The Severed Tower (28 page)

But now it sounded … wrong. It wasn’t a constant tone anymore, it was fragmented, it came and went. Hearing it chilled Mira. What was happening to this place? To everything?

Polestar itself surrounded the column of light. It was made of two sections: the Mezzanine—the circular, ground-level courtyard—and the Spire, the city itself that rose up into the air around the Gravity Well.

The Mezzanine was made completely of concrete, but it was anything but plain looking. It was scored in jagged patterns, each piece either colored with some kind of metallic sheen stain, or had bits of hundreds of different shiny things set into it—glass bottles, mirrors, polished stones, even gems.

The light from the Gravity Well shimmered down and lit it all in a flickering, ever-shifting blaze of color, and the effect was dazzling.

But it wasn’t all that serene anymore.

At the other end of the Mezzanine lay what was left of the huge Orb, and Mira’s stomach clenched at the sight.

The massive ball had fallen and crashed violently into the ground. The bulk of it was crumbled over several ruined buildings from the old town. The rest of it was shattered into millions of shards that covered the Mezzanine like some kind of strange, otherworldly snowfall, all of it flickering and reflecting the light from the Well.

“My God,” Mira said.

“Yeah,” Deckard replied. He sounded exhausted.

“What happened?”

“The Well weakened last night. Gravity at the top increased and the weight of the Orb was too much. Rest of the city’s fine, though.”

Mira looked skeptically up at the Spire, as it wrapped and climbed a thousand feet into the sky. She could still hear the sputtering, hissing sounds from the Well.

“When the Well’s back to normal we’ll rebuild,” Deckard continued. “Right now I gotta calm everyone down.”

Mira stared at Deckard, aghast. “When it goes back to
normal?
What if it doesn’t? What if it weakens even more? What if it goes
out,
Deckard?”

“The Well will be fine,” Deckard replied impatiently. “Always has been, always will be.”

Mira was filled with frustration. “Deckard! The Strange Lands are
changing.
For the worse. You need to evacuate everyone out of the Spire!”

Deckard spat again. “You mean like that coward at the Crossroads?”

“Do you even know what happened there? The Crossroads were overrun by
Tesla Cubes,
Deckard! Outside the first ring!”

“That don’t excuse it. One kid shirks his duties and we’re all supposed to? I don’t think so.”

“Echo’s ‘duty’ was to the people who lived at the Crossroads. He probably saved the lives of everyone there. You need to do the same thing, and you need to do it
now.
” She grabbed his shoulder with her free hand—and Deckard spun around in anger.

“You don’t get to tell me what needs doing!” he yelled venomously. “I don’t take advice from many people, and I definitely don’t take it from pretenders and hypocrites. You don’t deserve to be here, you
or
Ben. And you’re welcome to ‘evacuate’ whenever the hell you feel like it.” He started moving again, headed for a stairway onto the Spire, near where a mass of kids had gathered. “I won’t abandon this place. I’ll keep it breathing if it kills me!”

Mira stood staring after him. Deckard was, and always had been, the most arrogant, stubborn fool that—

Zoey stirred and moaned in her arms, and Mira decided to hold those thoughts for later. “Max! Come on,” Mira called after the dog. He reluctantly pulled himself away from the smells of the city and followed after her.

They walked as fast as they could toward the same stairway as Deckard. It was the main entry onto the Spire, a grand staircase of sorts, made out of polished cherrywood from who knew where, and it sparkled as bright as the Mezzanine, wrapping upward, narrowing as it climbed, until it became a more simple walkway of metal and sanded oak. Eventually more paths branched off from the first, climbing and careening in different directions, but always upward, connecting to the hundreds of buildings and platforms that jutted out past the framework at angles that would have been impossible in normal gravity.

Mira had never ascended the Spire without stopping to marvel at the audacity it took to construct. She understood why Deckard was hesitant to leave it. Polestar was more than just a city, it was a symbol—that the Strange Lands could be tamed. That there was nothing the survivors of the Assembly couldn’t accomplish if they worked together.

Mira believed in all of that, but she also knew Holt was right. Nothing stayed the same forever. So much was changing, and it felt like her entire life had been in flux for the last few months. Would it ever end?

As Mira climbed, she could see the citizens of Polestar gathered in the Mezzanine below, and they looked furious. When Deckard motioned for them to silence they only yelled louder.

He spoke to them wearily, but not weakly. “I know you’re scared! We lost the Orb, it’s true. But it can be rebuilt.
Anything
can be rebuilt.”

“What about the Antimatter Storm?” someone shouted from below.

“The Gravity Well repelled it, just the same as it does Ion Storms,” Deckard answered.

“That’s not the point!” a voice yelled.

“It shouldn’t be there at all, this is the
third
ring!” said another.

“How do you know the Well won’t weaken any more? How do you know it’s not weakening right
now?
”

The yells and jeers rose in pitch and fervor.

“Because I
do!
” Deckard shouted back, and the ferocity in his voice stifled the crowd. “Polestar has been here for years, and I’ll be damned if it ain’t gonna be here for years to come. Because it’s our
obligation
to keep it that way. Think of everything that would be lost if this place goes—the history, the achievement. What about all the kids who died building it? You think about them at all? Huh? What’s their deaths mean if we just cut and run?” Deckard gripped the stairway railing. The crowd grew quiet as they listened. The conviction in his voice almost made Mira buy into it. Almost. “No, sir. You wanna leave? You do it. Right now. No one’ll stop you. But I ain’t leaving. I ain’t ever leaving, not ’til the Tone takes me. This place is gonna stand forever. Because it’s our duty to see it
does,
no matter how hard it gets.”

The crowd’s loud challenges dissolved into quiet rumblings, and Mira could tell some had been convinced. She shook her head and kept climbing, taking the second pathway on the right, where it twisted up to a rounded building made from the wooden walls of an old church. Ancient stained glass windows circled around its perimeter, vibrantly reflecting more of the Well’s light.

She pushed through the building’s double doors, probably from the same church, and found the place empty. It wasn’t a surprise, everyone was likely downstairs in the crowd.

Inside the infirmary was a circular, wooden-floored room lined with colorful windows. The ceiling was made of Plexiglas, and it let the shimmering light from the Gravity Well fill the interior. About two dozen beds lined the walls, each a different kind or shape: brass, wooden, rod iron, some with headboards, others without, canopy beds, sleigh beds.

Mira laid Zoey down on one and pulled the covers over her. Her breathing was shallow. Her hair was matted with sweat, and Mira brushed it out of the little girl’s face. There was no question, she was getting worse.

But
what
was wrong with her? None of it made sense, and it only made Mira feel more helpless.

It was like she was already failing Zoey, the thing she feared the most. The little girl was sick and fading. She’d looked for Mira to get her to the Tower, and they were only at Polestar and she was almost gone.

Everything that had been building in her—the pain and the frustration and the fear, going back not just to the missile silo, or to Holt almost hitting her, or to Midnight City or Clinton Station, but all the way back—to the beginning. It all flared powerfully and Mira lashed out at a glass lantern on the steel nightstand next to the bed.

It shattered to pieces on the floor. Blood trickled down Mira’s hand.

It hurt. And it felt good. For a moment. And then the false strength of anger faded—and Mira cried. Great, sobbing tears that shook her body. She desperately fought it at first, tried to stop the outpouring of emotion, but it was too strong this time, and she gave in, covering her eyes and mouth.

When it was over, Mira opened her eyes and saw Zoey again. Nothing had changed. She was still there, laying silently.

Mira wiped her face and stood up, moved to a cabinet and took out some cleaning solution and bandages. She winced as she cleaned and dressed the cuts on her hand.

The crying had been inevitable. It had even felt good. But what had it done to help? Nothing. The truth was, she may be on the road to failing, to not being strong enough or smart enough, but she wasn’t there
yet.

And she didn’t have to be. She could figure this out, she told herself. She just had to think.

Zoey was getting worse. Fine. There it was. But
why?

Mira thought back to what the Librarian had told her before he died. He said Zoey was the
Apex.
That she was the most important thing on the planet.

But what did that really mean? What was the Apex? The only person to walk out of the Strange Lands, Mira knew, that was the Librarian’s theory; but even if that were true, how was it connected to what was going on?

Then a thought occurred to her. An unsettling one.

From every account they’d heard, the incidents occurring in the Strange Lands all started less than a day before Holt, Zoey, and Mira arrived.

Echo had begun abandoning the Crossroads a day before they arrived.

The Orb had fallen from the top of Polestar a
day
before they arrived.

What if Zoey was the missing link? What if she was somehow affecting the Strange Lands as she moved through it? What if the Strange Lands were changing …
because
of Zoey?

Or was “changing” even the right word? There was the fact that Anomalies appeared in different rings than they normally would. But—was that what was really happening? Maybe the rings were still the same as always, Mira thought. Maybe they were simply …
expanding.

The realization, the connection of everything, was so stunning that the bottle of solution fell from her hand and broke on the floor. Mira stared down at it in a daze, putting more pieces together.

It explained everything they had seen so far, it even explained the Tesla Cubes at the Crossroads. The Anomalies hadn’t moved beyond the first ring, the first ring had grown to encompass the Crossroads. The Strange Lands weren’t changing. They were
growing!
And they seemed to be growing faster the closer Zoey got to the Core.

Mira moved for the door, leaving Zoey asleep on the bed with Max curled up next to her. She stepped outside and looked up, but what she wanted to see was blocked from this vantage. Mira moved around the walkway, climbing upward around the infirmary, until she was between it and the Cavaliers faction residence, a castle-like structure made from the wood of old highway billboards, their old images and letters fading but still visible in jumbled patterns up and down its side. The faction flag, green with a sharp yellow sword, arced outward in the breeze.

Mira saw what she was looking for. The column of light that was the Gravity Well. She could hear the strange, fragmented hissing sounds that filled the air. A horrible thought occurred to her as she studied it.

If the Orb had fallen because the Well weakened, and the Well weakened because of Zoey, then Mira had very likely brought the city’s destruction right to it. And that meant—

A bag slipped forcefully over her head. A knot tied around her throat, sealing it in place.

She panicked and screamed, but it was no use. A hand covered her mouth, but there was no one to hear anyway, everyone was down in the Mezzanine. She kicked and fought, but whoever had her was too strong, and Mira felt herself dragged off and away.

27.
LUCK

MIRA COULDN’T SEE ANYTHING,
but she had a sense of where they were taking her. Upward. Along one of the branching stairways. She knew the sensations of climbing the Spire, the way the gravity gradually diminished. She could hear the crowd on the Mezzanine below still murmuring about Deckard’s speech.

There were at least two of them, because they had her by the legs and arms, and they were strong. Big kids, she guessed by their heavy footfalls, but Mira wasn’t going to make it easy on them. She struggled the whole way.

“Keep her from squirming,” one said.

“I got her, don’t worry. Take her in headfirst,” said another.

Her captors carried her through a door, and the sounds from outside vanished as it closed. The first thing she noticed was that it was cold. Really cold. She wasn’t sure what that meant, but—

Mira hit the floor and groaned. They hadn’t bound her, so she quickly untied the rope holding the bag over head and ripped it off.

She was in one of the city’s freezers, giant cuts of meat hanging from the ceiling. It was kept cold by Emitters, artifacts that radiated elemental forces in a similar way to the Amplifier she’d used back in the missile silo. In this case they emitted cold, and they hummed in each corner of the small, square room.

But the chill in the air was the last thing Mira was worried about.

Three boys stood in between her and the door. They were younger, big too, not as big as Deckard, but close, and she recognized them. Freebooters from Midnight City, and judging by the colors they wore, Glassmen, not Gray Devils, but if they weren’t Gray Devils—what did they want with
her?

“Hey, Mira Toombs,” the one in the middle said, a blond kid with rounded glasses. The fact they knew her name probably wasn’t a good thing.

“What do you want?” Mira asked, trying to sound unintimidated, but failing miserably.