The Red Tower (The Five Towers Book 2)

by J. B. Simmons

  “No, but...”

  “Silence!” she shouts. “You are in the Red Tower now. This is my domain, just as Blue is Abram’s and Sarai’s. You think you are special because you bring some power from Blue, but hundreds of other boys have been where you are now. Here you must earn the Pairing before you can be scoured. And if you don’t?” She shrugs. “You will be taken to the bottom of the tower. You will be devoured. Your memories will be wiped clean. You will start over, completely. As many times as it takes. So...you understand me now?”

  I nod, and the meek expression on my face doesn’t take any pretending. I can’t imagine anything worse than being eaten by the creature below and losing all the memories that I’ve gained. I couldn’t bear to start over, not after what I went through to get here.

  “If you so much as blow a hair off your forehead,” she says, “I will know. This is your last warning. Got it?”

  I take a deep breath. I have no choice. “Yes.”

  “Good.” The fire disappears from above her hand. She spins off and heads back toward her throne.

  Murmurs spread through the crowd. The drumming resumes. People go back into motion, but everyone stays away from me, like I’m a plague. It doesn’t take a genius to see that I don’t fit in here. How am I going to have a chance without my power? Boys like Axe are so much stronger. The girls get to summon fire and pick their pairs. No one will pick me. I miss the Blue Tower.

  A tall, skinny boy approaches me. He has a somber face but hard, bright eyes under a mop of sandy hair. “Hey Cipher,” he says, “I’m Marcus.”

  “You’re not avoiding me like the others?” I ask.

  “Not my choice.” Marcus shrugs and glances at Seymour, who has joined my side. Then he holds up his stone. The number 17 is scrawled on the bottom. “Looks like we’re together.”

  5

  RAHAB ANNOUNCES THAT it’s time to go to the Arena. Everyone begins moving toward the front of the Feasting Hall. A line forms before a small open doorway and a stairway leading down. Rahab stands by the door and watches as the crowd enters and disappears from view.

  Seymour, Marcus, and I are at the back of the line. Last place. I guess it makes sense. We’re the number 17s. Number 6 was assigned to guard the Arena, whatever that means. Seymour keeps talking about how much he would have rather gotten number 16, pig duty. He says the pigs don’t judge him or call him names. He says you get used to the smell.

  I interrupt his monologue. “You said we fight in the Arena? How does it work?”

  “Oh, it’s dangerous, very dangerous,” Seymour says. “A girl will perform, showing her power, and the boys fight to get to her. I suggest you stay quiet and watch. That’s what I always do. No matter how much you like one of the girls, just sit still and you can leave without getting hurt. Because if you go into the Arena...” Seymour eyes me up and down. “Boys like us don’t fare well, okay?”

  “So no powers?” I ask.

  “No way,” Seymour answers. “You heard Rahab’s warning. The Arena is just one way the girls decide who to pick, you know, for the Pairing. Better to stay solo if you ask me.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Marcus says.

  Seymour laughs. “Oh, I do, but I speak for you and Cipher, too. You’ve seen the other boys. They’d knock us out with a single punch.” He pauses, eyes on Marcus. “Hey, I remember you now. You’ve entered the Arena before, haven’t you? Yeah, I definitely remember it. I’ve seen you fight, and last time you got hit in the head by an axe and...” Seymour’s face goes pale as his voice fades.

  Marcus scratches his head casually. “Guess so. I don’t remember.”

  I’m glad all over again that I managed the keep the memories that I gained in Blue. “So you were wiped clean?” I ask Marcus.

  He shrugs. “Don’t remember.”

  “Oh come on,” Seymour says. “Tell us what you do remember. I’m always hoping to compare. Last time I woke up under furs in one of the deep, cave rooms that are warm and close to the creature. Those rooms are kind of nice. Kind of like wombs, I guess. Better to stay inside than come out into this harsh world. I wish they’d let us stay there longer. But Rahab came and got me. I guess it’s always like that. Is that how it was for you? You just woke up and now you’re here?”

  Marcus nods.

  Seymour asks more questions, but Marcus doesn’t say much. We move closer to the doorway, where Rahab still stands like a sentinel. Her fiery stare silences me. What does she have against me? Just because I’m from Blue? Or because I tried to put out her fire? Okay, that was a bad idea. I definitely don’t want to end up like Marcus. I want to remember Kiyo and Emma, and my Mom and my wife and my son from before—at least, the few memories that I have of them. The Red Tower must have something like the Sieve, some way to get our old memories back.

  “Seymour,” I say, interrupting him again. “How do we get our memories back?”

  “From the fire,” he answers. “They can come back clear as day, usually when it’s dark and you’re staring into flames. But sometimes they don’t come. I don’t know why. I don’t...like to think about it much...”

  For once Seymour falls completely quiet. He doesn’t volunteer more. I want to ask him more, about who he was before, but he keeps his eyes away, like he doesn’t want to talk about it.

  Rahab eyes the three of us silently as we go through the door beside her. Inside is a stairway going down, like a rough-hewn tube, almost as far as I can see. Flames hover just below the ceiling, giving a faint reddish light that dances along the cave walls.

  “Go on,” Seymour whispers behind me. “We have to keep up.”

  I began the descent, counting the steps to keep my mind occupied. I’ve reached number 144 when the stairs end and open into an immense round room. It must be the Arena. It’s not as big as the Feasting Hall, but it is somehow more intimidating. Several rows of stone benches rise from a wall that surrounds a large, circular pit filling most of the room. The pit has yellow sand as its floor, and in the center there’s a cube of reddish stone—about five feet on each side, and five feet high. There are a few weapons scattered around. An axe lays half-covered in the sand below us.

  Seymour tugs at my arm and I follow him around the circle to a seat on a stone bench, three rows back from the edge. My guess is it’s fifty feet from the center of the pit to the wall surrounding it. I look up at a large flame hovering in midair and burning directly above the cube in the center. While I study its flickering light, a flash of memory comes to me. I held a green plastic protractor against paper, studying the degrees and angles of a circle. The memory is so narrow and tightly bordered, like something seen at the opposite end of a long tunnel. But it must be from before, on earth. While I can’t see beyond that protractor and the circle, memories of numbers and formulas flood into my mind. I remember Pi. If this pit in the Arena has a radius of 50 feet, then the circumference would be 2 times Pi times 50. Pi is 3.14159... So that’s a 314-foot circumference. Thinking this makes me smile. I feel more comfortable. Maybe there’s no time in this place, but at least there’s Pi. I have to believe, or at least hope, that Pi can’t change, even here in the Five Towers.

  The sound of cheering brings my mind back to the Arena. Boys and girls line the edge of the ten-foot stone wall that encloses the pit. There are three rows of benches, but only the first is full and the second is only half full. The room could hold many more of us.

  Rahab stands on the opposite side of the Arena from us. Her voice echoes in the vast room: “The performance begins!”

  On cue, a girl steps out of a small gateway in the wall just below us. She walks toward the center of the pit, with honey hair flowing over her glittering red dress. She swings up onto the cube of stone and stands in the center. Arms raised, she turns and gazes around at the cheering crowd.

  When her eyes pass over mine, my heart almost stops.

  6

  YOU COULD LINE UP a billion sets of eyes. You could choose only the eyes that are brown and oli
ve-shaped. You might get down to four hundred million sets of eyes. It wouldn’t matter how many eyes there were, or how similar, because I would go straight to these eyes and know them as the ones that matter. They are the eyes that first looked deeply into mine, that fed me, bathed me, loved me. I would know these eyes in any universe or tower, at any time or age.

  Because they are my Mom’s eyes.

  I learned something once about penguins. On the frozen tundra, where the sun rises only half of the year, a mother penguin would lay a giant egg and let the father penguin scoot it up under his blubber and feathers to stay warm. The egg would incubate in that safe space, with thousands of father penguins huddling close to share warmth and deflect cold, while the mother penguins went out searching for food in an icy ocean. The mothers would be out there for weeks, swimming and diving and catching fish and storing them in their guts. Then they’d return in flocks. Hundreds and thousands of mother penguins, looking like an army of identical waddling tuxedos, would press through the frigid air back to the huddle of fathers with their football-sized eggs ready to hatch.

  And here’s the thing: the mothers knew, and the babies knew, exactly who belonged to whom. As soon as that little puff of feathers would lay eyes on its mom, all the ice and the ocean and the distance no longer matter. The penguins get by with their supernatural sense of family in their little bird brains.

  That hasn’t changed in the Five Towers. I’m like one of those baby penguins. Except, instead of crossing the tundra, my mother apparently died like me and came to this place where I instantly recognize her eyes as she stands on a platform in the middle of a pit of sand.

  The Arena. The crowd cheers for her. She looks like she’s my age. But it doesn’t matter. I love her like I did the day I hatched.

  “Oh man, you’re going to like this.” Seymour nudges me in the side. “Last time this girl performed, she drew nineteen boys. Nineteen! Can you believe that? I’ve heard only one other girl drew that many—Melissa—and she’s been in group 1 ever since.”

  Group 1. That means my Mom’s at the top. She goes to the Scouring. Was she ever there when I was there? Have we fought without knowing it?

  She raises her arms and the crowd falls silent. Then she starts to sing.

  The words are soft at first, the melody gentle, like I’m a little boy back in a bed with Mom singing a lullaby. But then there’s a flash of flame and above her head fire begins to coil like a crown a few feet above her as her voice rises and the tempo quickens.

  I feel myself pulled forward. I need to get to her, to tell her that I’m here.

  “Whoa!” Seymour says, holding me by the shoulder. “Don’t move, man. You’ll get smashed by the boys. Just stay in your seat. Quiet. Watch.”

  The fire above her expands and rises like fireworks in slow motion, pulsing to the rhythm of her song. She spins and dances seamlessly as she sings. My eyes can hardly take in all the bright movement.

  She ends on a long, delicate note. There is a moment of quiet, and then the crowd erupts. Everyone stands and cheers. Boys are shouting, pressing against the edge of the wall around the pit.

  “Now,” Rahab announces. “Let the race begin!”

  It’s like a floodgate opens. Boys begin sliding over the wall, dropping to the Arena. A few of them rush to pick up weapons.

  I can’t wait anymore.

  I fling off Seymour’s arm and in one quick motion I step over the wall, holding tight to the edge as my body drops on the other side. I glimpse Seymour’s shocked face, his head shaking, mouthing “no, no, no” as he looks down at me. Marcus is coming over the wall like me.

  My hands release. The sandy floor is soft as I land.

  I spin toward the center. Other boys are charging forward. I take off at a sprint.

  Two boys in front of me collide and drop to the ground, wrestling. I veer around them and keep my eyes on my Mom. Her back is to me. Flames still dance above her hands. Metal clinks from skirmishes around me.

  Twenty feet away from the center I’m hit from the side, hard. I never saw the boy coming. He sends me flying through the air and crashing down. At least he didn’t have an axe. He stays on his feet and charges ahead. He must be twice my size. I stagger to my knees, head spinning. There’s no way I’m going to catch him, and there’s no way I can let him get to my Mom before I do.

  I shouldn’t do it, but I see no other option. From my knees, I summon the air. Just a little. Wind snaps like a whip around the boy’s ankles. He tumbles to the sandy ground.

  Marcus sprints past me, wielding a sword.

  Sorry, Marcus, I think, as I trip him with wind, too.

  I move forward, weaving the air into a wall that blows the other boys back. A few get up and charge again, only to be flung back. I feel the power coursing through me. Mom has turned to me, her eyes open wide in shock as she stares at me. She recognizes me. She must. I smile, so close, when a fire bursts into life before me, out of nothing.

  The flames burn violent orange and red. But in an instant they fade.

  Rahab stands there. Her lips form a severe line. She reaches out and places her palm to my forehead. My power is gone. There’s only heat.

  So much heat. Burning.

  But still I look up, past Rahab and through the pain. The last thing I see as I collapse is my Mom’s eyes.

  7

  SOMETHING STROKES MY CHEEK, soft and gentle and warm. The strokes are in rhythm with my breathing. They bring me a memory, or a dream—it is hard to tell which—of when I was young, lying in bed with my mother coaxing me awake for the day. It is the kind of memory that has no time or place, because it was repeated so many times at such a young age that it is forged into my being.

  This is why, when I open my eyes, I am not surprised to see my mother sitting by my side. She gazes down at me, stroking my cheek, as I lie in a bed. I half expect to see red and blue and green trucks on my sheets, just as I had as a child, but this is not a memory. There are no sheets, only furs. The walls around us have a reddish glow from torch light. This is the Red Tower.

  “I can’t believe it,” she whispers. “You’re actually here.”

  “You remember me?” I ask.

  “Of course. You’re my little Paul.”

  The name feels odd, like a shirt that has shrunk and no longer fits. I sit up and rub my eyes. We are in a simple but large room with a low, domed ceiling. A fire burns in the hearth and three round windows line one wall. It’s dark outside. A fur rug lays in the center of the smooth stone floor. There’s a small table with two wooden chairs by the windows, and two leather chairs face the fire.

  “You like it?” she asks. “This is my place.”

  “It’s nice,” I say, meeting her calm eyes. She is a young girl, about my age. She looks so innocent, so...un-aged. There’s no trace of a wrinkle. All of her hard work, all of her cigarettes, are wiped away. But she remembers me.

  She takes my hands into hers. She wears a ruby ring, like the other girls I’ve seen. “How did you get here?” she asks.

  “I woke up in the Blue Tower, without any memories.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says, as her finger traces the scar on my hand. “I’ve heard Blue is cold. How did you get the memories back?”

  “I looked into the Sieve. It’s a pedestal of water at the top of the tower, and it shows memories. I saw you there.”

  “Do you remember...everything?”

  “No, only little bits,” I say. “But it turned out okay.”

  “Really?” She eyes me doubtfully.

  Well...Some of it was okay, like becoming a doctor and getting married and having a son, but other parts were not okay, like me and my pride and dying, however that happened. But we’re both here now, and Abram said this place wasn’t the worst option.

  “Maybe it depends on what happens next,” I say. “We found each other, didn’t we?”

  “Yes. How did you get here?”

  “Abram—he’s the leader of Blue—he told me that yo
u were in the Red Tower. So I came.”

  She smiles. “You were always so brave.”

  I squeeze her hand and lean my head on her shoulder. Her words make me feel better than I have since I woke up in the Blue Tower. It feels so good to be close to her, to a living and breathing part of my past. “I’m glad I found you,” I say.

  “Me too.” She sighs softly before continuing. “When you were seven, you decided you could do a flip on your bike. You didn’t practice, you just tried it.” She rubs a slight scar on the side of my forehead. “Twenty-three stitches. And now, on your first day in the Red Tower, you charge into the Arena without even knowing what it is. It could have ended a lot worse.”

  “How did I get here from the Arena?” I ask.

  “Rahab was very upset. You disobeyed her order not to use whatever power you brought from the Blue Tower. She was going to send you to the bottom, to be wiped clean. I asked her to give you another chance. She said no. Then I begged, on my hands and knees. She eventually relented, but she told me to keep it quiet. She didn’t want this to be an example to the others. You were lucky. As the Arena performer, I get to choose which boy wins. I chose you.”

  “Thank you.” I imagine what it would have been like to have been that close to my Mom, only to have my memories of her wiped away. I wouldn’t even have remembered that she was here, in Red. I would have started from zero again. The few memories that I have feel all the more precious. “I’m sorry about...rushing in like that.”

  “You’re sorry?” She grins, her eyes lighting up. “Now that is a surprise. Sorry used to be the hardest word for you to say. I couldn’t believe how many tears it took sometimes to draw that one little word out of you. But now you’re here, with me. There’s no need to be sorry, Paul.”

  “I go by Cipher here.”

  Her brow rises. “Why?”

  “A cipher is a code—a way to unlock something. The name came to me when I first arrived in Blue. I’m still desperate to understand this place’s secrets.”