J. Mitchell: Midnight City

She kept fighting him as the swarm pulsed and writhed around them. “Please, I’ll come with you, I won’t struggle,” she pleaded. “If you just help me get that. ” Mira pointed it out to him, a few feet away, lying there by itself. “Please, you don’t know how important it is.”

The boy stared at it a moment… then rolled his eyes, started pulling her away again. “You don’t need it where you’re going, sweetheart.” He pulled her harder, and this time she was unable to resist. He was too strong. He started dragging her away.

“No, please!” Mira cried, staring at the glass cylinder in agony as she was pulled away from it. “It’s incredibly valuable, it’s priceless almost.”

And at those words, the boy pulled up short. He stared down at her. “Priceless?” he asked, a hint of a new tone in his voice. She almost smiled when she heard it. It was child’s play now.

“Yes! You could trade it for anything !” Mira exclaimed. It wasn’t a lie—you definitely could. She had known people who would kill for that thing, for the opportunity it presented.

The boy looked at the cylinder, seemed to calculate its distance versus the risk involved. The swarm was all around them, and Mira had to spin to keep the flare up to drive them away. “Please, I won’t fight you if you get it. It’ll be worth it. More than worth it.”

When he looked back at her, she saw something remarkable. His eyes were crystal clear, no telltale tracings of black at all. He was Heedless, she realized in surprise (and envy). The Tone had no effect on him. “If it turns out to be a glass of water,” he said with a hint of warning, “you’re going to have a very unpleasant trip back home.”

Before Mira could answer, he lunged forward into the shadows, leaving her holding the flare for protection.

But she didn’t really need it. The sight of someone outside the protective cocoon of reddish light was enough to stir the creatures into a frenzy.

They darted downward at the bounty hunter, jaws and clawed appendages materializing from their bodies.

The boy blasted one that landed in front of him, sidestepped its corpse, and leapt for the cylinder.

He grabbed it as two more of the things flew toward him. The boy rolled away… and the things crashed into a stack of rotted crates. What was left of the heavy boxes came tumbling down in a mass of debris and splinters, burying the creatures.

The boy didn’t stop to look—he ran back for Mira, firing his shotgun as he went. When it clicked empty, he sheathed it on his back and drew a handgun from his belt all in one smooth movement, fired at two more creatures, dropped them dead to the floor.

Mira watched in amazement. He was more than good… he was amazing.

He reached her, stuffed the cylinder in her pack, and shoved her forward. “Anything else I can get for you?” he asked sarcastically. “Forget your toothbrush somewhere? Maybe your favorite socks?”

Mira scowled at him as they rushed for the lift.

The elevator was clear of the swarm. The red flare was still flashing there, keeping them away.

They reached the lift, shut the gate behind them, and hit the button to start it rumbling upward. The creatures swarmed all around them, slamming into the lift, shaking it as they tried to get at them, shrieking and scratching in fury. But there were two flares now—the light was too much. There was nothing they could do.

As the creatures receded, Mira breathed a sigh of relief. She had done it. She had what she came for, she had survived—barely.

Then she gasped as the boy shoved her hard to the floor of the elevator and pinned her arms behind her back. She felt rope circle around each hand, and flinched as it tied them together tight. “Ouch!” she said angrily, glaring at the bounty hunter. “That hurts!”

His hair was thick and wavy and unkempt but somehow managed to look intentional in its style. He was tall and well built—streamlined was probably the best word, muscles and quickness earned from years of running and fighting—but there was more to him than that. Behind his brown eyes were confidence and cunning in a proportion Mira didn’t often see, a calculated awareness of everything around him. He had… something about him—that was for sure. And it only annoyed her more.

He kneeled down to her, smiling as the swarm futilely pushed and shoved against the lift. “My name’s Holt, by the way. Holt Hawkins,” he said, mockingly introducing himself the same way she had when they first met. It made her blood boil. “And you were right. You definitely made me work for it.”

STARS PEEKED THROUGH THE TREE canopy high above the forest floor. Only the flickering light from the fire illuminated the campsite, but Holt was about to douse it. He built it as he always did, dug into a hole at the base of a tree, with limbs covering it. Doing it like that allowed the fire to still provide heat while drowning out most of its light and filtering the smoke. All to avoid detection. Not just from other kids, but from Assembly patrols as well.

As if on cue, the rumbling of distant explosions floated through the air, this time from the east. Strange, rhythmic percussive booms that hung in the air. The Assembly was still stirred up, it seemed.

“Excuse me,” a testy voice said from behind him. Holt turned and studied Mira, tied to a tree at the top of a small rise. He had secured the girl with rope, tying her around the waist and binding her hands on either side of the trunk. She wasn’t happy about it, but he didn’t particularly care. She had already escaped once, and he wasn’t taking any chances this time.

“Can you please make it stop staring at me like that ?” Mira asked, nodding to Max, who lay in front of her, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, watching her like a prized bone.

“Sorry, but no,” Holt said, dousing the fire with a pile of leaves he’d assembled earlier to block the smoke from rising in a plume when it went out. “Max is just doing his job. He knows you’re his meal ticket.”

“Oh, is that right?”

“You know how much your bounty is?” Holt asked. With the fire gone, the camp was thrust into the dark; only the filtered starlight above provided illumination.

“All I know is it’s definitely less than I’m worth,” Mira replied. She was just a dark shadow now against the tree.

“It’s a tidy sum, the biggest I’ve ever seen.” Holt moved to his cot, straightened his bag out. “Gonna solve a lot of problems for me and Max.”

“Only if you can get me back to Midnight City,” Mira said with a smile in her voice. “A lot can happen on a long journey like that.”

“I’m not too worried, now that you’ve lost your little bag of tricks.” Mira’s pack, adorned with the δ, and all the artifacts it contained rested underneath Holt’s cot for safekeeping. “Your wanted poster says you’re a Freebooter. Carrying that many artifacts, looks like it’s true. I thought Freebooters got along well in Midnight City. How’d you piss them off so bad?”

“Getting a price on your head doesn’t take much these days,” she said bitterly. “But it sounds like you know all about that, though. If you need my bounty to solve your problems, you must be on the run,” she replied. “Who owns your death mark? Rebel group? The Menagerie? Some Midnight City faction?”

Holt frowned as he crawled into his sleeping bag, suddenly aware of the glove on his right hand. He didn’t like her figuring out his predicament. It was best this Mira Toombs knew as little about him as possible, that she saw him only as her captor. But it was his own fault. He’d made the remark about needing her reward money, and the girl was smart, she knew what conclusion to draw. He’d be more careful.