“Ben, what are you doing?” she asked nervously. She could feel her heartbeat quicken.
“Showing you that I understand.” He let the second hand move a few more clicks, then clicked the button once more.
Mira gasped as a violent sound ripped the air. The world flashed blindingly.
When her eyes adjusted, Ben was gone, and everything in front of her was moving.
Reversing was a better word, actually. It was as if someone had hit REWIND on a VCR, and Mira watched as time somehow rolled itself backward in front of her. The glowing perimeter of the Time Shift flashed back to life. The machine shop began to painstakingly undo its former transformation, shifting back, piece by piece, into the old antique store.
As it did, the sound of roaring static filled everything. Mira covered her ears with her hands, trying to drown out the building wall of—
The sound and the light vanished. Time advanced forward—just like it had before. Whatever Ben’s chronograph had done, it was spent now.
The streaks of lightning-like fingers arced against the building again, transforming it back to the machine shop. As it did, a frightening realization occurred to Mira. The chronograph could rewind time, just as Ben thought. Which meant that Ben was now inside the shop again. He must be.
“Ben!” Mira shouted starting to move for the Anomaly.
But he exploded out the door just then, running hard toward her. Her heart skipped at the sight of him. Tucked under his arm was her Lexicon, undamaged and whole.
The light gleamed everywhere. The Time Shift was almost done. Ben had seconds only.
He lunged past the Time Shift’s perimeter …
… just as it flashed and faded, plunging everything back to darkness.
Mira stared at him as he stopped in front of her, breathing hard, sweating. There were two new cuts on his arm, where he’d hit something sharp this time. His eyes found hers, and then he looked down at her Lexicon and opened the red leather cover. She watched him flip the pages over and reveal the inside binding. Tucked into a fold was a picture.
Ben lifted it out.
It was a black-and-white photograph of a man, leaning against an old station wagon, holding a tiny girl on his shoulders. Behind them the ocean stretched to the horizon. The girl was Mira, years ago, and the man was her father. It had been taken by her mother during one of their summer visits to Portland. It was the one thing still left from that time, the thing she’d had the longest of any of her possessions. The relief she felt at the sight of it was overwhelming.
“I know what this means to you,” Ben said softly.
The chronograph in his hand was no longer silver. Now it was blackened and crumbling. It fell to pieces through his fingers like burnt paper, and then the full realization of what Ben had done hit her. He’d used the chronograph, sacrificed his chance to get what he what he wanted most in the world. He’d risked his life, and he’d done it for her.
Mira’s eyes glistened again.
“You’re right, I don’t feel much,” he said, staring at her with more emotion than she had ever seen. “There’s logical and illogical choices, that’s how I see things, but … it’s always been different with you. Logic goes out the door.” His hand gently stroked her cheek. “I do feel things, Mira. For whatever reason, I just … only really feel them for you.”
Mira stared back at him a moment longer. She didn’t care anymore what made sense and what didn’t in the world now. She grabbed his shirt and pulled him to her. Their lips found each other, their bodies pressed tight, and they didn’t need any artifact to make it feel like time had frozen.
21. FALLOUT
MIRA AWOKE FROM PLEASANT MEMORIES to pitch blackness and instantly felt sharp pain in her knee and left side. There was no way to know how long she’d been out, but she didn’t really care right then. She just grimaced and waited for the pain to pass.
A shadow shaped like Ravan sat next to her, her back against what must have been the wall of the concrete shaft they’d fallen into. Her rifle lay just to her side. She was shaking, and her right fist was clenched so tightly the knuckles were white.
Even in the dark, she could see the pain in Ravan’s eyes.
Mira had been lucky, it was obvious. She’d gotten scraped and banged, but as far as she could tell, she didn’t have any major injuries. Judging from the way Ravan was shaking and breathing, the pirate hadn’t been as lucky.
Mira could hear her sharp, painful intakes of air. The girl was tough as nails. If she was showing this much discomfort, she must be hurting bad. “Your shoulder?” Mira asked.
“Dislocated,” Ravan said through clenched teeth, breathing as shallowly as possible. Mira could see the girl’s left shoulder jutted upward, far behind where the ball normally would be. It made Mira wince.
Ravan groaned as she sat up against the wall. She braced her feet on the dirty floor, squared her shoulders, took a deep breath—and pushed backward.
The move was clearly designed to flatten her protruding shoulder blade and shove the ball back into the socket. It didn’t work. Ravan screamed, pushing as long as she could, and then collapsing to the floor on her right side, breathing heavy and moaning.
“Well,” Mira said. “That didn’t look fun.”
“Screw you,” Ravan said between ragged breaths. Through sheer force of will, she started driving herself back up against the wall. She made it about halfway before collapsing back down.
Mira watched the girl start to try again, then rolled her eyes. “Oh God, hang on…” She pushed herself toward Ravan.
With her good arm Ravan grabbed her rifle. She may have been injured, but she wasn’t helpless. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Mira froze. “I was thinking about helping you.”
“You think I’m stupid? You think I’d let you get close to me?”
Mira frowned. “You know, the problem with being so tough and self-reliant is that, once you get in trouble, you’re all on your own. Sit there in pain if that’s what you want, it doesn’t matter to me.”
Ravan gave her a skeptical look. “Why would you help me?”
Mira stared back. It was a good question. “You saw that big steel door in the ground up there. You and I both know that’s the only way out of whatever this place is, and it’s going to take both of us to figure it out.” Mira held Ravan’s stare, a half smile forming on her face. “Besides, me pulling your shoulder back into place? That’s going to really, really hurt.”
Ravan returned Mira’s look—then she laughed out loud. It was loud, full of irony, and in its own way contagious. Mira started laughing, too. Their voices echoed up and down the small, dark, concrete hole.
Ravan grimaced and stopped herself. “Okay—okay, stop, that hurts. Come over here, sit down on my left.”
Mira did as Ravan said. From this close, the shoulder was even more clearly out of alignment. Mira noticed something else. On Ravan’s right forearm, above the dark bird on her wrist, there were three long horizontal scars. They looked like they had been cut there intentionally.
“You like my badges?” Ravan asked, her voice laced with pain.
“Did that to yourself?”
“Oh, yeah.” Ravan slowly eased down onto the floor, lying on her back. “When a Menagerie leader fails in a raid without being wounded, they wound themselves. A punishment. A reminder. It’s not something that happens to me very often.”
Mira shivered at the brutality of it. “You’ve failed three times?”
“Two were raids. One was … personal.” Ravan looked at Mira squarely. “You’re gonna put your foot in my armpit, then grab my left hand.”
Mira nodded, took the girl’s hand and wedged her foot into place.
“You have to use your foot to brace the shoulder. Then you pull as sharp and hard as—”
Ravan wailed as Mira yanked the girl’s arm toward her.
There was a horrible crunching sound as her shoulder snapped down and forward, back into its s
ocket. Ravan groaned through a clamped jaw, rolling over onto her side. Every breath was a moan of pain. Mira smiled. She couldn’t help it.
“Better?” she asked.
“You … bitch…” Ravan growled.
“What? Was I supposed to count to three or something?” Ravan looked up at her, her eyes full of pain and fury. Mira grabbed her pack and Lexicon from the floor, pulled out two flashlights and tossed one to Ravan. Bright white light streamed outward, illuminating the environment around them.
The “hole” was really a square concrete shaft dug maybe fifty feet into the ground. When Mira lighted what was left of the floor above, she realized just how lucky she and Ravan had been. As far as they fell, they should both probably be dead.
What remained of a rusted metallic staircase wound its way up the walls of the pit. It stopped about halfway up, the remainder hanging loosely where it had ripped from its supports long ago. It groaned eerily in the shaft, bending and shifting dangerously.
Mira guessed what was left of those stairs had broken her fall and saved her life. They touched down just a few feet away, opposite a thick, metallic door set into one of the shaft’s walls.
Mira watched Ravan slowly pull herself up into a seated position, grimacing as she moved. She was sore, obviously, but she wasn’t shaking anymore.
Mira helped her slowly stand, and Ravan winced as she came to her feet. Once she was up, Mira shined her light onto the heavy door set into the wall. It was rusted, still in one piece, and it was cracked open. There was only pitch dark on the other side.
Mira pulled on it experimentally. It didn’t budge. She tried again. It groaned, the bottom of its frame cutting into the floor, but it only moved a few inches.
“Gonna take both of us,” Ravan said. She grabbed the door with her good arm and nodded to Mira.
Together, they yanked it backward—and the door scraped open with a sound like nails on a chalkboard. The echo reverberated into the chamber beyond, bouncing mournfully back and forth in the darkness there.
The two girls looked at each other, neither eager to step through.
From above came a sudden, horrible groaning sound. They looked up in time to see what remained of the rusted staircase begin to crumple in on itself. The supports ripped free from the walls, spraying great plumes of concrete and mortar.
With a shuddering lurch, it all came crashing down with a howl of bending metal.
22. THE UNDERNEATH
MIRA FELT RAVAN GRAB AND SHOVE HER forward through the dark doorway. They hit the floor hard on the other side, as the stairs crashed down, burying everything in a flood of metal and concrete where they had just been. Dust poured through in a huge wave.
When it was over Mira sat up and coughed raggedly, swatting away the dust and mortar and staring back at the doorway. Her light showed it had been replaced by a bulging mass of metal from the collapsed staircase.
“Just perfect,” Ravan said next to her, covered in dust, gingerly rubbing her shoulder.
“Well, you couldn’t have climbed out of there anyway,” Mira replied.
“I still would have liked the option.”
Mira looked at Ravan. She knew what she was about to say was probably going to hurt. “Thanks.” She wasn’t wrong.
Ravan watched Mira squirm. “Don’t make too much out of it, you were just in my way.”
The dark around them was thick and weighted, and the girls’ flashlights painted the interior with circular globes of brightness. It was another concrete square, like the shaft they were just in, but bigger, thirty feet across at least. In the dusty air, Mira could see strange, hulking shadows on the floor. The closest one was a large rectangular shape covered in a thick layer of gray dust, but there were still patches of soft green that showed through. Small pockets sat along its edges, three on each side, evenly spaced, and several wooden rods lay haphazardly on its top.
Ravan recognized it before Mira. “A pool table.”
All around them more and more shadows were revealed. Two arcade games, an old television set, a refrigerator, movie posters—all of it dust-covered and falling apart where it stood.
“It’s a rec room,” Mira realized out loud.
Ravan grabbed one of the old pool balls on the table … but it didn’t budge. She pulled harder. Nothing. It was as if it was seared in place.
“Those won’t move,” Mira told her. “They’re artifacts now.”
Ravan looked at her. “These pool balls are artifacts?”
“Everything in here is. When the Strange Lands formed, it fused them to whatever they were touching. Takes work getting artifacts back to the world.”
Mira studied the room closer. It only had one other exit, straight ahead of them. This door, unlike the first, already yawned open, framing more of the heavy darkness that lay beyond.
The dust was getting thicker. Mira took the pullover she was wearing off her T-shirt, and wrapped it around her nose and mouth. Ravan did the same. It seemed to help, though Mira’s eyes still stung. There was nothing to do about that.
“You know, eighty percent of dust is human skin,” Ravan observed.
“I could have done without knowing—” Mira cut off as the arcade machines suddenly flickered to life, their dust-covered screens lighting the room in pale, crackling, blue light. The girls jumped in fright as the television behind them lit up in a burst of static.
Mira’s heart beat frantically. “Damn.”
Ravan looked around them at the flickering screens and machines. “This place still has power.”
“Yeah, but how? Generator?”
“One hell of a generator, to still be working after a decade.”
Mira moved for one of the arcade games and brushed off handfuls of grime. Underneath the screen flashed and flickered; the image was scattered and fragmented, but she could still make it out. A list of high scores scrolled up and down.
“If we’re trapped, at least we’ll have something to do,” Ravan said.
Mira almost smiled. It was easy to forget the girl had been a razor’s edge away from killing her a few minutes ago. And Mira remembered why. “I don’t believe you, you know. Holt wasn’t in the Menagerie.”
Ravan shook her head in contempt. “You certainly are naïve about how things work, aren’t you? Must come from living in this crazy, fantasy world.” She touched more pool balls, all of them melded to the table. “I live in the real world—where survival is everything and nothing is pretty or fair. If you know Holt at all, you know he lives there, too.”
Ravan was partly right, of course. That was exactly who Holt had been when Mira met him, but he’d become much more than that. Hadn’t he?
“Holt was not in the Menagerie,” she insisted.
“You’re right. He wasn’t,” Ravan admitted, “but, he almost was.”
Mira hesitated, staring at the black-haired girl, unsure. “What does that mean?”
“It means that things, as they often do, got complicated. And when they did, Holt ran. He left everything … and everyone.” Mira wasn’t sure, but she thought she detected a slight note of bitterness in the girl’s voice. “And that, as they say, was that.”
Something moved in the hallway outside, past the room’s other door.
Both girls spun, aiming their lights—but now there was nothing, only shadows.
Mira felt her pulse quicken. “You heard that, right?”
Ravan nodded and unslung the rifle from her shoulder.
“Don’t bother,” Mira said. “There’s not much in the Strange Lands a gun’s good for.”
“I’ll hold onto it all the same, thanks.”
Slowly, carefully, they moved for the hallway, Mira wielding her flashlight, Ravan her rifle. One step. Two. And then Mira stopped as a sudden wave of dizziness filled her head. It was so sudden, she almost lost her footing. It lasted a few seconds—and then receded.
When Mira looked at Ravan, she was clutching one of the old arcade games for support. “You, too?”
Ravan asked.
Mira nodded. Whatever had just happened, it had made both her and Ravan dizzy at the same time, which meant it was environmental. A thought tried to rise in her mind, an important one, but she lost it. As though she knew exactly what had happened, but couldn’t remember.
Mira and Ravan moved into a hallway of more concrete, that held only dust and shadows. The girls’ flashlights scanned around it. It had a few more doors on the sides, another one at the far end that looked like thick, reinforced metal, and that was it. The hall was empty.
“No. There was something here,” Ravan said. “I know there was.”
There was movement in the corner of their eyes, like a black, floating ooziness.
They both spun, lights raising—and realized they were looking back into the rec room. Like before, it was empty; just the old pool table and the dim light from the same screens.
“That’s impossible,” Ravan said tightly. “We were just in there. It was empty.”
More sounds from behind them. They spun again, their lights illuminating the inside of an old shower room. Something globulous and dark disappeared as their light found it. Or was it a trick of the eye?
“What’s going on?” Ravan asked.
The dizziness swept over Mira again. She didn’t lose her balance this time, she just shut her eyes and tried to think. Making her mind concentrate was difficult all of a sudden. Her thoughts came at a glacial pace or not at all, dissolving away before they materialized. She knew what this was, she was sure of it, but it was so hard to remember …
Mira unslung her Lexicon and set it on the floor. She unlocked the big book with her necklace and ripped it open, flashlight in her mouth. She turned to the binder of Unstable Anomalies, flipping through them almost in a panic. Corkscrew. Corporeal Flux. Corporeal Ice. Dark Energy. Dark Matter Tornado. Dark—
Dark Energy! She ripped open the section, studying it, fingers tracing the pages of notes and equations, and as she did everything she remembered about the Anomaly came back to her, and it was all very, very bad. “Oh, God…”
The Severed Tower Page 17