This Falling Tower
A Novel by Ryan Grabow
First Draft preview, July 2025
http://www.egrabow.com/eden/

CHAPTERS T06/T07 (excerpt)
This draft is subject to future edits.

The heavy door latches behind him. He takes a few steps through the entryway and looks into the main room.

Ajax doesn’t even spot the empty hook before something slams into the back of his head. His legs scurry forward in vain. His face strikes the floor. As fast as Ajax rolls onto his back, and into the wall, he finds Sarsa’s eyes locked onto him. The Redist woman stands over him, holding the plasma rifle he keeps in the room.

Confusion flashes on her face before anger takes hold.

“You?!” she snaps.

Ajax spots the object that hits him, recognizing the weight he ties to the woman’s legs. Sarsa rigs it up to drop from the ceiling above the door. Then he notices how she’s holding the weapon and laughs as if it’s the cutest thing he ever sees.

“You even strap it to your wrist. Aren’t you smart?”

Sarsa’s glare threatens to bore holes into him. The plasma rifle is steady in her hands.

“Now that’s my weapon, locked to my DNA,” Ajax speaks with a victorious grin on his face. He reaches for the ion rail, thinking it can’t be charged. “Now be a good little pair of breasts and—”

His right hand explodes.

Ajax doesn’t hear his own cry of pain. Every nerve in the Counter’s body is on fire for a couple of seconds, the flames receding to the upper-half of his forearm, which is now a stump. Urgently, he wills the arteries of his arm to contract. An alarming amount of his own blood is already pooling on the floor, and splattered on everything else.

“My arm!” He hisses curses at her through shallow breaths. “My arm won’t grow back before the Apex!”

She plants the ion rail beneath his chin. Ajax’s spilled blood drips from her arm.

“I can finish off your jaw, too,” she speaks. “How do you like eternity now?”

Blood still dribbles from his arm with each heartbeat. Ajax can’t suppress the pain very well; it takes so much of his focus just to not bleed out. The only relief he finds is in the curses he shouts at Sarsa, the Redist who can’t simply command him to die but, with the plasma rifle, can kill him all the same. He speaks the pain in his arm so she might feel it, so she can suffer and lose focus too. If not for the strap on her wrist and her finger on the trigger, even a clumsy sputter of magnetism from his surviving hand could give him the opening he needs.

He watches her grip tighten uncomfortably. Sarsa hisses through clenched teeth as Ajax freely speaks every vile thing he ever wishes to say to superiors, underlings, Bluist men, and discorrupted women. Bit by bit, he notices Sarsa’s resolve giving out, a story told by the pained squint of her eyes and a slight buckle of her knees. Her own right hand, and her trigger finger with it, may even be paralyzed. All he needs is a few more words to break her.

Ajax fails to notice the spark in Sarsa’s eyes. His own words are so frantic he barely hears the curses being returned to him.

Sarsa makes a closed loop of his pain, fanning the flames of his nervous system a few seconds at a time, then taking odd pauses as Ajax shouts his tongue out. This happens long enough he doesn’t even know what he’s speaking anymore. He thinks the woman is trying to shut him out, unsuccessfully, until it dawns on him that the memories being reflected are changing.

The memories move between this room, the eastern command center, Rai Himace, and even the lab he’s grown in. The lab is in this city, just as Naiad’s military headquarters is. Every memory she speaks is now inside that headquarters, within every room and department Ajax knows. Sarsa is beside him as he skirts around the security to blow off meetings and skip drills. She’s listening to their plans as Naiad shifts their focus to Rai Ver While.

Sarsa isn’t shutting him out but listening, pushing through the pain to drive him toward the memories she wants.

Ajax forces his words to stop. The torrent of curses recedes into a frenzied gasping and his crippling pain visibly lifts from Sarsa’s face. Her breath slows and becomes steadier. There’s a soft chuckle.

“You Counters aren’t so different after all,” she speaks. “We suppress memories voluntarily. You do it involuntarily. And that bladder of yours reminds me what happens when the body is in extreme trauma.”

Indeed, blood isn’t all Ajax spills on the floor.

“What do you waaaaant?” Ajax moans, his voice raw.

Keeping one hand on the weapon, Sarsa pulls a small touchpad from her pocket. “I know you can program this to play back your voice.”

“Yeah? So what?” he spits back. “What good is the Ancestors’ tongue to you?”

Sarsa smiles sarcastically. “I spend years of my life asking that very question.”

Ajax tries again to suppress the pain of his arm, but he still can’t do it without relaxing the clenched arteries. “Fine,” he responds through shallow hissing breaths. “I’ll say whatever you want, just let me tie a tourniquet first.”

“No. No. I’ll tie your tourniquet... after I tie everything else, okay?” She presses something on the screen and turns it so Ajax sees the audio recording program. “First, we’re going to play a little game I know.”

The panel in the wall pushes open slowly, muffled by the pile of folded tarps that conceals it. All sorts of contraband falls to the floor as Sarsa steps out into the dark closet. Her binoculars reveal several earpieces at her feet. Sarsa finds it difficult to simply pass them by; her hangover may be receding, but the temptation to indulge again is far more patient.

Voices outside the closet bring her focus back. The speakers are all elderly, the Bluists’ Old Ones gathered together. The handful that are still alive speak about Verian’s promises to them, promises of eternal life.

Through their speech, Sarsa assesses the crowded room outside the closet: fairly large, its walls covered with black curtains, no Counters in sight — at the Bluists’ request, it seems — but with a discorrupted woman standing by the door and another circling the mob, as if to keep the old men corralled.

As for elderly women, common enough in Rai Ver While, none are found here. The memories she finds are of wives and relatives who mysteriously disappear since Verian’s takeover.

This is hell, Sarsa thinks. I’m in hell.

Sarsa looks at the earpieces again and realizes none of the Old Ones are using them. Pangs of anxiety are easy to find within their endless chatter. Sarsa realizes their abstinence isn’t by choice.

She takes a handful of earpieces opens the door. There’s just enough room for her to move behind the curtain without disturbing it. She sees what the Old Ones can’t, all the restraining equipment she has to navigate around in the dark, restraints that might be used on the men if they step out of line.

Meanwhile, the abundance of speech practically makes the curtain invisible to her. Sarsa reaches the far corner of the room and waits, propping her plasma rifle against the wall and crouching to the floor, watching the woman carefully through the men’s eyes.

“Come on come on,” she whispers.

A moment passes, and then another. Whenever one woman looks away, the other keeps the far corner in her sight. They don’t speak; Sarsa must judge what they see by the directions of their heads alone.

At last, the woman by the door opens it. As one faces out, the other faces her.

Sarsa pulls up on the curtain and scatters the earpieces.

“Hey, I know these,” one man immediately speaks, bending to pick it up.

“Do you think it has my favorite sound?” another fantasizes. “You can hear it in my memory, right?”

“Don’t waste your time speaking." This man inserts one into his ear. “There’s only one way to fly with these.”

Hearing the others, men start turning around to find the earpieces all claimed.

“Where’s mine?!”

“Hey what about me?!”

“Gimme that!”

“Me first! Mine!”

The front of the room blanks out as elderly men press toward the back, shouting, shoving, and striking each other for earpieces. The women reappear in the men’s speech as they fire darts into the crowd, darts with bright orange flights that stun on contact.

Sarsa passes some dart guns behind the curtain and grabs one just as a woman begins shouting for order; this is a new woman, the one who is outside the door as the frenzy starts. There are no more women guarding these men, and no memory of the door being closed when this one rushes inside.

Already halfway to the exit, Sarsa emerges from the curtain and walks as soberly as she can toward the open door. The men are so focused on earpieces, knockout darts, and the women snatching their contraband away at rifle point, that Sarsa cannot spot herself in their moans and curses.

A small platform is nearby, exactly where its supposed to be. Sarsa triggers playback on the touchpad and hears Ajax’s tortured voice giving commands to the computer. A blue ring promptly encircles her feet. She feels herself rising to the upper corridors of the building.

An empty hallway is before her. The circle shrinks and becomes a line on the floor, directing the final steps that Sarsa expects to take in this life. Ajax’s memories end here.

The door to the equipment room is open. In spite of her fears, and all the sensors in the hallways, no guards arrive to stop her. Sarsa wants to break character and sneer at the absurdity of it, to mock their lax security as Novarro surely would. The sight of a Counter inside the room puts a swift end to that temptation.

“At last, some help,” the Counter speaks.

The room is smaller than she expects. Servers and power amplifiers cover the walls from floor to ceiling, a ceiling blocked by a tidy patchwork of cables. Displays indicate several dots orbiting at the edge of Earth’s atmosphere, green and yellow lines scattering between them. Clusters of red dots flash along their orbital paths.

“I need to adjust these things constantly now.” He nods to the displays. “The waters above aren’t just raining down on us, they’re rising too. We’re running out of time.”

The Counter punches a few buttons. A panel on Sarsa’s right fills with maps and charts for the few operating satellites they still have.

“We can move a couple into higher orbit,” he explains, using his finger to highlight things on the screen. “This one needs to go polar, and this twin will probably follow it up. The rest are too far gone. Thrusters are jammed and burned out on all of them.” He looks up from his controls. “Please fingerprint the plans and send them to Naiad for approval.”

An alarm sounds. One of the satellites on the display flashes red, along with the circle that represents its coverage area. The landmasses of the map have no features, but Sarsa quickly figures out where Rai Ver While is. Her home is near the western edge of the flashing red circle, a circle that overlaps no others.

“They’ll silence me for sure if we lose that bird.” The Counter hurries to another control panel. “Don’t worry, its systems are all responding. We won’t lose it for a good, long time.”

With a nod of her head, Sarsa pretends to examine the plans on the screen. The Counter works swiftly to guide the ancient satellite through its newfound turbulence, turning to another panel on his left.

He faces away from her.

Sarsa pulls the gun from its holster and fires. The dart and its orange flight sticks from the scales of the Counter's neck. She hears a buzz of electricity pulsing through the man’s body as he begins to fall, appearing to reach for something as his body spasms into unconsciousness and slams to the floor.

She closes the heavy door and, finding a deadbolt, locks herself inside. A glowing portrait of Verian hangs on the wall beside her. Sarsa smiles at the dictator’s image as she takes up the plasma rifle once more.

“I agree with you, Verian,” Sarsa speaks. “Everything valuable in this world requires sacrifice.”

She turns, gazing intently at the blinking indicators, maps, cables, and numbers that link Naiad and his commanders to their armies throughout the world. She turns the rifle’s power to its highest setting. The frantic energy of the ion rail emits a high-pitched whine.

“Let the sacrifices begin.”

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