The Restoration of Flaws (The Phantom of the Earth Book 5) (27 page)

Brody lifted the shuriken and spun, slicing the terror bird’s body and dislodging its thick wing. He gashed its underside with an uppercut, and its insides spurted. It cried so loudly Brody fell to his knees.

He recovered and tore through the bird with the shuriken, his weapon and body covered with feathers and blood.

“Bub,” Luke said weakly.

Brody dropped the shuriken.

Blood bubbled from Luke’s neck and soaked his bony chest. Brody pushed his fingers to Luke’s wound, but just like with Damy, he was helpless. It was too late.

Luke tried to speak. His voice gurgled, and blood streaked down the side of his mouth. “Use … map … Turbulent Tunnel … elevator … Portage … Xylia … waiting for you …” Luke’s eyes remained open, but life had left them.

Brody closed them with his forefingers.

Reeeeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh.

Brody returned the cry. “You’ll have to fight for your meal!”

The birds’ loping footsteps came from all around him.

Brody turned backward, forward, and side to side, searching.

A claw broke through the light, catching Brody’s leg. The beak came down for his head, but he clutched it with both hands. He and the bird fell to the ground. Its tongue flicked near his face, the cry so loud he thought he might die, its breath as foul as stale urine.

The bird stuck its talon above Brody’s knee. Gasping and groaning, he shifted under the bird, and the talon dug deeper.

He reached for the shuriken, grasped it, and slung his arm around, slicing the bird’s neck. Its blood flooded over him.

Brody pulled the talon from his leg and bit his fist. He threw the bird aside, then sliced off a piece of his bodysuit and wrapped his bleeding knee.

He kissed Luke’s forehead. “Rest in peace, brave Gaian.”

Brody lifted his friend’s body over his back and carried him, just as he’d carried him along the Impossible Stairs.

Reeeeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh.

Brody bellowed. It was like being struck with a Reassortment baton. The screeches halted, but the ringing in his ears prevented him from knowing if the footsteps he heard were near or far.

Reeeeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh.

Brody collapsed into the wall and shook. The wails were so close now, the tremors traveled through the ground, into his feet and legs. He dropped Luke’s body and gasped. He lifted Luke by his arm and leaned in under his chest to get a better grip.

If I stop, I die.

He trudged through a tunnel with wind that gusted from vents on the sides, as fast as a hurricane, but he did not halt. He checked the map. He was on track.

He arrived at the elevator Luke had described.

Reeeeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh.

Brody fell but slid along the ground with Luke’s body to the elevator. He activated it. The opaque entrance cleared. He dragged Luke inside and slammed his hand on the digital option: TRANSPORT CITY.

The opaque entrance filled, and the elevator vibrated when birds slammed it with their beaks. Brody leaned against the polished Granville panel upon the wall, with Luke’s body strewn across the ground. And he laughed, so hard that he lost the feeling in his limbs. Then the laughter shifted to shouts, followed by sobs.

The elevator shifted to a diagonal ascent, then horizontal again. It shifted and zigzagged upward.

The panel on the other side ignited and rendered an image of a lake surface. A burning salamander swam through it, transforming into Damy. She knelt beside Brody. She put her hand beneath his chin, lifted it, and kissed him.

Release your sorrow
, she said,
release this guilt that you feel, release yourself to free Beimeni.

“I failed,” Brody said.

The road hasn’t ended.

“Don’t you understand? Everyone who gets close to me … dies.”

Anyone who hasn’t been close to you hasn’t truly lived.

“My mother died, my father died, Haleya died, you died in my arms, and now Luke. You were wrong about him …”

No, you were, for he served his purpose, and you can still save Beimeni by serving the people.
She stood.
You are the People’s Captain, and you always will be.

Brody rubbed his fingers over the burned
T
on his forearm, the scar left upon him by Lady Isabelle where his animated strike team tattoo once was.
I still am Captain Barão,
he thought. The elevator jolted to a halt. The entrance opened and Damy disappeared.

Brody stood, then draped Luke over his shoulder and limped over the limestone path. The security gate lay dormant, unguarded. He passed through.

He arrived at the precipice overlooking Transport City. The sprawling, flat radial city would normally be drenched by its silver Granville sun, filled with Portagens beneath massive carbyne canopies and the aromas of grilled beef, fried potatoes, curried chicken, broiled pork. Brody licked his lips at the thought. Instead, a single Granville panel hung above the city, emitting faint yellow light—the emergency panel over the city’s center.

A tremor from the elevators shook him. He turned. Scarlet beams of light reformed a laser grid to block the restricted area from where he’d emerged.

He turned back to the city and gasped.

The Granville night had returned.

Atop the carbyne that extended for kilometers, thousands of BP stood in tunics. A woman, unrecognizable at first, ascended to Brody from a limestone ramp.

“Xylia,” he said, astonished, remembering Luke’s last words. “This cannot be.” He hadn’t seen her since the day his father had killed himself, when he was ten and she was twelve
true
years old. He’d assumed his entire developed life that she’d been sentenced to the Lower Level. She still had the freckled face he remembered from their childhood.

“I knew you’d make it,” she said.

Brody would have cried if his body weren’t so dry. He gazed down at himself, covered with his, Luke’s, and the terror birds’ blood. He saw it in Xylia’s eyes, too. He looked butchered.

He eased Luke off his shoulder and laid him gently on the ground between them.

“You sent him for me?”

“Minister Kaspasparon, under direct order from Jeremiah Selendia.”

Brody cringed and grabbed his leg. The wound near his knee opened, and blood oozed over the drenched cloth.

“You’re hurt.” She helped him stand.

“I’m fine.” Brody stared at Luke. “He sacrificed himself for me. He stopped the terror birds from killing me, and I couldn’t do anything for him. I couldn’t save him—”

“You’re here, Captain, that’s all that matters. Luke fulfilled his role in this war.”

She called out in a language unknown to Brody. Several men came to his side and pulled his arms over their shoulders and backs. “We’ll get you medical attention.”

Xylia led the way down the carbyne ramp, which turned into a limestone ramp, grooved with bumps and silver bioluminescent fungus.

Brody felt like he might pass out. “You’ve put … Portage … great … danger …”

“Captain, has it been that long?” Xylia said. “Have you no memory?”

When Brody didn’t respond, she said, “We’ve suffered here for far too long, living beneath a system thrown over us from Phanes, one that doesn’t understand how this empire was built, how it was constructed on the backs of middle-third Harpoon performers, not the top ten percent, not the scientists, or the teams, or the aristocracy.”

“They … know,” Brody said, “they don’t … care …” His head dangled to the side. Xylia, her men, Luke, Transport City, and his people faded away.

Before Reassortment

Hengill Laboratory

Hengill, Iceland

Oriana regained consciousness. Her synsuit had delivered smelling salts into the atmosphere in her helmet.

The world was a blur. She rolled and sat against the wall. As sights and sounds returned to her senses, the remains of the inferno scattered around her; the laboratory’s sky-high wall melted or blown to bits; synism silos tipped over; dead transhumans; murky pools of genetic materials; twisted alloy. She’d never seen anything like it.

She checked the time to detonation: less than twenty-five minutes.

Oriana requested uficilin, fluids, and sustenance from her synsuit. She recovered and lifted herself to her feet. She passed beneath the archway exit she and Dr. Isaac Marshall had moved below before the scientist had been cut in half.

She entered the Sequential Alley. Bright light filled it, limiting her view, so she shifted to ultraviolet vision. At the end of the alley, where there had once been ramps, there was now only stone. She pounded her fists against the newly created wall. Hengill Laboratory had transformed!

Oriana extended her consciousness and entered Locust, but it didn’t respond to her queries. She heard a scrape behind her, flinched, and spun. She shifted between various views: organic, infrared, standard, and ultraviolet. No movement. The Sequential Alley shimmered with the sapphire hue of Oriana’s ultraviolet viewer.

Still no movement.

She shifted back to standard, to the bright light.

Another noise, like an alloy door slamming shut.

Oriana lifted her pulse gun, daring the infiltrator, or anything, to emerge.

I’m so close
, Oriana thought.
I have the data. I must earn the Mark of Masimovian and free my father and his striker and Nathan and Pasha …

She remembered the Timescape Theory, that she couldn’t alter this world, that all of these events assured the inevitable future: the end of man’s time on the surface. She backed away from the jagged wall. A solid substance blocked her view, and she requested a diagnostic from her synsuit. It indicated the wall contained limestone, granite, lead, and an unidentified alloy—a combination not consumable by the crushers. She couldn’t break down a wall with this composition using normal metabolic pathways; she’d instead require biostar material, which, while available in Beimeni, hadn’t been invented Before Reassortment.

Oriana would have to innovate, somehow. She recalled her training in House Summerset.
It’s sometimes easier to see what’s large rather than what’s important,
Lady Parthenia had said.
A weak eye sees, a strong one observes. Learn to
observe
the world as it exists in the ZPF and no one will defeat you.

Oriana observed the barrier before her, not as it existed in the physical world, but as it did in the quantum one. She focused her consciousness in the ZPF, concentrating on the wall. Her heart pounded her chest like it never had before, her mouth felt as dry as volcanic rock, and her body vibrated.

With all her strength concentrated in the physical and metaphysical realms, she punched the wall. She flew backward and the loudest sound she’d ever heard made her ears ring. She lifted swiftly off the ground and turned.

The wall had shattered like glass. She transitioned through her views before she settled on standard vision. She dashed through the tunnel ahead of her, then slowed before she arrived at a cliff’s edge. She looked down.

Scientists in biomats were either unaware of the attack or indifferent to it, for they rushed back and forth between desks topped with beakers, microscopes, and other laboratory gear.

Oriana dropped into the room and requested a location indicator from Locust.

Genetics.

Around the room, hundreds of cages held animals—chimpanzees, cats, mice, rats, dogs, pigs, and birds, among others. There were thousands of species, some benign, some with claws.

“Hello,” Oriana said.

The scientists ignored her and injected the animals or reviewed data feeds in electronic screens or shifted boiling beakers.

Oriana scanned the room—and gasped.

A section of tanks contained transhuman specimens in curdling water with dark circles around their orifices and blisters and slits along their bodies. They listed in the tanks like jellyfish. There were rows upon rows upon rows of them.

Are you seeing this
, Oriana thought,
or is this a Hengill trick? Keep moving. Must find the ramps.

Less than twenty minutes to detonation.

She looked back. A new wall had formed where Oriana dropped. When she turned, she no longer viewed the skeleton crew of scientists, who, it seemed, weren’t real. Instead she stood face-to-face with a black-and yellow-striped snake with eyes of liquid gold and a body the length of the
Voltaire.
It swung its tail and spit its tongue. It speared Oriana. She flew into the wall. The snake bit at her ankle, lifted her in the air, and spun her within its grasp. Its coils tightened.

Oriana contorted her body and gripped a diamond dagger on the side of her synsuit. She cut through the snake. It hissed and writhed as she flipped backward.

A second snake emerged, and she drew her sword. The snake reared its head back. When it struck, she dodged and severed its body.

The other snake still writhed from Oriana’s salvo. She stabbed it through its golden eyes.

Now many cages opened, and the contents emptied.

Oriana searched for a way out.

A howl, high-pitched and constant, ripped through her head before her synsuit adjusted for volume. She fell to her knees and dropped her sword.

Tanks exploded, and water gushed along the ground. The transhuman specimens spilled out, some with parts of their faces and bodies missing. The hungriest animals tore at their flesh and limbs. Others hopped on desks and ran or fought.

One of the animals, hairy and muscular—humanlike with fiery green eyes and an alloyed rod through its mouth—clutched Oriana’s leg and swung her across the room into a tank that shattered and collapsed.

Oriana scrabbled along the ground. The animal staggered. She sliced her sword clean through its torso to its skull. Oriana charged the creatures like an aera. She swung, kicked, stabbed, and slashed. When she finished, they all lay dead.

She cleaned her blade.

She accessed Locust.

Less than fifteen minutes to detonation.

The ramps were a half kilometer northeast. She examined the walls in Genetics, which were made of a different composition, one digestible for the mineral crushers. She activated ultraviolet vision, plotted a course, aimed her fist, and fired the crushers, then sprinted up the newly created tunnel.