Winterbay Read Online Free Page A

might want to, though, she couldn’t bury who she was and leave that behind in the same way. Say the wrong thing in this place, and people would figure out pretty quick what she was.
    True to her word, Olive had gotten her to the northern outskirts of Chicago, where the giant, towering form of the Assembly Presidium baseship hung over the ruins, so tall it disappeared into a bank of swirling clouds high in the sky. She quickly said her good-byes and headed north.
    Hopefully, she’d beaten the wanted posters here, but still, it was an obvious place to start looking. No doubt bounty hunters were already on their way, not just to Winterbay but to places like Currency and Faust as well. She had a day, maybe two, before the larger population centers were no longer safe for her, which meant she’d have to finish her business before that.
    Ahead of her the haze was brightening. As it did, Mira watched a shape begin to draw itself in the thick off-white canvas of the fog. It stretched and widened as she drifted closer, more and more of it revealing itself until the breadth of it finally broke into view.
    A few months after the invasion, when the Tone had gone active and the world’s youngest were left to fend for themselves, the city’s first incarnation had been built using an unlikely resource.
    Boats.
    Dozens and dozens of them, all types and sizes. Tugs, barges, paddlewheels, ferries, tankers, every kind of boat that had once run on the great lake, and the collection grew until it was more than a hundred strong. Over time they were moored and connected together, anchored as one giant platform in the northern half of the lake, away from the two nearest Presidiums in Minneapolis and Chicago.
    That had only been the beginning. In the years that followed, more and more survivors arrived as word spread. Once there, they began to build.
    On top of the boats, at first. Making a solid base of scrap wood and sheet metal, all of it blended and shaped together to be a cohesive, roughly circular structure that stretched some two square miles and encompassed the original mass of ships.
    Then they kept going, building upward, adding levels populated with markets and houses and workshops and stores, stretching to the sky. There were towers and buildings made of wood and plastic, all repurposed from the ruins back on shore, stretching defiantly above the cold waters.
    Unique in its construction, Winterbay differed from other cities in yet another way. As the ferry pushed through the fog, Mira saw it for herself: lights, gleaming and sparkling ahead of her in the night, and they were not lights like she was used to. They didn’t flash or waver in a multitude of colors. They were solid and lifeless and all tinged the same cold shade of white-blue. They were real lights, powered by electricity. Mira hadn’t seen that many in one place since the invasion.
    Most places were powered by artifacts now, items imbued with powerful properties from the dangerous place to the north called the Strange Lands. Artifacts and combinations of them were used for energy, for light, for heat, for pretty much everything that was needed or wanted, and the world revolved around them now. They were the new order.
    Everywhere but here.
    Winterbay used the giant collection of boats underneath it as more than just a foundation. Their old engines and generators were kept running and, working together, provided power for the entire city.
    That fact had come to define the place. Its residents and its governing body, the mysterious Quorum of Id, saw the city as one of the last fragments of humanity’s past, a place that kept the old memories and achievements alive. Consequently, Strange Lands artifacts were seen as vile. They were forbidden, and so were Freebooters—those, like Mira, who specialized in venturing into the Strange Lands. Here, Mira was already a criminal, even without the wanted posters. Being a Freebooter meant the death sentence in Winterbay. It was why