J. Mitchell - The Severed Tower

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 rocked 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.

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.