Midnight City by J. Barton Mitchell Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    Survival dictated it.
    The sounds of explosions rumbled through the night air again, like strange, reverberating thunder announcing the coming of a storm. It filled the space between the shadowy trees, rattled leaves in their branches. It sounded farther away now, though, which was a good thing.
    “What are they up to?” Mira asked quietly, almost to herself. “Something’s had them jumpy for two days.”
    “Three, actually,” Holt corrected her. “Some idiotic resistance group, probably. We’re not that far from Chicago, it’s probably the Blacksheep.”
    “The Blacksheep Brigade has their hands full, they never leave the ruins,” Mira said. “And they’re not idiots, they’re good at what they do.”
    “Which is what, exactly? Getting killed? You’re right, they’re great at that.” Holt made no effort to hide the contempt in his voice.
    “They’re resisting,” Mira said firmly, “making a stand, you don’t respect that?”
    Holt laughed. “Challenging the Assembly isn’t respectable, it’s suicidal. No one can beat them.”
    “There’s always a way,” Mira said. “Always.”
    Holt shook his head at the conviction in her voice. “Eight years since the invasion, if someone was going to pull it off, they’d have done it by now.” Holt rolled onto his back, stared up at the stars that he could see through the tree cover. “They crushed every military on the planet, subdued most of the population, all