The Severed Tower

by J. Barton Mitchell

  Ambassador spun its blocky frame—and saw the object of its obsession.

  The one the Scion named the Royal stood at the end of the street, four guardians on either side of it. Ambassador knew these would be its end. They would fade its colors.

  But … this was what had been chosen.

  The walker rumbled and charged powerfully forward. Streams of plasma flared from the Royal’s guardians, slamming into Ambassador’s shield. The barrier flickered once, twice, then died.

  The ordnance seared into Ambassador’s armor as he charged, ripping into the machine. It sensed its hydraulics begin to flame, a short in a servo hub, but it didn’t matter now.

  The Hunters tried to bound out of the way at the last moment. Three of them didn’t make it, and Ambassador drove them hard through a building wall. It whirled around as more plasma bolts found it. So did a stream of missiles, slamming into the walker in violent explosions that sent it stumbling back.

  It tried to jump forward again, but two of its legs were severed, it could only pathetically shamble.

  More plasma bolts cut into it, bursting through its armor, tearing into its electronics and mechanics. The machine took two more steps … then crashed to the ground, fire shooting from its exhausts.

  Still, the walker tried to pull itself forward. It would not let the Mas’Erinhah see it give in. It would push toward them until the Void claimed it.

  The Royal trumpeted with disdain—and then leaped into the air and angled its razor-pointed legs toward Ambassador’s fuselage. There was a violent shudder. Sparks. Its sensors died, its vision went dark, and without its connection to the Whole, it was utterly, ultimately alone.

  * * *

  HOLT AND MAX RAN after Ravan, and what was left of the Menagerie, toward the nearest building, trying desperately to avoid the guided artillery that was falling everywhere.

  “You really think a building’s the best place to be?” he shouted after them.

  “What do you wanna do?” Ravan yelled back as she ran. “Stay out here in the rain?”

  To his right, he saw the last silver Mantises explode and crumble. The huge Spider was ahead of them, blasting everything, but the gunships were focused on it now, concentrating their fire, and its armor sparked and buckled.

  And everywhere the Hunters poured into the city. It was the worst battle Holt had ever been in, and it was only getting worse. He just hoped he could buy Mira enough—

  A Hunter landed just to the left of Holt and Max, plasma cannons screaming. The bolts caught and spun him to the ground in burning pain. The pirates kept running, unaware.

  Holt fired the last three shells from his Ithaca, but it wasn’t enough. The walker advanced on him, its plasma cannon priming …

  … and then something leaped onto it, snarling, jaws sinking into the hoses jutting from its actuators. It was Max. He was defending his master. Holt reached for his Glock, ripped it free, aimed …

  “Max, let go!”

  It was too late. The machine whirled and twisted, shook the dog off and sent it crashing to the ground. Holt, eyes wide, desperately fired every round he had, trying to distract the thing from Max if nothing else, but the bullets just sparked off the walker’s armor uselessly.

  Max yelped horribly as the tripod impaled him with one razor-sharp leg.

  Holt screamed in anguish, frantically started to rise and—

  An artillery explosion rocked the ground, sending him flying away … and the world morphed into an unreal, slow-motion haze.

  He didn’t hear anything anymore, could barely see through the blood. There were blurs of movement that could have been walkers or explosions or White Helix. He didn’t know.

  The world shifted. He thought he heard someone yelling, and then he was being dragged, pulled into a strange white place with broken tables and counters that used to be shiny. An old ice-cream parlor, Holt’s mind barely put together.

  His vision focused a little. His body was searing pain. He wondered absently if he was dying.

  He saw Menagerie firing frantically out the windows of the old shop, saw them take hits and fall. Ravan appeared, hands on his face, yelling something he couldn’t make out. She pulled him close and kissed him. He wished he could feel her, he really wished he—

  A stream of plasma bolts threw Ravan violently away. Holt weakly turned, saw her lying still, blackened and bent. Still he felt nothing but pain, and even that was fading, mercifully.

  Past the door of the shop, in the streets, there was chaos, death, and destruction, but it all seemed like a dream. Just vague, blurry images. Hunters in the streets like ants. White Helix leaping and striking in colorful movements, then falling to the ground. The giant Spider walker overwhelmed, burning, collapsing downward, right toward him, in a strange, slow-motion fall he wasn’t sure would ever reach him.

  “Mira…” Holt breathed, though he couldn’t hear his voice. He saw her one last time—around a campfire in some forgotten forest, dancing with him. Smiling.

  The Spider crashed. The world went white. The pain ended.

  * * *

  AVRIL CLUNG ONTO THE water tower at the top of the building, overlooking the destruction below. Dane was barely conscious, and she held him in place so he wouldn’t slip away.

  They were the last left. She had watched the rest of her Arc fall one at a time, their deaths burned into her memory. It hurt more than plasma burns ever could.

  Below her the Hunters advanced into the city. She saw the Spider fall in flames and crash. She watched the five-legged walker, the one who had come with the Prime, valiantly charge into the swarm. It took on eight Hunters by itself before they overwhelmed it.

  It was all very heroic, and in the end all very futile—but that’s how it was always going to be. She only hoped the Freebooter had gotten the Prime to the Tower. In the distance she saw it, looming over the city, and Avril stared at it with hatred. She would tear the thing down if she could.

  “Avril…”

  Dane’s eyes were open. He was still handsome, she thought, still strong. She could hear the roar of approaching engines.

  “Go,” he said. The bulk of the Assembly were past them now, headed north, unimpeded, toward the Tower. She could escape, but she knew she wouldn’t. “Go.”

  “Ssshhh…” she told him, stroking the hair out of his eyes. “Quiet now.”

  She pulled Dane close as the gunships rose into the air around them, and his familiar shape and warmth was comforting, even then.

  “We grow stronger,” she whispered into his ear. The plasma bolts unleashed from all directions, searing heat overtook everything, and they were falling, falling into nothing …

  * * *

  MIRA STARED THROUGH THE pain up at Ben. He looked worse than he had at Polestar. His face was ashen, his eyes dark and hollow. He clutched two things, one in each hand. A glowing cylinder of plutonium, and the Chance Generator.

  “Ben…” she said weakly. He made no move toward her.

  “Are you … real?” he asked, his voice haunted. “I’m … seeing things now.”

  “It’s me, Ben,” she assured him. Even now, being close to him had its comforts. He was a missing piece of her in this place. “I almost made it,” she said with guilt, feeling Zoey’s fading warmth against her.

  Something about the statement seemed to get through to him. Ben’s eyes focused, and he looked to the side. “No. You did make it.”

  The Vortex swirled around them, but Mira noticed it was weaker now. Ben was standing easily, not having to fight so he wouldn’t be swept away. Looking closer, she could see why. A few feet away the Anomaly ended. There was nothing beyond it but a bright field of white, almost bright enough to block out the sight of the Tower, hulking directly above her now, so close.

  The realization hit her, and flooded her with something like happiness. She had made it, after all. By herself. As Holt told her she could.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  “It’s everything,
” Ben replied.

  Mira set her plutonium on the ground next to her, and then, with her good arm, started slowly untying Zoey, trying to do it as carefully as possible.

  “When I saw the Tower, for the first time,” Ben said, “it … felt wrong. I always thought you would be there.”

  “If I had, I would be dead now, wouldn’t I, Ben?” Mira asked. The Chance Generator seemed to waver with heat in his hand. “Like the ones who followed you?” Mira kept untying Zoey, loosening her legs from the straps, pulling her free.

  Ben looked back to her, confused but blank, as if he hadn’t heard. “You should have been there. I … promised you…”

  “You can still keep that promise, Ben,” she told him, and she meant it. “You don’t have to do this. You can help get me back. You can help Zoey get into the Tower.” She finished untying the little girl.

  “You don’t understand,” he told her, and she saw the strange, foreign flash of anger in his eyes. “After everything that’s happened, you still don’t understand. I’m supposed to do this!”

  Mira shook her head sadly. “No, Ben. You’re not, but someone is.”

  With the last of her strength, she grabbed Zoey and the plutonium with both hands. Pain lashed through her broken arm, but she fought through it … and heaved the little girl and the cylinder into the bright white light on the other side of the Vortex.

  Zoey flew past the swirling particles and then, what Mira could see of her, flashed and slowed down, moving in slower and slower motion before flaring in bright, fragmented color and vanishing.

  Pain, horrible and sharp, covered Mira’s body. She screamed, her cocoon of protection gone, and even though the Vortex was weaker, it was still active. The charged particles raked over her.

  “Ben!” Mira cried. She felt no shame at begging now. The pain was beyond anything she could have imagined, and the process was slow enough that she could feel it all happening. “Ben, please!”

  Ben stared at Mira, frozen in horror, watching the Vortex slowly tear her apart. “Mira…” he moaned in anguish.

  Mira tried to speak but the pain was too much now. She curled into a ball and screamed.

  “I’m sorry…” Ben said so low she could barely hear him. The look on his face was wretched. “I’ll fix it. I’ll fix all of it, I promise!” Then he leaped into the white light after Zoey—and vanished in the same prismatic flash, leaving her there alone.

  The last thing Mira saw was the Severed Tower stretching up into the sky, just on the other side of the white barrier. There was something familiar about it now. She had seen it before—or, rather, something like it. Somewhere else.

  For one brief, merciful second, the pain was forgotten as she made the connection. She knew what the Tower really was … and it made perfect—

  Mira’s consciousness disintegrated as what was left of her body shattered into billions of pieces and merged with the Vortex, like ash thrown into a hurricane.

  42. REMAINDERS

  THE WORLD WAS BLACK. A complete absence of color or light, of any world at all. It was silent, too. Still, Zoey was aware of it. In fact, it felt like she was standing on something.

  Under her feet a platform materialized, like a bridge of bright white energy that stretched between nothing. It glowed powerfully, but the illumination revealed only more black. Wherever she was, it was massive in scope, stretching farther than even the light could reach.

  In the far distance, very far, another sliver of white blazed to life. A second platform. And Zoey thought she could see a figure standing on it as well.

  Where was she?

  You are separate from space, disconnected from time, a voice said from somewhere, and the sound was jarring. Zoey took a step back, frightened. You are everywhere and nowhere. Both at once. Yet neither.

  Zoey looked for the voice, but it had no source she could find. “Hello?” she quietly spoke. Her voice sounded strange and disconnected. It just … ended in nothing, like the platform under her. “Hello?” she shouted.

  She looked back to the slit of light in the far distance—and saw something surprising. Now there were a dozen more shining platforms, each with a single, solitary person. There was something familiar about those figures, but from this far away she couldn’t tell what. As she watched, they became a hundred more, multiplying in the dark.

  “Zoey,” said a tiny voice.

  She spun and saw something impossible.

  Herself.

  A perfect replica, calmly staring back with her own eyes, speaking with her own voice. She instinctively took another step back … and her twin figure did the same, in an exact echo. It was like looking into a mirror, a three-dimensional one.

  Experimentally, Zoey raised her left hand. So did the replica. Zoey balanced on one leg. So did the replica. She slowly lowered her foot back to the platform, watching her twin do the same. Zoey stared in wonder. “Are you … me?”

  “No.” The replica’s mouth moved, Zoey noticed. It seemed to be the only thing that wasn’t tied to what Zoey herself did. It still didn’t make any sense. “Regardless of Deviation, Zoey, there is only one you.”

  Zoey’s eyes narrowed. “Who … are you?”

  “It would be more efficient to exchange the idea of ‘who’ for the idea of ‘what.’”

  “What are you, then?”

  “The combined manifestation of six million, four hundred thousand and sixty-seven entities and their Deviations.” Zoey didn’t understand any of that, and the look on her face, the one she saw reflected in the replica’s, made it very clear. “We are what you refer to as … the Severed Tower,” her twin clarified.

  Zoey saw her own eyes widen, and a host of memories came flooding back. “Am … I inside the Tower?”

  “It is inefficient to think in geographic terms. The Severed Tower has no inside or out. It simply is.”

  It didn’t sound simple at all. In the distance, there were thousands of platforms now, each with two figures standing on them. A few were close enough to see detail. On every one stood two versions of Zoey facing each other, just as she stood facing her own mirror image.

  The effect was startling. “Why does everyone look like me?”

  “Because they are you, Zoey. They are you in other Deviations.” Zoey looked back at the mirror image in confusion. “A Deviation is a break in time.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You come to a fork in a path. You can go left or right. You choose right. That is a Deviation. You easily could have chosen left. Another Deviation exists for that possibility. Deviations exist for every possibility in all the universe, Zoey. They are infinite, and each connects here at the Severed Tower.”

  Zoey swallowed. “What is the Severed Tower?”

  “To understand that, you must understand the Strange Lands, and to understand the Strange Lands, you must first understand some truths about the invasion of this planet. Are you aware that the alien race you know as the Assembly uses massive base ships to transport its people through space?”

  Zoey nodded. She had been inside one of them, the Oracle had shown her the memories. There were hundreds of them, called Presidiums, scattered throughout the world, stuck like giant daggers into the hearts of the planet’s largest cities. But what did that have to do with anything?

  “Presidiums are powered by singularities,” the image continued. “Contained, miniature black holes that produce tremendous amounts of energy and grant them faster-than-light travel. One of these Presidiums intended to land here, in this city, but, as it began its descent, something went wrong. The vessel’s drive core failed, and the energy of the singularity was unleashed in the Earth’s atmosphere. The resulting discharge violently ruptured space and time in an initial wave of two hundred square miles.”

  “It formed the Strange Lands,” Zoey whispered.

  “Correct. More so, everyday objects that were caught in the disturbance were altered at the quantum level, the effects of which gave them unique properties
based on their original functions.”

  “Artifacts…”

  “Ruptures in space-time throughout the blast radius created pockets of chaos that manifested in various dangerous ways. The farther one moves from the center of the blast, however, the less powerful these pockets are.”

  “Anomalies…”

  “Lastly, every entity, human and Assembly, millions of them, the energy and experience and consciousness of each, was compressed into a single force.”

  “You,” Zoey stated.

  “Correct. Though, it is more efficient to think of us as a ‘we,’ or multitude. Our intelligence is infinite, albeit … temporary.”

  Before Zoey could ask more, bright light flashed in the distance. There were hundreds of thousands of lighted platforms now, some much closer, with both figures staring right back at her.

  She saw the source of the flashing. Some of the platforms had been replaced with a field of white light, as if they, and the darkness around them, had simply been wiped away. It happened to several hundred more while she watched. Something about it was … ominous.

  “What’s happening?”

  “In those Deviations, balance has been restored,” her doppelgänger replied.

  Zoey had heard that statement before, in her dreams. She didn’t like it. “What does that mean?” More and more platforms flashed and disappeared, thousands of them, but there were millions more left, stretching everywhere, as if into infinity, like stars.

  “The answer is—complex. You are of the Tower, but your intellect is limited to the age of your human form. You may not be able to understand.”

  “I want to try,” Zoey said, watching more and more of the platforms and figures being wiped away.

  “Ninety-two-point-one-percent of all Deviations answered similarly,” the mirror image stated, as if making an observation. “The universe is a structured thing, Zoey. It naturally attempts to replace any aberrant form of chaos with an ordered system. Planets naturally align themselves around the pull of a sun. Moons around planets. Electrons around nuclei. Even in biology, the pattern continues. Separate, singular pieces of organic information naturally evolve into ordered strands. It is why the one you knew as Gideon chose the human symbol for DNA to represent his White Helix. He understood this concept. He knew that the Severed Tower and the Strange Lands, by their nature, were unordered and chaotic. He and the Librarian both knew the time would come when the natural chaos of the Strange Lands would be replaced with order.”