Page 36 of Godslayer
“I guess there was some kind of shut down? The whole place. I got two messages. One said to evacuate, but then immediately after, there was another one that said reset in progress, or something like that.”
“They shut it down?” Jasina, who looks even more exhausted after a few minutes of rest than she did before, is still trying to make sense of things. “The tower?”
“No,” I shake my head. “The city.”
“How do you shut down a city and reset it?”
“Well…” It feels pretty obvious to me, but it also feels kinda gross to say it out loud.
Jasina’s eyes go wide. “Theykilledthem?”
I shrug, feigning uncertainty. But it feels like the only logical answer. “What else would they do with all the people? Theycertainly weren’t down in the train station, on their way to another city.”
She blows out a breath. “Wow. Do you think it was the bot things that did it? Do you think they attacked them?”
“I dunno.”
“Well.” She gets to her feet, looking around the room, arching her back, stretching it, as she sighs with a heaviness that makes me wonder if she’s OK. Her eyes land on the bookshelf across from the one we use to enter and exit the Extraction Towers. “I think we should go investigate.”
My own eyes slide over to the bookshelf, which is actually a door that leads back into the city innards, and if you follow that path to its eventual conclusion, it also leads to the Little Sister dorm inside the Maiden Tower.
I wanted to go look when we were up in the other towers, but I never acted on it. Or even brought it up as a possibility. All those cities were inhabited. My curiosity over the idea tempered by the possibility that even if there are identical cities, there might not be identical people. We’d be seen as… invaders. It would be a bad move. But this city is different. We have time here. Twenty-one days, to be exact.
“Xi,” I say.
Jasina’s face screws up. “What?”
“That’s what this place is called. Xi Factory – Dimension 702. The voice in the Looking Glass room said it.”
“It’s a weird name.”
“Yeah. I wanna go look.” I nod my head at the bookcase. “I wanna see the Maiden Tower.”
Not the Little Sister dorm—theMaiden Tower.
I get how it sounds. But it sounds that way because that’s how I meant it. “I need to know, Jasina. I need to know if there’s a Clara here.”
“What if there’s a ‘you’ here? What if there’s a ‘me’ here?”
“I think we should know that.”
“Is that why you want to know if Clara’s here? Or are you hoping?—”
“No,” I say. Pointing at her to cut her off. “I already told you, she’s my greatest failure.”
“So you’re what? Looking to save her if she’s here?”
I want to deny this, but I can’t. So instead, I redirect the conversation. “I want to save everyone, Jasina.” But it comes out on a yawn, so I have to start again, making it a question this time. “Don’t you wanna save everyone too?”
“Then why are we blowing people up, Finn?”
“We’re not. I mean, we are, but only a small number of people are living inside the Extraction Tower. And I can justify sacrificing them because… theyknow. Not the entire family, but the Extraction Masterknows. So if he’s sending girls into the tower to appease a god that doesn’t even exist, then he’s evil, Jasina.”
“What about your father? Was he evil too?”
I’ve thought about this a lot as well. And while I really want to say no, because I knew him, he raised me, he was good to me, and in the end, he rebelled—I can’t. So I nod. “Yes. Even him. Because he officiated several Extractions over the course of his duties. At any point he could’ve said no.”
“He would’ve ended up the same way.”
