The Restoration of Flaws (The Phantom of the Earth Book 5) (36 page)

A haunting, singsong voice echoed through the tunnels.

Jocelyn’s song floated from all the tunnels at once, it seemed. She giggled. The Janzers activated their pulse rifles, the tips aglow.

She burst out of one of the tunnels and whipped around into another, so fast that not even the Janzers reacted in time. Her sausage curls bounced out of sight.

The Janzers waved their hands.

The Granville panels turned taupe.

One of the Janzers dashed down the same tunnel as Jocelyn had.

Breccan stuck his sword through the Janzer’s visor.

“Report,” a Janzer near the gates said. “Report!” he said louder.

No response.

The melody drifted from tunnel to tunnel, along with Jocelyn’s giggles. The Janzers waved their pulse rifles, and one of the leaders ordered three of his division to split up into separate tunnels.

A sword slashed through each of their visors.

“Report,” said a Janzer near the gates.

No response.

The remaining Janzers fired their pulse weapons wildly, then stopped to reload.

Verena yelled, “
NOW!
”

She and Xylia and Breccan emerged from the shadowy tunnels.

Breccan slung two shuriken to take out a Janzer pair.

Xylia twisted another Janzer’s neck.

Verena fired her pulse guns, and the blasts lit up a cavern filled with shattered stone.

A full division remained intact.

Too many
, Verena thought.

The division regrouped and rotated in their attack formation. They dodged the pulse blasts or, if they were struck, their synsuits protected them.

The Janzers’ galaxy swung to Verena, and one dislodged and engaged her. She stabbed her sword at his head, but he ducked, then wrapped his arm around her, slamming her into the wall.

Jocelyn screamed and swooped to Verena, and another Janzer moved out of the galaxy in perfect synchronization and roundhouse kicked Jocelyn into the stone. The child collapsed.

Xylia and Breccan fired at the formation, but the Janzers moved in harmony, like piranhas in the sea.

They rotated around Xylia and Breccan and slashed at their heads. When that approach failed, the Janzers targeted weak points in the synsuit plates on their bodies.

Xylia’s shoulder plate popped off, and as fast as it flew, a Janzer’s sword punctured her skin and bones.

Breccan punched the Janzer’s elbow, grabbed him, flipped him, and broke the Janzer’s visor. The Janzer groaned.

Xylia, the sword still lodged through her shoulder, ended the Janzer’s life with a shuriken through his face.

A pulse blast shot past Breccan’s helmet and crashed into a Granville panel.

Verena sat up and grabbed her neck.

She turned.

Jocelyn lay on the ground. Blood dribbled from her mouth.

Verena felt a rage build in her gut. She unleashed herself upon the Janzers, swung, twisted, flipped, and stabbed.

She killed them all, with Breccan and Xylia by her side.

When the last Janzer fell, a shuriken clean through his helmet, Verena sprinted to Jocelyn, slid across the ground, and lifted her head and body in a smooth motion. The child was as limp as a spring leaf after a storm.

“I knew I shouldn’t have allowed this,” Verena said. She injected Jocelyn with uficilin. “Please, please, please, please …”

Verena lifted the visor on her helmet so she could take deeper breaths. She pulled Jocelyn’s chest to the audio capture on her helmet, near her ear, and listened. She heard the metronome of life beating.

“My gods, child,” Verena said, not believing her words, “you survived.”

Jocelyn put her finger on Verena’s mouth.

“Momma, I’m not a child,” she said weakly. “I’m a Polemon.”

Verena nodded and kissed Jocelyn’s forehead and hugged her. Jocelyn wiped her own face with her forearm, smearing the blood from her nose. Verena kissed her nose and hugged her again.

Xylia ripped the sword from her shoulder and screamed, then stabbed a dose of uficilin into the receiver on her forearm. The blood that had flowed freely down her torn bodysuit slowed and finally stopped.

“You all right?” Breccan said.

Xylia waved him off. She moaned and limped. To Verena, she said, “They’ll have sent a distress signal.”

Verena didn’t respond. She was looking out at Artemis Square.

Beimeni City

Phanes, Underground Central

2,500 meters deep

Oriana could feel Antosha’s presence in the ZPF, preventing her access. She wanted to run down the marble stairs and dart across the square to help her father. Antosha stood kilometers away from her father, his head bowed, his eyes closed. The distance didn’t matter, for it seemed he’d drawn Father into his mind, the same as he’d done with her in the RDD.

Where Antosha took her father, she did not know, but she couldn’t let this connection continue unhindered. She eyed the lady’s sword, its hilt visible in the layers of her gown.

“One move from you,” Lady Isabelle said, “and I’ll kill you.”

Father fell to his knees.

Oriana reached for the sword. Isabelle grabbed Oriana’s wrist and twisted. Oriana winced. She broke free and spun around Isabelle’s back, then pulled the sword from its sheath. When she turned, General Arnao put his sword beneath her chin.

A wave in the ZPF spread over the surface of Phanes Lake, solidifying the top layer of it. Oriana squinted. She extended her consciousness. Far in the distance, where the lake narrowed into the northern part of Beimeni River, shadows moved over the lake. Was this another one of Antosha’s illusions?

A blast, as from a pulse rifle, followed by screams, stole Oriana’s attention. The disturbance came from the side of the square near the intersection of the northwest districts and the First Ward.

Antosha didn’t notice, it seemed. He raised his arms and threw back his head, while Father knelt.

Something’s not right
, Oriana thought. The air was tinged with the smell of burnt metal and clay, scents she remembered from when Antosha had brought her to Candor Chasma. Had he brought Father there too?

Pulse blasts fired across Artemis Square, and the crowd panicked. One of the salvos struck Antosha and hurled him across the square, his cape on fire. Women screamed.

Embers spread in his wake, like a meteor had skidded across the earth.

The Janzers removed Antosha’s burning cape and surrounded him. They drew their swords.

The crowd dispersed from where the assassin stood, his head hooded, his thick arms layered with tattoos that swayed in the shapes of seaweed and coral.

The assassin strutted into the square.

Father collapsed.

“
Zorian
,” Lady Isabelle said.

Oriana did not know a Zorian, but she liked him already. He bowed to Lady Isabelle. His hood pulled slowly back from his head, though his hands never moved. He had an
S
shape upon his forehead, sloppily scrolled within his light skin. He aimed his pulse rifle at Isabelle and pulled the trigger. A Janzer threw himself on top of her. The pulse blast shattered the marble steps upon the stage. Oriana smelled burning minerals.

The crowd screamed.

The ministers and couriers scattered.

“
Kill Zorian
,” Antosha said from behind his Janzers. His face smoldered.

The Janzers drew their swords and rushed. Oriana never saw a transhuman move as quickly as Zorian. He whirled into them, swung his sword, snapped their necks, threw shuriken, and fired his pulse gun. It seemed as if he had fifty hands instead of two. He killed twenty Janzers at least before they fell back and into formation.

They came for Zorian in a whirlwind.

Zorian held up his hand, and the Janzers’ necks began to snap of their own accord. They broke over him like water. The bodies piled up around him.

His head turned sharply to the side and up with a sickening crack.

The crowd gasped.

Zorian fell.

Antosha rose, his hair singed, his face burned, his body protected by the liquid synsuit. He shook his head at Zorian.

“Brody!” a woman said. “Get out of there!”

Antosha hand-signaled the Janzers, who reestablished order among the crowd.

Oriana dashed toward her father. He was so far from her. His hands lay on his knees, his face red.

“I’m … here,” she said, gasping. “I’ll help you.”

Oriana felt Antosha’s consciousness in the ZPF, his mind connected to the Janzers and the teams and the crowd and, through Marstone, all the commonwealth.

Listen to me, Beimeni,
Antosha began,
Captain Broden Barão, the fugitive from the Lower Level, disgraces Chancellor Masimovian’s memory by leading the same terrorists who ended our chancellor’s life in Luxor City to Artemis Square. Here and now, the disgraced captain and his Beimeni Polemon represent all the flaws in our society. They’re selfish, ruthless, and full of traitorous emotions. They ignore the importance of service and loyalty to the commonwealth, the importance of respect for tradition and of Chancellor Masimovian’s precepts, of delivering proper and significant conversions, the importance—

This man has deceived us all,
Father interrupted. His voice intermingled with Antosha’s until his took control. He stepped farther into the square, closer to the teams. The woman who’d arrived with Father, who looked, Oriana realized, so like Mother, started to run into the square. Father put up his hand. She halted.

“Father,” Oriana said, “the longer we wait, the more time Antosha will have to turn the city against us.”

Father nodded. Oriana heard his voice in her head.
Don’t enter the square. He’s concentrated on me. I’ve contained him, but in here he still has control.

He swiped his hand through the air and brought forward the woman’s consciousness for all Beimeni to view.

Antosha scowled and sent waves over the ZPF.

Father blocked him. The woman strutted into the square, tears falling down her cheeks, though she smiled. The scenes that filled every Granville panel in every unit, ward, and square of every territory were the ones Oriana had searched for since she’d learned about her father’s conviction.

Scenes that could set him free.

The woman wasn’t Oriana’s mother.

She was Gwendolyn Horvearth.

Madam Champion of the First Trimester Class of 368. Oriana had seen her hologram upon the Mantel of Champions for House Variscan.

Three Harpoon Champions to end Antosha’s rule
, Oriana thought.
Yes, yes, yes, we must succeed.

Antosha sent another wave, but Father repelled it. In the panels, Antosha held Gwen’s cheek in his palm and transferred visions and feelings from the day when Haleya Decca had succumbed to Reassortment.

He is not who you believe he is,
Gwen transmitted.
He’s a master manipulator, a killer.

Antosha twisted his face, and another wave passed over the square. Its tremors cracked the marble. The crowd screamed.

Oriana sensed Gwen and Father in the ZPF, working together. Gwen kept her balance and her focus with Father, his connection to her strong.

Gwen visibly shook when Father brought forward her memories from the Bicentennial.

Antosha ordered her to weaken Father with a synism powder filled with sensory disrupting synisms designed to disrupt his connection to the ZPF.

Gwen did as he requested.

Oriana’s eyes grew wide. Gwen separated her mother from her father.

She danced with him and kissed him!

She helped Antosha kill my mother
, Oriana thought.

Gwen wiped her tears.

The commonwealth heard Antosha’s words in Father’s head upon the Dream Forest:
kill him, kill him,
and Father, weakened from Gwen’s and Antosha’s poison, his vision in twos and threes, his body not his own, killed Vernon Lebrizzi.

This is nothing but another deception from Captain Barão,
Antosha sent, though he couldn’t halt the images.

“You traitorous slut!” Antosha said to Gwen. She wiped her face again and laughed.

The remnants of Antosha’s scalp still smoldered.

“You were nothing without me! You wouldn’t have been bid for at all in the Harpoons.”

Oriana took in a sharp breath. Antosha had helped Gwen in the Harpoons, like he had helped her?

Antosha raised his arms.
Beimeni, as your chancellor today, I beg you, hear me now. Broden Barão and Gwendolyn Horvearth deceive you, for they want what you have, what we all hold dear. Remember that it was I who was chosen by freely elected ministers to lead the commonwealth against Reassortment, I who developed the Lorum-infused shielding that enables safe passage through the underground and protects Sky City from above and below, and assures our civilization’s first unprotected return to the surface in nearly four centuries.

Captain Broden Barão killed a fellow RDD scientist and failed for decades to cure us. My fellow Beimenians, never forget that he sent countless of your kin to their deaths in Jubilees and issued orders that would send countless more to the Lower Level, never to return.

He is the one on whom we should lower the hammer—

The Granville syntech, including that over the massive vase in Artemis Square, clouded. Father didn’t pull from Gwen’s and his mind any longer.

He pulled from Antosha’s.

The Granvilles showed conversations with Lady Isabelle, General Arnao, and Chairman Gallegos, tidings of revenge, false flag attacks in the North and Northeast, the plot to deceive and depose Chancellor Masimovian and to derail the Great Commonwealth’s unprecedented economic prosperity.