The Restoration of Flaws (The Phantom of the Earth Book 5) (12 page)

“For the rest of your days in this Lower Level,” a new Janzer began, “you two are teammates. You will report for duty at the same time each work shift. One doesn’t show, the other’s punishment is determined by the Controller. You might lose a limb. You might starve to death. Who knows. You fellas are on the third line today. Darvas will get you up to speed on the line ops.”

A black bot approached them. It explained how to empty the minerals from the bins to the proper conveyor belts and which sizes of bins went where, then returned to the check-in area. The place stunk of feces and vomit mixed with alloy. Brody lifted his shirt over his nose. Luke did the same.

For the first few hours, Brody welcomed physical activity. By the eighth and ninth hours, he couldn’t fathom where the minerals they sorted had originated, for he didn’t believe the Earth held a cache this large, not this shallow in the crust. Did they ship it down from the Northeast?

By the fifteenth and sixteenth hours, he felt dizzy. Sweat streaked through the soot on his forehead, his eyes sagged, and his arms shook.

Go to a place …
Damy’s voice.

Brody dropped bits of minerals into the bin on the belt.

Where we can be together …

Brody turned away from Luke, who stared knowingly with his sea-blue eyes.
Where do you want me to go?

You remember our spot in the Northeast?

Brody drifted as the picture formed in his mind, as tangible as the conveyor belts and the minerals beneath glowing stalactites here at the bottom of the world. Mount Soevejow, one of the tallest artificial peaks constructed in Gallia and Underground Northeast, at Hotel Geurice, the only hotel in the commonwealth made from pure jadeite—his and Damy’s first visit after they had met forty-nine days earlier during the tour in the RDD. Brody knew it to the second because he gave her a different-colored rose every seven days, and on that day in that year he stood with Damy near the Fountain of Youth, half-nude in ivory silk, a warm fragrant breeze wafting over them, nude Beimenians bathing all around.

He had handed her a rose, red-pink like her eyes, and set it behind her ear. They took a luxury catamaran from Aquinaria Wharf, traveling along the rivers to Gallia and the hotel, and he carried her into their room with its organic featherbed and spa and organic aromas, where they had listened to the soft chords of Veronicella and undressed.

If I go there now
, Brody thought,
will you meet me?

I’ll always be there.

Always?

Always.

Reeeeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh.

The high-pitched sound belched over the work area and broke Brody’s reverie, vibrating his boots and the minerals on the belts.
The birds,
he thought. The Janzers lined up with the birds near a clearing as large as Artemis Square, dark like obsidian. Brody, Luke, and all the exiles stopped working, covering their ears. The noise was like nothing Brody had experienced. The conveyor belts stopped, and the exiles recovered and turned.

Reeeeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh.

Brody grimaced, for the sound felt as if it pierced his soul.

Before he could ask what was happening, Luke had pulled him to follow the other exiles who formed rows in the square.

“Strong now, bub,” Luke said. His lips barely moved. “That’s the only way to survive the stairs.”

The stairs?
Brody thought. He hadn’t noticed any stairs on the Controller’s map or when he’d entered the mine.

The Janzers marched them through a stone corridor. Blood streaked the ground, here and there. Brody trudged next to Luke and hundreds of thousands of exiles to a cloudy onyx archway.

Twenty-four Janzers stood upon the lowest stairs, their Reassortment batons inactivated, while a Janzer whose synsuit glowed midnight blue stood alone at the highest point.

“Clothes off!” the blue Janzer said.

Endless rows of exiles, men and women alike, soon stood nude. Brody noted that many more had skin much lighter than his.

The bots collected the clothing.

“
March!
”

At first, no one moved.

Then Brody heard a hum, like the moans of many dying animals, and the Janzers disappeared through the walls. The walls closed, and the exiles forced Brody up the stairs and to the left. Its distance astonished him, the horizon as far as Mars, it seemed. He passed marble pillars topped with lavender, a maroon Granville sun broken by tinted clouds. He drank in these features with his eyes, ignoring the footsteps of those beside him, ignoring the cries and
fire
, and the smell of burning coals and flesh.

Magma crawled along the back of the cavern, slow and bright. Brody moved up and across, up and across, up and up and up. At the sixth platform, he glanced over the side and understood the depth of the stairs: he was, in fact, moving over a repetitious staircase, the lowest portions filling with magma.

Luke fell, and Brody lifted him.
Don’t stop
, he mouthed.
If you stop, you die.
Whether Luke heard him, Brody couldn’t tell, but he got up.

They climbed up, up, up and across, up, up, up and across.

More exiles were forced upon the stairs. Brody suspected there must be millions. They panted and hurled and collapsed and died, buried in igneous rock.

How can I lead these people when I can’t lead myself?
Brody thought.
How can I organize resistance when none can hear me?

If only he still had his neurochip, he could access the ZPF—then he could lead them to freedom.

At the eighteenth incline, sweat rolled down Brody’s cheeks, and his legs burned, his mouth overcome with an unquenchable thirst. His vision shifted. He found himself in Beimeni City, sipping champagne with Nero, Verena, Chancellor Masimovian, and Lady Isabelle in the Fountain of Youth. Together, the old friends raised their glasses amid the sounds of lovemaking and falling water, and the flowery scents of roses mixed with citrus and the spicy vapors from the Fountain’s pedestals.

“Serve Beimeni,” Lady Isabelle said.

“
Live forever
,” Brody and his strike team replied.

Isabelle, Masimovian, Nero, and Verena disappeared, replaced by exiles, stairs, stench, and, not far below, rising magma.

Brody spit phlegm, dark and bloody.

A wave of exiles pushed against him. The magma drew nearer, the moans louder.

He pulled Luke to him before the exiles could trample them. They climbed.

At the twenty-eighth incline, perspiration mixed with soot upon their bodies, the air unbearable, hot and misty, tinged with smoke, sweat, puke, excrement.

At the fortieth incline, Brody moved up the marble stairs outside the Fountain Temple with Damy in hand, golden silk across their bodies, revealing their left breasts.

The rising heat from the magma seared his hair and skin, forcing Brody away from the Fountain Temple and Fountain Square and Damy.

Exiles dropped all over the stairs. The magma swept them up like refuse. Brody all but carried Luke now, his teammate’s eyes closed to slits, snot dripping from his nose.

At the fifty-second incline, Brody dodged bodies strewn over the stairs, exiles exhausted and asleep, in comas, or dead, too many to count.

He wasn’t sure if Luke was breathing, and he slapped his face.

Stay awake, friend.

The noise from Luke’s mouth sounded like a dying bear.

If we stop, we die.

At the sixty-first incline, a scenario looped in Brody’s mind in which he avoided hands and feet and fingers and hair and death and magma, and he and Luke ascended to the precipice and took out the Janzers, rushed the elevators, commandeered a ship across the Infernus Sea, and took the elevators to Beimeni City, where he exposed Chancellor Masimovian and, with the strike teams behind him, led a contingent to the Lower Level to free the exiles.

At the seventy-third incline, Brody delayed his plan, for he could barely breathe.

He moved over the stairs with Luke strewn over his shoulders.

A Janzer’s voice blared over the speakers, though Brody couldn’t hear his words, or anything, not the drops of sweat that fell from his arms and hands and legs or the hissing, burning rock, or the death cries, or the flare from the fires when a body combusted.

If we stop, we die.

At the seventy-seventh incline, Brody glanced up at the stairs’ reflection, the unending journey. He dropped his head, and the unfamiliar rush of mortality swept over him, similar to what he had felt on Vigna and in Farino Prison.

If we stop, we die.

Brody couldn’t have said when the magma ended its rise, but suddenly a mist consumed him. The magma cooled, frozen by water that flowed down the center of the stairs.

The few survivors dropped and cried and kissed the stairs.

Ash rained on them.

Brody set Luke near a pillar, swiveled at the landing, and with all his strength tackled a Janzer, who flipped Brody on his back.

Brody’s breath gave out, more so after the Janzer crashed his boot on his chest.

The Janzer lifted Brody, who grasped the Janzer’s helmet.

I won’t give in
, Brody mouthed, not speaking, and smiled.

He spat onto the visor. The Janzer threw Brody into one of the pillars along the staircase. Brody oozed down it like a slug.

The Janzer strutted toward a newly existent exit tunnel. His comrades seemed amused by the encounter.

Brody rose and gasped. He lunged for the Janzer’s ankles. The Janzer wrapped a hand around his neck.

I’ll kill you
, Brody mouthed,
kill you!

The Janzer dropped Brody on his knees. He choked as loud as any transhuman before death.

I’ll free them all.

Saliva and mucous flew from Brody’s mouth. The Janzer let go. Brody leaned over and puked.

The Janzer struck Brody with a dart. He sank to the ground. The last words he heard were, “Take him to the Controller.”

The Impossible Stairs shrank in his vision and disappeared.

Brody screamed and awoke. Gasping, he wiped his face. He lay on his cot in his unit in Region 7.

This isn’t going as you expected, is it?
Damy’s voice. Her likeness was illuminated in the wall.

The plan proceeds, or so Luke tells me.
Brody’s ability to speak had returned after his first Vitex dosage, but he didn’t dare do so, unless he was with Luke on the factory floor where the noise provided sufficient cover. Even then, they rarely managed a full conversation. They had been on the factory floor when Luke had told him,
I can get you out.

As much as Brody hung on those words, he wasn’t ready to trust them, or his own strength.

Brody’s hair had grown back. It splayed messily around his head and face, mixed with sweat that dripped down his beard. He wiped his face and head and neck and chest with his clothes.
Luke knows the way.

Luke can’t even make it around the Impossible Stairs more than ten or fifteen floors without gagging. How could he ascend from Region 7 to Beimeni?

I don’t know! I’ll carry him.

She disappeared.

Sitting in the dark, Brody heard a majestic melody, a song played on his floor every fifth day, a few hours after final shift, a few hours prior to lockdown. He opened his door’s vent, spied Tyler’s maroon light. Brody didn’t care. He closed his eyes, and enjoyed the tune, the harmony of harps, bassoons, cellos, violins, and timpani, instruments he’d once heard played in the Fountain Temple and Artemis Square, a lifetime ago.

He closed the vent, undressed, and lay on his cot.

The Controller had questioned him after the last two runs over the Impossible Stairs, in which hundreds of thousands of exiles collapsed and died, cremated and buried.

“I don’t know how you’re doing this,” the Controller said, “but if not tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that, you’ll follow the rest to your grave, and I’ll be sure to piss over your ashes before we spread them over Phanes Lake.”

Brody unscrewed the pipes to his sink and found his Vitex dropper. He dabbed one drop beneath each eyelid in the dark. Without it, he’d be dead by now. Even with it, there was no telling how much longer he could survive.