J. Mitchell - The Severed Tower

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.