The Severed Tower

by J. Barton Mitchell

  “And what if I say you don’t look like the kind that’d be palling around with Tiberius Marseilles? What if I say I don’t buy it?”

  “Then you can come find out for yourself,” Mira said, trying to sound confident. “But I guarantee you won’t have as good luck as you did with that dimwit a second ago.”

  The Captain studied Mira intently, weighing things, calculating. Then a slight smile formed on her lips. “Well…” she said as she stood back up and the Solid disappeared into a pocket, “color me convinced. How exactly were you hoping to cash this in?”

  A Solid was a token given out by high-ranking Menagerie leaders to non-Menagerie who did them important favors. They could be presented to any other Menagerie leader, and that leader was obligated to help them in some task as repayment. It was never that simple of course, but Solids were rarely given out, and it was assumed anyone possessing one must be in the good graces of someone important. At a minimum, a Solid would usually ensure your safety.

  “Two of my friends have been taken by the Assembly,” Mira said. “They’re headed northwest, and I need help rescuing them.”

  The pirates all stared at her a moment—then burst into laughter, the sounds filling the air. Even the black-haired girl chuckled.

  “Well why didn’t you just say so?” she asked. “I was expecting something difficult or out of the question.”

  “What’s so funny?” Mira asked in a low voice. She had to stay firm, had to be strong.

  “What’s funny is that getting killed isn’t part of honoring a Solid, no matter who it’s from. Even the Menagerie don’t tangle with Assembly unless we can’t avoid it, and you’re talking about chasing down a group of them. Trust me, if the aliens have your friends, they’re good and gone. So drink to their memories, and spend this Solid on something nice for yourself.”

  Mira sighed. It had been too much to hope that the Solid alone would get their participation, but there was another approach.

  “You’re going into the Strange Lands,” Mira observed, studying all the gear that had been offloaded nearby. “Why?”

  “What, we’re best friends all of a sudden? It’s nothing you need to stress about,” the Captain replied. “We’re here for something special. It’s another reason I can’t just go off looking for your friends. Of course … the way it’s looking now, we might be experiencing something of a delay.”

  Mira smiled. It was as she’d hoped. “You need a guide. And all the Freebooters you would have hired at the Crossroads are gone now. There’s nothing left of that place.”

  The girl spat. “That’s about the long and short of it, yeah.”

  “You hoping to get to Polestar?”

  “Among … other places.”

  Any other time Mira would be incredibly curious what the Menagerie’s goals might be here, but right now she had other things to worry about.

  “The Assembly took my friends inside the Strange Lands,” Mira said carefully. “It’s not totally the direction you need to go, but it’s close. You help me find them, I’ll help you get to Polestar, and you get to turn in one of Tiberius’s Solids when you get back to Faust.”

  There were murmurings from the pirates around her. The Captain stared at Mira intently. “You any good?”

  “I’m not the best, but I can get you where you need to be. Either way, looks like I’m the only chance you’ve got.”

  The Captain’s stare hovered on Mira a few seconds more, then she smiled again. It was disturbing. “My name’s Ravan. If I agree to this it means three things. I’m in charge, you’re a hired hand; you do what I say, when I say it. Fighting Assembly’s a deadly game, and I can’t have you running around on your own.”

  Mira nodded.

  “Two: If we don’t find your friends—if the Assembly makes it to a Presidium or a processing center or an Osprey den—it’s over … and I keep the Solid for my trouble, and you’re still taking us to Polestar. Agreed?”

  Mira nodded again. She didn’t like it, but it was what she expected.

  “And three … if at the end of this you start thinking of ways to get off honoring our bargain…” The smile again. “Well. I’ve known lots of people who’ve tried very similar things, and they aren’t members of the living anymore. Need I be any clearer?”

  Mira forced herself to muster as much calmness as she could. “No, I think I get the gist of it.” The two held each other’s stare a moment longer. Then Ravan nodded.

  “Assume you got some way of tracking these friends?”

  “I do,” Mira said.

  “What is it, an artifact?”

  “Yes.”

  “How far away are they?” Ravan asked, starting to think and plan.

  “I can’t tell distance, but they’ve had about half a day’s head start.”

  “You said northwest?”

  Mira nodded. Ravan’s eyes slimmed, thinking it through. She turned to one of the boys next to her.

  “Get everyone ready, we head out in thirty. Tell them to pack light, we’re moving fast.”

  “What about the boats?” the kid asked.

  “Tell Steans and Riddick to take them downstream and wait at the Gillespie Interchange. We’ll meet you there when this is all said and done. Give it … five weeks. You haven’t seen us, we ain’t coming back.”

  The kid nodded, moved briskly toward the boats, shouting orders, yelling at other kids. They all started scrambling, making ready to leave.

  Ravan looked back to Mira, and when she did Mira noticed something she had overlooked in the tension of the past few moments. Ravan’s eyes were a perfectly clear, sapphire blue. The black, fingerlike veins of the Tone weren’t there. She was Heedless. Whether Ravan had noticed the same thing about Mira, or she just didn’t care, Mira wasn’t sure.

  “Looks like you got exactly what you wanted, Red,” Ravan said, her blue eyes flashing, “and you know what they say about that.” She turned and moved back for the boats to collect her gear.

  Yeah, Mira thought, staring after the Menagerie Captain. She knew exactly what they said about that.

  Beneath her, Max whined and looked up questioningly.

  “Told you you wouldn’t like it.”

  11. MAS’ERINHAH

  ZOEY PUSHED BACK into the wall of the dark building, staring at everything around her. It was a big scary place, with shadows clinging everywhere, and she didn’t like it. Her head hurt, too. It seemed to be getting worse, the more the walkers took her in to the Strange Lands, and she didn’t know why.

  Night had fallen outside, and Zoey could see the half moon through a giant crack in the building’s far wall that ran floor to ceiling. It was a large structure, with brick walls and heavy frames, and it seemed to consist of just one huge room. What remained of rows of long wooden benches stretched all the way to the other side.

  There was something else. Something almost impossible to wrap her mind around.

  The far wall from where she sat was bursting open inward. Bricks and mortar and debris hung in the air, spraying outward. The benches and chairs there were thrust forward, shattering into splinters and flying forward, and the beginning of some kind of huge truck exploded through the wall, its headlights still shining like glowing eyes, flooding the interior of the old building.

  But it was all somehow amazingly frozen in place.

  Like you were watching it on TV and someone had hit PAUSE. Zoey kept staring at it as her mind tried to make sense of it all.

  While the truck was the most dramatic example, Zoey could look around and see others.

  On the desk near her, a stack of papers had fallen off a desk, fanning outwards toward the floor—but they never reached it. They hung in the air, frozen in place just like the truck and the debris at the other end of the room.

  Curiously, Zoey slowly reached out and touched one of the papers.

  There was a sizzling sound, then a flash of light—and the paper unstuck like someone had hit PLAY. It floated downward, and as it did it
hit other papers, and they too sizzled and flashed and unstuck, settling along the floor like fallen leaves.

  Zoey watched in fascination. She wished Mira was there to explain it.

  An annoyed electronic sound echoed behind her, and Zoey turned around.

  There were four green-and-orange Hunters in the building, watching her intently. Since the others had left, these four had kept their glowing triangular eyes locked onto her, never moving, just watching her like some prized possession.

  They didn’t want Zoey touching things in here, and she understood why. If just touching the frozen things unstuck them, what would happen if she touched that truck bursting through the wall?

  It made her shiver thinking about it.

  The other tripods, including the differently marked one, were outside. She could feel each of them, could point to them if she had to. They were circling the city ruins they’d found, but it was probably less for pursuers, Zoey guessed, than for the Anomalies.

  It was odd, but she found comfort in the closeness of the Hunters, of relying on their senses and technology. Every time she thought of them, she thought back to riding as they raced through the dark. The walkers had run all night. Zoey had held on as they leaped and dodged through the invisible Anomalies, moving with agility and power, until she forgot she was holding on at all, and for a moment it felt like she was one of them. The Feelings stirred inside her pleasantly at the memory.…

  But she wasn’t one of them, she told herself, pushing the Feelings away. The walkers were bad, and they had hurt her friends.

  Before they left, the machines had hung Holt from the thick wooden rafters that spanned the length of the old building. He was still unconscious, recovering from his injuries, hanging limply about five feet off the floor, legs dangling underneath him.

  Zoey swallowed and got to her feet, took a few tentative steps toward Holt. The walkers watched, but made no move to stop her.

  “Holt,” she whispered. He didn’t respond, just hung silently. She said his name again, louder. On her tiptoes she couldn’t even reach his dangling feet. Zoey jumped upward, swatted at them, but she was still too short. She frowned, made ready to jump again …

  … and then shrieked as the cloaking shields of more walkers flashed and dropped away, revealing three green-and-orange machines right beside her.

  One was the leader, the scary one. It trumpeted angrily, stomped forward, and Zoey scampered back. The other two walkers just watched. So did the four at the other end of the room. The machine’s three powerful legs impaled the floor on all sides of her. It towered over her, its three-optic eye spinning and staring into her.

  Zoey shut her eyes.

  Then her mind was suddenly full of imagery and sound. It all came lightning quick, an impossible blend of sensation and impressions, and it was all too fast to make sense of. It flowed through her mind’s eye faster and faster, consuming all her thought.

  And then it stopped.

  Zoey exhaled violently. Her head was full of pain now. She moaned and clutched it between her hands. It was worse than it had ever been.

  “Please…” Zoey said. “It hurts.”

  The sensations came again, pouring into her head in a thick stream of suggestion. Zoey cried out, crumpled to the floor. “Please…”

  The sensations ended. Above her, the walker trumpeted again. There was a note of frustration to it.

  Green laser light flashed from two of the Hunters, and bathed Zoey in their glow, moving and focusing on her head. The pain lessened. Zoey looked up at the walkers. Somehow, they were stopping the pain.

  The four tripods from the other end of the room joined the rest and added their own streams of warm, green laser light to Zoey’s head.

  The pain vanished almost completely. More pain than she even knew she had been feeling. She slumped against the wall in relief, breathing in and out. It felt so amazing, a world without pain.

  The lasers shut off. The differently marked walker stepped back, and stood unmoving like a statue. A humming emanated from it, so deep and low it vibrated the crumbling floorboards underneath Zoey’s legs. The sound began to grow louder and louder, building in power.

  Zoey had no idea what was about to—

  She shielded her eyes as bright, powerful light flooded the interior of the building.

  The illumination bled up and out of the three-legged walker, drifting into the air, filling more and more of the interior with its radiance. When it was clear of the machine, it almost instantly formed into a brilliant, huge crystalline shape, made of pure energy, that hovered over Zoey.

  The tripod that the field pulled itself out of suddenly became lifeless. Its lights died, there was a slow, descending hum as its mechanics shut down and it slumped downward. It was as if without the strange pulsing field of energy the walker was dead.

  Zoey stared up at the bright, fluctuating crystalline shape. She had seen those shapes before, of course. They floated up and out of any destroyed Assembly craft. But those weren’t like this one. The glowing, geometric shape above her was not golden like all the others she had ever seen.

  This one … was a brilliant green and orange—just like the colors of the walkers around it.

  The two colors mixed together so perfectly it was impossible to tell where one began and the other ended. At the same time, both were distinct and prominent, and they lit everything in a combination of emerald and rusted light.

  The sight was so beautiful, Zoey almost smiled.

  An intense burst of static exploded to life in her mind. It overtook everything, roaring through her consciousness, and Zoey grabbed her ears, futilely trying to block it out.

  But the static hiss pushed in regardless. The bright green-and-orange, light-filled shape pulsated above her. She wanted to cry out in fear—but stopped when the first “suggestion” came.

  It was the best word Zoey had to describe it.

  It was almost the same as the Feelings. Only these were much, much more powerful—forceful, insistent, and aggressive. They were loud and scary. And the pain was coming back. Building inside her head again, threatening to rip it apart.

  Zoey screamed as the suggestions came in a powerful steady stream, filling her mind. They were like words or thoughts translated directly into pure perception, and they flashed by too fast for Zoey to make sense of.

  “Stop!” the little girl cried out on the floor. “Please…” The crystalline shape hovered over her. The stream of suggestion continued. Zoey wanted to weep, but she forced herself not to. She had to be strong. Like Mira and Holt. Like Max. But, the pain …

  Green laser light flared outward from the walkers around her.

  Zoey breathed out as the pain diminished. Even with the combined laser light of all the Hunters together, it wasn’t enough to stop it completely, but it was enough that she could think.

  The sensations continued, one after the other, racing past like a flooded river.

  Zoey reached out for the Feelings, the ones deep down in that other part of herself, and they rose, flooding her with comfort, giving her strength. She let their ideas wash over her, feeling what they intended. If she could just slow down the suggestions somehow, they seemed to say. If she could give herself time to read them, maybe it would be bearable then.

  Instinctively, Zoey did the only thing she could think of. She pushed back with her own thoughts against the pure sensory information being force-fed into her mind.

  And the stream shuddered. It slowed. For a brief moment she could almost make sense of the suggestions. The Feelings swirled in encouragement. Zoey pushed back even harder, projecting her own thoughts directly at the crystalline shape with all the strength she had.

  The suggestions slowed again—and this time they stayed that way.

  Zoey felt elated. As long as Zoey pushed back against the stream of sensations, she could force them into a more tolerable speed. She could understand them.

  They were just impressions, just suggestions and senses.
It was simple and concise, the same idea over and over, and if she had to put it into words, it would be:

  Can you hear us?

  The shock of the question’s simplicity made Zoey’s concentration slip. The stream overwhelmed her again and she grimaced, feeling the pain rising. She concentrated, pushing back once more.

  The suggestion was still the same. Can you hear us?

  Yes, Zoey thought in response, I can.

  As she did, the crystalline shape above her flashed brightly, its fluctuating shades of green and orange blending together into pure white light. The walkers on either side trumpeted electronically in surprise.

  A new sensation bombarded Zoey then.

  There was no way she could translate it into words, it was just simple emotion, uncomplicated and pure, nothing else, and it felt like … pride. Zoey knew it came directly from the hovering energy field above her, and the realization troubled her.

  If that green-and-orange shape was transmitting feelings into her mind, did that mean … it was alive?

  Another suggestion came more powerful than the first.

  Do you remember?

  Remember what? Zoey thought back.

  The suggestion shifted and morphed almost instantly, different streams of consciousness and ideas merging together into something new.

  Us, the crystalline shape seemed to imply. You are of us.

  Zoey stared up at the shape in fear and confusion. A part of her wanted to recoil at the thing’s thoughts, but another part felt a familiarity with communicating this way. It was almost like hearing your native language for the first time after living in a foreign country. Part of her felt drawn to the shape now—and that made her even more frightened.

  We are Mas’Erinhah. We have waited long.

  The feelings of satisfaction and joy bloomed—and then cut off completely.

  The stream ended. The glowing field of green and orange floated back toward the machine it had left earlier, burying itself into the walker until it disappeared.

  When it did, the tripod reactivated. Lights flashed, mechanics hummed to life, its triangular eye burned red, green and blue. The tripod stood up powerfully and glared down at Zoey.