J. Mitchell - The Severed Tower

The pain grew in her head as she connected each mind, flaring up, growing stronger and stronger; but Zoey held on to the Feelings, let them aid her and give her strength. One mind after another she added to the string, and each one brought new flashes of pain and dizziness—but she kept going, fighting through it, each presence she touched was one more closer to her goal.

Then it was done. Zoey touched each of them, more than fifty minds in all, and there was a moment, a brief moment, where she marveled at what she had done. But then the pain threatened to overtake everything, and she shoved forward toward the wavering, bands of color that were Ambassador.

The world flashed and upended. She felt a wave of nausea and pain, but she held on.

There was a sound. Like a powerful, punctuated blast of distorted noise, and a quick wave of heat. Zoey gasped, her stomach clenched, her ears rang—and then the pain in her head exploded. She cried out, but she wasn’t sure anyone could hear.

Everything went black. She thought she felt a blast of cold wind, thought she heard screams and explosions.

Then, from the distance, a projection entered her mind. Thoughts, pure emotion. Ones she recognized. They were not Ambassador. They were from another source. A terrifying, dark one.

Scion! We are here!

The last thing she remembered before she gave in to the pain and the darkness, was that the Royal had found her, just as it had promised.

* * *

MIRA SAW AN IMAGE of Zoey, like before on the train bridge, but this time the girl wasn’t smiling. She was grimacing in pain. Then there was a burst of sound, a wave of heat… and everything around her was suddenly windswept chaos.

A cracked and fragmented road ripped forward. Frightening, twisted shadows stretched into a pitch-black sky of swirling clouds that glowed with eerie yellow light. It was a city, or at least its ruins, and Mira had a good idea what it was.

Bismarck, the center of the Strange Lands. It meant Ambassador and Zoey had done what they intended. They had teleported them deep into the Core, deeper than most Freebooters ever dreamed of going, and one look around showed her why.

Her hair blew wildly from the intense winds that roared around them, so strong, it was hard to keep her balance. Antimatter Lightning flashed almost constantly in the sky. There were other things, huge things, moving in the distance. Giant funnels of swirling black that roared powerfully through the landscape.

Dark Matter Tornadoes, one of the most powerful Anomalies in all the Strange Lands, and here Mira was watching half a dozen of them.

As they moved, Dark Matter Tornadoes displaced physical space. Whatever they touched remained solid, but its atomic structure was stretched and bent, and the effects of their continued passage through the ruins was plainly visible. The broken streets were filled with a mishmash of cars and vehicles that were still solid, but twisted into impossible shapes, like some kind of abstract painting. The buildings, if they still stood, were just as haphazard, stretched and blended into one another. It was painful to look at.

Mira watched one of them move, rumbling in the distant east, and following it brought her eye to something that made a chill sweep over her. The others, two dozen Menagerie, two dozen White Helix, were all staring at the same thing.

To the north, less than a mile away, a giant mass of tiny, flashing particles swirled like some huge alien sandstorm stretching out of sight. It was called the Vortex, and behind it, just visible through the veil, rose a massive black elongated shape that stretched into the sky. It didn’t touch the ground, just hovered over everything. Even more amazingly, it was broken in half about two-thirds up its length, the top piece having separated and tilted outward as though it was falling… but it never did. It just hung there suspended in place, unmoving behind the Vortex.

It was the Severed Tower.

The center of the Strange Lands. The very thing she had been laboring so hard to reach, and it was right there, maybe three miles away. A giant shaft of darkness that seemed to stare down at her with menace. She had wondered whether or not it was even real, so few people had seen it. If she was honest, a part of her had hoped it wasn’t—but it was. And it hovered there like some impossible monolith, waiting for her, stretching thousands of feet into the air.

She felt a surge of dread. How did Gideon or anyone else think she could get them to that? How did—

“Zoey!” It was Holt’s voice, and Mira instantly hated herself. Her attention had been on the Tower and not on the little girl who had sacrificed everything to bring them here.

Holt ran toward Ambassador, the only one of the group immune to the fierce winds. Underneath the walker lay Zoey. She wasn’t moving, she didn’t even look like she was alive.

“Oh, God…” Mira slid onto the rough pavement. Holt pushed a whining Max out of the way and knelt down, too. Ambassador rumbled above them, bathing her in the green light, but it no longer seemed to have an effect.

“She’s breathing,” Holt said, and Mira sighed in relief. At least there was a—

The healing laser shut off. Mira stared up at Ambassador. “What are you doing?” she yelled at the machine. “Help her!”

The walker’s eye shifted to Mira for a moment—and then it took two loud, powerful steps backward.

“Help her!” Mira shouted again in fury.

Ambassador considered them a moment more, then there was a flash, the same violent burst of sound… and the machine was gone.

“No!” Mira shouted.

“I knew we shouldn’t have trusted that rusted piece of—” Holt began, and then was cut off as explosions rocked the ground. He shoved Mira down, covering both her and Zoey.

Behind them, the Menagerie and the White Helix ran for cover wherever they could find it—Dumpsters, the sides of walls, the twisted shapes of cars and trucks, all while the explosions continued.

Mira saw the source. The sky behind them, to the south, away from the Tower, was full of ships, dozens of them. She could see their burning engines and flashing plasma cannons, raining down yellow bolts of light. It was the Assembly. They were already here.

Even so, the winds were so strong, the gunships were struggling to stay in formation, spinning and drifting out of place—but still they fired, unleashing volleys of heated death at the group. Mira could just make out the colors on the ships. Green and orange.

“Yeah,” Holt said. “Not good.”

“Avril, Dane,” Gideon shouted nearby. He was crouched behind the shattered shell of an ice-cream truck, which looked like it had been melted. “Divide your Arcs, we must distract them from the Prime. Use the Pattern, the invaders are weak against it.”

Avril and Dane yelled orders to their groups, and the White Helix raised their masks, lowered their goggles, and bolted from their positions, each in a random direction, and leaping into the air in flashes of orange and purple. The gunships tried to target them, their cannons blazing, but the Helix’s accelerated movement was too fast for even them to track. And the gale-force winds weren’t helping. Two of the gunships slammed into each other and exploded, crashing to the ground in a fireball on the other side of an old post office.

Ravan wasn’t sitting idly by either. “I want six men each in those top floors,” she yelled, signaling the two tallest buildings near them. “The rest of you take up spots in the intersections on either side, there’s plenty of cover. If we catch them in a crossfire while the Helix are jumping all over the place, the winds might knock them out.”

Ravan’s men didn’t hesitate, instantly dividing and moving. Ravan looked at Holt, and then nodded to something on the ground. It was his pack and guns. The pirate had brought them.