The Severed Tower (43 page)

The remaining White Helix and the Menagerie moved close. Holt and Mira, Ravan, Avril, Dane, they all stared at Zoey expectantly.

“I still think it’s too many people,” Mira said. “It should be cut in half.”

“We can reduce the strain on the Prime, if it proves necessary,” Gideon said, as he slowly knelt in front of Zoey, “but I don’t believe it will.”

Zoey studied Gideon as he lowered himself, his foggy eyes never looking completely at her. “You are scared,” he observed without judgment.

Zoey nodded. She was. She didn’t know if she could do what he wanted, and she desperately didn’t want to fail Mira or Holt.

“Can you sense my emotions,” Gideon asked, “in the way you do others?”

Zoey shook her head no. It was true. Even now, with him this close, he was unreadable to her.

“Try again,” he instructed.

Zoey reached out toward him—and this time, Gideon’s feelings were
open.
Whatever walls or self-control he normally maintained were gone, and she could sense everything he felt, a wide array of complicated emotion that stretched out before her, and amid all that mix of sensation was a confidence so radiantly bright that it overpowered everything else.

A confidence in
her.
That she had the ability and the will to do exactly what he thought she could. Gideon’s confidence in her gave her strength, pushed the pain in her head even more into the background than Ambassador’s laser light could, and she smiled as she felt it.

“You are everything I hoped you would be, Zoey.” Gideon smiled at her. “Are you ready?”

Zoey nodded and moved closer to Ambassador. His flickering eye stared down at her.

Holt and Mira each took one of her hands. Holt’s was shaking. Mira’s eyes were glistening. Zoey didn’t need her powers to know what each of them felt.

“We love you very much,” Mira told her.

“I know,” Zoey replied.

“Oh, God, please, if we’re doing this thing, let’s get it over with,” Ravan said impatiently. Mira glared at her, but the pirate didn’t seem to care.

“What do you need us to do, kiddo?” Holt asked. His voice was tense.

“Just … close your eyes, I guess,” Zoey said. “When you touch Ambassador, you’ll see his colors. Gideon will imagine where we need to go, and then, you know—hold on.”

“Right,” Holt said with very little enthusiasm.

Zoey breathed in slow and deep—and then closed her eyes. She reached out and instantly found Ambassador, his colors bursting to life in her mind. That was the easy part. Now came the hard one. She reached out again, but this time toward the minds of the people around her. One by one, their thoughts and memories merged with her own. Holt, Mira, Ravan, even Gideon, and with each new presence she touched, the pain in her head flared hotter.

She kept building the connection, trying to merge all of them, one after the other, but she—

Zoey broke the link and fell to her knees. It was just too much.

Ambassador rumbled above her. Max whined and she felt Holt’s hands wrap around her.

“This is insane!” Mira cried. “She shouldn’t be doing this!”

“Zoey,” said Gideon softly. “It hurt?”

Zoey nodded. The pain subsided enough that she could open her eyes and look at him.

“Pain is seldom the end of a path,” he told her. “More likely, it is just an obstacle to the other side.”

“What’s on the other side?” Zoey asked weakly.

“All the answers you have ever sought. Is it not worth a little more pain … so that you might be free of it forever?”

“Don’t manipulate her like that!” Mira’s voice had an edge to it that Zoey didn’t like. She could feel Holt start to lift her up and away.

“Wait,” she said. “Let me try one more time.”

“Zoey—” Mira started, desperate.

“I
want
to try one more time,” she reiterated, and Holt and Mira went silent. Even Ravan stared at her with a look that bordered on respect. Before anyone else could argue, Zoey closed her eyes again and reached out for Ambassador. When she touched him this time she tried something else. She called on the Feelings, bringing them to the surface, and they heeded her call, rising up and filling her.

Once more she reached out toward the people around her, touching each, one at a time, their memories and thoughts flowing through her. As she did, the Feelings expanded, showed her other ways, ways that could more efficiently connect her mind to the others, and Zoey followed their suggestion.

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.

“Mira.” Gideon approached them, ignoring the explosions. “It is time.”

Holt got up and studied the little girl underneath him. “What about Zoey? She’s not even conscious!”

“Mira can carry her. The Prime does not need to be awake to enter the Tower.”

Mira shivered in fear. Gideon was right, the time had come, and she wasn’t even close to ready. Holt seemed to sense it.

“I’ll go with her,” Holt offered.

Gideon shook his head. “Mira’s Offering is only enough to protect two people.”

“But I don’t have the plutonium!” Mira cried. “And … I’m not…”

“Trust in the Tower, girl. It will provide. And remember the dragon. Remember the mirror.” Gideon held her gaze meaningfully another moment, then turned and ran, leaped into the air in a flash of yellow and disappeared after his students.

“Holt!” Ravan shouted. Yellow bolts sizzled through the air.

Mira stared at Holt desperately. He studied her back. “I can’t do this,” she told him pitifully.

“Mira—”

“I can’t! Everything is depending on me, and I’m not good enough. I’m not good enough to—”

Mira cut off as Holt’s hands circled her face and drew her to him. He kissed her deeply, the trepidation and fear and explosions forgotten for one merciful moment. Her heart raced. When he pulled away, she stared into his eyes.

“I know what happened to you here, but it doesn’t matter,” Holt said. “You’re not that little girl anymore. I wish you could see yourself the way I do. You’re the most amazing person in my life, and I try to live up to your example every day.”

As he spoke, new sensations and feelings filled her, fighting with her doubts and fears. In spite of the chill of the wind and the danger, she felt warm.

“You’ve always had it in you, you just never looked for it because you didn’t believe it was there,” he continued, forcing her to look back into his eyes when she tried to look away. “I’ve never believed in much, but I believe in
you,
Mira, and if you have any faith or trust left in me, if I haven’t completely destroyed it all and burned it away, then trust me now. I
believe
in you. You can do this, and I know you will. I know it … because I know
you.
”