The Restoration of Flaws (The Phantom of the Earth Book 5) (30 page)

“It’s no trick,” the minister said, as if she knew his thoughts. She hand-signaled the man with the tattoos.

He sheathed his sword and removed his helmet, letting it clank and roll down the stairs. Zorian Selendia took several steps before three guards cut him off, pointing their swords at him in the front and at his sides. He gave the minister the grin that Connor knew so well, so confident, so cunning, so dangerous.

Zorian held up his hands. “We’re all friends here, aren’t we?”

“What’re you doing here?” Connor asked. He thought about all the BP from Blackeye Cavern who had died and were dying presently upon the islands in Farino Prison. “Do you understand what you’ve done to our people?”

The minister spoke in a language Connor didn’t understand. Her guards lowered their swords and retook their positions on the stairs.

Connor turned to the minister and bowed deeply. “With your permission, Minister, I’d like to speak to my brother for one hour, alone.”

The minister raised her brow, then twisted toward Xerean Acropolis behind her, beyond the colorful fields. “You have one hour.” She glared at Connor, then turned back to Zorian. “After that the boy and I shall continue our negotiations.”

The boy,
Connor thought, seething. He pursed his lips, trying his best not to insult the minister. His army, and his Polemon operation to end the war, depended on him controlling his emotions.

“You’d best be careful, Minister,” Zorian said, looking at his little brother, “he’s not the Cornelius I knew in Piscator any longer. He might bring more pain to you than you might to him.”

Mueriniti chuckled, her three chins jiggling, then hand-signaled her guards. In a movement unseen, one unlatched a Reassortment baton and rapped it into Zorian’s neck. He screamed violently and dropped, overcome by spasms. The animals that surrounded the citadel, grazing in the fields, took breaks from feasting to bellow in various prehistoric tones.

Connor knelt to Zorian, who still shook from the dosage of
E. agony.

“What’s wrong with you?” Connor said. “Why can’t you fight back?”

Zorian raised a shaking finger to his temple and tapped it.

Connor looked at Mueriniti with rage in his eyes. “What have you done to him?”

“Your traitorous brother has annoyed everyone, it seems. The commonwealth has put a bounty on him as large as the one on you.”

Connor moved to unsheathe his diamond sword but stopped when the minister waved her forefinger.

“My, my, you’re not as bright as Lutetia assured me.”

For half a heartbeat, Connor felt something that might’ve been fear, until he quelled it. “Whose side are you on?”

“Much has changed since your little jailbreak.” The minister hand-signaled her guards again, and this time they helped Zorian to his feet. “Your traitorous brother is my hostage to ensure the BP holds up their end of the bargain.” She frowned at Zorian. “Poor boy here wants to please his daddy, who also, for a time, wanted him imprisoned.” She turned to Connor. “Chancellor Masimovian is dead and Antosha Zereoue has recalled
all
Janzers to the inner territories and Palaestra.”

The minister turned and eyed the Flag of Xerean, flying just a bit higher than the Flag of Beimeni, Connor now realized.

“Who’s to suggest we Beimenians are one?” the minister continued. “The precepts? Who’s precepts? A dead chancellor’s?”

“You’re going to … break away?”

“My, my, maybe you
are
a fast one. Perhaps Lutetia was right.” Mueriniti raised her chin defiantly. “The lesser territories have seceded. Why shouldn’t the North?” Connor tried to speak, but the minister spoke over him. “They fucked us,” she added, “fucked us for so long we lost our dignity.” She leaned closer to Connor. “I’m done being fucked.”

The minister swept her massive arm out as if to brush it across the universe. “For decades that wench Lutetia set the Janzers upon our territories. Oh, she thought she was so smart, blowing up our supply lines, turning our people against Jeremiah and his Beimeni Polemon. I sent them traitors as required, yet the attacks continued. All the while they placed the blame on the BP, and I went along with their little game. And here we are, the chancellor is dead and that bitch is going to seize more control with Antosha than she ever had with Masimovian.” The minister raised her voice. “He took his Janzers from my territory, and they will return over my fat fucking dead body.”

With that she rumbled down the stairs, silk and hair floating behind her. “You have one hour, boy!” She continued her raucous descent. The guards rushed down the stairs behind her. “One hour! Then you, your brother, and your army are mine!”

Zorian had recovered from the baton jab, though a bruise had begun to crop out on his neck. He rubbed it. He wasn’t as muscular as Connor remembered.

“You once asked me what a barracuda looks like, little brother,” Zorian said. He pushed his head down toward the minister’s party, which weaved over a walkway to a separate entrance into the citadel. “There’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen.” He cracked his neck.

Connor laughed. “The minister implied we should go to the acropolis.”

“After you.”

Silently, they treaded across the sunstone slab through the open part of the citadel to the other side and down the steps, then made their way along a winding cobblestone path between colorful trees and prehistoric fauna, the
Megatherium
with their bulbous salt-and-pepper tails, dark fur and three claws, and
Megaloceros,
the elk with antlers the width of a transhuman, and
Glypotodon,
the domed turtle-like giants that Connor knew weighed more than one thousand kilograms. The fields smelled like burning firewood, and Connor remembered his nightmare, the one on the Island of Reverie in the forest, when Hans and he were swept away by a rising tide.

“Murray told me you abandoned us in Beimeni City,” Connor said.

Zorian said nothing and revealed nothing in either his expression or in the ZPF. They moved between the sunstone pillars of the acropolis and stepped onto its polished surface. Connor grabbed Zorian by the arm and turned him so that they looked upon each other face-to-face. “Brother,” he yelled, “why didn’t you help us escape the capital?”

Zorian broke free, then grabbed Connor by the throat and squeezed. “You touch me like that again and I’ll throw you off this cliff.”

Connor calmed his emotions and focused his energy in the ZPF. He overpowered Zorian’s connection to the quantum universe and slowly, methodically unfurled Zorian’s fingers from his throat, then lifted his eldest brother in the air.

“Connor?” Zorian said.

Connor didn’t reply. He blocked Zorian’s quantum connection, lifting him higher off the ground, and moved with him to the edge of the acropolis, to the end of Mount Lilien. He held Zorian airborne above the white rapids of Beimeni River, rushing one hundred fifty meters below.

“You will tell me,” Connor said, “or I will drop you.”

Zorian laughed, softly then uncontrollably. “Ah, if Father could see you now, little brother, how angry he’d be … that you’ve turned into me.”

Connor pulled Zorian back to him and threw him on the acropolis’s stone ground.

From his hands and knees, Zorian eyed his brother with contempt. “You want to know the truth?”

“I want to know why you turned on your family.”

“I love my family.” Zorian stood and wiped his arms.

“You have a very strange way of showing it.”

“You think because you have a superior connection to the ZPF you understand more than the rest of society.” His voice turned cruel. “You think because Hans treated you with
E. evolution
and Aera and Father taught you how to control your connection to the cosmos you’re unstoppable. Well let me explain something to you, little brother, I fought for my family for decades before you were even born. I killed commonwealth agents, I killed so easily and quickly I was once the synbio thief, supplying the BP with all our resources until Aera took my place.”

“So that’s it, you’re jealous of anyone who’s better than you, like Hans?”

Zorian bared his teeth, then oddly, he began to sob. “There’s no end to the cycle, no end to the death. We kill and they kill, and around and around it goes. Our mother …”

“Died to save my life, the way any sane mother would.”

“Died because our father wouldn’t do what was necessary and kill Chancellor Masimovian, and they wouldn’t let me kill him, and now it doesn’t even matter. Mother is dead. Hans is dead. Masimovian is dead—”

“Our people in Blackeye Cavern are also dead, Zorian. Because of what you did—”

“There you go again, moving your mouth and sounding like Father. I
saved
more lives by forcing them out. Father in his haste to create homelands rather than extinguish the commonwealth’s iron fist once and for all by killing his brother-in-development put us all at risk to Reassortment exposure. It was a miracle it lasted as long as it did! Those people were about to die in agonizing pain—”

Boom!

A pulse blast raced across the acropolis and smashed into Zorian, and though his armor protected his body, the momentum from the shock wave sent him airborne. It all happened so fast.

Connor rushed to the edge of the acropolis and looked down.

Zorian splashed into the river.

Connor turned.

Pirro stood beside one of the pillars, holding a pulse gun, from the tip of which smoke curled.

“Why?” Connor demanded. “He was on our side!”

Pirro dropped the pulse gun and put his head down. When he looked up, he said, “He gave the commonwealth the Hollow.”

Connor heard Pirro’s thoughts. He fell to his knees.

Pirro said, “Our great father is dead.”

Before Reassortment

Triple Drop Cave

Hengill, Iceland

I can’t give up,
Oriana thought,
not now.

She rose and chased Dr. Shrader. He stood at the cave’s entrance, looking out, still emitting his strange signals though now they sounded almost like a high-pitched flute. When she got close enough to feel his mind in the ZPF, she tried to retrieve the data he’d stolen. He blocked her, not even bothering to turn around.

Oriana was exhausted. Less than thirty seconds remained to detonation.

Either the doctor sensed the imminent destruction of Hengill Laboratory, or something else drew his attention. The signals he’d been emitting ceased. Oriana collapsed, and he dashed out of the cave.

She willed herself up the incline, crawling over the slippery stones up to the entrance.

The blasts of the geothermal vents shook the ridge. The ground vibrated. Steam and lava erupted.

The bombs
, Oriana thought.

She leaned against the mossy stone, injecting herself with uficilin. The relief it spread through her didn’t feel as good as it normally did—the mission had not gone as planned. Surely, the Reassortment Strain had escaped containment by now. Oriana wondered how long it would take for the strain to mutate into the killer of transhumankind. She didn’t plan to find out.

She descended the ridge and knelt and took cover as she neared the lake. Stealth helicopters, at least fifteen, flew through the fog over Lake Thingvallavatn. Thousands of Hengill Guard barricaded the shoreline—and the island and the portal.

Two shadows moved through the mist.
I’m trapped
, Oriana thought.

She reached for her sword and pulse gun but found neither. She must have lost them in Triple Drop Cave. Oriana stood and shifted her weight to her left leg, ready to give the last of her energy to a fierce roundhouse kick.

The arctic fox and another of its pack emerged. Oriana straightened. She connected to them through the ZPF and opened the compartment on her synsuit, revealing hundreds of sucrose rations. She held them out, then sent images of the lakeshore to the foxes, hoping they would understand she wanted them to swarm it.

The foxes hopped over sinuous lava streams and disappeared into the ridge.

Oriana smiled.
Gods be with you
, she thought, then jogged between the hissing vents to higher ground.

A sound, a loud squawk this time, spread over the ridge. Again, it carried the Lorum’s alien signals.

Whatever frequency they used, it was crippling. Oriana pressed her hands to her helmet near her ears and knelt. Her eyes watered involuntarily.

Above, the helicopters crashed in a cacophony of scraping alloy and bursting engines, influenced, it seemed, by Shrader’s attack. The night filled with gunfire and missiles.

When the signals ceased, she ran toward the lake. The doctor’s rampage, downing the Western Hegemony Guard, might’ve allowed his access to the portal, but it also allowed her freedom to roam through the ridge.

Upon her approach, hundreds of foxes rushed down the ridge, through the smoke, hopping over streams of lava and water.

On the lakeshore and the small island, the Western Hegemony Guard lay unconscious or dead, she couldn’t tell. Shrader stood beyond them. His arms were raised. What was he doing? Oriana hid behind a boulder.

The foxes drew closer to Oriana, drawing Shrader’s attention. He manipulated the mist, revealing their onslaught and Oriana’s position.

Shards of dark blue phosphorescent light swirled around Shrader and the time portal.

She sensed his presence in the ZPF. He’d learned from Ruiner, it seemed, for he was altering the portal, manipulating the exotic matter, connecting the particles to another place, another time.

Suddenly Shrader turned and raised his fist. The boulder that shielded Oriana burst, the shock wave blowing her back as easily as a phoenix feather.

The foxes moved away from her, howling, running, dying.

Oriana rolled and found her footing. She rushed through the ridge, staying low, picking her way to the lake’s shore, avoiding the lava streams, hiding behind shards of stone and moss, left, then right, closer, closer. By the time she got there, Shrader was no longer visible on the island. Dead foxes lay scattered about with the Western Hegemony Guard, who were, in fact, dead.