The Severed Tower

by J. Barton Mitchell

  “What’s the big deal, if they’re just attracted to metal?” Holt yelled.

  “See what those things are doing to the planes? Touch one and they’ll do the same thing to you. In a few minutes, this whole place is going to be flooded with them.”

  Zoey felt Holt groan under her. “Forget I asked.”

  Mira skidded to a harsh stop, almost falling over. Ahead of her the air was full of the lethal glowing cubes—a thick mass of hundreds of them drifting between the various wrecks, igniting into sparks when they made contact.

  “Back!” she shouted, then turned—and stopped again. When Holt spun around, Zoey saw why. The air behind them was full of the same cubes, sparking violently as they began to cover and bore into a cargo helicopter.

  The air was filling with them, and Zoey moaned as the pain in her head kept rising. There was nowhere to—

  Someone grabbed Mira and Holt and yanked them off the path and underneath a rusting fighter jet. Zoey climbed off Holt as they ducked under the old plane, and saw a group of five other kids. Max darted underneath with them, barking, until Holt silenced him.

  More sparks, and another plane collapsed inward on itself under hundreds of the glowing cubes. There were thousands now, Zoey guessed.

  “Mira!” Echo shouted, pushing toward them. His voice was shaky, and Zoey could feel the shock and fear coming off him. “Been pinned here five minutes. Lost four of my guys already. They’re Tesla Cubes! Outside the—”

  “Yeah, I have eyes!” Mira yelled back, just as shocked. “How can this be happening?”

  “I don’t know! I … I should have evacuated sooner. I felt it, I knew something like this—” More plumes of sparks sprayed into the air as a helicopter disintegrated loudly.

  “No one could ever predict this, Echo, it’s insane!” Mira tried to console him, but Zoey felt no change in the emotion coming from him. “Listen to me, we need to get to Northlift! Before the Crossroads are completely over—”

  “I said no!” he retorted angrily. “I’m not losing anyone else! Besides, it’s at the other end of the city, where the cubes are the densest. You’ll never make it.”

  “Hate to break it to you,” Holt told him, “but those cube things are behind us now, too, and with the way they’re multiplying, in another ten minutes they’re going to be pretty much everywhere. The northern side’s closer, it’s less of a run. That lift’s our best chance.”

  Echo snapped to the sound of screams, watched as a giant B-1B bomber fell to pieces in a shower of rust, covered with cubes. Zoey could sense the emotions drifting off him. Frustration, disdain, and anger. He had lost a lot of friends to the Strange Lands, but he had always seen the Crossroads as safe. The realization that it wasn’t hit him hard.

  “Echo,” Mira said. “It’s important. If we can get inside the Strange Lands … we can maybe change everything.”

  His eyes slimmed. “I don’t even know what that means, Mira. Change everything? How?”

  “I can’t tell you,” she said, and Echo frowned. “But I think I’ve earned your trust. After everything we’ve been through.”

  Echo’s gaze visibly softened. Zoey felt new emotions from him. Guilt mainly, and sadness. “Cashing that chip in, huh? It’s that important?”

  “It is,” Mira said simply.

  Echo and Mira stared intently at one another, then he seemed to relent. “Fine. But then you and I are even. And I can stop feeling guilty every damn time I see you.”

  Mira nodded. “Deal.”

  “We can’t use the main paths,” Echo stated, “they’re too open, and the air’s gonna be full of cubes, especially up high. Only shot is to stay low, move under the planes.”

  The glass from a ruined Apache helicopter next to them burst into shards.

  Holt nodded encouragingly. “How about we get going with that?”

  Echo spun and told his men what was happening: They were moving for Northlift; they would try to get out of the city that way. No one argued.

  Mira grabbed Zoey’s hand and pulled her forward, dashing out from the cover of the fighter plane and running toward another one. Zoey’s head throbbed and pulsed, and she could sense the cube things all around her, growing, filling the air and decimating the city. Thousands upon thousands of them now.

  They rushed toward a cluster of helicopters.

  Behind them two of Echo’s boys screamed, and Mira clamped a hand over Zoey’s eyes, stopping her from looking. The cubes must have touched them. And that had been that.

  Behind them came more explosions. A blossom of flame shot out from the side of the cliff at the far end of the city. There were screams as something big and dark fell loose from the wall, plummeting downward and crashing to the ground in a cloud of dust and fire.

  Southlift, Zoey realized. And right before it fell out of sight, she could see it was completely covered in the glowing cubes.

  “Damn it!” Echo cursed as they slid under another plane. Zoey felt his frustration. His city was being eaten alive and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  More cubes burst to life in bright flashes around them. Tens of thousands. The number growing every second. Everywhere, the old planes and helicopters, and the city buildings they had been turned into, were covered by the cubes, and they shook and rocked as sparks sprayed from them.

  They kept moving, running between and under the planes, dodging the cubes above.

  Ahead of them, not more than a hundred feet away, Zoey saw the cliff face rising straight upward, and climbing up along it were the tracks of Northlift, the elevator which would get them into the Strange Lands. So far, it hadn’t attracted the cubes—but it wasn’t on the ground either, it was hanging in the open air at the top.

  “Damn,” Echo said, staring at the lift. “Have to lower it.”

  “Did Ben use it?” Mira asked.

  “Who the hell knows. We gotta do this fast.” Echo rushed out from under the plane toward a bank of controls near the lift’s platform, and started shoving levers and pulleys in different directions.

  From up top came a stuttering sound, as the engines began to turn. Zoey saw Northlift shudder and start to descend, crawling at a glacial pace down the cliffside.

  Holt groaned in frustration. “You have got to be kidding me!”

  The last kid with Echo screamed violently, and this time, Mira wasn’t close enough to shield Zoey’s eyes.

  “Danny!” Echo shouted, but it was too late.

  The kid’s right arm touched one of the cubes in the air. His body flashed once—and then dissolved into a thick cloud of black particles, amid a mass of orange sparks that burst outward and fell to the ground.

  Zoey shut her eyes, her head throbbing powerfully. The cubes were everywhere, multiplying, burrowing into and decimating the nearby planes, filling the air like a glowing swarm of insects.

  Mira grabbed Zoey and pulled her back. Holt held onto Max as he howled at another explosion nearby. The elevator was lowering too slowly. The cubes were pushing in.

  Zoey stared up at Mira fearfully. “What do we do?”

  Mira didn’t say anything, just clutched Zoey tightly, staring at the cubes that were growing and filling the air.

  “Mira!” Holt shouted.

  Zoey felt desperation and fear pour off of Mira in great torrents. She was frozen, unable to move. The cubes closed in.…

  Then there was a sound like a powerful, punctuated blast of static and noise. In a flash of light, something big materialized out of thin air about twenty feet away. An Assembly walker, big and powerful, with five legs. The one from before, the one stripped of its colors. One second it hadn’t been there, and then the next … it had. The machine gleamed brightly in the afternoon sun. Its three-optic eye whirred as it focused on Zoey.

  “Assembly!” Echo stumbled back, his eyes wide with shock, but the machine ignored him.

  “Zoey!” Mira screamed, the sight of the walker breaking her spell. Holt ripped his shotgun free.

  T
hen the cubes in the air all pulled away and drifted faster and faster toward the walker, drawn by its thick metallic fuselage.

  The machine’s shield flashed to life around it, a glowing sphere of energy—and then sparked violently as the cubes made contact. The energy barrier flickered, but it held. The cubes couldn’t punch through.

  But they kept trying. Dozens. Hundreds. All magnetically pulled toward the walker. In seconds, it was covered in them, and Zoey could barely see inside the flickering shield.

  Even so, she could feel the thing’s triangular eye bore into her. And then it lunged away, leaping farther into the city, trailing hundreds more cubes with it, and clearing the air around the lift.

  If only for a second.

  “Would someone like to tell me what the hell’s going on?” Echo yelled.

  “When we’re out of here!” Mira shouted. Northlift sat down with a thud, and everyone ran for the platform nearby.

  Max growled as, feet away, an old jet detonated and lifted straight up into the air.

  Holt sat Zoey inside the lift, and she noticed something unique about Northlift. It had no controls inside it. It was just an empty, polished wooden box. Probably so that its use could be more strictly controlled, she figured.

  Holt pressed her protectively into a corner as more glowing cubes moved in to fill the vacuum outside. There wasn’t much time.

  “Echo, get in here!” Mira yelled as she jumped in.

  The little kid didn’t answer, just shoved the control levers back into place. Northlift rocked and groaned as it started to climb back up the cliff wall.

  “Echo!” Mira screamed, and Holt pulled her back before she leaped off after him.

  “Someone’s gotta run this thing,” Echo said. “You know that. Besides…” Echo finally looked up her. “I owe you one.”

  Mira screamed Echo’s name again, trying to break free of Holt’s grip, but she couldn’t, he was too strong. The air filled with cubes, and Echo was surrounded. There was nowhere for him to go, and he knew it. So did everyone inside the lift.

  He stared at Mira a second more … then he stepped directly into the swarm, touching three cubes at once. He didn’t even have time to cry out, his body flashed into black dust and red sparks almost instantaneously.

  Mira cried in pain. She ripped free of Holt’s grasp, and pushed to the edge of the lift. Holt stared after her but left her alone.

  As the lift rose, Zoey stared down at what was left of the Crossroads. From higher up, they could see everything—and it was all horrible.

  There were hundreds of thousands of cubes now filling the air, covering the old planes, dissolving them. What was left of the buildings and wrecks sparked violently and fell in on themselves in bursts of flames. The city was done for, it was imploding in a torrent of sparks and fire.

  At the opposite end, dozens of kids raced up the road that wound around the walls of the quarry, fleeing to the south. Thanks to Echo, most of the city had probably escaped. Images of the Librarian flinging himself into the pit of the Artifact Vault filled Zoey’s head. Echo was another person who had died so that she could continue on.

  What if she wasn’t worth it? It made her ashamed.

  Northlift shuddered as it came to a halt at the top of the cliff.

  Max darted outside, and Holt followed, grabbing Zoey. Mira was the last to leave, staring out over the destruction a moment longer before finally rushing after them. Zoey could feel the anger and the grief and the shock swelling off of her like ocean waves.

  Holt seemed to recognize it, too. “Mira, are you—?”

  “We need to get to the river,” she said tightly. “It’s the main path north, at least for awhile.”

  Zoey looked ahead of them. There was nothing but open country there, more rolling grassland, with the occasional old road crossing through it, and sporadic groves of trees. The Missouri wound northward less than a mile away.

  A sudden surge of sensations pushed through the pain in the little girl’s head. She felt presences. Nine of them. Anger and disdain and obsession poured out from one in particular, stronger than the others. Something about it was familiar … and frightening.

  She figured out what it was too late.

  “Holt!” Zoey screamed as the metallic netting flashed toward her. It hit her hard, sent her crashing to the ground and rolling through the grass, wrapping her tighter as she did.

  Pain flared in her head again. Everything went hazy and slow motion.

  Zoey heard Mira scream her name, saw her run desperately forward.

  She heard the electronic trumpetings of the Hunters as their cloaking fields dropped, and then the scary one, the differently marked one, charged into Mira and sent her flying.

  Anger and fear flowed from Holt as he pulled loose his shotgun—then nothing but pain as the plasma bolts spun him to the ground.

  She heard Max’s howl. Then it, too, went abruptly silent.

  So did everything else. There was only her throbbing head.

  She felt the green-and-orange walkers lift and tuck her underneath one of their bodies. Then they were moving, rushing through the grass and leaving the Crossroads behind.

  Zoey tried to fight the growing numbness in her head, but she was too weak. The last thing she remembered was the flash of cloaking fields activating around the Hunters as they carried her away from everything she had come here for.

  Then the world faded to nothing.

  7. TIME SHIFT

  LIGHT FROM STAINED GLASS WINDOWS hung in the dusty air, lighting everything in the antique shop with beams of pastel color. Suits of armor, old typewriters, paintings, vases, and crystal, a crossbow, an Apache headdress, books—all of it disused and forgotten in what was left of the old store.

  Mira Toombs, no older than seventeen, clung to the shelves that ran from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, and were just strong enough to hold her weight. She slowly slid her way along the side of it, easing toward a specific glass-covered shelf at the very top, painfully passing by the multitude of items stored there.

  It was hard ignoring them. Each gave off a unique, distinct hum—the mark of all major artifacts in the Strange Lands—and this far into the fourth ring, it wasn’t a surprise that everything in the store gave off that hum. It was a treasure trove, and if Mira could bag it all up and bring it home, she would have more Points on the Scorewall than she could ever spend.

  But that wasn’t why they were here. They’d come for something specific. And there wasn’t time for anything else.

  “How we looking?” she asked, tentatively taking another step. The dirty floor was maybe six feet below her. A fall from this height would hurt.

  “Between four and five minutes,” Benjamin Aubertine stated, about the same age as Mira, one eye watching her, the other on a ticking stopwatch. If he was worried, his face didn’t show it. But then again, he rarely betrayed any emotion.

  Mira frowned. “That’s a pretty big gap.”

  “I told you, there’s no exact math for Time Shifts. All you can do is estimate.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Mira retorted, taking another step. “You’re not climbing a shelf like it’s Yosemite.”

  “Well, of the two of us, you’re the lighter one.”

  Ahead of her the shelves where Mira had been placing her feet vanished, an empty space for a collection of large brass telescopes, each humming in a unique tone. What would a telescope do as a major artifact, Mira wondered. What would you see if you looked through it? The thought excited her as much as it chilled her. You might never recover from what you saw through one of those lenses.

  Unfortunately, the shelf they needed was just above the gap, and she had no way to reach it. Mira studied the shelves and, near the one she needed to get to, saw an old coat hanger screwed into the frame.

  Quickly, she unslung the Lexicon from her shoulders and carefully leaned toward the hanger, circling its thick strap around it. When it was done, she shifted her weight to the right, leaning outwa
rd and holding onto the strap to keep her from falling. It held her weight, which meant she could reach the top shelf now.

  “The odds are good I’m gonna end up breaking your fall,” Ben observed.

  “Do you want what’s up here or not?” Mira used her free hand to rub off the dust that had caked the shelf’s glass cabinet. It was filled with exactly what Ben predicted: timekeeping devices from a variety of eras—water clocks, hourglasses, pendulums, wrist watches, even an old armillary sphere made of gold, silver, and topaz. Of all the items, it hummed the loudest, and Mira stared at it greedily. She could only imagine what that would do if activated.

  “Three minutes, give or take,” Ben announced from below, studying his stopwatch. “You see them?”

  She made herself focus. Near the back of the shelf rested six chronographs, complicated kinds of stopwatches that could record individual times for comparison. Of course, Mira only knew that because Ben had told her. It was what he’d brought them this deep into the Strange Lands for: a chronograph of a certain era that had become a major artifact. He had his own theories about what it would do, but the truth was he never intended to use it. It was a bargaining chip, a valuable one. Something he would give Lenore Rowe, the leader of the Gray Devils back at Midnight City, in exchange for what he truly wanted: a fully funded expedition to the Severed Tower.

  It would probably work, too, if the artifact did what Ben thought. It was something someone as ambitious as Lenore Rowe would trade anything for.

  But they had to get it first.

  “What am I looking for again?” Mira asked, gingerly opening the glass cabinet.

  “An older one, early twentieth, late nineteenth century. No Seikos or Timexes.”

  “What about Gallet?” she asked, studying two of the older looking ones.