Read The Restoration of Flaws (The Phantom of the Earth Book 5) for Free Online

something in his eyes she didn’t want to discover but that she didn’t fear.
    “You’re a supreme scientist,” she said, “a great mind in a great commonwealth, and a great deceiver in a time of turmoil—”
    “You speak like a neophyte who thinks she knows all, but you haven’t lived long enough to understand the commonwealth’s troubles. The conversions that I’ve achieved have never been matched and never will be. That’s not deceit, that’s reality—”
    “What about my family? My mother?”
    “The whore.” Antosha caught Oriana’s wrist before her hand could whip his face. He tsk ed and squeezed her arm. She thought he might break it before he released her. “In your eagerness to unearth my past, did you discover Vernon Lebrizzi?”
    Verne, the trader from Navita, the illegal orphan developed into a phenomenon performer in the Harpoons last year by House Variscan—and an apparent romantic interest of her mother’s. “I know all about Verne—”
    “Do you?”
    “I won’t participate in this commonwealth mission.”
    “Oh, yes , you will.”
    “I’ll go to the Office of the Chancellor if I must!”
    “The chancellor might not want to listen to you.” Antosha lifted a Granville sphere from his pocket. He set it upon a golden pedestal atop the balustrade. Above and around it, a blurred hologram formed. “Madam Champion, in your research, did you find … this?”
    Millions of Beimenians roamed on towerlike islands with faint electric light emanating between them. Janzers on airborne rocketcycles weaved around them.
    “Let me clear your view.”
    The holographic rendition zoomed to Lord Nero Silvana in chains, bandages over part of his head. Oriana recognized his facial features and what was left of his mohawk. Minister Noria Furongielle had showed her holograms of him and her father, and told her about their development in House Variscan.
    “What’s this?” she said.
    Antosha waved his hand as if he were a Marshlandic magician. The hologram shifted to a line of Beimenians in bodysuits who trudged beneath stalactites aglow with holographic burning salamanders. Thousands and thousands of them made their way to a row of elevators where Janzers paired with strange birds stood. The image zoomed in on a man, his head shaved, his eyes dark, his face drawn. Surely, this man was her father. She recognized his image, but what had he turned into?
    Her father fell to the ground and writhed and gagged. Oriana covered her face with her hands. She wanted to cry; she wanted to scream.
    Then she examined the Granville sphere. He’s a master of deception, and I mustn’t let him get in my head , she thought . She blocked his access to her neurochip the way she would at times block her twin during development. Antosha didn’t react or move. Nor did he alter the world he’d rendered.
    Brody kicked and screamed on the ground, while the strange birds, held on carbyne leashes by the Janzers, screeched and plunged forward and chomped their massive beaks.
    Oriana shivered. She wouldn’t let herself cry, but the world seemed as if it collapsed around her.
    Antosha withdrew the holographic imagery and revolved around Oriana.
    “Yes,” he said, “you will help Dr. Shrader recover so that we can learn about his past and the synthesis of the Reassortment Strain. You’ll visit with Captain Holcombe’s team and me and your brother today. If you’re successful, I will lobby the chancellor to allow your father and his striker to keep their lives, a reward for your service.”
    He strode back to the suite’s archway entrance upon the terrace, where he turned and said, “Also, my dear,” wagging his forefinger, “you won’t be permitted to see or speak to Nathan Storm until this mission is complete.”
    Oriana screamed and rushed up the marble stairs. She spun with her swiftest roundhouse, but he caught her leg and twisted her ankle. She heard it break when he dropped his other elbow into it. She clenched her