J. Mitchell - The Severed Tower

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.

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 outward and holding onto the strap to keep her from falling. It held her weight, which meant she could reach the top shelf now.