Free Winterbay by J. Barton Mitchell

disconcerting way. However old this story was, it still had a certain power over him. It had been formative, this experience.
    “Back then air pumps were solid and heavy, felt like two crowbars in your hand, one inside the other. He came up from behind, overconfident, loud … and I spun and clipped his right knee with the pump, dislocated it, I think. Then I beat him. Bad. Broke his nose, knocked some teeth loose, fractured his skull, cracked a rib, I’m pretty sure, and when it was done I left him lying there, bleeding. Funny thing was, he never told anyone. Probably because he was too busy. Every day after that, some new kid jumped him and got his own revenge. It was like watching sharks in a feeding frenzy.” He smiled slightly then. “I realized I hadn’t actually been scared of Max at all. I’d been scared of the idea of Max. Everyone in that place had been told Max was the baddest kid there, so they believed it, until the reality was shown to them, and then things changed pretty damn fast. I learned from that. I learned it’s people’s perception that matters, it’s what they believe. And belief always comes from ideas, Mira, and the takeaway is, those ideas don’t have to be anything close to the truth for people to accept them. A single idea, the right kind, can inspire incredible things … or incite horrors beyond description. Wars, crusades, miracles, inventions, they all started as ideas. They’re the world’s real currency, before the Assembly and now. Maybe now more than ever.”
    Mira studied him back, things not entirely lining up. “But from the way you describe the Machine, it sounds like a vault,” Mira said. “An idea isn’t something tangible. You can’t just lock one up.”
    “Can’t you?” Armitage asked, his cold, crystal-clear eyes focusing on Mira’s, a hint of amusement in them.
    It sounded insane. Armitage wasn’t crazy, though, Mira was sure of it. He was ambitious and dangerous, but he was sane. Which meant there was something to what he was saying, she just didn’t know what.
    “Suppose we’ll find out. After tonight, my guess is Winterbay’s gonna be a very different place,” Armitage said. Nearby, Reiko smiled. He nodded to her and looked at the door out of the room. “Time to go, girls. Make me proud.”
    Mira started for the door and found the relief she felt ironic. So far, she had pulled everything off. No one seemed to know she had planted that last combination. No one seemed to know she had seen what was in the room across the hall. Those were victories … but she had a feeling she hadn’t faced the worst of what Winterbay—or Armitage, for that matter—had in store for her.
    Then again, it didn’t matter, did it? She was past the point of no return now, and she’d see it through. She had to. The plutonium was worth all the risk.

Needs
    The two girls stood at the bow of an old tanker in the rumbling Underworks, staring into the shadows ahead of them. “I’m guessing that’s it,” Mira said, trying not to sound amazed but fairly sure she wasn’t pulling it off.
    “I think it’s a safe bet, yeah,” Reiko replied, not pulling it off either.
    They’d been moving for over an hour through the Underworks. It was no bigger a place than the city above, but the haphazard way you had to navigate it meant it took much longer than it should. There were no straight paths here in the dark; you had to jump between the various boats and platforms, and sometimes you had to go the complete opposite direction of where you wanted. Even so, eventually, they got there, watching the boats thin out until there was nothing left but black water and a giant round shape looming out of the darkness ahead of them, like some kind of rusted monolith.
    Their flashlights revealed it was the beginning of a massive steel cylinder, its sides stretching out of sight in both directions. Shining their lights upward showed where it pushed through the “roof” of the Underworks