The Restoration of Flaws (The Phantom of the Earth Book 5) by Raeden Zen Read Free Book Online

hair and over his body. He shivered. In the distance, two divisions of Janzers weaved on their rocketcycles from island to island. They split up into pairs. Upon their approach to an island, one dropped a tray and the other held a pulse rifle pointed at the prisoner.
    Connor peered over the side again. Halfway down, he spotted curdling movement beneath the murky water before a streak of light passed from its head to its tail. “What’s swimming around down there?”
    “Electric eels,” Nero said.
    “They’re too big to be eels,” Connor said. They were longer than whales he’d encountered in the Gulf of Yeuron, where Connor caught fish with his brother Hans before he had been killed in a commonwealth Jubilee, volunteered to test the latest serum for Reassortment treatment.
    “They’ve been altered with synisms,” Nero said, “and if I were you, I wouldn’t fall down there.”
    “No,” Connor said, now noticing the electric currents that flowed from their heads to their tails. “I suppose I won’t.” His breath puffed out in clouds, and he grew gooseflesh. He’d never been so cold, even in Boreas. “What’ll they do to us?”
    “Isn’t it obvious?” the woman said with a cracked tone.
    She uncurled, twisted on her side. The sounds of chains rattled around her. She eased over the stone and out of the darkness into a thin shaft of light spread from glowworms over the stalactites. Connor gasped.
    Aera.
    Bruises covered her face. Her neck and shoulder were sewed shut with wires.
    “What happened?” Connor said.
    “We got the Lorum orb,” Nero said, “and we escaped the City of Eternal Darkness. The Janzers chased us. We might have made it, but Antosha has some kind of new Protector Prototype.” He looked down. “We weren’t prepared. They got the orb back.”
    “So now we’re here,” Aera said, “and they’ll need new volunteers for the Jubilees.” She paused, as if speaking stole all her strength.
    “Who will succeed Captain Barão on Reassortment?” Connor closed his eyes, knowing his folly as soon as he spoke.
    “Who do you think?” Aera said.
    Of course, Supreme Scientist Antosha Zereoue was the obvious choice to succeed Captain Broden Barão, particularly after his performance in Faraway Hall, reawakening Dr. Kole Shrader, the man frozen near absolute zero who might be immune to Reassortment. Connor had been there, at Faraway Hall, when it happened. He had been supposed to block Antosha while he was distracted, to protect the Lorum operation and prevent just this outcome. He recalled the crowd’s frantic chants, the medical bots, the synisms, Shrader, and the hallucinations Antosha wove around him, his own death on the Island of Reverie.
    Connor reached for the ZPF. The collar blocked his access. He concealed his feelings and thoughts the way Father had taught him, closed into a cerebral safe anything that tormented him about the operation and his flaws and the Beimeni Polemon.
    I must persevere and make it back to Hydra Hollow, he thought. Father must know how far Antosha has advanced with his use of the zeropoint field. If Antosha’s telepathic reach stretched as far as Boreas to Nyx, what would stop him from finding Hydra Hollow? What would happen if he overcame the safeguards that Father had installed there? Connor remembered the stories he’d heard about Lady Isabelle’s raid beneath Hautervian City in Underground South. That had been decades ago, when she had led a surgical strike into the Polemon’s southern stronghold. Very few had survived.
    “What happened in Boreas?” Nero said.
    “Antosha’s powerful,” Connor said, “much more so than my father knew. He did something to me, changed the way I perceived the world around me.”
    Another man nearby sat up. He hacked and spit over the side. The eels stirred when it hit the water.
    “Pirro?” Connor said. “Pirro …”
    He knelt and shivered under another gust. He adjusted to the cold, then cringed, for if Pirro,