The Severed Tower by J. Barton Mitchell

Author:J. Barton Mitchell [Mitchell, J. Barton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

26. POLESTAR

MIRA WATCHED HOLT AND RAVAN LED AWAY into the old city ruins. She knew where they were taking them. It used to be the Mobridge sheriff’s office in the town square. It still had its jail cells, and Deckard used them when people got unruly.

But what could she do? Zoey’s weight in her arms reminded her she didn’t have a choice, at least not right now. So she ran until she finally caught Deckard.

“Take the kid up to the infirmary,” he said. “Too busy to deal with you right now.”

The Gravity Well flickered and pulsed in front of them, a giant column of light burning into the air, disappearing into a ceiling of swirling clouds thousands of feet above. She could hear its familiar soft hissing. Oddly, it always seemed the same volume, no matter how close you were. It was pleasant, usually, like a soft whisper, and she had always drifted off to sleep listening to it.

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.

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