Chapter 17 #2
I tossed my head back and let my laugh echo off the popcorn ceiling and back to us.
It was complete and utter insanity.
How can these people believe this crap? How can they expect anyone to believe them?
She has to be playing with me.
I’m so tired of being strung along.
This is ridiculous.
When I looked back down, she had her lips folded into a flat smile. She waited until I finished laughing before speaking again, slowly but no longer in a whisper.
“I’ll take you out of The Tower. I’ll show you that there’s life out there. I’m not making it up.”
“Out of The Tower?” I snorted. “Into the Void? You expect me to believe that?” I crossed my arms and stood. “Fine. I’ll call your bluff. Do it now.”
Veda stood too and nodded as she moved toward the door. “You have to be quiet, though.”
I opened my mouth. Shut it again.
She’s really going to play this out?
Damn. She’s certifiably nuts.
I followed her into the hallway, not bothering to shut the door behind me or turn off the light.
We crept through the same twisting corridors I’d snuck down that morning.
Veda led us to the carved door and into the Upper Room.
It looked ominous now without the sunlight from the long windows.
The room was mostly in shadow, barely illuminated by the strands of moonlight seeping in.
Veda didn’t slow or glance back. She beelined for the tapestry. With both hands, she gripped one side and dragged it across the pole it hung from. Metal sliding against metal rang out in the room.
A wooden door stood behind the tapestry. No markings. Just an old-fashioned brass knob. If the tapestry hadn’t covered it, I would have assumed it to be a closet, if I’d noticed it at all.
Veda opened it, reached inside, and grabbed an unlit torch. She struck the club against something on the wall behind the door, and it burst into flames.
Holy shit.
That was the moment I realized she truly and wholly believed that she was about to take me outside of The Tower. Also—apparently—these guys lived in a replica of a medieval castle with secret passageways and torchlight.
I squeezed my fists at my sides, making sure I still had feeling and wasn’t dreaming. Adrenaline raced in my blood, drawing my attention away from my extremities.
New Plan A:
Join the guild. Explore all the secret passageways and ancient mysteries and shit.
Kill Azazel.
Then kill Soren and get the hell out of here.
I bit the inside of my cheek to stop from smiling, but Veda must’ve seen something in my face because she grinned in the flickering light. She stood there with a torch in her hand, waiting.
My shoulders dropped, and I could barely find the dignity to shake my head in disbelief at myself for humoring her.
“You’re really committed to this, huh?” I mumbled.
She didn’t answer.
She just turned and disappeared into the passageway.
I sighed, then followed her in. My footsteps echoed behind hers on a paved passageway lit only by the flickering orange glow of the torch, a faint globe of light bobbing ahead of me, barely enough to illuminate the rough-hewn stone walls.
I trailed the ball of fire, and a sharp breath caught in my chest when I realized that I’d dreamed something like this before.
A ball of light in a dark passageway. I had been running. Then floating.
Veda stopped after what felt like an impossibly long walk, especially considering I’d seen the size of Hearth Haven Inn from the outside. There was no way we were still inside it.
She looked over her shoulder, another broad grin on her face, eyes gleaming. In the shadows, her face looked made for a slasher film.
“Try not to freak out,” she said, tone light and casual.
“Mm, sure.”
It was easy not to freak out, because I had already figured out that she would probably show me something that might corroborate her theory.
Something that could be explained if she knew more about how The Tower actually worked.
It’s how conspiracies always started. We were going to see a glass panel that looked like a window, revealing shrubbery or something.
Perhaps there was a painting, or even an old photo, that would make it seem as if The Tower were still on Earth.
They had a story they’d passed on and would latch onto anything that could support their fantasies.
Wouldn’t it be nice if it were true?
We could have Earth again. We could breathe real air and live real lives.
There’d be a god looking down on us and someone to save us all.
“And a purpose to all of this,” a smaller voice added.
I didn’t bother masking my sigh.
Veda turned back away from me. I heard the metal scrape against stone as she pushed open a heavy door.
Pale light poured in from above, and I blinked hard.
A bamboo ladder tied together with vines led upward through the opening.
The most shocking thing wasn’t the door or the ladder. It was the sudden rush of hot, wet air that barreled into me. Like the saunas at the Babel gyms, but gritty. Raw. It wasn’t filtered or perfumed or controlled by a carefully orchestrated climate system under Parthenon’s programming.
“Whoa!” I whispered. “Why is it so hot?”
Veda laughed high and loud, her mirth echoing strangely in the narrow space.
“Welcome to the uncontrolled climate of the real world.”
She placed the torch in a holder on the wall and let it burn there, casting shadows behind her as she climbed the ladder without offering more explanation.
I stood at the base of it for a beat too long, watching her ascend until she was just a silhouette moving in a wash of pale green light. Then I followed.
My palms slipped on the bamboo rungs, slick with sweat. My bare feet ached each time the ridge of the stalks dug into a pressure point. I tried to aim for the flatter spots between joints.
It wasn’t a short climb. There were at least forty rungs.
Halfway up, both feet slipped off, and I had to scramble to find purchase again.
The outside of my right shin scraped against something sharp, but I held in my curse and kept climbing.
My legs shook violently by the time I neared the top, and considering myself fit, I knew it wasn’t from exertion.
I was five rungs away when Veda’s shadow moved out of the way.
I could see it: leaves the size of bed sheets fluttering in hazy moonlight.
The air only grew hotter. Sticky. Alive. It clung to my skin, clotted in my lungs.
The sounds were the most jarring. They hit me all at once, overwhelming me, and it took a good while before I realized they were separate sounds and not all one enormous cacophonous billow.
Birds. Monkeys. Insects.
Not speakers piping in the nostalgic ambiance of a world we’d lost thousands of years ago.
These were separate sounds, layered and competing. Real.
I knew they were real.
My fingers finally found the edge of the hatch, but the corrugated metal surface was slick. I slipped and had to catch myself on the rung below with a curse.
It wasn’t the concrete I was used to gripping when climbing out of holes.
“Here,” Veda said, reaching down. She gripped my wrist tight and pulled until I’d managed to haul myself out beside her.
“Thanks,” I muttered, too out of breath to say anything else.
Maybe it was the exertion. Not from climbing. From breathing.
Every breath I needed came with a price. Sharp and stinging, I had to work for them. I dropped to my knees, gasping, and looked around.
Great swaths of green leaves—some larger than my entire body—hung from branches, a color of brown I had never seen before. Flashes of red and orange and green and blue, darkened in the moonlight, danced among the canopy.
And the moon.
The moon shone so brightly that I squinted. Everything glowed with its kiss. There was no need for lampposts or any other lighting. The strangest part was that I could see different shades on the moon. Indentations or carvings. A rough surface glowed.
What the hell?
Veda had to be telling the truth, or at least she believed she really was.
The moon in The Tower was just a flat, figment of our recollection that helped the surviving humans ground themselves in the patterns of time that they had evolved under.
It was for our benefit. This shimmering rock shone for no one but itself and whatever had made it.
Anyone who laid eyes on it would question The Tower’s authorship of such magnificence.
My breath hitched. My chest squeezed.
I looked at Veda, stunned.
“Ouch!” I yelped and slapped at the stinging sensation on my leg. I checked where I’d slapped myself to find small smudges of blood. One on my hand, and one on my leg.
“It’s a mosquito,” Veda called out over the jungle’s din.
I brought my hand up closer to my face and tilted it one way and then the other. A little black bug with its gossamer wings and threads for legs lay lifeless on my middle finger, while crimson stained my first three.
I blinked down at the tiny corpse.
I’d never seen a mosquito before.
With no insects in The Tower, I’d never been stung by anything before. I’d also never actually taken a life before. Not even a bug’s.
I’d killed something.
The ease of it was terrifying. Exhilarating.
Wait. An insect?
I looked from the life on my fingers to Veda.
“Now look up,” she said softly.
Nope.
Nope.
Not going to do that.
I stared at her instead. Stared at the soft gleam of sweat on her forehead, the defiant pride in her posture, the profile of her face as she followed her own directions and looked up.
If I looked up, I would believe her.
And belief was dangerous. Just ask Lillemore Chapman.
I’d just been bitten by a real insect with real blood. I’d just taken a life.
The temperature kept rising. My lungs weren’t even working anymore. Useless fleshbags.
I did it anyway.
I followed her pointer finger to look back behind me and up, up, up.
Up through the foliage and the birds—real birds—and the moonlight.
Real moonlight?
Up.
There it was.
A great black-and-silver monolith rising endlessly into the inky gray clouds, its surface gleaming faintly under the moonlight.
The Tower.
It stared back at me, jeering. Impossibly wide. Endless in height.
From left to right, it consumed the horizon. I couldn’t see where it ended.
But I knew it did because of everything else that wasn’t a part of it.
The unpredictable breeze, the second mosquito eating away at the back of my left hand.
The heat that sweated for me—humidity. The noise that had morphed back into a chaotic chorus no one would ever want to accurately replicate for historical reference or nostalgia. Maybe for torture if we still had wars.
The realness of everything was collapsing in on me, but the monolith in front of me seemed only to rise higher.
That was the highlight of this entire scene. This entire world. The universe. That had been my universe.
Had been.
My knees buckled.
“That’s the Tower,” I whispered to myself.
If that was The Tower, then—
Where am I?
I’m dead and in the fucking Void.
“Shit,” I croaked.
Then the panic overtook me. My chest heaved, and the air in my lungs never made it into my bloodstream. A wave of heat battled for dominance over the sticky humidity, suffocating any chance I had of survival.
My hands went numb, and pinpricks sounded off in my fingers and toes.
The jungle blurred. The Tower swayed.
Nope.
That was me.
I swayed.
The last thing I remembered before losing the world—a world I hadn’t known existed just moments ago—was a cool touch around my waist, a hard body at my back, and a hot breath in my ear.
“Welcome to Earth, Xiao Ying.”