The Song of the Jubilee (The Phantom of the Earth Book 1) by Raeden Zen Read Free Book Online Page B

illusory firmament named after the supreme scientist who invented it. Starlight drenched their white marble terrace and Brody with pale light.
    She stepped through the archway onto the terrace. Brody didn’t act as if he heard her. An artificial cool breeze wafted over Damy. She rubbed her arms. She sensed her eternal partner’s unease. A chill raced down her spine.
    “Reviewing your notes?” she said.
    “Not yet.” He sounded exhausted, but not startled, as if he’d known she were standing there behind him. Yet he didn’t turn to her.
    Please, gods, protect him from his failures, and himself. Damy could always tell when he lied to her. It seemed too easy for him in recent decades to do so.
    Brody sipped. He still wore his official Beimenian suit pants, which normally went with a dark suit jacket lined with golden buttons down his left side. Instead of the jacket, he wore a gray cutoff shirt with familiar strike team axioms sewed into the back. FIDELITY AND HONOR. LOYALTY AND PROTECTION.
    Damy rubbed her hand over his back, over the words, understanding the delicate balance he navigated between the commonwealth and the strike teams, which were designed, at first, to be independent protectors of the people in the underground. So much had changed over the centuries. The teams still consisted of three members, a captain, a strategist, and either a striker or an aera (a female striker), with neophytes selected for training during the Harpoon Auction, but the commander rank, the leader of all the strike teams, no longer existed. The teams were now overseen by Corvin Norrod, Supreme General and Director of Peace.
    “You need sleep, my darling.” Damy massaged Brody’s shoulders. “You need your mind fresh to attack—”
    “What I need is to find a way to stop Reassortment,” Brody said. He broke away from her grip, placing his steaming mug on the nearby pedestal, then faced her.
    She hardly recognized him, his bronze skin too light, rippled with fine lines, his eyes lined with exhaustion. His insomnia worsens by the day, she thought, and he looks like he hasn’t gone to the Fountain of Youth in years.
    “What I need is a sustainable alteration of transhuman cells to confuse it,” Brody continued, “or a way to destroy it, or disable it, or—”
    “A rested mind is a wise mind. A troubled mind is a weak mind.”
    “I’m not troubled or tired. I’m determ—”
    “You’re frustrated.” Damy rolled her neck in a smooth motion, and her bones cracked. “Understandably so, but you’re not alone.”
    “That’s correct. I’m not alone. If I fail, Nero and Verena fail with me. When I make mistakes, my team dies with me. And you,” he glanced at her neck, where she wore the coveted Mark of Masimovian, “you don’t understand failure.” He turned from her, back to the square. “Nor should you.”
    Damy stood silent, watching his movements from behind. Clearly, the trial had gone badly. But was Broden Barão, Supreme Scientist of Reassortment, truly jealous of her research skills? Or was he still angry she’d pushed him away from exclusively using transhumans on the surface? Masimovian’s Third Precept scrolled through her mind: Jealousy is treachery. Treachery is culpable. Culpability is never questioned. If it was jealousy Brody felt, a forbidden emotion, he’d become skilled at hiding it from Marstone and Lady Isabelle, though not from her.
    She raised her hand to the synthetic tattoo on her neck, a black-ink bust of Chancellor Masimovian held by two phoenix feathers. Brody would earn his Mark, just like she’d earned hers. It was only a matter of time. But she understood, she remembered what it was like before she achieved significant conversion, the threshold a scientist must reach to receive the Mark. How desperately she had craved immunity to the demotions that plagued so many RDD scientists. Though most of these resulted from failure to achieve even proper conversion, a meaningful but less