The Restoration of Flaws (The Phantom of the Earth Book 5) (16 page)

Oriana stepped back.

He approached, and she stepped back again.

What was he doing? Who was that woman?

He reached for her, too quickly for her to move, and put his hands around her neck, but gently.

She felt a flush of hormones in her veins, as if she’d been dipped into a Gaian spa. It felt lenitive, exciting, and she didn’t resist, at first, when Antosha kissed her!

His lips tasted like cider, all wrong.

She pushed his face away and turned, her breath shallow. She felt the heat around her eyes.

“Fulfilled your wish,” Antosha said, “so now will you cut me?”

My gods
, Oriana thought,
he knows, he’s heard!

She slipped out of her fur cape and threw it to the ground, feeling a rush of cool air, relief from his touch. She wiped her face. She’d wash her lips with chlorine.

“You can’t hide from me,” he said.

“Touch me again, and I’ll kill you.”

“You’ll try and fail as others have before you.”

“I’m not the others.”

He cupped her chin firmly. “Perhaps not,” he said, “but you’re mine.”

Oriana pulled her chin out of his grip. She took steady breaths to control her rage. She looked straight into his eyes and didn’t flinch. “My brother is in a coma because of you. I will never forgive this.”

“But you will do what I ask, if you want him back.”

A flash of phosphorescent light blinded Oriana …

… When the burst cleared, she stood with Antosha on Mars. Cliffs stood in the distance, turned dead by the planet’s dead core. A scentless breeze tumbled the dusty soil. Closer to her, buildings, green grass, and stone pathways stood beneath a terradome, in the center a courtyard of stone.

“Welcome to Candor Chasma.”

Antosha extended his hand over a crystal pyramid. A burst of energy flowed from it, and Oriana heard a voice, very faint, say,
We are the Lorum.

She had heard about the commonwealth’s ansible: the famous intergalactic communication technology, normally hindered by the Earth’s magnetic fields, and unleashed on the Martian surface.

Antosha nodded toward the terradome, where two men walked the stone pathways—her father with Antosha! Though not Antosha as he looked presently. His eyes were as pure as sand, his bronze face not as drawn, his lips lifted in what might’ve been a smile.

“Your father knew nothing of the true capabilities of the zeropoint field until I enhanced the ansible communicator for him on Mars and allowed him to hear the cosmos. He didn’t achieve proper conversion until—”

“My mother helped him,” Oriana broke in. “What does that matter? You didn’t have to take me here to prove your power. I know it. And all you ever use it for is to kill and maim—”

He backhanded her.

“Remember who you’re speaking to.”

“Who
are
you?”

Antosha stepped back. The steel in her voice seemed to catch him off guard. He cleared Candor Chasma and took her back into his meditation center.

“I’m the man who’s going to lead the people back to the surface.”

“The only way for you to do so is to help me find out what Dr. Shrader knows.” With her hand over her bruise, she settled the lies in her mind and hoped she could shield them from Antosha’s sight, just as she would, at times when it advantaged her, hide her thoughts from her twin brother during development. “You need the synthesis of the original Reassortment Strain to cure it, and you want me to fetch it.”

“If you play this game, my dear, you will lose.”

“I have nothing
to
lose.”

“Except your father and your brother—”

“Whom you will not harm as long as I serve. This was your offer, and a supreme scientist is bound by his word.”

She hoped she’d cornered him, for Marstone
was
listening, and Lady Isabelle enforced the precepts and RDD policies as guided by the Office of the Chancellor.

Antosha nodded. “Let’s get you a uficilin injection for that bruise.”

Oriana smiled.
Finally
, she thought.
I’ve got him.

RDD Infirmary

“That’s it,” Oriana said, “one step after another. You’re doing great.”

Dr. Shrader trembled on the bars as Antosha spotted him along the track. The doctor’s skin appeared rosier than when he had first awakened, though his muscle spasms seemed worse, caused by movements that would be simple for a transhuman newborn.
How will this man serve as striker for the mission?
she wondered. What was Antosha’s play?

She didn’t speak to him on the way to the infirmary, but she felt him in her mind the same way she used to feel Pasha sneak in her head during simulations.

Sweat dripped around Shrader’s face. On his way back down the bars, he lost his grip before Antosha stabilized him. “Another injection,” Antosha said when Oriana stopped the doctor from falling back.

A medical bot placed a gun to Shrader’s neck and pulled the trigger. His face turned bright red, and saliva dripped from his mouth. “Another,” Antosha said. A different bot fired into the other side of the doctor’s neck, and he coughed and fell to his knees.

He put up his hands. “Don’t, don’t help me!” Sweating profusely, he lifted himself on the bars and made his way down on his own.

“Get him in the harness,” Antosha said.

The three of them dangled from Harpoon harnesses in a triangular formation in the rehabilitation portion of the infirmary. The illusion of trees, moss, torchlight, crystal bridges, white sands, and dark pits surrounded them. Water trickled down the stones.

“What is this?” Dr. Shrader said.

“It’s your mind.”

“That cannot be.”

“I’ve helped you pull Oriana and me into your subconscious. This is where your secrets lie. This is where you will discover who you are.”

Oriana felt it now, the ZPF, in the way her brother had used it at times to see into her, to communicate with animals and outwit his foes.

“Take us with you,” Antosha said, “wherever your mind will lead. Don’t be afraid, give in to the unknown, let us inside.”

The scents of berries and syrup and coffee tickled Oriana’s nose. The scene shifted to a table in a room with cedar walls. A harpist played in the corner near a fireplace.

“Where did you take us?” Oriana said.

Antosha raised a finger to his lips. Dr. Shrader was rapt, watching the scene before him. Scientists carried wineglasses and serious expressions, all except a blonde woman in a gown who held a much younger Dr. Shrader’s hand. They talked, though Oriana couldn’t hear what they said.

Then Shrader stepped closer and examined his twin of the past, as if he were a bacterial specimen.

The scene disappeared, and Oriana hung in a harness beside the doctor and Antosha.

A bot lowered them.

“What did that woman say?” Oriana asked. “What did you learn?”

“My name is Dr. Kole Shrader. Luella and I were the lead researchers for the Western Hegemony’s League of Scientists, an elite team structured to complete the Reassortment Strain.”

“What was the goal?” Oriana said. “What did Reassortment do?”

“I can’t remember.”

“You must,” Antosha said.

“Take me back there,” Shrader said to Antosha. “Take me back to Luella—”

“The mind doesn’t operate this way. You shared your soul with us, not ours with you, and I can only open the doors, I cannot force you through. The session ended because your mind closed, not the other way around.”

“Why do medical bots refer to me as the Legend? Where am I? What happened to Luella?”

“You were stored in suspended animation for three hundred sixty-eight years,” Antosha said.

“So how old
am
I?”

“That depends on your definition of time and age.” Antosha altered the surrounding Granville panels to show a field at dawn, a rising summer sun. “Time is the ultimate paradox, a river that carries us away, but we are the river, it is a tiger that destroys us but we are the tiger, it is a fire that consumes us but we are the fire. These are not my words, but those of a wise man long dead, which your presence has proved wrong, many long years later. Hegemonies, peoples have been brought to their maker, the transhuman race nearly destroyed. And we would have been, were it not for those of your kin who created this world.”

“Beimeni,” Dr. Shrader said.

“The only place on Earth safe for long-term transhuman habitation, and we need your help if we are to survive, and return to the surface.” Antosha removed the Earth’s surface from their surroundings.

“This place is … fake … a mirage.”

A phosphorescent flash overtook them. They stood in a canyon, Dr. Luella Shrader with Dr. Kole Shrader of the past. Tears of laughter streamed down his and her cheeks, though, it seemed, Dr. Shrader of the future didn’t know why.

This was Antelope Canyon, Oriana realized. Why here?

Luella grinned and moved to the canyon’s wall. She brushed her forefinger along it and dabbed the dirt onto Shrader’s arm. She said something Oriana couldn’t hear, but now Dr. Shrader of the future laughed with his twin of the past and his lost Luella. At the dead end in the canyon, an alloy box protruded from the earth. Letters blinked in deep red: LIVELLE.

“Dr. Luella Shrader, requesting permission to enter Livelle Laboratory.”

Phosphorescent light burst in the canyon. Oriana hung in her harness beside Shrader and Antosha. Luella and the Livelle Laboratory entrance were gone.

“What happened?” Oriana said.

“We were in Livelle Laboratory,” Shrader said. “Luella was with me when the soldiers came …”

“Go on,” she added.

“The lights flashed when the soldiers broke through. They took my colleagues through the tunnels, some to the exits, others to the elevators that fell deeper into the laboratory. They took Luella and me to the elevators!”

He paused and blinked. “There’d been an attack in Hengill, an Eastern Hegemony … infiltrator … the Autocrat ordered Operation Preservation! The start of hostilities!” Shrader’s eyes grew distant. “No, it can’t be! We’re so
close
, the Reassortment Strain can work, we can make it happen! We can end the war! The Eastern Hegemony cannot know about Livelle!”

“Doctor?” Oriana said. “How did the Reassortment Strain escape containment?”

“Shut up! Get in the fucking elevators! Now! We were so close,
so close
, could’ve ended the war—”

“Where did the war end?” Oriana said. “Tell us what happened. It might be the only way to save the commonwealth.”
It might be the only way I can save my family!

“I don’t know,” he said softly. “They froze us, as Operation Preservation called for, they took us to the depths of Livelle Laboratory and put us in stasis and shipped us into containment deeper within the Earth.”

He looked around the room. “But if I’m here, that means the rest are too. Luella! Take me to her, please, please, take me to my dearest Luella!”

They traveled to Livelle Cemetery in Livelle City. Antosha led them to Luella’s grave. Mist flowed between the marble gravestones and mausoleums. An angel sculpture rested upon a pedestal, her arms outstretched, wings extended. Shrader moved in front of Luella’s gravestone, his hooded cape fluttering in the artificial wind. The air smelled of flowers.

“My condolences to you,” Oriana said.

“You can enter our minds,” Shrader said to Antosha, “is there a way for you to bring her back?”

“I’m a scientist,” Antosha said, “not a sorcerer.”

“How did she die?”

“I’ll let Oriana explain since she understands her commonwealth history so well.”

Northeast

0 meters deep

“Remarkable, isn’t it?” Antosha said.

“It
is
,” Dr. Shrader agreed.

He, like Antosha, wore a biomat suit to protect from the Reassortment Strain. Antosha didn’t mention that the biomats, like the terradomes, were prone to failure upon the surface.

Hills and mountains stretched out below them, so thick it was impossible to see individual trees. A river with white rapids flowed over stones into inlets.

Their helicopter flew through a peach sky so pure it might’ve been a dream. They crossed a much wider river and neared the Island of Reverie.

Electric-appearing strands of radiation spread in triangular patterns, spiraling from the Reassortment research terradome’s peak. The chopper descended through the dome’s quarantine sector, then landed upon a pad. A group of Reassortment research scientists waited outside, standing in a crescent formation.

The main hull slid open. Antosha helped Shrader down the steps. The force from the chopper’s blades nearly toppled the doctor before Antosha steadied him and hand-signaled the scientists. The steps retreated back to the chopper, the hull closed, and the helicopter powered down.

“I don’t understand,” Shrader said, looking at the invisible barrier far above. “This dome doesn’t protect from … Reassortment.”

“Reassortment is the plague in the paradise, Kole, it permeates the atmosphere, the Earth’s fauna and flora. It is as much a part of our world as oxygen and water, and no terradome structure we’ve designed can block its passage, not yet—”

“And it only kills transhumans?”

“Does that surprise you?”

“That’s far from how we envisioned the strain.”

“Is it?”

One of the scientists approached them. “Supreme Scientist Zereoue,” he said, “welcome to the Reassortment research terradome.” The scientist extended his hand, and Antosha shook it. He introduced the scientist to Shrader, and he swooned as if he’d just met a Hammerton Hall performer. The other scientists who waited all bowed toward Shrader as if he were a king.

When the scientists joined their colleagues near the workstations, Shrader said, “I don’t get it, why does everyone I meet react that way to me? I didn’t succeed in what you people call the time Before Reassortment. If anything, my actions contributed to this—”

“You will not speak of your actions, here or anywhere. The people think you are the Legend, a savior. It is not your place to take that from them.”
It’s mine
, Antosha thought.