J. Mitchell - The Severed Tower

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.

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.

“Pretty simple, really,” another said, the one on the left, the biggest of the three. His voice sounded like a bag of rocks. “Just have a question for you. Answer it in a way we like and you can go. Pretty much in the same shape you came in.”

As they spoke, Mira’s eyes scanned the locker, looking for anything that could help. The only artifacts here were the Emitters, and they weren’t much use. She’d left her bags in the infirmary with Zoey.

“Last time we saw you was a few months ago, before you got that price on your head.” It was the one with the glasses again. The third one so far hadn’t spoken. But he did have a knife in his hand, Mira saw. Her heart beat faster. “Something interesting about that, though. Back then, me and my friends were pretty sure there was something different about you.”

“That being… you weren’t Heedless, ” said the big kid, and Mira felt a cold tingling of fear. She had an idea what their “question” was going to be, and there was little hope she could answer it in a way they wanted. It was now official—she was in trouble.

“You’re wrong,” Mira lied. “I’ve always been Heedless. If you were Gray Devils, you’d know that.”

The boy on the right, the quiet one, shook his head and finally spoke. “No. Pretty sure you weren’t.”

“Me, too,” the glasses said. “So here’s the question. How the hell did you do it?”

They started to move toward her. She took a step back.