The Gambit with Perfection (The Phantom of the Earth Book 2) (5 page)

“What contract are you studying?” Damy said. He didn’t respond. “I command it,” she said, “I’m your supreme scientist—”

She wanted to punch him when he flashed his teeth. “It’s not my place, if
he
didn’t tell you—”

Damy grabbed Verne’s wrist and downloaded the contracts into her extended consciousness. She sifted through data on the viability of a Mission to Vigna. Beimenians placed their bets en masse; to do so was in their blood, she knew, and the bid-and-ask prices on the multitude of contracts for this mission flashed and moved up and down with the ebb and flow of information and emotions, fear and greed. Bids were highest on the so-called “Mission Fission” contract, the one that predicted the team would split apart, molecules emaciated by exotic matter. The team. The team.
The team.
The whites of Damy’s eyes expanded.

She closed her extended consciousness, and her eyes. When she opened them, she said, “So, what did you bet on?”

“The better question is why Brody didn’t tell you, why he—”

“No, no, I’ve heard about your style. Your style benefits from transhuman death. What about your fiendish brethren down in Navita?”

“Hey sister, I can’t help where I came from any more than you can.”

“I’m not your sister.”

“I was doing fine before they found me and sent me to the Northeast,” Verne said. His voice turned hateful. “I didn’t ask the Variscans for help.”

Joanna told them to calm down. They didn’t listen, and now stood face to face. “I didn’t need their help—”

“You’d be dead—”

“—and I didn’t ask you to recruit me.”

Damy drew back as if infected by
E. agony
, usually transmitted over the ZPF to transhuman DNA with a baton, which spread Reassortment-like pain signals throughout the body.

Verne took his leave. When he neared the exit, he turned back and, with his glass in hand, said, “I don’t care about the pit anymore.”

“
Bullshit.
”

Damy didn’t know how much time had passed or how long she’d been sobbing. Finally, the tears slowed enough that she could rush to the restroom, wash her face, and sprint out of the Nicola Facility to an intra-RDD transport from which she tried to connect to Brody fifty times during the short journey to the Huelel Facility. He never answered, and the bots at the Huelel Facility told her he’d left hours ago.

Hours ago
, she thought,
hours
.

She took an interterritory transport from Palaestra City to Beimeni City and dashed along North Boardwalk. She weaved between Beimenians in golden tunics and shawls, who waited, she assumed, for their turn to enter the Fountain of Youth, and Beimenians in tanned capes, selling synism vials, colorful and fragrant, until someone in a maroon cape crashed into her. Damy’s satchel flew off her shoulder and she fell. She looked up. The contents of her bag were strewn along the wooden planks: lipsticks and a compact, z-disks, access cards, a garnet bracelet, benari coins. Her bodysuit had torn at the arm, where a bruise was already forming.

“Madam, please forgive me!” said the adolescent boy, an apparent Courier of the Chancellor.

“Watch where you’re going on the boardwalk!” She collected her belongings. The boy lingered at her side. “No! Just go! Get away from us!”

Damy said
us
out of habit, then wondered,
Is there still an us? Why wouldn’t Brody tell me about a courier, about a Warning, a commonwealth mission?

When she arrived at her unit in the First Ward, she searched her satchel for her access card but couldn’t find it. She squinted, blocked the glare of Phanes’s Granville sun reflecting off the blue-and-gray marble skywalk. She didn’t know if she forgot her access card in the Nicola Facility or lost it on the boardwalk. At her unit’s entryway, Damy telepathically initiated the DNA scanner, and a hologram materialized. It hollowed grooves for a palm and fingers matching hers. Damy pressed her hand into it.

Brody, can you hear me?

No response.

Brody!

Damy’s calf muscles flexed. She pressed her hand to her head. Where could he be? INSERT ACCESS CARD FOR ENTRY still blinked above. Damy heard a crack and a snap—the sound of an entryway clearing. Her neighbor, Clara, emerged. She wore a silk gown that revealed her left breast, standard garb worn in Fountain Square.

“You okay, Damy?”

“Oh, yeah,” Damy said, “great.” She grinned. “Brody just likes to pretend we live Before Reassortment, or that we’re in Yeuron or Piscator.”

Clara sniggered nervously and frowned. “I guess, I meant, with the Warning, are you going to be okay?”

Damy turned pale, less from Clara’s tone than her meaning. She swiped her forehead. “Yeah … of course … we’ll be fine.”

“Well, let me know if you need anything. I’m around.”

Damy thanked her and waved. As Clara sauntered toward the elevator, Damy rubbed her eyes. The barrier cleared, and there Brody stood. He looked the way a Beimeni captain should, a sculpture of perfection, shaved, clear bronze skin, a sash across his chest and wrapped around his waist, his deep red-brown hair falling just above his shoulders.

Damy glared at him, arms crossed, hands tucked under her elbows. “About time.”

She stormed past him through the great room, down the hallway, and into the kitchen. The countertop and cabinets were etched from the earth, outlined with forest-green marble. Damy lifted three jugs of water out of a cabinet and placed them in the containment area, a vessel surrounded with synisms designed to convert gaseous carbon dioxide exhaled by transhumans to the solid form, dry ice, which cooled the contents, keeping anything placed inside fresh. She pushed a button and washed her arm in the marble sink.

“You’re hurt,” Brody said. “Merrell, bring a vial of uficilin—”

“No, I’m fine, a courier ran into me.”

“Hey, slow down.”

Merrell, their keeper bot, closed the case of uficilin vials and disappeared into the back rooms.

“Look at me,” Brody said.

She stared at the ground and exhaled before she looked. His bright blue eyes were placid. How did he stay so steady?

“I’ve been selected for—”

“A commonwealth mission, my
friend
Vernon Lebrizzi had the pleasure of informing me earlier. Some heathen derivatives trader tells me about a mission before my eternal partner, and now I get it, the chiding looks I got on the transports, at the Huelel Facility, on North Boardwalk, in Artemis Square, just now with Clara, I’m the last one in the gods damned commonwealth to know about this!”

He moved his lips to her forehead, but she pulled away. “Forgive me, my love, you’ve been so … worried, and I didn’t want to—”

“Tell me the truth.”

“—hurt you. I don’t know how Verne or anyone found out about it.”

“The
balls
on Chancellor Masimovian,” Damy said. “I’m so an—”

“Annoyed, with me, I know.” Brody pointed to the ceiling, a common Beimenian signal that referred to Marstone, the eye in the sky. “Let’s sit.”

“It’s not just about this … mission,” Damy said. “He asks you to cure Reassortment. He asks you to unfreeze Dr. Kole Shrader. Now he’s sending you away again—”

“I’m honored to serve Beimeni,” Brody said, his expression serious, forbidding even, “and I won’t risk Dr. Shrader’s life until I’m sure we have all the tools we need, not after … the accidents.”

Damy ran her fingers through his thick fiery hair, thinking about their failure to revive the scientists frozen near absolute zero, killing all those in stasis except for Dr. Shrader. “So this is my fault?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I just want to get out of here.” Her eyes moved back and forth rapidly, frustrated. “We’re never getting out of here, are we?”

“Don’t say that. Listen, whatever happens on this mission will not stop us from moving forward. You once worked with me on Reassortment and Regenesis. You may be the one to lead—”

“I wouldn’t want those projects, not if you’re gone.”

“Point is, my love, we’ve survived countless challenges. We’ll resolve Reassortment one day too. We’ll return to the surface.”

Damy sent a telepathic command, and their Granville panel, which stretched along the curved wall in the great room, extended over the opening to their terrace. She emptied her mind and filled it with the panel’s inner workings. The illusion surrounded them. Brody joined her and held her hand amid the appearance of a balcony in an old-world city, a city Before Reassortment (and the Second Hundred Years’ War), a city of skyscrapers, clear skies, and rolling crests of ocean over the horizon. Seagulls glided overhead, and far below, people and trams rustled over cobblestone roads. The aroma of the salt water mixed with cheeses and desserts.

“It’s supposed to be daytime,” Damy said, “it’s
supposed
to be spring … so, let’s suppose …”

Brody put his fingers on her lips. He accessed the panel, and the illusion shifted. Now they were at the edge of a reflective obsidian surface. In the distance, shadowed mountains sandwiched by a bright blue hue, and beyond the mountains, a crescent moon inside a crescent moon inside a crescent moon. They heard songs from a flock of nightingales, smelled burning wooden torches. Moon and shadow and bird and fire all created by Brody’s mind.

“What if I instead dreamed of night,” Brody said, “and you with me and no one else in the world?”

He pulled her close and caressed her neck with his lips. She wrapped her hand around his arm and enjoyed his musky scent. She felt Brody’s hair skim her chin and his breath on her skin. She closed her eyes when he kissed her.

And there was no one else in Damy’s world except him. The Warning disappeared. The failed Jubilees disappeared. Project Silkscape and Vernon Lebrizzi and Clara and the Courier of the Chancellor and Chancellor Masimovian himself, even the troubling thought of welcoming a child into this underground world, disappeared …

Damy lay nude with Brody on the fur rug in their great room. He pulled a silk sheet, drenched with moonlight, over them. A new illusion engulfed them. Torches formed an arch, and plumes of smoke fluttered from the wicks, transmitting the neurosignal congruent with the smell of burning embers.

“We don’t have much time,” Brody said.

“What do you mean?” Damy said.

“I must go to the Fountain Temple.”

She knew he would prepare with his team, and she was due in Silkscape City for another review. She hoped Verne wouldn’t be there.

Brody pulled her close and pressed his forehead to hers. “What can I do for you?”

“Go to Vigna,” she said. “Give the chancellor his significant conversion … and come back …” Damy’s voice escaped her.
Please gods
, she thought,
keep him safe, bring him home, let him lift the Warning when he returns, let the board approve a conclave
.

“Come back to me,” she said.

“I’ll never leave you.”

Portage City

Portage, Underground Central

2,500 meters deep

Connor stood upon a glass skywalk just outside a ministerial building. It was morning rush hour in Portage, and all he could think about was how much he hated this place—the Portagens, Lady Isabelle, the commonwealth, and, most of all, himself. If he weren’t so undeveloped and inexperienced with the ZPF, his older brother might still be alive.

“Why can’t we go after him?” he’d asked after Hans’s capture, during a meeting with Minister Kaspasparon and the Beimeni Polemon. Connor had only just learned about the BP, and that his father was its founder, and that its goal was to overthrow the central government in Beimeni City. “Why are we sitting here like starfish when we could be blacktips?” When the minister twisted his brow, Connor said, “Sharks! Blacktips are sharks! Minister, why will we allow my brother to die?”

Minister Kaspasparon had put his hand on Connor’s shoulder and said, “Reassortment Hall is beyond our ability to penetrate, and Chancellor Masimovian has spoken.”

And Connor had let them override him, then stood silent in the Gallery of the Minister when they’d watched the Jubilee, Hans upon the Earth’s surface, the celebrations in the Valley of Masimovian and Wuchiaping Square. He’d expected the aristocrats in Phanes to enjoy the show but had been aghast to see the Portagens dance till they could dance no more, even after Hans screamed louder than anyone Connor had ever heard, after blood dripped down his brother’s face and neck, crystallizing, and he lay curled in the fetal position, dead, surrounded by animals that sought to feed off his carcass.