The Descent into the Maelstrom (The Phantom of the Earth Book 4) (4 page)

“Face me,” Isabelle said, “and allow the Granville Crowns to ease onto your skulls.”

Oriana grew goose skin as the ring rested on her head. A new world materialized above the Granville sphere, sprawling and beautiful, unlike anything she’d ever seen. Black onyx skyscrapers with moon-shaped windows arced around an oasis, its aquamarine water topped by alloy platforms extending up to a glowing orb.

“You knew the pledge,” Isabelle said to Oriana, “a basic requirement on the first day.” She paused and lowered her voice. “Let’s see how you handle a Granville world.”

A silhouette of an adolescent girl’s body formed on the sand. As the three-dimensional image focused, Oriana understood she was in the Granville world. How strange to be suspended in House Summerset and standing with the candidates and feeling the sand with her toes all at once!

“This Granville sphere is part of the third-generation variety used by consortiums throughout the commonwealth,” Isabelle said. “You’ve seen the smaller spheres and flattened variations of Granville syntech in your developer’s houses, no doubt.” The candidates agreed with nods and yeses. To Oriana, Isabelle said, “Where were the spheres invented?”

“Palaestra,” Oriana said.

Lady Isabelle circled her. “And what do the scientists and engineers in Palaestra believe?”

“Everything you can imagine is real.”

“What is it you imagine, child?”

Beads of perspiration gathered over Oriana’s face. She thought of the holographic artwork in her room, the one with falling leaves and roses surrounding the First Aera, who stood by a stream, clouds overhead. She imagined the silver necklace around Aera’s neck, the shuriken in her hand, the radiance in her amethyst eyes that made Oriana imagine
she
was Aera.

And Oriana wished that Aera was with her now.

“I know what you see, child, for in this world I know all.”

Oriana turned to Lady Isabelle.

“Override my Granville world. Pull the rest of us into your vision and let us see what you see.
This
would be the mark of the champion on day one.”

Oriana couldn’t breathe. She wanted to run, to be anywhere but in front of the trimester class with the towering Lady Isabelle who demanded something she could not do, a skill the Summersets had never taught, an ability she did not understand. Did Lady Isabelle presume she had learned about the ZPF? That she had trained with Granville panels and spheres? Should she have trained with them? Had the Summersets led her astray? Set her up for failure? Doomed her to life in a lesser territory, or worse—the Lower Level?

Gods
, Oriana thought,
I hate them for this!

“An ominous introduction, Miss Oriana,” Isabelle said near her ear, her voice soft and fierce. “Not even your
Aera
will be able to save you during the Harpoons. You’re relieved.”

She scurried back to Pasha, biting back sobs.

The whispers resumed until Lady Isabelle declared, “Falcon Torres! Come hither!” Falcon moved with the stride of a champion, the stride of a boy developed by the house synonymous with champions, House Variscan.

“I want you all to learn from Miss Oriana’s failure.” Isabelle strutted around Falcon’s godly physique and eyed the candidates, her boots clicking over the wooden deck. “I want you to understand that your capability to interact with the ZPF and with Beimenian technology is vital to your and humanity’s survival.” She raised her arms. “Falcon Torres, I want you to enter my Granville world and breathe the arid air, run along the sand, ascend the platforms, all the way to the orb.”

The clouds above and below the candidate stadium darkened. The Granville sphere glowed bright, and the atmosphere it generated in the world above whirled into a frenzy. Lightning clapped the water, the platforms, and the black buildings.

Falcon stood calmly, his eyes determined, his bluish-brown hair brushed to a ridge atop his head, like a striker. He balled his fingers into fists and lowered his head. The ramblings among the candidates picked up once more when he materialized in the Granville world, and the bolts ceased, the clouds lightened and parted, and the sun’s rays struck the oasis, platforms, and skyscrapers.

“Yes,” Isabelle said, “candidates, learn from Falcon Torres.” Falcon sprinted across the sand. By the time he reached the shore, the sun had set and the moon rose with the night. “Open your minds to the possibilities of the commonwealth!” Isabelle said. “To its energy, its technology, its power to which there has never been an equal in the history of the world!”

Isabelle joined Falcon in the Granville world near the oasis. She sashayed across the water, a whip in hand. She snapped it toward Falcon with a
crack
, but he lunged an impossibly far distance over Isabelle, up to the first platform. He crashed into it and slid backward but pulled himself up. Isabelle slapped the whip around his ankle and pulled. Falcon struggled to hold his position. She yanked harder, but Falcon didn’t fall. He twisted on the platform and shook the whip loose from his leg. Isabelle fell forward and rolled across the water before she knelt, looking up.

The platforms activated.

They zigzagged and moved up, down, and side to side. Falcon timed his jumps and moved with the grace of a mountain lion all the way to the orb. He held it high above his head and roared. The musings began in earnest, candidates saying, “That doesn’t mean anything,” and “We can’t let him win,” and “He’d make a sturdy comrade,” and “What a loser.”

The rumblings didn’t last long before Isabelle called for decorum. “This concludes your first day of Harpoon instruction,” she said. “Be gone, study your Beimeni history and hone your use of the zeropoint field.”

The chatter picked up again, and as Oriana and Pasha tore a path to the exit portal, Nathan Storm tore a path to Oriana. “Hey, nice job today,” he said.

Oriana straightened, speechless. Was this him being clever? Was he insulting her?

He handed her a z-disk. “A bunch of us are getting together at the Candidate Café,” he said. “The instructions are in there. Just download them before you leave the classroom and you’ll have them in your neurochip when you get out.”

She stared at the z-disk in her hand. When she looked up, Nathan had already reunited with Desaray. They chatted with Duccio and Gaia on their way to the exit.

“What was that all about?” Pasha said.

“Not sure,” Oriana said.

“You did great today—”

“Not as good as you; you would’ve been able to reach the orb—”

“No I wouldn’t, but that doesn’t matter. Variscan candidates develop differently, but we’ll get there. We will. Together, and—”

“Don’t, Pash. I’m so mad at the Summersets right now, and—” Oriana hushed as a group of candidates weaved around her and her twin brother. When she and Pasha neared one of the exits, she said, “And I won’t let Falcon Torres get the first bid.”

Hydra Hollow

300 meters deep

“He saved my life and rescued my father. You
will
release him!”

The boy
, Nero thought,
must be
. He heard the
crank
of alloy against rock outside. He leaned against the wall, his mouth as dry as stone. He’d thought himself victorious in his and his captain’s operation to rescue Jeremiah Selendia, the leader of the Liberation Front. One second, Nero had spied Gaia City with its geothermal vents rendered on the inside of the transport in which they traveled, the next, Aera’s palm. Now he enjoyed a view of his cell’s limestone walls. He didn’t know how long he’d slept. He’d lost track of time.

He still wore what remained of his striker synsuit, the side and leg plates torn by the Janzers in Permutation Crypt, his bodysuit ripped and encrusted with dried blood on his quadriceps, where the Janzer’s diamond sword had ripped into him. The wound was mostly healed, thanks to multiple uficilin injections on the way out. Nero limped to a limestone ledge, sat, and stared at a stream of blue-green bioluminescent water that trickled down from the ceiling.

He heard a tapping at his cell bars. A familiar face; it was Cornelius Selendia dressed in a dark green cape, hood up over his head, a sword sheathed across his back. Animated tattoos of starfish and seaweed undulated over his muscular forearms. He held chains in his hands.

“They didn’t tell me … about this …” Connor said. He dropped the chains.

Nero was glad to see the boy up and about again. During the raid into Permutation Crypt, Connor had connected to the ZPF in a way Nero had never experienced. He’d overwhelmed the Janzers’ telekinetic defenses, ripping apart more than three hundred of them: he’d saved the operation from ruin. Then he had collapsed from exhaustion, and Zorian, Connor’s older brother, had carried him out of the Crypt.

Presently, Nero’s anger over his imprisonment won out over his sense of gratitude. “We had an accord.”

“Aera acts alone. She doesn’t hold to the commonwealth’s rules or those that govern the BP—”

“Are these
your
rules?” Nero nodded to the cell walls. “You enlist a strike team captain and striker to your cause and turn on me—”

“Your captain’s the reason I’m here.” Connor leaned his hand against the side of the limestone cell, and Nero noted the uneasiness in his tone and in his stance, so unlike the boy’s confidence in the Crypt. “Something’s … happened …”

Nero sprang to his feet. He grimaced but limped to the bars. “The Bicentennial?” He could barely move from the pain that shot down his leg. While Nero had raided the Crypt with Connor, Murray, and Aera, his strike team captain, Broden Barão, had attended the two-hundred-year celebration of Chancellor Masimovian’s rule in Hammerton Hall. “What happened?” Nero reached for Connor through the bars and pulled him by his cape. A sensation struck his muscles, paralysis. He released Connor and dropped to the stone floor.

Jeremiah Selendia rotated around his son, not at all how Nero remembered him—weak, withering, half-dead in the transport after they’d escaped the Crypt. Connor seemed tiny next to his father. A fur cape hung around Jeremiah’s broad shoulders. His head and face were shaved. His eyes looked clear and sharp, his power in the ZPF as effective as Brody’s.

How long was I out?
Nero thought
.
A trimester must’ve passed for Jeremiah’s full recovery.

“Not that long,” Jeremiah said, “but long enough.”

“We saved you—”

“You betrayed me.”

“Lady Isabelle—”

“Killed my son because of you and your Jubilees and your adherence to Masimo’s backwardness.” Jeremiah knelt and rotated his fist clockwise. Spit flew out of Nero’s mouth, as if he were being squeezed for pulp. Nero twisted his brow, shivered, and his eyes closed, but he didn’t make a sound. “You know full well you’re sending those people to the surface without a cure—”

“We … had … accord …”

“Ah … the accord. I recall a similar agreement you and I and your captain shared in Palaestra. When our accord stated we’d work together to free the people from this underground inferno, an accord you and your captain and your strategist dismantled when you turned me in to Lady Isabelle!”

“We … didn’t—”

“The way of Reassortment with you—”

“Father!” Connor said as Nero bellowed. “He’s had enough! Please, let him go! He helped me, carried you out of the Crypt, and you wouldn’t be here now without him … and … he deserves to see …”

Jeremiah looked up to his son. “Yes,
yes.
” He stood and nodded. “Wise beyond your years.” He ruffled Connor’s hair beneath his hood and released Nero, who gasped for air as if emerging from under the sea. Jeremiah activated a Granville sphere, and the cell bars dropped into the floor. “He’s right, you do deserve to see.”

Hydra Hollow

300 meters deep

Connor watched Nero, still rocking back and forth like a submarine in the Gulf of Yeuron. Connor would ask his father, when the time was right, how he hurt the striker, how he induced the paralysis, how he controlled his telekinesis within the ZPF. Connor couldn’t use the ZPF like that, at least not since Permutation Crypt, when he’d lost control entirely.

His memory of the raid was a blur, the descent through the pit, the shifts, his broken leg, Murray’s death, the Janzers. He’d killed them to save his comrades, but he didn’t know
how
he killed them. To be sure, he’d connected to the ZPF, but so much anger, so much energy had flowed through him in the Crypt.

Since he’d awakened a few days ago, Connor couldn’t telekinetically lift a pebble.

He’d seen his eldest brother, Zorian, manipulate the quantum field to influence matter, breaking fishermen’s arms as easily as he would twigs. He’d seen his older brother Hans stun Janzers with telekinetic bursts in the Department of Peace. He’d seen his developer adjust matter atop Beimeni River, turning it semisolid so they could trot across it. But these uses of the ZPF displayed by his father were still mostly unknown to Connor, for the power to bend a man by mere thought, without killing him, seemed unfathomable—yet utterly desirable.

“Left leg, here,” Connor said.

He locked the chain clamp around Nero’s left ankle, then another on the right. The chain connected between his ankles, long enough for Nero to walk through the Hollow’s limestone tunnels to the Leadership’s chamber, a deep cavern with natural pillars, stalactites, and stalagmites. Three Granville panels were angled ahead of a stone table.

Father paced the length of the table where the rest of the Hollow’s representation sat—Gage Voss, Executive of Hydra Hollow, his commonwealth liaison, Brooklyn Harper, and council members Lizbeth, Zoey, and Isaiah. Pirro, a council member from Blackeye Cavern, the Beimeni Polemon’s eastern stronghold, was absent, escorting Zorian to the Cavern on Father’s orders. Jeremiah had also ordered the once old man to take athanasia treatments, so he could be of more use to the group. Pirro resisted at first, his nonviolent form of protest threatened, but once his back straightened out and he began to walk without a cane, he stopped griping.