Up The Tower by J.P. Lantern

gone, then. She was always gone. He had many feelings about her, and most of them he wished were as gone as she was. Crash had told him she had died years ago, on the streets. Crash had said he would never let Samson out in the streets.
    You won’t die, though? Right, Crash?
    Crash took him then—impressed with the omni-ball he had made. Crash had told him, also, after a few years, the real reason his parents were killed. Crash told him all about the nano theft. Though perhaps he didn’t frame it that way when he revealed the information, Crash had told Samson the reason he should blame himself.
    Maybe that had been intentional. Samson wasn’t so very dumb. It was another way for Crash to control Samson—to foster that sort of guilt. It didn’t matter, even if Samson could imagine the information in that way. His guilt of surviving that brutal murder was the lens through which all other influences and information came through.
    The omni-ball sat high on a shelf in his workshop. Not his first invention, but one of the first he could remember actually thinking about making. Before that, Samson’s thoughts weren’t really turned on—he had no planning, no forethought. Tools and materials had been in front of him, and he had made it all work. His mother and father were so impressed.
    Marie. Marie and Archibald Castelle. Those were the names of his parents.
    “When we do start?” asked Partner. “What are we doing? Is there more fixing?”
    “Yeah,” said Samson, firing up the blowtorch. “More fixing.”
    One straight blow through the neck. It would take maybe ten seconds. He figured Partner wouldn’t ask too many questions. He hoped he wouldn’t.
    Nah, baby. You done me good. I ain’t gonna die.
    From outside, he heard a horrible rumbling, like mountains whirling against one another, like the sky opening up, like God muttering curses in some titanic, craggy voice.
    Tongues of flame spouted up in the distance, and smoke began to billow outside his window—the explosions near, if far below him. Even as high as he was, he could hear screams through the whipping of the wind. He shut off the blowtorch and rushed to the window.
    From his vantage point, it almost looked like an eye opening up in the city—long lids of buildings swinging backward, revealing a terrible, endless pupil that would never stop trying to swallow him whole.
    “Tremors of the earth!” Partner stood up and began to catch the falling scraps of the room. “Disaster! Turmoil! Crisis!”
    An earthquake, all around them. Beneath them. Alarms sounded. He felt like a sailor on a ship being dragged down into a maelstrom. Even if you jumped out—especially if you jumped out—everything would just get worse.
    He had to get out. The top of The Tower—Crash’s escape pod. Samson had put it together ages ago, when he was ten. He had made it work, dammit. He hadn’t built the whole thing himself, but he had done all the circuitry, all the tech. It wouldn’t fly for long, but it would be enough to escape this death trap of a building.
    Crash would no doubt be on his way there. Samson had to beat him. He could beat him there, and then he could wait for him and save him. That would be good.
    The notion of The Tower falling was intrinsically foreign to Samson, who had never lived anywhere but there. But now it seemed certain as well as foreign, like some djinn stalking after him, casting shadows of bad luck in his path.
    Everything rocking and spinning, waves of tools and rubbish landed on Partner. The copbot buried underneath it all.
    “This is heavy!” Partner’s hand busted through the pile, searching for an exit.
    The Tower bent and shifted, shaking all of Samson’s room out of his tiny window, which broke almost instantly. He landed hard next to the window, cutting his hand on the shattered glass.
    In front of him, now—very nearly above him—tall towers of his shelves and cabinets skidded down the wall.
    It would crush him.
    * * * * *
    G ary