The Severed Tower

by J. Barton Mitchell

  Zoey was right, though. The skies shouldn’t have started darkening until almost the third ring.

  “How do you know that, Zoey?”

  “It just … feels like things are different, but I’m not sure how I would know.”

  The little girl kept looking behind her every few minutes, staring back down the old roadway to where it disappeared into the horizon.

  “Are they following us?” Mira kept her voice low as possible.

  Zoey shook her head. “No, but it’s looking. It won’t give up until it finds me.”

  “It?”

  “The Royal one. I can’t hear it anymore, it’s too far away. But it will come.”

  The little girl was clearly traumatized. Maybe if she—

  “And what are we talking about?” Ravan had walked close, studying them with a calm detachment, her hand on the shoulder strap of her rifle.

  “We were just wondering if the Assembly was following us,” Mira answered, looking away.

  “Doubtful,” Ravan said. “The Portal was a long way from town. They’ll have to run search patterns just to find our tracks. By the time they sort it all out, we’ll be at Polestar.”

  “If you’re lucky,” Zoey said offhandedly. “They’re Hunters. It’s what they do.”

  Ravan studied the little girl. The pirate Captain was no fool, and the less she figured out the better. If Ravan knew that different Assembly factions were blowing each other up to get to Zoey, she might decide to kill the girl and be done with it.

  “What are you going to do with us?” Mira asked.

  Ravan moved her gaze back to Mira. “Haven’t decided yet. If I see some value in keeping you, then I will.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  “I’m sure you can figure that one out all by yourself.”

  “I have a Solid.”

  “And I honored it.”

  “You didn’t honor anything. You cheated me. That Solid came directly from Tiberius, and when he hears—”

  “Whatever debt he may have owed you was rendered null and void the moment you started traveling with Holt Hawkins,” Ravan calmly cut her off.

  Mira stared back. “Why?”

  Ravan just smiled. “If Holt didn’t trust you enough to tell you, I don’t see why I should.”

  Mira looked away. The Menagerie was the group looking for Holt, she knew now, the one he’d been running from since she’d met him. Ravan had recognized him, that much was clear. In fact, it seemed liked they knew each other. If that was the case, did that mean Holt had been in the Menagerie?

  Mira wouldn’t believe that. Holt was … Holt. He wasn’t a thug or a thief. He wouldn’t have been in the Menagerie.

  What did it all mean then?

  She remembered the way Ravan had touched him, how she’d whispered into his ear. It implied … a familiarity.

  Why hadn’t he just told her the truth? Then she never would have gone to the Menagerie in the first place. Then again, what would she have done instead? No one else would have helped her. Holt and Zoey would still be in the Assembly’s clutches, if not for Ravan.

  Mira sighed. Nothing was ever simple.

  Zoey groaned next to her, holding her head with both hands.

  Mira felt for the little girl. The headaches hadn’t lessened any, it seemed. She touched her tenderly. “Sweetie, you okay?”

  “It feels like…” Zoey whispered. “It feels like something’s coming.”

  “What does that mean?” Ravan asked dubiously, but Mira ignored her.

  Mira had come to trust Zoey’s instincts, as unpredictable and strange as they were. If she said something was coming, Mira took note. “What’s coming, sweetie?”

  “That.” Zoey pointed to the north. When Mira looked icy fear gripped her spine. A mass of swirling darkness was building there, and it seemed to glow faintly with blue light; massive, towering into the sky, out of sight for miles, and it was moving, toward them. Fast.

  The sight was stunning. Everyone down the line stopped automatically to stare at it.

  “Looks like a sandstorm,” Ravan said.

  “It’s no sandstorm,” Mira answered in horror. “It’s an Ion Storm.” Mira couldn’t believe it. Ion Storms were third ring Anomalies, but there it was, sweeping powerfully down the hillside, tumbling toward them, a wave of darkness that blocked out the dim sunlight as it moved.

  “It’ll rip everything organic apart, down to the atoms. It won’t leave anything. We have to get inside something.”

  Mira looked around wildly. There were a few abandoned cars nearby and an old tractor, but their windows were broken, they wouldn’t be any shelter.

  “There,” Ravan pointed.

  In the distance, half a mile maybe, a dirt road diverged off theirs. It ended in the middle of an overgrown field, where a small clearing was encircled by a large chain-link fence. Inside the clearing rested a group of five or six small, square buildings.

  There was no indication of what it used to be, but it didn’t really matter. Even from here Mira could tell the buildings were made of concrete. If they were still sealed, they might survive the storm inside. Might.

  “Tell your men to run,” was all Mira said. She lifted Zoey onto her shoulders and bolted down the road as fast as she could. Behind her Ravan shouted, and the pirates reacted instantly, following in a dash.

  The storm swirled powerfully down the hill, and then leveled out and blossomed forward when it reached the valley.

  It was coming fast. Too fast.

  “Mira!” Zoey shouted. She had almost run past the road leading to the fenced area.

  Mira’s feet slid as she turned and raced down it. She could hear the frantic footfalls of the Menagerie behind her. The storm was barreling forward. Mira reached the fence, and skidded to a stop in front of it.

  There was a gate, but it was padlocked. Next to it, a rusting metal sign hung on, with a message that was barely readable.

  PROPERTY OF STATES AIR FORCE ENTRY STRICTLY AUTHORIZED USAF PERSONNEL USE OF DEADLY FORCE SECURED FACILITY

  Mira set Zoey down, ignoring the sign and kicking the fence. It was old, but it was strong. It wouldn’t break. “Damn it!” She kicked it again.

  “Move!” Ravan shouted behind her. The rest of the Menagerie were coming fast. One of her men had pulled a pair of bolt cutters from his pack. Mira jumped out of the way as he placed its open mouth onto the padlock and squeezed. He groaned with the effort.

  “Parker!” Ravan yelled at him. “You wanna die out here?”

  “No, skipper,” the boy said through gritted teeth, trying harder. The padlock snapped apart. Ravan kicked the fence in and everyone charged forward. The rumbling sound of the Ion Storm filled the air.

  “Mira!” Zoey shouted as the pirates ran past and knocked her down.

  Then one of them scooped her up as he ran. “Got her!”

  Mira didn’t argue, she found her footing and ran into the fenced yard. The storm was almost on them now, blooming and rolling forward, blocking out everything as it towered over them, coming fast, darkening the sky.

  She could hear it now, too. The strange, voltaic rumble that came from whatever charged particles the storm was made of bouncing off one another. It was growing. Louder and louder as it roared toward them.

  Max barked frantically, and Mira turned as she ran, saw him growling and biting at the pirates carrying Holt, disappearing with them inside one of the buildings.

  They were little more than shacks, cubes of concrete, maybe twenty square feet each, with heavy metallic doors on the outside. The closest one was ahead of her and to the left. Ravan was running for it, too, and Mira double-timed it.

  As she ran, she saw something else in the middle of the field. A giant circle of steel, hundreds of feet across, stretching from one end to the other. Some kind of huge, metallic door set into the earth. What the hell was this place?

  Mira would be happy never finding out. She kept running for the shack, saw Ravan ram into its doo
r with all her weight and blow it open.

  The rumbling static grew and everything went dark as the Ion Storm closed the distance.

  Mira lunged inside, hit the ground, and rolled to a stop. She just had time to see two Menagerie behind her scream and shudder as a cloud of blackness washed over them, ripping them off their feet. Their bodies disintegrated into a black, powdery substance that mixed with the rest of the darkness.

  Ravan slammed the door shut, holding it sealed with her body.

  The two girls looked at each other as the charged rumble built to a fever pitch outside. The building, concrete or not, vibrated as the brunt of the storm washed over it.

  “You sure this place will hold?” Ravan asked.

  “Ion Storms don’t do as much damage against rock or metal. Give it a few days and it’ll disintegrate the building, but it won’t last that long.” At least, so the old logic went. The Strange Lands were changing, for all she knew this storm could last a month. Mira tried not to think about that, though.

  “Wouldn’t roll over if I were you,” Ravan said.

  Mira slowly craned her head around slowly. The floor beneath her wasn’t concrete, it was wood, and most of it was rotting away. She could hear it groan under her.

  Less than a foot away the wood ended, and a gaping hole of blackness began, a sheer drop into darkness. She had almost rolled off it into … who knew what. The bottom was nowhere to be seen.

  “Told you.” Ravan stepped away from the door. The air still rumbled outside.

  The floorboards, where they still remained, came to a smooth, orderly stop before the chasm. It meant the hole was intentional, and this shack was built to contain it.

  But what was it?

  The floorboards creaked dangerously as Mira moved to a crouch, peering downward. The hole had concrete walls that dropped into the dark. Along the edge of the wall to her right she could see rusted metal supports bolted into the hard surface.

  Mira had seen a lot of desiccated urban environments, and she could put the pieces together. “A stairwell,” she said. “Or it used to be.”

  The floorboards groaned as Ravan stood next to her. Mira could see lines of rotted dust tumbling into the dark as the wood began to loosen and split.

  “I don’t think we should both be on here,” Mira said, starting to rise—but Ravan’s boot stepped on her shoulder, pushed her back down.

  Mira froze. She was right at the edge of the hole.

  “Why not?” Ravan asked in a casual tone. “Nice place, this. Out of the storm. Dangerous, though. Who’s to say what might happen in here? Would be easy to just … take a wrong step, wouldn’t it?”

  The floorboards creaked again. Mira swallowed. “Still got a ways to go until Polestar,” she said. “Killing me wouldn’t be the smartest thing you’ve ever done.”

  Ravan had always exhibited powerful self-control, but the look in her eyes right now held more ardor than Mira had ever seen. “Who is Holt to you?” she asked with slow, deliberate words.

  It wasn’t the question Mira was expecting. “Holt?”

  “You followed him into the Strange Lands, all the way from the Crossroads. Chased after some of the most dangerous Assembly I’ve ever seen, and burned a Solid from Tiberius himself to get me to help you. Who is he to you?”

  Mira felt the anger that had been building inside her peak. She’d had enough of Ravan’s constant threats and power games. “Who’s he to you?” She shoved Ravan’s foot off her shoulder and sent the girl back a step. “Just another Menagerie deathmark with a price on his head? Another Star Point on your hand?” Mira advanced on Ravan and the floor swayed and cracked under them. Neither noticed.

  “He’s much more than a dollar sign.” Ravan didn’t flinch as Mira stepped closer. “Especially to me.”

  “I’m supposed to believe you two are buddies, is that it? Holt wouldn’t have anything to do with the Menagerie.”

  “Oh, little angel, that is precious.” Ravan smiled sardonically, studying Mira with thinly veiled contempt. “Holt had plenty to do with the Menagerie. And he and I are a lot more than friends.”

  The implication wasn’t something Mira had considered, and the words hit hard. She was flustered, tried to find something to say, but couldn’t. It only made Ravan’s smile more intense.

  “The Menagerie isn’t what most people think, you know. It’s more than just a disorganized band of idiots pillaging everything they see. It’s a community. For instance, do you know how couples in the Menagerie show their commitment to each other?”

  Mira said nothing. She didn’t like where this was going.

  “We take the same tattoo. It’s called a Troth.” Ravan held up her right hand. The black raven stood out prominently, wings outstretched to either side. “Has Holt ever shown you his right hand?”

  Mira’s thoughts wavered, remembering the single glove he always wore. “He … keeps it covered.”

  “Does he?” Ravan asked. “Well. I guess you two aren’t very close at all, then.”

  Mira stared into Ravan’s clear blue eyes, her emotions reeling back and forth like they were caught in the storm outside. Then the floor disintegrated beneath their feet. Both girls screamed as they plummeted down into the shadows that yawned open beneath them.

  20. CHRONOGRAPH

  MIRA TOOMBS WAS SEVENTEEN AGAIN, running for her life through the old antique shop with Ben as it violently transformed around them.

  The air kept rumbling and brightening. The front door was just twenty feet ahead, but getting there wasn’t as simple as it looked. Mira flinched as a whining table saw materialized in front of her, its blade spinning wildly.

  Everywhere around her, time was shifting everything into a machine shop that must have existed in the same space at some different time.

  Normally, it would have been a fascinating thing to watch, but the fact that she only had about twenty seconds to get out of the Time Shift’s perimeter before she was wiped out of existence sort of killed her curiosity.

  And then there was Mira’s Lexicon. Left behind. Lost. Mira forced herself not to think about it.

  She dodged out of the way of the table saw, but raked the side of it as she ran by. The impact sent her reeling and crashing to the floor. Mira tried to push up—then cried out as a shelf of books became a shelf of screws, nails, and bolts that poured down and flattened her.

  “Mira!” It was Ben’s voice. In a daze, she felt him lift her off the floor and drag her toward the exit, barely dodging a welding station as it formed out of nothing, its blowtorch flaming and sparking.

  Somehow they reached the door, burst through it and out into the street. The small town was dark, with an ominous sky full of swirling black clouds and colored lightning. Mira could hear the air crackling around them. The Shift was about to solidify, and they ran as hard and as fast as they could.

  The rumbling silenced. The air returned to its normal shade of dark. Mira and Ben spun around, staring back behind them at the antique store. It was surrounded in a sphere of flickering light, the edge of which was just a few feet in front of them.

  The perimeter of the Anomaly. They’d made it out. Barely.

  Streaks of lightning-like fingers flashed all over the building, and where they touched it the structure transformed. The signage and framing and paint of McKelvey’s Lost Treasures antique store shifted into the equivalent version of Miller and Sons Machine Works.

  Mira watched it morph into its new form, watched it all being wiped away. Tears glistened in her eyes. Slowly, pointedly, Mira began to count. “One, two, three…” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Ben studying her, but she didn’t look back. “Four, five, six…”

  “Mira?”

  “Seven, eight, nine…”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Counting how many extra seconds we had before the Time Shift finished.” When she spoke, the bitterness and anger in her voice surprised even her. “Seconds we could have used to get my Lexicon.”
<
br />   “Calculating the time it takes a Time Shift’s energy to expend is even more difficult than calculating how long between the events,” he told her, and his dispassionate voice only made her angrier. “You saw how off we were in there.”

  “How off you were,” she said, still not looking at him. “I would have taken the chance, Ben. I would—”

  The shimmering and the flickering lightning all vanished in a heartbeat, sucked away into the air. The Time Shift was gone. So was the antique shop, and so was her Lexicon and all it contained. Everything was still and quiet.

  The tears that had been threatening to form now fell from Mira’s eyes.

  Ben seemed confused. “A Lexicon can be replaced, Mira.”

  “It wasn’t just a Lexicon, Ben, it’s…” Mira shook her head, feeling the anger rising. “Never mind. You wouldn’t understand. You don’t feel anything.”

  “Mira…”

  “Nothing means anything to you, except the Tower and your Points, though I’m not sure you feel anything for them, either. But, hey, I’m glad you got your artifact. That’s what matters, right?”

  Ben stared down at her. His face was blank, but there was a slight impression of sadness there. Mira had hurt him. Or at least as much as someone could hurt Ben. It was irrational of her, she knew. Feeling the anger toward him. It was selfish and silly, but what was in that Lexicon meant everything to her. It was all she had left, and now it was gone.

  Ben looked down at the tarnished chronograph in his hand, its silver chain dripping through his fingers. He stared at it for a long moment in silence.

  Then he clicked the button at its top.

  Mira could just hear the second hand began ticking clockwise around the colored dial inside the glass, moving from one number to the next, counting up. As it did, the chronograph began to glow. A slight hum formed around Ben, growing louder as the artifact powered up and its second hand kept ticking to higher and higher numbers.

  Mira’s eyes widened. She knew, just as well as Ben, that a major artifact of that orientation could only be used once. It was what made it so valuable.

  “Ben…”

  “I do feel things,” he said quietly. The hum kept building. “Not anywhere near as much as you, but I do.”