Midian Unmade Read Free Page A

silent.
    It’s too late: the word is out, and the boy with the bleached corn hair is smirking, amusement in his eyes. “Me,” he says. “You think you’re the only one who ever wished she knew where the monsters were? Come on, Blondie. I won’t hurt you. But I might lead you to your heart’s desire.”
    The computer’s secrets have been spilled out on the floor like pearls, or teeth. There is nothing left to learn here, and the night is young. Babette rises like a wisp of smoke, too graceful for the gawky thing she seems to be, and inclines her head toward the boy who dared to speak to her. “Yes,” she says. “Take me to Midian.”
    *   *   *
    Once, Midian. Once, safety and security and home in the deep warrens and the living earth. Babette knows she is not walking backward through time—knows it better than any other member of the tribe. She has seen Cabal since the destruction of their sanctuary, seen him scouring the edges of the world looking for safe haven. She knows to the bones of her that whatever she walks toward, it can’t be home. But Babette, for all her cold-blooded strangeness, is a teenage girl, and teenage girls are vulnerable to dreaming.
    She follows Matt through the alleys behind the library like a rat following a piper, her girl-skin drawn tight around her bones, hiding her second face from view. Matt moves almost as quickly as one of the Nightbreed, skipping from one side of the alley to the other, his strong boy’s bones moving in his lanky boy’s limbs. The smell of him is everywhere, blood and flesh and sweetness. She isn’t the hungriest member of the tribe—can be sated on cat flesh and rat flesh more often than not—but she still wishes he would move a little more like a predator, and a little less like prey.
    After they have walked too far for her liking and not far enough for her to feel safely distant from her kin, Matt stops. “Here we are,” he says, waving a hand to indicate a rusty door set into the hard brick of a nearby wall. “Midian.”
    Babette frowns, searching his face for the joke she knows must be hidden there. No joke reveals itself. She looks to the rusted door, and passes judgment: “This is not Midian.”
    â€œIt is if you want it to be. Midian isn’t a place, Blondie; it’s a state of mind. Places can be destroyed, but ideas are harder to kill.” He moves to the door and knocks twice, calling, “It’s me! Let me in; I brought new blood.”
    â€œWhat’s the password?” demands a voice from beyond the door.
    â€œMidian lives,” says Matt. He’s trying to sound old and wise and eerie. He sounds like a child playing at things he doesn’t understand.
    I should go , thinks Babette. Go now, while this farce is still unplayed, while she still has a chance to slip away unnoticed—but curiosity is a strong thing, and she wants to know what lies behind that door. So she stays where she is, stays as she is, as it swings open to reveal a teenage girl in too much makeup and a black lace dress two sizes too small for her.
    â€œWelcome to Midian,” says the girl. “Do you fear monsters?”
    Here is a question Babette can answer honestly. “Only the human ones,” she says.
    The girl looks disapproving. “This is not a place for pretenders or people looking for a scare. Do you come to Midian freely and with an open mind?”
    â€œI have always been coming to Midian,” says Babette. “Midian is where the monsters go.”
    â€œSee, Danni? She’s one of us,” says Matt. “Let us in.”
    The girl he calls Danni rolls her eyes and steps to the side, holding the door open as she does. “Welcome to Midian,” she says. “Enter freely and be unafraid.”
    There are so many things Babette wants to tell her: wants to tell her that when one enters Midian, one should