The Green Tower Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, or persons is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by J.B. Simmons

  All rights reserved

  Cover by Jocker Benitez

  ISBN 978-1-949785-04-3

  Published in the United States by Three Cord Press

  www.jbsimmons.com

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  THE GREEN TOWER | Book Three of the Five Towers

  Map

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  THE GREEN TOWER

  Book Three of the Five Towers

  Our thirst for more could not be quenched.

  The more we grasped, the tighter we clenched.

  We scampered and gathered and gathered to hoard.

  Possessions became our master and lord.

  And when we’re old with our treasures all heaped,

  a sad example of what greed has reaped.

  Our fists still clenched in a grasping motion,

  till at our death, when our hands are opened.

  - Irwin Mercer

  Map

  1

  VINES CRADLE MY body like a net. They are brown and as thick as my thumb. They should be breakable. I’ve tried, but the organic ropes do not weaken. Not even gnawing works. It only leaves a bitter and dirty taste in my mouth. The cords might as well be chains. At least they leave gaps wide enough for my arms and legs to stick through.

  A warm breeze makes me spin, like a bug dangling from a spider’s web. Everything around me is wood. Wooden floor, wooden walls, wooden ceiling. The room has a dozen odd angles and grooves. Thick tree branches jab up through the floor and out the roof.

  With each spin I see the girl again. She dangles in a net like mine, like another caterpillar in a cocoon. We’re just out of reach from each other.

  “Hey, you awake?” I ask softly.

  She doesn’t bother sitting up. Her golden hair spills out through the bottom of her net as she twists and stretches and spins slowly. Her blue eyes blink sleepily.

  “I am now.”

  “Sorry, I was...” Feeling bored. But that’s a bad excuse for waking her up. “Any luck with the vines?”

  “No.” She yawns widely. “I’m going back to sleep.”

  I yawn back. “I’ll let you know if anything interesting happens.”

  She closes her eyes and turns her head to the side, resting it on her hands. The motion is enough to make her dangling net spin again, with her body curled into a sleeping ball at the bottom.

  She sleeps a lot. I can’t hold it against her. Sleeping makes the time pass. My eyes feel heavy, too, but this time I resist it. Someone has been bringing food, and I’m going to find out who they are. Get some answers.

  It always happens the same way. We drift to sleep. We wake with new food resting on two small tables beneath us, one under each net. Each table holds a wooden cup of water and a wooden bowl of food. The food is usually a few mushrooms and strips of salted meat. Once or twice it’s a bowl of strange, nutty paste—with mushrooms, of course. Always mushrooms. They taste like dirt. But we lick the bowls clean every time, starved by the time the meager food has arrived. We use the empty bowls for our necessities. We don’t talk about that. We don’t talk about much. We’ve tried guessing about who we are, where we are, and why we’re here. Neither of us knows, so there’s not much to say. Despair brings quiet, and quiet brings sleep. We wake up to the old bowls gone and another fresh batch of food below us, but no sign of how it got there.

  Not this time. I will stay awake.

  My eyes blink heavily. I will stay awake. I hum and shake my head. I yawn.

  I will stay...

  When I wake up, water and food have been brought. The girl is already eating. Her slender arm reaches down through the net for another handful. My bowl has four mushrooms and two strips of the dried, salty meat. One more strip than last time. I start with the water. Then the meat. It tastes wild.

  “You going to eat your mushrooms?” the girl asks.

  She’s managed to sit up, with each of her legs sticking through gaps in the bottom of the net and resting on the table beneath her. She bends her toes back and forth, making her cocoon sway.

  I tell her she can have them. We’ve come to a little arrangement. She offers me her meat. I offer her my mushrooms. The problem is: we haven’t managed to make the exchange yet. We’ve tried three, maybe four times now. The food always ends up on the floor.

  I scoop up the handful of mushrooms from my bowl and maneuver around to sit as she does, legs hanging out and balancing on the table. We face each other, both rocking our cocoons.

  With my toes pressed against the table, I kick off as hard as I can. The table falls over, knocking the empty bowl and cup clattering to the floor. Now the momentum is going. I shift my weight inside the net, going with the motion, picking up the pace.

  It takes some time before I match her rhythm. But when I do, our nets move in tandem, forward and back, forward and back, until—at the height of the swing—we can extend our arms to within an inch of each other.

  “Okay, ready?” I hold out the mushrooms.

  “On three.” She holds out the meat. Her net swings toward mine, higher and higher. “One,” she says, coming close.

  We swing back and forward again.

  “Two,” we say together.

  As we make the third swing, our arms extend and our eyes lock onto each other, concentrating.

  “Three!”

  Perfect. My right hand delivers the mushrooms the same moment that my left hand grabs the meat. I clutch the treasure inside my net as the swinging slows. It seems silly, but it feels good to have pulled it off. Maybe because I’m bored, tied up, and otherwise useless in this net. Or I’m just hungry for more meat.

  The girl smiles at me. “Nice work. Next time we’ll do even better.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  She glances down. There’s a dark object on the wooden floor—a mushroom.

  “One casualty,” she says in an amused voice. “But you got all you bargained for. You owe me.”

  I can’t help but smile. “Okay, room for improvement.”

  “And plenty of time to practice,” she says.

  Our swaying nets gradually fall still again. We eat our bartered food in quiet. We can hear things outside the room. Birds sing. Squirrels chatter. Occasionally there are other voices talking. They’re too distant to make out words, but it’s somehow comforting to know that we’re not the only people in existence.

  When I ask the girl who she thinks they are, she tells me she’d like to figure out who she is first. “But whoever they are,” she says, “they must not be too bad. They feed us,
right?”

  I’m not so sure. I may not remember anything, but my gut tells me it’s not right to tie someone up in a net. I also know that the girl and I are young—too young to have done much to deserve this. We seem innocent. My only blemish is a pair of matching scars on the backs of my hands.

  The girl soon falls back to sleep. I try to stay awake again. I yawn but manage to fight off the sleep, determined to see who brings the food. I want answers, and I want out of this net.

  A long time later, there’s a sound below. A plank of wood lifts on the floor beneath me.

  Stay quiet, stay calm, I tell myself as my heart pounds. I peek through almost-shut eyes, enough to see but not be seen. A head emerges through the hole in the floor. It’s a girl with straight brown hair and brown doe eyes. She doesn’t look at me.

  Breathe deeply, I remind myself, like you’re sleeping.

  The girl moves very quietly, very deliberately. She would not have woken me up. She sets a tray down on the floor beside the fallen tables. She picks them up, then places a fresh wooden cup and bowl on each one. She reaches into a bag hanging from her shoulder and retrieves mushrooms. After she fills the bowls, she pulls a large piece of dried meat and a knife out of the bag. She uses the sharp blade to slice off two pieces of meat for each bowl. Just as she begins to put the meat and knife away, she pauses, staring at the floor.

  A dark spot holds her attention. It’s the mushroom that had fallen on the floor—the casualty of my exchange with my companion in the net. The girl bends down slowly and picks up the mushroom, studying it. Her head turns to the nets for the first time, as if she previously had no concern for us. I know I should close my eyes, but I’m too curious. And then it’s too late.

  As her eyes connect with mine, she jumps in surprise. “You should be asleep!” she gasps in a whisper.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  She glances down at the mushroom in her hand, then at me again. “You didn’t eat...” She stops herself, bringing her hand over her mouth.

  “What do you mean?” I say. “Please, tell me where I am.”

  “Oh dear.” Her hand falls to her side, limp as a dead fish. “Daniel was going to show you everything, but...”

  “But what? Who’s—”

  “Oh!” she interrupts me in a pained voice. “Now you won’t be ready! We’ll have to start all over!”

  “Slow down,” I say. “Can’t you just—”

  She cuts me off again. “I’m sorry. I have to...” She springs into motion, grabbing the tray and dashing through the opening in the floor.

  “Wait, wait!” I’m shouting as she flees, but she’s already pulling the plank back into place and disappearing from sight. As I’m trying to make sense of all this, a glint of metal catches my eye.

  She left her knife on the table beneath me.

  2

  THE GIRL STILL sleeps in the net beside me, her body cradled in the vines, her hair spilling through the gaps like liquid gold. Not even my shouting woke her up. Nor did it stop the other girl, the one who brought the food, from dashing out as soon as she knew I’d seen her.

  You didn’t eat... she said.

  I didn’t eat the mushrooms. They must put us to sleep.

  But why does she care if I saw her? She said I wouldn’t be ready...ready for what? Why won’t I be ready? And who is Daniel?

  I shake off the questions and focus on the knife.

  The hilt hangs off the corner of the table, just beyond my fingertips. My breath steadies as I concentrate, my body still swaying slightly in the net. One wrong move and I might knock the knife off the table. It’s my only hope of getting out of this hanging prison.

  Focus. Get the knife.

  My arm stretches and two fingers pinch the tip of the blade, dragging it carefully away from the table’s edge and pulling it up. I clasp it with both hands, staring at it in fascination. The hilt feels smooth in my hand. It looks made of bone. The sharp metal blade has intricate carvings of a forest. The lines are so delicate I can see the individual leaves of trees and the eyes of a stag with huge antlers in the center. Who carves meat with a blade this nice?

  “Stop thinking,” I whisper aloud to myself. “Get out.”

  Still mumbling get out under my breath, I grip the knife tightly and press the blade against one of the vines forming the net. It does not slice like butter, or even meat. Not surprising since I couldn’t even chew through the vines. It’s also hard to get leverage while hanging in the net, but I position myself to press down with all my weight, sawing back and forth.

  The knife starts to cut through the tough fibrous rope. Once the first slice is made, the rest of the vine gives way more easily. I keep at it until I’ve sliced through ten vines in a straight line at the bottom of the net.

  It’s enough to slip out. I try to catch my fall by grabbing at the net, but only lose my balance and fall to the floor, also knocking the table and the food down in a loud clatter. Hurrying to my feet, I stretch and breathe deeper, tasting freedom.

  The girl, amazingly, is still sleeping.

  “Hey, you!” Standing on my tip-toes, I reach up and tap her back. I give a little shove, making the net swing. “Come on, wake up!”

  It takes a few more taps and shouts before she finally stirs. Her eyes slowly open, seeing me, then seeing the knife. She gulps. She looks surprised or terrified, maybe both.

  I lower the knife. “A girl came while you were sleeping. I stayed awake. When she saw me, she ran out and forgot her knife.”

  “How did you...?”

  “It’s the mushrooms. Listen, we have to hurry. Want out?”

  She gazes down at the knife uncertainly. “But...surely someone will come back. She will realize she left the knife. They might...well, I doubt we are supposed to get out.”

  “Supposed to? Who cares? Come on, scoot over and I’ll cut your net.”

  She still looks doubtful, but she does as I say. I manage to climb onto the little table beneath her net. Working from my knees, I have more leverage and make quicker work of the vines. When the gap is almost large enough for her to fit through, I tell her to grab hold of the net and let herself down slowly.

  I slice through one more vine. The hole breaks open.

  She comes falling out, collapsing onto me, and knocking us and the table all down in a crashing heap.

  “You didn’t hold on!” I say, scrambling to my feet and holding out a hand to help her up.

  “I tried.” She takes my hand and stands, stretching her arms high over her head. We’ve been hanging for who knows how long beside each other, but this is the first time we’ve been so close. Her blue eyes, golden hair, and elegant features look out of place. She wears light brown shorts, cut off at the knee, and a brown shirt cut off at the shoulders. My clothes are similar. They are soft and look like deerskin. We’re both barefoot.

  “Ahhh, this feels much better.” She cranes her neck back, looking up at the net. “Thank you for cushioning my fall. It broke open so quickly.”

  “That’s gravity...”

  Curious blue eyes meet mine. “What is gravity?”

  “You have to be kidding,” I say, but it’s clear she’s not. I don’t know how I know what gravity is, but it seems like such an obvious thing that I can’t believe she doesn’t know. “Gravity is a force of nature that...” The muffled sound of footsteps overhead makes me stop. “I’ll explain later. Let’s get out of here.”

  “But we do not know where we are. Where will we go?”

  “We’ll figure it out.”

  I kneel beside the plank that the other girl entered through. The knife wedges into a crack and lifts the wood just enough for me to grab the plank and slide it away. A steep, narrow staircase leads down.

  Holding the knife ready, I go first. The wood creaks beneath my feet. My head drops out of the room, and I freeze.

  We’re in a tree. It’s larger than I could have imagined, with a trunk at least fifty feet wide. Branches twist and weave aroun
d us, with dozens of rope bridges connecting them. Small wooden buildings are scattered among the branches. The foliage is so dense that I can’t see where the tree ends, around or above us. But far, far below the thick trunk meets the ground, where there’s a dense forest of much smaller trees.

  “What are you waiting for?” the girl calls out above.

  “Sorry, you have to see this.”

  I back away from the staircase. She descends and looks around in wonder. But then she glances past me and her eyes widen.

  “Welcome,” says an old man’s voice.

  3

  THE OLD MAN leans on a gnarled staff, studying us with dark, beady eyes. I’m not sure if his long beard is hair or moss as it hangs over a velvet green robe. I’m not even sure if he’s human. He looks like a larger, living version of the mushrooms that were putting us to sleep.

  “Who are you?” the girl asks, coming to my side.

  “My name is Daniel.” The old man’s voice creaks like a tree bending in the wind. “I lead this tower.”

  “What tower?” I ask, gripping the knife firmly. Surely I can outrun him if it comes to it. But then what? Swing down the branches? Yes, whatever it takes to get free.

  “The Green Tower,” Daniel says. “Would you like to know how you got here?”

  “Yes.” The girl bows as she speaks, as if we stood before a king. “I would very much like to know.”

  “I will show you.” Slowly, deliberately, the old man raises his staff and points it at the wooden building above us—the room where we’d been tied in nets. “We cleanse your system before we restore the memories that you’ve already seen. It makes for a...fresher start.”

  I take a step back. Cleanse our system? Is that what he calls the mushrooms, the nets?

  “It’s no use running.” Daniel stares at me, as if reading my thoughts. “You must be cleansed, Cipher.”

  “You don’t know me.” I feel defiant, but I’m shaken inside. Cipher? Is that my name?

  “We have met,” he says. “This, too, I will show you. But you must let the cleansing complete. It should not be much longer, even with your escape... Most unusual, that was. But no surprise, I suppose. You obey your instincts, and Abram always said you were special.”