The Severed Tower

by J. Barton Mitchell

  Mira walked for about a mile, following the river, before she noticed something odd. The overgrowth around the trees that flanked the water stirred as she moved. Like something was pushing through it, following her.

  Mira frowned when she figured it out. “You can come out now.”

  A shiny black nose pushed through the grass, followed by a fuzzy head with pointed ears. Max stared at her over the distance, and she heard a low growl.

  Mira almost laughed. At least something was still familiar. “I’m going after them, what more do you want?”

  Max didn’t move.

  “Don’t guess you have any ideas on how to find them?” If he did, the dog didn’t say.

  Mira saw the necklaces were still hanging outside her shirt. She grabbed them to stuff them back inside, then noticed one of them. It had a tiny compass for a pendant. And the strange thing about it was that the needle didn’t point north. It pointed northwest. Mira smiled. She had given Zoey an identical necklace weeks ago in the Drowning Plains. They were both Strange Lands artifacts, and they were linked. They always pointed directly to each other.

  “What do you know,” she said. It didn’t solve everything, but it was a much better position to be in than a few seconds ago. Now she just needed a way to deal with the Assembly. An idea occurred to her. A desperate one—but those were the only kind she had now.

  Mira looked back to Max, still hovering in the grass near the trees. “You coming or what?”

  9. LASER LIGHT

  ZOEY TRIED NOT TO CRY, but it wasn’t easy. She’d been hanging underneath the green-and-orange tripod for hours as it darted over the ground. The netting that held her was some kind of thin superstrong metal, and it was sharp, too. It cut into her skin, and the worst part was, the more she moved, the tighter it got.

  It was night now, and what she could see of the landscape raced past—but it made no sense.

  It wasn’t trees or grass or farmland. It was cars. Thousands of them, all different kinds and sizes, stretching ahead unendingly, along some desiccated highway. Where was she? Still in the Strange Lands? She’d lost track of how long they’d been moving, and she had no idea how fast the walkers could go.

  How would anyone find her now, she wondered. This far away, lost in the dark. She felt more alone than she ever had. The first thing she could remember was Holt finding her in the wreckage of that ship, and since then she’d always been with him and Mira and the Max. No matter how scary things got, they were always there, and now they weren’t. She felt tears welling up and pushed them back.

  The world ceased its rhythmic bobbing as the walker slowed. When it stopped, the net released. Zoey came down hard on her elbow, but before she could cry out, there was an intense flash of blinding blue light. She felt the netting that held her dissolve away.

  For the first time in hours, her limbs stretched out, and Zoey’s eyes teared at the relief of it.

  Then she sensed movement around her. There were nine of them. She couldn’t see them yet because of the blue light, but she knew all the same. This close to her, each of their presences glowed separately in her mind, like colors. Not specific colors, but all colors at once, each blending and swirling in a unique way all its own.

  Ironically, it was pretty.

  The machines stared down at her, their sharp legs puncturing the soil, their armor gleaming in the moonlight. One of them pushed forward and the others gave it room. It was differently marked, its patterns of green and orange were bolder.

  Its triangular multicolored eye focused on her, and as it did Zoey felt sensations from it. Pride, arrogance, lust, a heavy mixture that drifted off it like heat from a radiator, and all of it directed at her. Zoey tried to shrink into the ground, but there was nowhere to go.

  The walker trumpeted a single, distorted note. The others echoed it, as if agreeing.

  Zoey flinched as laser light streamed from two walkers. Triangular shaped beams of purple and red energy that seemed both solid and intangible at the same time. She shut her eyes at the brightness, and these she could feel. They gave off a muted heat as they moved over her slowly, like hands examining a patient.

  Then the beams flashed off, and Zoey sensed satisfaction from the walkers.

  Something else dropped to the ground near her. Something heavy and big, and she turned to see what it was.

  It was another body. Blue laser light seared outward and dissolved away the netting which constrained it. The figure groaned and unwrapped itself, but otherwise didn’t move. Zoey recognized him instantly.

  “Holt!” she shouted. The Assembly had brought him, too!

  She felt a burst of relief—then regretted it. Holt was hurt, a prisoner like she was. It wasn’t right to be glad he was here. But she was. She wasn’t alone anymore, and it mattered.

  Zoey tried to move for him, but one of the walkers stepped in front of her.

  The same walkers that scanned her a moment ago did the same thing now for Holt, running their lasers over his still form. Zoey could see the blood soaking his clothes. He must have been shot, she realized.

  Zoey looked at the differently colored walker. Its eye looked back, whirring indifferently.

  “Please,” she told it. “I know you can help him. It’s why you were scanning me a second ago, to see if I was hurt.”

  The walker’s three-optic eye stared into her. Did it understand her? She had no way of knowing.

  “Please…” she begged it. “Please don’t let him die.” Tears started to form in her eyes, but she stopped them. She wouldn’t cry in front of the Hunter, no matter how much she wanted to.

  The machine studied her a moment—then it trumpeted an almost disdainful sound, and looked toward the walkers near Holt.

  As if by command, the tripods there turned and faced his crumpled form on the ground, and a different set of beams, green this time, emitted from diodes on their bodies. Slowly they moved over Holt, hovering above his different wounds, where the most blood was.

  As they did, Zoey reached out to Holt with her mind. There was nothing there at first. He was blank. It scared her, the idea that he might already be dead, but as the laser light moved over him, she started to sense glimmers of emotion and thought. Faint at first, but gradually building strength.

  He was coming back, she realized. Zoey felt more relief. The walkers were healing him.

  Zoey looked back at the differently marked tripod. “Thank you,” she said.

  She felt sensations wash out from it. Disappointment and confusion mainly, it didn’t seem to understand her concern. But Zoey didn’t care. Holt would live. She wouldn’t be alone. If he was alive and with her, then there was a chance, however slim, for things to all be okay.

  Zoey watched as another tripod turned its back toward her. There was a series of clicking sounds as slots opened in its rear armor. Four of them. Two near the bottom, two more at the top. To Zoey’s eye, they looked like … hand grips and foot rungs.

  The differently marked walker’s targeting laser streamed to life in red and purple. Zoey watched as the beam moved to the back of the other walker, splitting into distinct streams, each lighting up one of the four slots.

  Zoey understood. She was to put her feet in the rungs, use the others like handholds, and ride the tripod like some kind of mechanical horse.

  At first she felt fear and revulsion—but the more she thought about it, the better a deal it seemed. What choice did she really have? She couldn’t run, the walkers would be on her in seconds, and anything was preferable to being wrapped up in that net again.

  Zoey moved for the back of the machine, climbing on top of it, placing her feet and hands in its back.

  It wasn’t a perfect fit, but it worked well enough, and the height was such that she could just peer over the top of the machine and look straight ahead.

  One of the walkers shot out a new mass of netting that wrapped around Holt. He moaned but didn’t awaken as it scooped him under its body.

  The world roc
ked up and down as Zoey’s walker moved with the others and formed into a line. Laser light streamed from each of them, red and purple triangular beams lighting up the night and the endless length of dead, ruined vehicles.

  Zoey followed the lasers into the distance … and gasped.

  Things hovered in the air ahead of them, hundreds of them. They looked like perfect spheres of crackling energy. Some were absorbed into the old vehicles or buried in the ground, but most floated heavily in the air. If she watched them long enough, Zoey almost felt like she could see them moving, slowly drifting one way or another.

  They were invisible, Zoey figured out, only appearing when the lasers touched them, and when they did, they flared to life in brilliant color. The walkers were using the beams to find them.

  They were beautiful, but something about them was also menacing. She had little doubt that touching any one of them would be very bad. They must be more Anomalies, like the cubes back at the Crossroads, and the realization made her remember Echo. A chill went down her back.

  The bold walker trumpeted again—and Zoey held on as the line of tripods burst forward into sprints, their lasers streaming ahead, finding the Anomalies as they ran faster and faster.

  Zoey, eyes wide, watched as her walker leaped on top of cars, jumping back and forth, dodging in and out of the floating spheres of crackling energy. The wind whipped through her hair. Bright waves of red and purple and white light streamed all around her as the strange spheres lit up and then went dark, over and over, as the walkers dashed through them.

  Zoey felt the machine’s legs under her, pushing it powerfully forward. Sensations reached her from the walkers. More elation, more joy, but this wasn’t about her. It was because they loved to run, to move fast. It was a love of something foreign to them, she somehow knew. A love of something not of their own nature, and it accentuated the experience.

  In spite of herself, Zoey smiled, watching the flickering spheres of energy whip past as the walkers jumped and dashed nimbly forward through the night. It was … exhilarating.

  It wasn’t until much, much later that Zoey realized that right then she had no longer been scared.

  10. SOLID

  MIRA LAY OUT OF SIGHT at the edge of the tree line, staring at two black boats moored on the riverbank. They were big, and looked like they’d been river ferries at one time, before being extensively modified. Extra decks and levels had been constructed, and they held huts and shacks, probably crew quarters and cargo holds, and the hulls were lined with gun ports.

  Each boat flew the same flag, red with a white, eight-pointed star in its center. It was what Mira had been looking for.

  Menagerie boats, the ones Holt had seen on the way to the Crossroads. The Menagerie were bad sorts to deal with normally, and Mira hated having to approach them. It wasn’t smart, but she’d been doing a lot of not so smart things lately.

  Gear and equipment sat on the riverbank where it had been unloaded—packs and supplies, guns and ammo. It looked like a military operation, and it meant one thing: The Menagerie were going into the Strange Lands. But why? Mira had never heard of them doing that before.

  Max whined at the sight of the ships, not liking it. She didn’t blame him.

  “Yes, I have a plan,” she told him. Max looked up at her skeptically. “And you’re not gonna like it.”

  On the riverbank beside the boats, a crowd had formed in a tight circle, watching something happening in the middle, amid cheers and yells. Mira couldn’t see what it was, but she’d bet it wasn’t a friendly game of horseshoes.

  She took a deep breath, grabbed her pack, and stood up. None of the pirates noticed, the crowd was too busy. Even when she and Max started walking toward them, no one sounded an alarm or even glanced in their direction.

  More than three dozen kids, none of them older than twenty, had made a ring around two others in the center who were circling each other warily. Both held knives. One was a boy sporting a goatee and a wicked looking scar down one side of his face. He had a tattoo on his right wrist, like all Menagerie members, his a blue shark. He also had several cuts across his arms and a larger one on his chest, presumably recently acquired from the person he was facing.

  And that person was not what Mira expected.

  A very fit, lithe girl, about Mira’s age, with olive skin and obsidian-black hair that trailed down her back, tied into a tight braid. She was beautiful, but in a hard-edged way. She wore black cargo pants, a T-shirt, and a single utility belt across her waist. A black crow or raven was tattooed on her right wrist, and on the left was an eight-pointed star, just like on the flag above, with four of its points colored in. It marked her as a Captain, Mira knew, the fourth leadership rank of the Menagerie, and it entitled her to run her own ship.

  It meant she was in charge here. It meant she was who Mira needed to talk to.

  The girl moved with quick, controlled steps. Her eyes never blinked, only watched and calculated.

  The boy lunged for her like a charging bull—and the girl sidestepped and kicked him in the rear with a disappointed frown. The crowd cheered and laughed and the boy whirled around with hatred in his eyes. The girl didn’t seem to care.

  “This is already boring me, Leone,” she said.

  He moved for her again, slashing wildly with his knife.

  The girl dodged the strike, then another, then kicked out with a knee, caught the boy in the stomach and sent him reeling backward. As he did, she twirled the knife in her hand and threw it.

  The boy howled in pain when it stuck in his leg. He fell to one knee.

  The girl was a blur as she closed the distance. Her momentum fueled a kick that sent her opponent crashing on his back, and then she stomped down on the kid’s stomach with her boot. The air burst from his lungs. He shuddered, tried to move, but couldn’t.

  Slowly, the girl kneeled down, yanked the knife out of his leg. The boy screamed again—and then went silent as he felt the cold blade on the scruff of his goatee, near his throat.

  “So tell me if I’m wrong, Leone,” the girl spoke with a hint of amusement, “but I’m sensing a formal removal of your challenge to my leadership.”

  The boy nodded. Quickly. Agreeably. There were laughs from the crowd.

  “Good,” the girl said—and then rammed down the knife. Leone flinched as it punctured the sand just inches from his head. “Now get your ass back to your post.”

  The boy leaped up and hobbled toward the boats as fast as he could, jeers from the crowd following him. They didn’t last long, however.

  “And would someone—any of you idiots really,” the girl yelled, a new hint of menace in her voice, “like to tell me who that is.” She looked right at Mira on the outskirts of the circle. Mira swallowed nervously as the pirates all whipped around toward her. “I posted lookouts for a reason. Or at least I thought I did.”

  The looks of surprise on their faces were quickly replaced with anger. They started moving for Mira. They were all armed, she noticed, all about her age. Mira took a step back, but Max growled next to her. He didn’t budge. The advancing boys stopped in their tracks, eyeing the dog warily.

  “Oh, don’t bother,” the Captain said in annoyance, standing up, wiping the blood from her knife before sheathing it. “If she was trouble, we’d know by now.”

  The black-haired girl pushed past her crew, studying Mira a moment, before looking down at Max.

  “Looks like you brought us dinner,” she said. “Been a long time since we’ve had dog.” The pirates all around her laughed.

  “You’re welcome to try eating him,” Mira said evenly, “but I wouldn’t recommend it. His bite’s a lot worse than his bark.”

  “I might eat you both, you don’t tell me who you are and why you’re here.”

  Mira had to play this right, the Captain wasn’t like the others. She was smarter, and dangerous, it was obvious. If Mira seemed too eager, the girl would sense weakness. If Mira dragged it out too long … she’d grow impatient.
Neither was a good thing.

  “What was all that in the circle?” Mira asked, ignoring her question, trying to seem unintimidated. “Somebody slip too many notes in the complaint box?”

  The pirate girl’s demeanor was anything but warm. “Leone was trying to get his third star point,” she said. “One of the more fun ways you can do that is to challenge and kill your Captain. It’s how I did it. He miscalculated, though. Just like you are by playing games with me, little girl. I like your red hair. Maybe I’ll take some for a trophy.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend that either.” Mira casually opened her pack, reached inside it.

  The Menagerie all raised their weapons, but the Captain didn’t move. She just studied Mira with growing impatience. Mira pulled out a square piece of metal about the size of a dog tag. On it was stamped the same symbol as on the flag, the eight-pointed star.

  Mira tossed it on the ground in front of them. When the pirates saw it, they slowly lowered their weapons. Even the Captain raised an eyebrow.

  “A Solid,” she said with genuine curiosity, “and where did you get that, little one?”

  Her repeated use of the word “little” irked Mira. “You know, you and I are pretty much the same size, right?”

  “If there’s one thing Leone just learned, it’s that size is a relative thing. Where’d you get the Solid? Steal it from someone—or stumble across it on a corpse?”

  “Look closer,” Mira said. The Captain frowned, then knelt down and picked up the small piece of metal. When she saw what was on it her eyes widened. She looked back at Mira in a different way. It was the reaction Mira had hoped for. That was no ordinary Solid. On it, the eight-pointed star had been colored in with metallic red paint. Only one person in the entire Menagerie gave Solids like that.

  “I’m a Freebooter,” Mira said, holding the girl’s gaze. “Did a job for your boss, found something he was looking for a few years ago. Wasn’t easy. He was grateful. Next time you see Tiberius, tell him Mira Toombs says hi.”