoniously dropped them, they were still very, very far from the bottom of the chasm. He quickly moved forward, out of sight of the drop below. As he did so, he noticed the cabinets were all labeled, and the labels placed inside etchings of the δ symbol.

Mira walked to a specific cabinet, pulling Holt gently along, and turned down its row. “What does that symbol mean, anyway?” Holt asked, watching the way her red hair brushed the turn of her neck.

“Which one?” Mira asked back.

“The one you guys put everywhere, the one that means ‘artifact.’ The one on these shelves, the upside-down Q thing.”

“It’s called the Feigenbaum constant,” she said absently, scanning the artifacts on the shelf. “In the World Before, it was a number that appeared everywhere in nature, in things that were supposed to be random but really weren’t. Dripping faucets, falling leaves, blooming flowers. It was one of the main numbers in chaos theory.”

“But why choose it to mean artifacts?”

“Ask the Librarian—he’s the one who picked it,” she answered. “But I’d guess it’s because the artifacts themselves are pretty much pure natural chaos.”

Holt followed her progress through the shelves. “Who was the old man before the invasion?”

“A scientist, a famous one, but that’s all I know,” she said. “He doesn’t talk much about the past. But he was the first one to travel the Strange Lands, the first to see the core. No one knows more about that place than him. Hell, no one probably knows more about anything than him now.”

Mira kept examining the shelves, and it was then that Holt finally looked at them himself. His stomach tightened as he realized he was surrounded by not just artifacts, but major ones as well. Potent artifacts from deep inside the Strange Lands, things that didn’t need to be combined with other pieces in order to do frightening things. These were powerful enough on their own.

Next to him, a bright, prismatic, laserlike beam shot out from the lens of an old microscope. What Holt would see if he looked through it, he had no desire to know. On the other side of him, the two pieces of an old, faded slide rule floated and rotated around each other, like a planet and a moon, inside a large cork-sealed glass jar. On the right, a small clock stood ticking away time, but its hands were moving backwards, not forward, and they glowed with a dim yellow light. And there were more, many more, all around him, stretching to the end of the row, lining the shelves and filling the ledge with colors and flickering light and strange sounds.

Ahead of him, Mira came to a stop, looking at something specific on the second shelf of a cabinet. “Here,” she said, and Holt didn’t need to be Zoey to read the apprehension in her expression. He looked to see what all the fuss was about.

Admittedly, it didn’t seem all that threatening. It was an abacus, Holt knew, an ancient counting device, with little red beads that slid across tiny wires in a wooden frame. It wasn’t glowing or moving; it didn’t pulse or float or make strange sounds. It just sat there, silent and unassuming.

It made Holt all the more wary.

“You’ll have to carry it,” Mira said, looking away from the artifact to stare at him now. “I can’t hold it with my artifact. They might not affect one each other, but then again, they might, and as dangerous as they both are, I don’t want to risk it.”

Holt looked at the simple abacus, sitting serene on its shelf. He wanted to argue the issue, but what was the point? It was their only way out of here, wasn’t it? He forced himself to reach out and take the thing.

Nothing happened. It sat cold in his hand, feeling no different from any other item. He studied it cautiously nonetheless. “How does it work?” Holt asked, keeping his eyes on the thing. “You know, so I know how not to activate it.”

Mira held him in a skeptical look. “I think it’s safer not answering that,” she said.

ZOEY AND MAX MOVED DOWN the dark tunnel that lay behind the curtain. The little girl was scared, but she pushed forward regardless, holding the slightly vibrating quarter in her hand, reminding herself to be like Holt and Mira. Max padded along silently behind her, and whenever she stopped, he bumped his fuzzy head into the backs of her knees.

She didn’t get the sense that the tunnel was all that long, but it was moving in a curve, and since she had started down it, a glowing red light had been building ahead of her, becoming brighter and brighter. The light didn’t flicker or waver: it was constant, providing the only real illumination inside the dark tunnel. Whatever it was, it was just around the end of the curve.

A few more steps, and Zoey came face-to-face with it… and it was nothing like she expected.

In front of her sat a machine about as big as a refrigerator, with a base of wood and the top half encircled in a square of glass. It was once painted in colorful colors, but now it was faded and old. Along the top, the words DORINA THE DIVINER were written in an elaborate script whose paint had mostly worn away from years of weathering.

She stepped closer, finally able to see what sat inside the glass box at the top of the machine. When she did, Zoey jumped back in fright, almost tripping over Max.

Inside the glass, the slumped, lifeless body of an old lady stared back at her through the glowing red light. Around her head was a sparkling, jewel-encrusted cloth. Dozens of chipped and broken gold necklaces draped down her neck. Zoey tensed, staring at the figure inside, expecting her to leap straight through the glass… but the old woman just lay there completely still, her eyes open and staring sightlessly, blankly ahead. Max growled low behind Zoey, apparently not liking the figure much either.

It took a moment for the truth to connect in Zoey’s mind. The woman was not—nor ever had been—real. Looking closer, Zoey saw that the woman was actually made of wood. There was only half of her, the top half. One of her wooden arms had fallen off, and Zoey could see the mechanical parts and gears that had once probably made her move and gesture and maybe even speak. The machine looked like something you would find in an old carnival, and it had definitely seen better days.

Zoey moved closer, staring into the blank eyes of the gypsy. Red light bled out from the machine in spite of the fact that there was no way it could be plugged in and working here. A slight rumbling emanated from the box, which Zoey could hear when she was close enough, deep and low but muted, like the crashing of a waterfall from someplace far away. Still, those things were the only indications the machine was anything other than what it appeared to be.