J. Mitchell: The Severed Tower

As much as he didn’t like it, the kid had pulled one hell of a rabbit out of her hat at Midnight City. She’d saved them all, and at the same time done something even more impossible. She’d gotten Holt to believe that things could change—maybe even that the Assembly could be beaten—and Holt had promised to help her, whatever it took. He’d promised.…

“Holt?” Mira asked again.

“Yeah, I was using it,” he answered, trying to keep the anger out of his voice. “And if I hadn’t we’d all be dead. We wouldn’t have made it to that truck, and we definitely wouldn’t have outrun the tripods.”

“That doesn’t make it right!” Mira exclaimed. “We can’t start depending on something unpredictable. We have to rely on our own skills or we’re going to wind up in trouble, especially where we’re going.”

Where they were going, of course, was the Strange Lands. A dangerous place to the north, where, for whatever reason, time and space no longer worked right. Mira was a Freebooter, someone who specialized in traversing that landscape and bringing back the artifacts that lay there—common, everyday objects that had been imbued with otherworldly powers. The abacus in his hand, the subject of their argument right now, was one such artifact, one Holt had unwillingly become the owner of in Midnight City. Since then, it had proved to be more valuable than he could have imagined.

Holt frowned. “I don’t see what’s wrong with having a little luck on our side.”

“What’s ‘wrong’ is that, in order to increase your luck, that thing drains someone else’s nearby. Did you forget that?” Her eyes burned into his. “What happens when you use it in the Strange Lands, and there is no one else nearby? Who do you think it’ll take the luck away from? Max? Me? Zoey? ”

Holt shook his head. “If we stay in its influence sphere, we should be—”

“You don’t know that! It could kill everyone in order to profit, you—me, and Zoey included.” She held her hand out toward him. “I’m sorry, Holt, but I need you to give it to me. It’s just too dangerous. I shouldn’t have asked you to carry it in the first place.”

Holt stared at her and felt the anger begin to rise again. Now she was giving him orders? She just expected him to do as he was told?

Holt pushed it back down. Again, it wasn’t like him… and maybe there was something to that.

He pulled the Chance Generator out of his pocket. It looked harmless—an ornate antique piece of wood with chipped, colorful beads running its length. As he looked at it he felt the need to slide a few of them upward. Just to be safe.

Just a few of them…

Holt’s eyes narrowed. He pushed all the beads down, shutting the abacus’s power off. He showed it to Mira. “Look, it’s off, see? If it’ll make you feel better, I won’t use it anymore.”

“Holt—”

“I promise. If you think it’s dangerous, then I’ll leave it alone. You know more than me, and nothing’s more important than you and Zoey. I’ll shut it off, and I’ll keep it. You said it shouldn’t be near your other artifacts, that they might react to each other.”

Mira stared at him, unsure, thinking things through. In the end she nodded. “It would be best if you could hold it, but I’d feel better if it was in your pack, not your pocket.”

“Done,” Holt said, though he felt a slight twinge of worry. All the same, he shoved it in his pack and sealed it away. “Okay?”

Mira smiled and reached out, touching his hand. “Thank you.” It had been a day or more since Holt had felt her hand. It felt good.

The two stared at each other, then Zoey spoke up beneath them. “I feel better now,” she said. “The Max helped, I think.”

They looked down at her. The little girl had an arm around the dog’s neck while she scratched his ears.

Mira frowned. “I doubt that. Unless his smell overpowered the pain.”

“The Max doesn’t smell!” Zoey insisted.

“You know, if her powers are causing the headaches, it’s just another reason she shouldn’t use them,” Holt said. “The Assembly come running every time she does.”

“Once we get to the Strange Lands, that won’t be a problem.” Mira smoothed the little girl’s hair. “The Assembly never go in there.”

“I can’t even imagine that,” Holt said. “Not having to look over our shoulder every five minutes.”

“We might lose the Assembly,” Mira replied, “but there’ll be plenty of other things to watch out for. You might end up missing our alien friends.”

Holt doubted that was true, but then again, he had very little idea what was ahead of him. He’d never been farther north than Midnight City, and certainly never stepped foot in the Strange Lands. Yet, their plan was to go farther than even that.

In the Midnight City artifact vault, Zoey had interacted with the Oracle, a major artifact that functioned something like a fortune-teller. Holt didn’t completely understand all that it had revealed to the little girl, but it had been clear about one thing: To get the answers Zoey needed, there was a place she needed to go—an infamous landmark in the center of the Strange Lands called the Severed Tower. Supposedly, so the stories went, if you could survive the Strange Lands and make it to the Tower, it would grant you one wish.

It always sounded like a fairy tale to Holt, but lately he’d been witness to some fairly amazing things he wouldn’t have believed a few months ago. He really didn’t know what to think anymore. All he knew was that Zoey said she needed to get to this Tower, and he had promised to help her.

“Is that a way out, Holt?” Zoey asked. Holt followed her gaze upward with his flashlight.

A steel ladder ascended the concrete wall to what looked like the bottom of a manhole. “Good eye, kid.” Holt tested the ladder. It was rusted, but it seemed sturdy enough.

He quickly scaled it and pushed the heavy cover out of the way. Daylight poured in and Holt winced at the brightness before crawling up and out.

They were near the edge of the old city now, just a few wrecked houses and buildings, most of them burned-out husks. He looked south, where they had come from. There were no sounds of explosions, no flashes, but there were several columns of smoke a few miles away, probably from the battle they’d escaped.

While there was no sign of anything now, those green-and-orange ones could cloak themselves, Holt reminded himself, so you never really knew.

He looked north, saw the plains widening and advancing again, back toward where they needed to go. Toward the Strange Lands.

He hoped Mira was right about the Assembly not following them inside. That would be a blessing, even in spite of her insistence that the place itself could be much worse. It was a chance he was happy to take.

“Look safe?” It was Mira, underneath him.

“Safe as it’s gonna be, ladies,” he said. “Come on.”

In a few minutes they were all up, moving northward, Holt making sure to take advantage of whatever limited cover the remains of the urban environment offered. All too soon they’d be back in the plains, where everything was open.

The giant Antimatter storm they’d witnessed a few days ago was gone now. They could no longer see its strange, multicolored lightning, but there was another indication they were headed the right way: the eerie aurora effect, wavering and fluctuating like the pictures he’d seen of the northern lights as a kid. Only these were visible in the middle of the day, and they were coming closer.

Instinctively, Holt’s hand slid into his pocket—and found it empty.

There was a brief flash of panic before he remembered he’d shoved the abacus inside his pack. He relaxed. He could get to it if he needed to, he told himself.