The Descent into the Maelstrom (The Phantom of the Earth Book 4) (21 page)

“Tell me everything.”

“She’s working with my father.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“She has no weakness that I could distinguish, except maybe that her thoughts dwell on her past. Seems my father helped her through the trauma of the collapse, and she sees herself in his debt.”

The flutists were joined by trumpeters. Their melody rose to a crescendo and concluded, followed by applause and the sound of silver tapping glass. When the hum of conversation resumed, Zorian said, “That could be trouble for you.”

“Where’s the entrance?”

“There’re multiple modes scattered in Navita. But you can’t just walk in. They find you. The labyrinth I solved is being altered as we speak.”

Isabelle pulled up a map of Navita City in her extended consciousness and stilled the Great Falls. She panned over the rolling water of the city’s inner layers. A white circle penetrated the walls to the elevators and pedestrian paths. She felt a chill race down her spine. Memories of her near death beneath Navita City surged forth, quickening her heart. “Do you think I’m going to rush into Navita again, make the same mistake, you fool? We’ve searched the caverns of Navita thoroughly, with no signs of what you—”

“You searched like a
Beimenian
.” Zorian waved his hand as if it were a diver. “You thought they’d dig
down
. You never imagined they would dig
up
.” He swallowed another olive.

Isabelle grimaced, for Reassortment permeated the Earth’s bedrock at depths that shouldn’t have been possible: the traitors could be risking the commonwealth’s integrity with this stronghold. “Your BP heathen brethren risk over three hundred million lives in the commonwealth. What is it Jeremiah seeks? Power? Justice? For what exactly? He broke the law, not us.”

“You don’t have to tell me, my lady.” Zorian sipped his wine and slathered Vivoan goat cheese over a cracker. He crunched it and grinned. “I hate them as much as you do.” He washed down the food with his wine. “The commonwealth is crawling with BP, my lady.” He shivered. “Their connections permeate your government, they’ve infiltrated the private consortiums and every crevice of your power—”

“And I will destroy them all.” Isabelle was beginning to enjoy fantasies of how she would dispose of this arrogant pup, once his usefulness was spent. But she checked her thoughts, lest he sense them and give her false intel.

Zorian winced. He ate a pickle and took another sip of wine.

“Where’s their next target?” she said.

“The Front doesn’t trust me with such details any longer.”

“Is there another stronghold beside the one in the east?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“There’s only one way to know if I can trust you.”

She pushed the plates covered with scraps of salmon and pork bones to the side and reached her fingers across the table, the synisms that colored her nails lavender leading the way. “Take my hands.”

Zorian grinned and did as she requested.

She hated that she couldn’t simply read his thoughts as she did with most Beimenians. He somehow blocked her, almost certainly by use of the ZPF. She could get around a recaller at close range. Zorian’s skills with the ZPF were different than Jeremiah’s, and, in some ways, more powerful.

She squeezed his hands and saw nothing, for a hood covered his head. A man gave Zorian instructions. Isabelle didn’t sense fear within him as he moved, only excitement. When the hood lifted, she gasped. Men and women ate and laughed and drank and carried children in their arms. They sang and danced, as if over her grave. Her nostrils flared, and in this, Zorian’s surreal world of the Beimeni Polemon, the mythic Blackeye Cavern that had eluded her for so long, she felt anger rise within her like never before.

Zorian’s hands thudded the table where she dropped them. The lace cloth lifted over the food with the wind. “How long have they been there?” she said. “How shallow have they gone? Don’t they realize what they risk? If Reassortment seeps—” She checked herself, lest her rage enable Zorian to gain access to her consciousness, the way his younger brother Hans had when she’d interrogated him in the Department of Peace.
Damn these Selendias, damn them all to the Lower Level!

A waiter bot came by to fix the tablecloth.

“How the hell should I know?” Zorian said, his feet now crossed upon the table’s edge, his hands behind his head. “All that matters, my lady, is that they’re there now, right above your snout—”

She grabbed the bot with her mind and threw it off the roof. There was a long quiet moment, followed by screams and a crash below. The Opeans dining around them froze midbite. Zorian put his feet on the ground.

Isabelle stood and tore off her wig.

“Not. For long.”

Alpinia City

Marshlands, Underground East

2,500 meters deep

Oriana dreamed of the forest and pond near the Candidate Beach. Nathan and she had returned there often during free time. He took off her clothes and called her beautiful, like he had on the first day of classes. He dropped his bathing suit, and they slipped into the water. He squeezed her butt, lifted her, and kissed her. His mouth tasted like Dunamisian chocolate, the dessert he’d fed her before the first time they made love.

Oriana moaned when she felt his fingers on her sex, then his manhood inside her. When she opened her eyes, she gasped.

“My gods,” Oriana said. “Gaia?”

Blood drenched Gaia’s curly hair, dripping down her cheeks and neck, over her breasts. “Stupid cunt.”

Gaia looked down. Oriana did too. Rather than Nathan’s manhood, a carbyne
sai
cut deep into her. Gaia removed the
sai
and Oriana’s blood rushed into the pond.

Oriana screamed.

Gaia laughed and punched her with the blunt end of her
sai
.

Oriana fell underwater.

She blinked and coughed, coming to. Her neck was sore. She rolled it and found she was lying in water, her cheek against a stone. She felt her sex, then looked at her forefingers, relieved when she saw dripping water rather than blood. She sighed. Sitting up, she threw her soaked hair away from her face and protected her eyes. The river steamed in the terracotta Granville sun.

A flock of ravens flew above an alloyed sculpture of a man’s head, submerged up to his nose, lichen around his ears. A crown crested his head with scythes that crossed over birds in flight, and his brow looked thick, the alloy darkened along the wrinkled creases of his cheeks. She heard noises. It sounded like crickets. She turned. The roots of the trees spread between the rocks, the trunks thick with moss and algae. The forest smell pleased her until something brushed against her leg. She started, pushing herself out of the water, then looked down. Her bodysuit had ripped along her left leg and up the side of her body. Her hands slipped off a stone, and she splashed in the warm water.

Where am I?
Oriana thought.
Is this real?

A fish jumped out of the water in front of the sculpture.

Oriana extended her consciousness. She flipped through hundreds of riddles. A coin toss. A mathematical mystery. A magician. A bridge-crossing at night. She stopped there. What about a bridge?

“Lady Parthenia,” Oriana said, “what is this?”

No response.

She trudged through the wet sand and seaweed and onto the shore.

“Lord Thaddeus?”

The only reply came from bullfrogs croaking in the weeds. She limped up the stones and to a ridge along the hill, surrounded by oak trees with trunks as thick as the domes in Halcyon Village. Was this the VR? Everything looked and felt so solid around her, and wounds never stung quite like this in the simulator.

“Who goes there?” a man said, his voice deep and breathy, unfamiliar to Oriana.

She lost her balance and dropped to her knee, her hand upon the rough limestone ground.

A pair of men stood before her in the dark uniforms and silver belts of the Marshlands Citadel Guard. The one on the left had a beak of a nose. He pointed a scanner at her, and a neon blue grid spread over her. It focused on her eyes.

“Oriana Barão?” said the guard.

She blinked and nodded.

The guards exchanged a look.

“The minister seeks your presence.”

The guard on the right injected her with uficilin. She threw her head back and lost her balance, the relief spreading from her head to her toes. The guard caught her and cuffed her.

“What’re you doing?” Oriana said.

The guard didn’t answer her. He led her onto a carbyne boat large enough to fit six transhumans. Its engine purred, and they broke through the calm stream that weaved through the forest and cliffs, down the waterway until the city opened before Oriana. It looked ethereal, with white pillars, white buildings, white skywalks, white sculptures of the Twin Gods of the Cosmos, a nude man and woman intertwined. They neared the white marble buildings, several topped by polished domes. They passed a massive white gargoyle with wings extended, water flowing from its open mouth into the stream. Upon their approach to the largest of the domed buildings, two white lions stared at her, their tails wrapped around their bodies, their teeth bared, their manes shards of minerals upon their necks.

They neared a gate. Oriana’s captor stroked his beard and spoke to the guardsman at the gate in a language Oriana didn’t understand. The guard unlocked a mechanism that stirred the water, and the bars submerged. “We have the renegade candidate,” the bearded guardsman said in Beimenian.

Renegade candidate?
Oriana extended her consciousness again and flipped through her schedule: training with Pasha in a Cretaceous jungle, cardiovascular fitness upon the Earth’s moon of a thousand years ago, earth science and history of four billion years, molecular, biological, and mechanical engineering, Beimeni history, and Trimester Trek.
Trimester Trek
, she thought, and the visions swept over her like the waterfalls beneath the archways of Alpinia City Citadel. A transport whizzed along a nearby maglev track. A group of scientists in white bodysuits and transparent lab coats laughed as they ambled over a skywalk. Oriana turned here and there. Alpinia City. Trimester Trek. Nathan Storm.
Oh no, no, no. Where’s Nathan? Where’s Pasha?
She tried to connect to them through Marstone but couldn’t.

Her mouth felt so dry, her head so light, her body so lethargic. “What day is it?” she asked.

The guardsmen ignored her and led her up the steps to the citadel, where morning rush hour brought workers in droves. Inside, the sunlight broke through skylights. Rubies glistened along the walls. They reached a landing, from which the golden steps continued up, strewn with white rose petals. At the top, beneath a chiseled stone sign that read GALLERY OF THE MINISTER, Noria Furongielle sat cross-legged upon a golden pad embroidered with vines and flowers, a white tiger on either side. Two shirtless members of her guard, as well sculpted as the lions at the entrance, loomed beside the tigers.

The minister stood. Oriana struggled to keep her mouth from falling open. White rose petals layered Noria Furongielle’s body from the waist up, spiraling around her neck, over her perfect breasts, and down her back, melding into the design of a prim white chiffon skirt that dangled to her bare feet. A ruby hung from a silver chain around her neck.

“Let me look at you,” the minister said.

The guardsmen forced Oriana closer.

Noria reached toward her. Oriana twitched. She had never seen a woman so regal and as beautiful as Minister Furongielle, and she wanted nothing more than to run back home to House Summerset.

“You have nothing to fear here, child.” Noria touched Oriana’s hair. “Oh my, you look just like
him
…”

“Why … pardon, my lady, but why did your guardsmen bring me here? They said you wanted to see me?”

“Do you not remember your dive off the side of the Seaborne Bridge?”

Oriana remembered Urelayura Hall and Lady Isabelle and nearly one hundred riddles, but she didn’t remember … a bridge. “Where’s my brother …”

“Pasha.”

Oriana stepped back. “And Nathan and Desaray and …” She found she couldn’t say Duccio’s name aloud, which was odd. “My team, where’s my team?” She accessed the ZPF and attempted to call Pasha and Nathan through Marstone again. Again, no response. “I can’t reach them.” She stepped forward. “Please, Minister, will you let them know where I am?”

“Calm your nerves, child. Your team, less your twin, left the city long ago. They reported you missing.”

“Did they win?”

“Afraid not, child, but that shouldn’t concern you—”

“I’m in trouble for this, aren’t I?”

“You’re lucky you’re alive. Two meters to your left and you might’ve crashed into a boulder. Uficilin heals, athanasia reverses age, but neither can breathe life into the dead.”

Noria spoke to her half-nude guardsmen in that unfamiliar language. They bowed and slipped behind a row of heavy curtains. A warm breeze wafted behind them, carrying delicious sweet and savory aromas. Oriana’s stomach growled.

“I don’t remember diving off a bridge.”

“Do you remember your plan to break into my citadel’s archive?”

Oriana felt the blood drain from her face. “No … I wouldn’t—”

“You would, and now you will take my hand and follow me into my garden.”

The tigers sniffed Oriana and purred, then hopped on top of their feather beds. Noria’s fingers felt as soft as cashmere. She led Oriana outside, through a tunnel made of waterfalls, into a large garden cove. White petals adorned the walkway, and pink ferns with dark stems dotted the grounds. Pink trees and leaves grew upside down from the ceiling, drawn to ultraviolet plating hanging from chains. Steam rose up from the waterfalls and spread throughout the cove. Noria pulled one of the leaves down to Oriana. “Feel this.”

Oriana slid the fern between her thumb and forefinger. It was slippery and hard, like the rocks she’d climbed over when she’d awakened near the sculpture in the stream.

“They’re prehistoric plants, brought back to life by your mother, a gift to … her sister.”