by Zen, Raeden
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:
WE WILL STRIKE THE IRON FIST
FROM IT THE BLOOD OF OUR KIN WILL FLOW
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 Solst
ice 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?
From the precipice, Hans could see the main cavern in its entirety. Endless rows of Beimeni Polemon, as the rebels were sometimes known, sang and danced between the streams. From where Hans stood, the water appeared to flow faster, the bioluminescence burned brighter, and the melodies echoed louder.
Soon the songs and drums softened. Hans’s heartbeat calmed. The crowd of four million quieted.
Hans took the president’s place between Gage and Charlene in front of a crystalline pedestal that held the Formation of the Underground, the historical constitution that the chancellor purported to adhere to. Murray took his place with the Cavern’s representation. The people dropped to one knee. They raised their right hands, as did Hans, mirroring Gage and Charlene.
“Do you, Johann Selendia, pledge yourself to the people of the underground?” Gage said.
“I do,” Hans said.
Charlene picked up the Formation and held it in front of Hans. “Do you, Johann Selendia, pledge yourself to restoring the Formation of the Underground to its rightful place as the law of the land?”
“I do …” Hans hesitated, looking to Murray, who nodded and eyed the Formation. Hans remembered the next step. He put his left hand upon the Formation’s thick leather-bound cover. “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the Liberation Front, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Formation of the Underground.” The Formation had been written during the early days of the Livelle city-state, the place from which humanity spread throughout the underground after the Death Wave. It guaranteed certain rights, including freedoms of speech, thought, profession, development, and life, none of which had been upheld by the Masimovian Administration. The chancellor’s precepts had instead superseded the Formation since he took power in 168 AR. Hans, like all the BP, vowed to end Masimovian’s rule.
He turned to the crowd. Discreetly, he connected to his people in the ZPF, understanding the world through their consciousness. They believe in me, he thought, they still think we can win the war. Hans nodded to the crowd, raising his arms the way his father would. The movements felt awkward to him, but when the crowd stood, their chants warmed his heart:
Hans, Hans, Hans, Hans
Hans, Hans, Hans, Hans
When they silenced, Hans led the Liberation Front in the recitation of the Polemon Proclamation, the words his father first put into z-disks in 308 AR that permanently set the Front at war with the commonwealth. Lady Isabelle never referred to the rebels by the Liberation Front, instead preferring Beimeni Polemon. Jeremiah had liked it so much, he renamed their proclamation after it in the year 327 AR.
After they finished, the crowd cheered. The sounds of guitars, drums, and chatter spread beneath the stalactites, between the bioluminescent falls, streams, and limestone columns of the Hollow. The smells of beer-battered chicken, fried fish, and seared steak filled a rapidly constructed bazaar. Hans walked through the crowd, greeting his people. His head throbbed. He missed Maribel. He couldn’t wait for the evening to end.
Squeals from a group of excited children stole his attention. Hans turned. There among them stood Zorian.
Hans felt his blood quicken. His older brother lifted one of the little girls, holding her as easily as he would a fish. Smiling and waving his hand in circles, weaving his fingers, he telekinetically juggled seven garnet gemstones. They were the size of kiwis, Hans’s favorite fruit in Vivo. The girl screamed happily, reaching for the gems just beyond her fingertips.
“Look who it is, sweet one,” Zorian said to the child, “my little brother, in my father’s clothes!” He let the girl take one of the gems and set her on the ground. She ran away, and her friends gave chase. Then Zorian let the remaining floating gemstones fall to the hard sandy ground, one by one, in a line between himself and Hans, near a stream’s shoreline. “How does it feel to be President of the Liberation Front?” He stepped over the gems and kissed Hans’s shaved, painted cheeks.
“Wrong, unnatural …”
“Because I should be the President.”
“Because our father isn’t dead, Zorian.”
“Or is he?”
“Our contacts would have heard and told us. No, brother, he still lives, and we must rescue him.”
Zorian sneered. Hans tried to peer into his older brother’s mind the way he did most Beimenians. Yet, as always, he could neither hear his brother’s thoughts nor search his neurochip. It was as if he were dead.
“What have you heard?” Hans said. His older brother continually sourced intelligence from the commonwealth. He’d even broken into the Department of Peace, and somehow survived to share the tale and the intel.
Zorian said nothing. He folded his heavily muscled arms. He had the sharp Selendia features: high cheekbones, crested hairline, and aquiline nose. His tank top revealed the animated tattoos of seaweed, coral, and cephalopod feelers that swayed over the skin covering his arms, shoulders, neck, chest, and back.
“I guess now that you’re President of the Liberation Front, I have no choice but to obey you.” Zorian leaned closer to Hans and smirked.
The children returned and demanded Zorian’s attention. He stepped away from Hans and ruffled a boy’s hair, then looked back. “I’ve been worried sick about you since Father’s capture.”
Hans sighed. This was typical Zorian, prickly as a puffer fish one minute, his best friend the next. “It’s good to see you in uplifted spirits,” Hans said, and when Zorian smiled, “I can’t help but ask: Why have you missed shifts during the peak season in Piscator, and why haven’t you been answering the Leadership, or me, through the zeropoint field?”
Zorian knelt to another boy and snapped his fingers, creating the illusion of sparks and smoke that formed into phoenixes, which flew away. The children ran after the phantasms.
“Why did you miss the Leadership’s assembly?” Hans pressed. “And what have you learned about Father?”
On one knee, Zorian looked at Hans from the corners of his eyes. “You left Connor in Piscator?”
He had a way of searching Hans’s mind, even as he somehow shielded his own thoughts from Hans’s probing.
“Connor’s safe with Arturo.”
Connor had been Hans’s charge since he returned to Piscator following the initial increase in Janzer security in Vivo some fifteen years ago. Chancellor Masimovian had sent ten divisions, or sixty Janzers, led by Lady Isabelle to search out and destroy members of the Beimeni Polemon. By the time Hans and Zorian arrived in Piscator, the Janzers had killed their mother, but she and the other surviving BP managed to hide Connor, the baby brother the elder Selendias didn’t know they had. Arturo, who also fled to Piscator, also cared fo
r Connor.
“That Father could be apprehended in Piscator suggests the territory is under enhanced surveillance,” Zorian said. “Lady Isabelle will find Connor if he stays.”
“No harm will come to him.” Hans studied his older brother’s mind, found nothing. “Tell me what you learned.”
“It’s a matter of when, not if, they will take Connor.”
Connor’s telepathy wasn’t advanced enough for him to fight the commonwealth’s agents, least of all Lady Isabelle. And though Hans had wanted to bring him to the Hollow or the Cavern years ago, Father wouldn’t allow it. He didn’t want his youngest son to live among the BP’s secret societies at the Earth’s shallower depths—he didn’t want Connor involved in the war.
Hans rerouted. “Maybe you’re right, brother. Maybe you should take Connor to a distant safe house, given the heightened surveillance.” He knew Zorian wouldn’t agree but hoped this would alter his psyche, create an opening to his neurochip. Zorian disliked Connor, blaming him for their mother’s death.
Hans probed but could penetrate neither Zorian’s neurochip nor his mind.
The children once more had returned and persisted in getting Zorian’s attention, screaming his name, pulling on his tank top. He gently, telekinetically lifted the wooden and limestone toys—swords, pulse guns, batons, shuriken, and grenades—from their hands, into the air. They yelled and laughed, jumping up to reach them. Zorian lowered the toys to their grasping fingers. “Go on now! Be off! I have business to discuss with Mr. President.” They seemed worried Zorian or even Hans might try to take their toys, preventing them from playing Commandos and Janzers. Screaming, they darted through the crowd.
Zorian turned to Hans, and his smile faded. “No, brother, I’m afraid that isn’t going to work.” He again lifted the garnet gemstones with his power in the ZPF, moving them in circles, counterclockwise between himself and Hans. “If you’re captured, I will rescue you. But if I’m taken,” he tenderly patted his chest, “my life is lost, like all the rest. Many of our comrades have been arrested by the commonwealth over the last three years. We can’t risk more.”
