The Synthesis and the Animus (The Phantom of the Earth Book 3) (13 page)

Inside the city’s medical center, a medical bot with JENNY chiseled to its breast plate, handed him a white gown and escorted him to the hallway outside the delivery suite, where Verne sat on a bench, arms crossed, his unbuttoned silk shirt covered with dirt and streaked with his and Damy’s sweat.

“What were you doing at the gorges,” Brody said, his voice as rough as granite, “with a woman less than three days from her delivery day?”

Verne extended his arms, his palms toward Brody. “She asked me. She begged me. I swear—”

Brody grabbed him. “You should’ve left her at home! You should’ve been working on Project Silkscape in Lovereal! You should’ve—”

“It wasn’t my idea. I told her we shouldn’t go—”

“You’re lucky she isn’t dead!”

“Should I escort Vernon Lebrizzi to the waiting area?” Jenny said.

Brody didn’t answer and set Verne on the ground. He realized how ridiculous he sounded, for his eternal partner and his babies could be hurt, or worse, if something had gone wrong with the accelerant injections.

Jenny latched its alloy arm through Verne’s fleshy one. He didn’t resist. They disappeared through an exit at the far end, Verne’s head down, suspenders hanging off his shoulders. Brody turned. Damy lay in a bed on the other side of a glass enclosure, her legs spread, held by straps, and concealed by cloth.

She should’ve asked me to take her to the gorges.

Despite everything she was going through, he couldn’t stop the thought.

Brody took the hallway chair and waited. He didn’t know how much time had passed when Jenny opened the door. Behind the bot stood Damy wrapped in a cashmere gown.

She scurried around Jenny. “
Brody!
”

She threw herself into his arms, and he kissed her dotingly. He tasted the berries on her lips and inhaled her flowery scent. He tightened his grip.

He felt terrible for being so selfish this whole time. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you today.” He held her face with his hands. She felt so cold and looked terrified, all the color gone from her bronze cheeks. “Are you hurt? Are … our babies …”

He couldn’t say it, but Damy understood. She held his right hand and rubbed her face into it, then kissed him. “I’m fine, so are Pasha and Oriana. They’re being prepared.”

Prepared,
Brody thought. He made sure his recaller was activated in his pocket, for the more he thought about the commonwealth’s procedures, the more he hated them. Was this why his parents had kept him hidden? Was this why they had risked arrest, censure, and death: to keep him from being
prepared
and developed as if he was a pig and a computer, rather than a transhuman being? Instead of expressing his displeasure—that he and his eternal partner couldn’t even hold their babies—he said: “Thank the gods you’re safe.” Then he looked at Jenny. “Where are our children?”

“Aha,” Jenny said, “follow me. The chancellor’s heirs are ready for the viewing.”

They took an elevator deeper into the center. At the Natal Level, fifty floors down, Jenny led them into a hallway with windows looking on postnatal viewing booths. They passed new moms and dads and developers along their way to a booth with holographic blue and pink letters:

Damy hugged Brody.

Jenny said, “Shall I allow your visitors to join you?”

“Visitors?” Damy said.

“Vernon sent us all messages.” Brody wiped his eyes and turned to Jenny. “Send them in.”

“Even Vernon Lebrizzi?”

Brody pursed his lips and turned to Damy. She had the look of a neophyte who’d done something naughty, but Brody could tell the guilt was twisting her inside. He could feel it in the ZPF. He wouldn’t hurt her, not now, with this their first and likely only time to see their twins until after they took the Harpoon Exams and were purchased at the Harpoon Auction. “Yeah, let Vernon in too.”

The glass doors spun on the far end of the hallway, and in flew Nero, trailed by Gwen and Verne, all three dressed in cashmere gowns. After the kisses and hugs, the group turned toward the babies, who appeared so peaceful, so serene, so smooth, and so unaware of what awaited them in Dunamis and Underground West.

Verne pulled Brody aside. “I didn’t mean to cause any trouble,” Verne said. “Please, forgive me. I would never endanger—”

“Let’s just forget about it,” Brody said. “Damy, Pasha, and Oriana are safe, and that’s all that matters.”

Verne agreed. “Who’s that?”

Brody looked up. Lord Thaddeus, tall and broad with a belly Brody didn’t remember, strode down the hallway. Lady Parthenia glided in his wake, still as slim as a twig, with a face that would melt any man’s resistance to temptation.

“Look at you,” Lord Thaddeus said to Damy. She disappeared in his garb when he hugged her. “Beautiful, and a big-time scientist in Nicola.”

“So good to see you, Monsieur Developer,” Damy said. She kissed his hand, then turned to Lady Parthenia and bowed. “Madam Developer, you’re as angelic as I remember.”

“Where’s Noria?” Lady Parthenia said. “I was hoping to … see her again.”

Small chance for that, Brody knew. Minister Noria Furongielle was more likely to travel to the fighting Hole of Yeuron or fishing Block of Piscator than to visit with Parthenia and Thad Summerset. Whereas Damy had told him the lady acted “unpredictably,” Noria said Lady Parthenia beat her nightly. “That’s not how it was,” Damy had insisted, “the lady struck her once, and only when Noria spit in her face after thirty hours in the simulators.” Brody’s development wasn’t easy either, but the Variscans would never strike their candidates. He eyed Parthenia carefully and, out of the corner of his eye, noted Thad likewise scrutinizing him.

“I’ll not have Noria near my babies,” Damy said, “and I’ll not speak of her today.”

Parthenia grabbed Damy’s hand. “My dear, I meant no harm.” She grinned and gazed at Oriana and Pasha. “They’re lovely, like their lovely parents. We’ll make sure they impress in the Harpoons, that their performances are worthy of your reputations and House Summerset.”

Conversation ensued, and Brody, smile firmly fixed, did his best to discuss the hearing, the demotion, Antosha’s return, Gwen’s status, the attack in the Superstructure, and every other sensitive subject the Summersets dredged up. He was thrilled when Jenny gathered the guests and escorted them to the exit.

Now he and Damy stood before their twins for the viewing, the only time alone with their children they were ever sure to have. Damy’s eyes followed Oriana when she swayed, bundled in her pink wool, her round eyes glazed and curious. Oriana reached a hand out toward Damy, and Brody imagined what his eternal partner might have looked like before development.
Who might Oriana be without House Summerset?
he wondered.
And who will she become, given the choices we’ve made?

Pasha, jealous of his sister’s attention, reached as if to the stars with tiny fingers. His cheeks, puffy like marshmallows, lifted when he smiled. His foot was stuck in a pillow, and when he kicked it out, another foot poked from beneath the blue wool. Brody wanted nothing more than to whisk them to Underground South, where security had never been as strong as in Central and Northeast. But if he developed them himself, how would they compete in the commonwealth? And if he hid with them, how could they elude Lady Isabelle?

He hugged Damy, stuck in space and time until Jenny returned and told them the viewing was over.

“Aha, come, come, it will be best this way.”

Brody and Damy wiped their eyes, held hands, and took the elevator to the top of the center, where they meandered to the exit. They made their way to the line for the city transports, a line one hundred Beimenians deep. The glass-and-carbyne oval intracity transports stopped and zipped and zipped and stopped. They stepped forward, then stepped again, caught in an indolent daze.

An adolescent boy, dressed like a Courier of the Chancellor in a chameleon cape and dark boots, intercepted Brody and Damy upon their approach to a vacant transport. The momentary holdup led to gripes from the crowd. “Either get in or we will!” cried one spectator, with cusses flying from others.

The boy handed Brody two coins. “Captain, the Front offers its congrats to your family at this special time,” he said and disappeared into the crowd.

Brody rubbed his fingers over the coins. They were burlier than benaris, altered, the forbidden snake on one side, the forbidden phrase on the other.

He dropped them in his pocket.

Damy dragged him into the transport. She glanced through the skylight toward the ivory onyx towers, drenched by illusory starlight and moonlight. “Don’t tell me the chancellor summoned you again.”

“It’s not a hearing, my love. It seems word of our twins’ birth has spread, and we’ve received a benari gift.”

“Can I see?”

“Why don’t we wait until we get back to the city?” Brody wouldn’t put Damy in unnecessary danger, for if she were ever asked, she could truthfully deny her knowledge of his BP encounter.

“Surely there can’t be any harm in allowing your eternal partner to hold benari gifts, is there?”

“No, I suppose not.” Brody reached in his right pocket, the pocket without the BP coins, and delivered two benari coins with a 50 on the front.

Damy narrowed her eyes. “Did he say whom it was from?”

“I missed what he said, sounded like a lord in Palaestra City, but I can’t be sure.”

Beimeni City

Phanes, Underground Central

Back in their apartment unit in the First Ward, with Damy in the shower, Brody set out his recaller and placed the BP coins near it. They’d already visibly oxidized, the forbidden phrase no longer legible. He pushed a small indentation on each of them, and when he did the coins split in half. One of them contained a cryptor. A cryptor was a diamond shard that contained a bacterium,
E. cryptor
, typically used by the Janzers who guarded Fountain Square, enabling Beimenians to know how long they’d have to wait for entry. He inserted the cryptor into a vein on the top of his hand. Activated, the cryptor filled with Brody’s blood; he knew the bacterium infected his neurochip, as it was programmed to do, when he extended his consciousness and read:

Genetic code,
Brody thought. Far too short to be that of any species. Confounded, he twisted the inside flaps of the coins and noticed the cipher key. He began running through the endless combinations and permutations. When the shower stopped, Brody removed the cryptor from his hand and tucked it back in the coin, closed the other coin, then hid them beneath a cushion on his couch between a slit in the stone.

Damy was too upset herself to notice Brody’s distraction as he worked on the cipher over dinner. When she was asleep, he rose and stood on the terrace, overlooking Artemis Square. He ran combinations through the night, until finally, as the sky began to lighten, the letters moved through each other, revealing words:

Beimeni City

Phanes, Underground Central

2,500 meters deep

Lady Isabelle lay in a sea of burgundy rose petals and steaming water in Phanes Spa, her neck lodged against the bath, head resting on a warmed and new-mown hay-scented towel. Her dampened hair lay upon her neck and shoulders and curled around her breasts. A quartet of musician bots played chamber music in the corner, and the rays from the Granville sun flickered through a skylight above.

“My lady looks troubled this afternoon,” Valentine said. The courier, also nude, lay relaxing on the other side of the bath, her long, colorful hair splayed around her. “Is there anything I can do?”

“No, my sweet, I’m afraid not.” The BP attacks had worsened in the days since Captain Barão had disappeared. In his report to the DOC, he’d claimed he’d been abducted by common criminals seeking ransom. He’d convinced them they’d never get paid, and if they were caught, they’d be sent to the Lower Level. The next thing he knew he had awakened in his apartment unit. It wasn’t entirely unusual—many criminals don’t understand what it means to be hunted by the Janzers, and when they do, they often give up quickly—but the captain didn’t provide enough details to follow up. Isabelle would need more help, and soon. “Do you remember what I told you last trimester, about your future in the commonwealth?”

“I might one day become Lady of the First Ward of the great city.”

“Do you still want that?”

Valentine hesitated, looking away from Isabelle. She gulped. “I do.”

“To protect your people, you’ll have to make difficult decisions. You might have to recommend to the Great Court to exile citizens to the Lower Level. Can you do that?”

Valentine turned back toward Isabelle. More assuredly, she said, “I can.”

Isabelle sighed. She envied the courier’s courage and ignorance. She recalled her life before she’d been forced to kill her fellow transhumans; before her children had betrayed her and the commonwealth they’d sworn to serve. It twisted her inside, thinking about all the Harpoon candidates she’d worked with over the decades who’d joined the BP—whose lives had ended prematurely. Would Valentine betray her as well?