The Song of the Jubilee (The Phantom of the Earth Book 1) (4 page)

“No biomat suit breaches detected, Captain.”

Three more scientists collapsed.

“Reassortment has achieved critical levels inside the dome, Captain.”

Two more scientists collapsed.

We’re evacuating, now!
Brody sent. He hand-signaled the research bots. Some rushed to the helicopters, others to the dead scientists, wrapping them in body bags. The surviving scientists dashed toward the landing pad, up the stairs, and into the helicopters. They lifted off, one after another.

After the last one departed, Brody entered his helicopter with Verena and Nero. He connected to the chopper’s navigational intelligence and ordered it to take them back to Area 55, where they would undergo quarantine before being allowed back into Beimeni.

Brody closed his eyes. As usual, his career and life were in jeopardy. How he would explain the latest biomat suit failure to the board and ministry was anybody’s guest. The chancellor wanted results, and rightly so, but Brody couldn’t keep his team alive long enough to study the pathogen, not on the surface. He would need to innovate, find a way to solve this thing underground.

He looked out the windows in the hull, watching the island move farther and farther away until it was a green speck between the river and ocean. The screams of his team members echoed in his ears. He could already see the look of horror on Damy’s face when he told her he’d failed again.

Hydra Hollow

300 meters deep

“Mr. President,” the helper said, “the Leadership awaits, as do your people.”

The title escaped the child’s lips so easily and elegantly, Hans almost believed her. “Interim President,” he said. “My father isn’t dead.”

Unlike in the commonwealth, children spread about Hydra Hollow, with some employed as helpers of the Leadership. The president’s cove, a cavern of granite, bioluminescent waterfalls, and a prehistoric pond, seemed empty to Hans without their presence. His own helpers, a boy and girl who’d been assigned to aid his preparations for the inauguration, stood next to him. They turned toward their colleague standing near the cove’s entrance, where heavy curtains hung.

“I pray to the gods that Jeremiah the Liberator lives,” the helper said.

“Save your prayers, child,” Hans said. “My father’s belief in the Twin Gods of the Cosmos did nothing to protect him from the commonwealth. Neither did my mother’s.”

The helper’s face lost all its color. She tugged on the leather strap around her neck that crossed over her tunic and shoulder. “What do you want me to say?”

Murray Olyorna stepped through the curtains, which swayed between stalactites and stalagmites. Wisps of mist disappeared from stone pedestals near the curtains, then returned, spreading the smell of cinnamon. “Tell them we’ll be ready soon.”

The helper nodded and turned to go.

“Wait,” Hans said. The helper looked back at him, her body tense. She appeared preadolescent, with sausage curls that bounced above her shoulders whenever she moved. She still carried a bit of baby fat. “What’s your name?” Hans asked.

“Jocelyn Vertulli.”

Hans saluted her, moving his forefinger over his forehead in an S-shape. “You do us proud, Miss Jocelyn.”

She returned the salute, along with a radiant grin that made Murray chuckle.

Hans completed his salute in earnest. “Now, didn’t you have some important business?”

“Yes, I do!” Jocelyn whipped around, her sausage curls bobbing as she scampered off behind the curtain into the limestone tunnel.

Hans and Murray exchanged a bemused look, then Murray wrapped the last of the silk sashes around Hans, who held his arms up at his sides.

“Do you think Zorian will come?” Hans asked.

He hadn’t heard from Zorian since before their father’s arrest twelve days ago. Like Hans, Zorian lived and worked undercover as a fisherman in Piscator Territory. With it being peak fishing season there, they had to be careful to leave only on their days off—they couldn’t maintain their commonwealth identities without meeting the Office of the Chancellor’s quotas. In all, it was an especially troubling time for Zorian to disappear, but then his brother was nothing if not unpredictable, one of the reasons the Leadership had appointed Hans to head the Liberation Front in their father’s stead.

“I doubt it, kid.” Murray adjusted the sash, took a step back, and nodded approval. “Zorian will find his way back to the Front, in his own time and in his own way.”

Hans dropped his arms. “I hope so.”

Murray waved to the two helpers, then gestured toward Hans with an open palm. “Please finish.”

The children brought over their wooden stools, setting them on either side of Hans. First, they tied his leather boots and belts. Then they climbed the stools and set cuffs, bracelets, and sashes bearing the insignia of the
Morelia spilota spilota
, an ambush predator, around his wrists and arms and neck. After this, they dipped brushes into ceramic bowls filled with a dark paste and painted Hans’s face with lines, creating a labyrinth to and from his eyes, nose, ears, and mouth. This design represented the Front’s system of tunnels throughout the commonwealth, called the Polemon passageways. When the children finished, they stood to attention.

“You have the looks of a president,” Murray said, and when Hans scrunched his brow, “the look of your old man.”

Hans shook his head. “I’m not Jeremiah Selendia, and I don’t like these suggestions that he’s gone.” He smiled sadly to his old friend and developer. “Besides, I look nothing like Father.”

Jeremiah was a mountain of a man, with the broadest shoulders and a trimmed beard that swooped from his ears to beneath his chin. Hans had shaved his own beard after the assembly at which the Leadership appointed him, and he was slim enough to fit through the narrowest of passages.

Murray took Hans’s chin lightly in his hand and met his eyes. “You’re our leader now, Johann. You must see the truth, even when it’s the last thing we’d ever wish for.” He paused. “If Lady Isabelle has Jeremiah, he’s as good as dead.”

Hans broke away from Murray’s hold. “The way of Reassortment with her,” he swore. Lady Isabelle Lutetia, eternal partner to Chancellor Masimovian, held so many titles that Hans lost count. But the one that mattered was hunter of the Liberation Front. In that effort, she used Marstone—the artificial intelligence based in Beimeni City that monitored transhuman brain impulses in the zeropoint field—to probe for the unregistered of the underground. That she might’ve used Marstone to locate Father in Piscator unnerved Hans, for Jeremiah was a skilled telepath who knew how to elude it. His father had installed mechanized protections against Marstone in Hydra Hollow in the west and Blackeye Cavern in the east, but how much longer would they work? If Jeremiah was vulnerable, they all were, and everyone knew it, Lady Isabelle most of all.

Hans grimaced. “You think she took him to Farino …”

Murray peered at Hans from the corners of his eyes. Sweat budded over his forehead and above his thick eyebrows. His expression revealed little of the mischievousness it normally did. Hans recognized it as fear, so palpable he could taste it. He raised his eyebrow, inclining his head. Murray gulped. He swiped his trimmed mustache and beard, nodding.

“Then you know what I have to do.” Hans stepped away from Murray and the helpers, his dark green silk cape sliding along the ground. He rubbed the dirt from his hands in a round marble sink filled with warm water natural to the Hollow.

Perspiration now dripped beside Murray’s close-set eyes, down his cheeks and neck. This time he wiped his face with his arm and the back of his hand. “The survival rate for an escape from the prison rivals that of Reassortment exposure,” he reminded Hans.

It was true; a jailbreak from Farino Prison was a fool’s errand. The fortress was built and guarded by Janzers, who enforced the chancellor’s laws. Its millions of towerlike islands rose up from a vast prehistoric lake deep in far northern Farino Territory. But the Front needed Jeremiah. Hans could not fill the void his father left. No one could. And nothing, not his own hopes or the faith of all his comrades, would change that.

“Nothing is forever.” Hans spoke with a Phanean accent, moving his forefinger in the infinity loops, just like Chancellor Masimovian. “Lady Isabelle and the chancellor have their weaknesses. So does Farino Prison. We need only find those weak points and exploit them.”

Murray smirked. “You are your father’s son.”

Now the helpers of the Leadership tied Murray’s boots and belts. They climbed their stools and set silk sashes across his shoulders, careful not to cover the
Morelia spilota spilota
woven into the fabric of his tunic from his neck to his waist. The boy lifted a petrified wood-link necklace from his pocket. Each piece of the necklace was a letter. He set it around Murray, latching it near his neck, while the girl flipped the letters here and there along Murray’s front, making sure the promise, a phrase long ago forbidden by Chancellor Masimovian, could be seen:

Can I risk so much for the Front’s cause?
Hans thought as he read the message his father spread throughout the populace like a virus.
If it comes to it, can I fight this war without my father, and without Mari’s support?

Hans lived with Maribel Hunter, his eternal partner, in a clandestine unit in the Sixth Ward of Piscator City. She supported the Liberation Front, but not so much Hans’s decisions, especially lately. She was afraid for their lives, with good reason, admittedly.

It seemed everything and everyone Hans loved was suddenly at risk. His younger brother, Connor, was especially vulnerable—not even fully developed yet and with no knowledge of the Liberation Front. Hans would have to do something about that once he returned to Piscator. For now, though, his people needed him. They needed to believe they had a chance. And so, Hans tried to put all his doubts aside, as Father would want him to. He dried his hands with a towel and turned.

The helpers parted the curtains, and Johann Selendia’s inauguration began.

He stepped along the limestone. Green bioluminescent falls sang down the walls. The luminous bacteria were native to the Hollow, while this water was stolen from the commonwealth’s coolant system—a spider web of carbyne piping supplied with water from the arctic bay above Area 55. Without it, the Hollow’s heat would kill a transhuman in days. And though this tunnel smelled mossy and musky, Hans never mistook it for a forest. He had grown up in Vivo City upon a man-made island in Vivo Territory, where fauna and flora of every type lived. One day, after the Liberation Front succeeded, Hans would return there with Mari.

He entered the Hollow’s main cavern. Limestone pillars, stamped with fossilized fish, supported the world Hans had built with his parents and Zorian. It looked just like it had during the opening in 339 AR. Its stalactites were covered with glowworms emanating violet light. Waterfalls along the edges emptied into many streams that slithered along the cavern’s floor, sparkling with silver bioluminescent light. The sounds of songs, conversations, and drums bombarded Hans, and the enormity of the event struck him like a wave: four million people gathered inside the Earth for his coronation.

“You ready, kid?” Murray said, breaking Hans’s trance.

“Ready as I’ll ever get, old man.” Hans looked into his friend and developer’s sweaty face, still as youthful as Hans’s thanks to the athanasia therapies the Front stole from the commonwealth.

Murray wrinkled his nose at Hans’s comment, then hand-signaled the commandos waiting on the limestone stairs that led to the east side’s precipice. They rushed down the stairs and along the main aisle, a walking path spattered with golden pebbles—a common Beimenian gesture, a wish for eternal life—that wove through the crowd. The commandos raised their diamond swords, creating a tunnel from the cavern’s center to the base of the precipice, where the Leadership awaited Hans’s arrival.

Along his walk, Hans peered slyly at Murray at his side, then to the Leadership. He wondered if they, too, viewed him as a boy, like Murray did, for Hans recalled the days when he and Zorian would run beneath their tables and around their chairs during council meetings with the Front in Vivo Territory, forty-five years ago. Those meetings were often held at the farm of their foster father, Arturo Andretta, in Vivo City. Jeremiah and Solstice had given their children to Arturo out of fear they’d be discovered by the commonwealth in Piscator Territory, the place Lady Isabelle knew Jeremiah and Solstice traveled to after he was demoted from Project Reassortment in 283 AR.

Gooseflesh spread over Hans’s arms as he thought about those dangerous days in Vivo City, before the Front could escape to Hydra Hollow and Blackeye Cavern. In the Hollow and the Cavern, the risk from Reassortment seepage was great—humanity had fled this depth of the underground after the Great Reassortment Panic of 165 AR—but the risk from commonwealth discovery was low, or so they hoped. Travel throughout the underground since the war began in 308 AR had never been as treacherous as it was in the last three years, with many of Hans’s comrades captured or killed.

The survivors of Lady Isabelle’s latest purge were all gathered on the precipice: Charlene Ripley, Executive of Blackeye Cavern; Luke Locke, her commonwealth liaison; and council members Pirro and Xander. Murray also hailed from the Cavern and would soon stand with them. The Hollow’s Leadership included Executive Gage Voss; his commonwealth liaison, Brooklyn Harper; and council members Lizbeth, Zoey, and Isaiah. They’d all held Hans in their arms at one time or another, and some had likely changed his diapers or fed him with spoons and bottles. How would they regard him as President of the Liberation Front? Would they be as loyal, tenacious, and productive for him as they were for his father? And could ever he be as strong a leader?