J. Mitchell - The Severed Tower

She saw the source of the flashing. Some of the platforms had been replaced with a field of white light, as if they, and the darkness around them, had simply been wiped away. It happened to several hundred more while she watched. Something about it was… ominous.

“What’s happening?”

“In those Deviations, balance has been restored,” her doppelgänger replied.

Zoey had heard that statement before, in her dreams. She didn’t like it. “What does that mean?” More and more platforms flashed and disappeared, thousands of them, but there were millions more left, stretching everywhere, as if into infinity, like stars.

“The answer is—complex. You are of the Tower, but your intellect is limited to the age of your human form. You may not be able to understand.”

“I want to try,” Zoey said, watching more and more of the platforms and figures being wiped away.

“Ninety-two-point-one-percent of all Deviations answered similarly,” the mirror image stated, as if making an observation. “The universe is a structured thing, Zoey. It naturally attempts to replace any aberrant form of chaos with an ordered system. Planets naturally align themselves around the pull of a sun. Moons around planets. Electrons around nuclei. Even in biology, the pattern continues. Separate, singular pieces of organic information naturally evolve into ordered strands. It is why the one you knew as Gideon chose the human symbol for DNA to represent his White Helix. He understood this concept. He knew that the Severed Tower and the Strange Lands, by their nature, were unordered and chaotic. He and the Librarian both knew the time would come when the natural chaos of the Strange Lands would be replaced with order.”

Zoey watched as more and more platforms, thousands at a time, were wiped away and replaced with empty white light. Zoey didn’t like watching it.

“Why is the balance coming back now?” she asked.

“Because you have returned to the Tower. You are its final piece, and all pieces of an unordered whole must be present before they can be ordered.”

“But… what happens then?”

“When the Presidium suffered its containment failure, the explosion ripped the ship into two pieces. The impact never occurred, however. Time, in its ruptured state, halted at the epicenter of the quantum disturbance and throughout the expanding blast of energy.”

“That’s why they’re growing,” Zoey said, thinking about what Mira had believed. “It’s… an explosion. The Strange Lands is a weird kind of explosion. It was frozen in time and now it isn’t.”

“Correct. The closer you, Zoey, move to the epicenter, the more energy of the blast is released. Now that you are here, the energy in its entirety can be released, and when it is gone, balance will be restored. The Strange Lands will be no more, the quantum disturbances will normalize, and the Severed Tower will cease to exist.”

Something occurred to Zoey then. “What will happen to all the people in the Strange Lands?”

“They will die,” the mirror image stated.

Zoey stared in disbelief. “The White Helix? All of Mira’s friends?”

“As well as the denizens of Midnight City. The quantum blast will expand and engulf it as well.”

Zoey’s hands shook at the idea, one part of her mind trying to imagine the devastation, another part picturing images of other people. Ones she knew. Holt. Mira. The Max. Gideon. Even Ambassador. They would die, too. Because of her.

“Concern for your friends is inefficient,” her twin said, sensing Zoey’s thoughts somehow. Around them, the flashes continued violently, wiping away tens of thousands of Deviations at a time.

“Why?” Zoey asked.

“Because they are already dead.”

Zoey felt the tingling of fear. The thing in front of her couldn’t have meant what it just said.

“They died fighting a large Assembly force in an attempt to ensure you reached this point. They succeeded,” the mirror image said, as if it should be some sort of consolation, but it wasn’t.

Pain and sadness erupted inside Zoey with an intensity she had never known. Tears welled in her eyes, she forgot to breathe. It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t…

“If it provides you comfort,” her twin continued, the flashes strobing everywhere in the distance, “in ninety-seven-point-three-percent of all Deviations, your friends perish. There is nothing you could have done to save them. You have not failed them in any way. You have merely fulfilled your purpose.”

“And they died because of it!” Zoey shouted in despair and stepped forward. So did the mirror image. “ Everyone’s going to die because of it! Because of me! ”

In her mind she saw Holt carrying her on his back; Mira showing her how artifacts worked; the Max pushing his nose under her hand. Zoey’s vision blurred, her body wracked with sobs. She collapsed to the platform and felt her twin do the same.

Please, don’t let it be true, she thought. Please…

“We do not understand your grief,” the mirror image stated with genuine confusion.

The words instilled a foreign emotion in her. White, hot anger. It flared through her, and she wiped the tears away and stared into the twisted version of herself. “When I got here, something good was supposed to happen!”

“Something good will happen, Zoey. Balance will be restored.”

“How is that good? How is it good if everyone dies?! This is what I was supposed to do? This is why the Librarian and Gideon and the White Helix and Mira and Holt and Ambassador and everyone else tried to get me here? This? ”

Around them, hundreds of thousands of platforms vanished in flashes of bright light. There were few left now, she noticed. In a few more moments they would all be gone.

Zoey breathed in and out heavily, shaking, the tears staining her cheeks. She asked her next question almost in desperation. It was the one thing she had wanted to know, the one absolute, the thing that, in the end, drove her need to be here, to find this horrible, unfair place. It was the reason for everything. “Who… am I?”

“Who do you think you are?”

“I don’t know,” Zoey admitted. She felt nothing but sadness now, the rage was gone. “I don’t remember. The Librarian called me the Apex. The White Helix call me the Prime—but I don’t know what any of that means.”

“Different terms for the same thing. While the mathematical equations that underlie the Strange Lands and the absorption of its entities are immense and complicated, they are not efficient. They resulted in a remainder.”

Zoey was still confused. “I don’t—”

“If you take ten numbers from eleven numbers, what do you have left?”

“One,” Zoey answered, wiping away the tears. She had to concentrate, had to listen. Maybe there was a solution in what the Tower was telling her, maybe there was something she could still do.

“Precisely. The reality is far more complicated than eleven minus ten, but the concept is the same. In the end, there was a mathematical remainder—and that remainder was you, Zoey.”

Zoey remembered what the Oracle had shown her. She remembered being on the hillside, watching the falling stars that turned out to be something much worse. She remembered her mother, and the explosion in the air, and the panic that swept through the crowd. She also remembered the rushing wave of energy that washed over her.

“Did I… die?” she asked, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.

“Not entirely. Your original physical form was wiped away with everyone else, but your essence, your consciousness, remained, as did theirs. Instead of being absorbed into the mass that became us, however, you were reborn.”