“Why?” I ask.
“The circle shows each person a memory, an important one,” Marcus says. “It’s some kind of key to the White Tower. Everyone in Black guards against it. I think Black reveals very little of the past. I’ve learned far more in my little time here, in Red. Not that I like it.”
This explanation sends my thoughts spinning. The white circle is a key? When I fought in the Scouring for Blue, I stepped on the circle several times. My memory there was the same—a hospital where I was the doctor and my son was the patient, surrounded by my wife and others. I’ve never been able to finish the memory. Fighters in the Scouring knocked me out of it. Maybe I need to try again.
“So what did ya learn about your past here?” Seth asks Marcus.
“I was a Roman gladiator,” Marcus answers flatly.
“And you fell in love with the Emperor’s daughter,” I add.
“Yes, Livia.” Marcus runs a hand through his black hair. “I see her over and over again. She’s the one who appeared when I stepped onto the white circle. She haunts every flame I see in this burning tower. Her curves and lips and olive skin made Venus jealous...”
Our group falls quiet for a moment, but then Khan bursts out laughing. “An emperor’s daughter, eh? I knew we had something in common!”
Marcus almost grins. “Don’t tell me you fell for one, too?”
“Oh yeah, the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen was the daughter of my emperor, Genghis Khan. He had hundreds of daughters, so I figured he would consent to our marriage. But she was his first daughter. He wouldn’t give her to me. So we ran away together.”
“How’d that turn out for ya?” Seth asks.
Khan shrugs, a smile lingering on his face. “Don’t remember. Don’t really want to know. My new pair isn’t making me look. So I’m not asking.”
“Who’s your new pair?” I ask.
“Apple,” Khan says. “That girl you were with. She’s not bad. A lot quieter than Jacana.”
Not bad. That’s an improvement. It makes me smile. “Who’s with Jacana now?”
“Me, of course.” Jafari thumps his chest. Unsurprisingly, he’s risen quickly and taken Axe’s place, and he’s paired with his sister again. They must know each other well. They will be a wild force together in the Scouring.
“I’m glad,” I say. “So, I was asking, how do we take down Black?”
“If you really want to go after them,” Marcus replies, “I think the best chance is shoving their girls into the white circle. Then they’d be distracted by memories, and you and our girls could use powers.”
The boys look to me, but I glance up at the girls on the balcony. Marcus is right. If the girls from Black weren’t in the way, we could weave our powers together. Maybe even Blue, Red, and Yellow at the same time. It could be as strong as my last Scouring with Blue, when I linked with Emma and Kiyo to hold Blue, Yellow, and Black. So. Much. Power. Maybe enough to capture everyone in the Scouring. Four teams of twelve. And if we captured all 48 in one trip, that would put Red’s numbers at 144. Equilibrium. It’s a stretch, but worth a try. My work as Alpha would be done.
“Marcus, that’s brilliant,” I say. “Let’s come up with a plan.”
32
THAT NIGHT I enter the Feasting Hall for the first time as the Alpha. The Red Tower welcomes me with a standing ovation. They must have heard how many we captured in the Scouring. Their chant follows the deep drumbeat, “Alpha, Alpha, Alpha!”
I take the throne beside Rahab. It’s not a comfortable seat. But as I look over the long feasting table, with the girls on the left and the boys on the right, I realize that I’ve accepted this tower. I’m no longer fighting against it. I’m fighting with it. My initial coolness is gone. Something about having Emma back and being the leader again has brought me around to Rahab’s view. I still like Blue, but it is cold. Genius needs Passion—otherwise I’m the doctor who’s always better than others, seeing them as tools. But Passion needs something else to control it—otherwise I’m with Samantha, fueling fires that should never be lit.
The evening’s feast ends. There’s a performance in the Arena. Our Scouring group stays the same. I wouldn’t want it to change.
We continue training and planning for a few days, until I stand with my team of twelve before the gate of Scouring again. This time there is no division. The twelve of us know each other. I lead with Emma, followed by Hank and Zelle, Marcus and Boleyn, Seth and Amy, Jafari and Jacana, and Khan and Apple. The girls wear dresses, as usual. The boys wear identical metal helmets with two ram horns coming out of the sides. I’d found them among the Alpha’s supplies. Khan told me Axe had never wanted to use them. Axe was a fool. They may be uncomfortable, but they serve as a uniform, uniting the boys as the collars link us to the girls. The helmets will also make it harder for other teams to recognize me, if they try to single me out.
We are ready when the gate rises. “Let passion burn!” I shout.
“Let passion burn!” the group responds, starting to chant.
We continue chanting as we charge into the Scouring. We draw everyone’s attention. The other teams watch us go straight to the white circle in the center. We form a circle around it, careful not to let a toe or a heel step onto the milky stone. We face out. We watch. We wait.
None of us uses an ounce of power. We want to make Black come to us, but for their two girls not to have a target. Not yet. If they cloud us with their smoke, it will stop us from using our powers.
I stand on the opposite side of the circle from Black, with Emma close beside me. We face Yellow and Green. Their groups are hardly moving, staying close to their gates. I still know so little about how these two towers work. Emma told me a little about Yellow. They are healers. But what else? And how does Green hold its own? When I went to their forest with the Blue Tower, the Green fighters hid until they had us surrounded, then sprang a trap. Maybe they wait until they sense another tower is vulnerable. It makes sense. They hide in the forest. They sneak attack.
Clanking metal makes me glance back over my shoulder. Black is coming toward us in a solid square of shields and spears. They’re at an angle to reach Marcus first. The plan is working.
Hold, hold, I mutter under my breath. Our team has to hold until Black charges us. As soon as they do, I’ll send a blast of wind at their backs to knock them into the white circle. Then the Black team will be distracted by memories. We’ll fence in the girls with a wall of air and fire, and I can drag the boys out with the wind, one by one. The rest of the Scouring should be easy pickings after that.
“Now!” Marcus shouts.
I spin and summon the wind like a gunslinger. Marcus and the others from Red are diving out of the way. The team from Black is directly in front of me, their shields like an iron wall on the other side of the white circle. Emma’s power floods through the link, and I fuse it with the air to send a white-hot howling blast, like a solar flare, into the backs of the Black team. At the same time the other girls from Red summon two walls of flames to lock them in and channel the wind. The Black team has nowhere to go but the white circle.
The front line of Black hits the circle first. They fall to their knees, their expressions going blank. Now the two girls are visible, dressed head to toe in Black. I pull more power. The gale force wind knocks one of the girls into the white circle, where she falls forward and folds over with her head bowed. That leaves only one.
But she stands perfectly still, her pose relaxed, her black clothes motionless despite the wind, her toes an inch from the white circle. Her shadowed eyes under the hood glare out at me.
Monica. The same girl who stopped me before. Again she looks familiar.
She holds out her hand, reaching over the white stones, and beckons for me to come. I pull more power, as much I’ve ever held, but still it has no effect on her. The black smoke smothers me before I can even see it coming, completely severing my link to the power. I hear a voice, Monica’s voice, in my mind.
&nb
sp; Come to me, she says. I have what you seek.
What do I seek?
Before an answer comes, something slams into my back and knocks me forward. All I see is a blur of green before I’m on my knees in the white circle. I’m instantly in the same vision as before, in the hospital hallway. Monica still stands where she was, but now she’s at the end of the hallway. Her eyes are the same, but she’s wearing pale blue scrubs like a nurse, instead of a black robe and hood. She has long red hair pulled back. She has a face I know, because...she is Samantha.
No, not possible, I tell myself. Monica can’t be Samantha. It’s an illusion.
Samantha beckons for me just as Monica had. Then she enters a room at the side of the hallway. I rise slowly to my feet.
“We saw this before,” Emma says from beside me. She must have been knocked into this, too. Maybe the link forces her to see whatever I see. She’s also dressed like a nurse, as she was the first time we were in this vision.
I force myself to breathe, stay calm. “It’s a hospital,” I say. “Where people are healed.”
“It looks...very clean,” Emma says.
I move forward down the hallway, Emma following, toward the room that Samantha entered. I open the door and see the same scene as before. Five people are inside. Dr. Fitzroy stands there in his white coat, my white coat, saying at the foot of the hospital bed, “I failed, I failed...” A young boy lays motionless on the bed with a shaved head and his eyes closed. A woman in a black suit—my wife—kneels by the bed, crying. But this time I know one of the nurses in the room. It’s Samantha.
She turns to me. My breath freezes. She’s in the vision. She shouldn’t see me.
“I told you, Paul,” she says. “I have what you seek.”
The dots connect like fuses. It feels like a bomb exploding inside me. Samantha is Monica. Monica is Samantha. She is here, in the Black Tower.
The Scouring is finished.
The words boom into the hospital room, just as they did in Blue. It is all the same. The booming words, my body frozen in place.
The fire will try your work, the voice says. If your work survives, you shall receive your reward. If your work is burned, you must be purified.
And then the fire surges, engulfing me, my wife, my son, Emma, Samantha, the hospital, and everything else.
33
MY MIND STIRS before my body. I lay on my back, on something soft. A fire crackles nearby, its warmth washing over me in waves. The smell of burning wood and spices fills the air. My hands, my feet, even my eyelids refuse to budge. I stay calm inside. This is not the first time it’s happened—the white circle in the Scouring, the obliterating fire, and the voice. Last time, in the Blue Tower, I woke up in a room of cots with Emma beside me. I had captured her. She was beside me in the vision. Surely she’s still with me now. Did I capture anyone from the other towers? I’d knocked everyone in Black into the white circle. The more I remember, the more my gut wrenches with guilt, confusion, excitement. Samantha is here. Why does she call herself Monica?
Eventually, my eyelids slowly lift. The first thing I see is Rahab, sitting beside me on the floor.
“Ah, good,” she says. “Our Alpha returns to life. Your body will regain motion soon. Consider it a blessing. You need time to think whenever the white blaze consumes you. That was some plan out there. Taking the battle against Black all the way to the White Tower gate, eh? It showed passion. I liked it. It even turned out pretty well, though it could have gone very badly.”
“Emma?” I manage to croak, through unwilling lips.
“She’s right here beside you,” Rahab says. “Hello Emma. Keep working on those eyelids. You’ll get them open.”
“What...happened?” I ask, unable to turn and see Emma.
“You two managed to capture eleven from Black before the Scouring ended.” Rahab sounds as pleased as I’ve ever heard her. “They’ve all met Behemoth, and they’ve been wiped. This brings our tower’s numbers to 106.”
“Who was lost?” My fingers and toes are beginning to wiggle.
“Hank,” she answers. “There was an assault by Green while you and Black fought in memories. They took him.”
“No...not Hank.” Green?
“Don’t look so worried,” Rahab says. “He was captured trying to save you. Quite impressive, really. He had little he needed to see here. He was ready.”
“Oh.” This reminds me of something Abram told me in Blue. We can see some memories only in certain towers. Does this mean I’ll have to go to Green, too? And Yellow? And Black? “Am I ready like Hank was?” I ask.
“No,” Rahab says, “but you are close. The hardest things remain to be seen.”
Enough mobility has returned for me to shake my head and sit up on my elbows. Emma lays beside me, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. Her skin is pale.
Rahab sits to my other side. Her auburn hair looks redder in the firelight. It reminds me of Samantha. The hardest things remain. My mother is in Black. Samantha, too. Maybe that’s where I should go. It’s not like when I was in Blue, when I thought I needed to save my Mom from the Red Tower. Now I know better. We need each other to fully understand our pasts.
“When can I leave Red?” I ask.
Rahab smiles at me, and it is not a kind smile. “If you leave before you have seen what you need to see, you will be wiped. Such a shame that would be, to have to start over with nothing. You’d have to do Red all over again.”
Not good. “Is that what happened to my Mom?”
“There are layers of memories—those from earth, and those from here,” Rahab says. “Sometimes it is better to remember the remembering than to relive the memory itself. It gives you more distance from the past. The Scouring requires being wiped and learning again and unfolding these layers. You do want to leave the five towers, I assume?”
I don’t need to answer. Of course I want to leave. The only other option is to be stuck here in this young body forever, always facing the risk of getting wiped. Rahab knows that. I sit up slowly and meet her bright eyes, which reflect the flickering fire. “Is there any way I could go to Black without leaving Red and getting wiped?”
“I wondered when you would ask.” Rahab studies me calmly.
“Please tell me,” I say. “I’ll bring back captives if I can.”
“You still think very highly of yourself,” she says. “Your mother may not want to come back with you. She has her own stories to learn, and Black may have more to reveal. As it likely will for you, someday.”
“But doesn’t Black reveal little of the past?” That’s what Marcus told me.
“The Black Tower shows what must be shown,” she says.
The answer makes me frustrated. Maybe my Mom and Samantha don’t need me. But I need them. I want to share our stories, to say sorry. I can’t just wait for them to show up in the Scouring. And if I capture them there Rahab might wipe them. “If I do bring back captives,” I say, “will you promise to leave their memories intact?”
“Ah, you feel passion,” Rahab muses. She glances to Emma, who is now sitting up as I am. “And what of you, Emma? Would you go with him?”
“I will follow Cipher,” Emma answers.
“Even into the dark?” Rahab asks.
“Anywhere.” Emma’s answer makes me flush with embarrassment. While I’m thinking only of people from my past, she puts me first here. I don’t deserve her devotion.
“Very well.” Rahab rises slowly. “I will show you something about the Black Tower.”
Emma and I manage to stand and shuffle slowly after Rahab to the far wall with the opening. The wind feels much colder away from the fire. The flat, empty stone ground of the Scouring is far below. The Black Tower stands like a thick iron pole along the wall of the Scouring to our left. But there’s a mountain ridge separating us, with sheer cliffs rising hundreds of feet and descending directly down to the Scouring’s wall.
“You see that you cannot merely walk to it,” Rahab says. “The r
idge is impassible. Trust me. Others have tried, and it has not ended well. But...” She turns to me, her gaze intense. “There is a way. A very dark way.”
“What is it?” I ask.
“It is dangerous, but not for the reasons you might think,” Rahab says. “You have to go through the tunnels, underneath the towers.”
“Tunnels?” Emma gasps. It is a stunning revelation. I should have thought of it before. Maybe that is how the leaders of the towers meet with each other, and how food from one tower’s land can reach another tower.
“How do we reach them?” I ask.
“Behemoth guards the way,” Rahab says.
I’d hoped to never see that creature again. “Why?”
“It is the only way. The two of you must pass through his cavern to enter the tunnels. He might let you pass if you’ve brought our tower to 144.”
Might let you pass. Sounds like a slim hope. “That could take a long time,” I say.
“Not at your current pace,” Rahab replies. “Keep it up.”
I look to Emma, and she nods. We can do this if we must. “So if we get the numbers,” I say, “and Behemoth lets us into these tunnels, what then?”
Rahab’s expression is solemn. “As you can see, the distance is not far from here to the Black Tower, but it will take you to the depths, to the edge of the very pit.”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“You will see,” Rahab says. “But I must warn you, there is a place far worse than the five towers. You may glimpse it in the depths.” Rahab surprises me by shuddering, her skin suddenly looking pale and cold. “Even we, the leaders, have memories. And so even we avoid the tunnels if possible. As much as I want to see Joshua, it is not worth what I must pass through to reach him.”
The Red Tower (The Five Towers Book 2) Page 17
