“There were wagers?” Ezra asked, wondering who it was that would be jealous of Ezra’s result.
“Among the other pilots, yes. Hold on, look.”
AKIVA MISSINGDATA DAVENPORT
HEALTH OF TISSUE: IDEAL
BLOOD TYPE: ALPHA
BLOOD CLASS: D
MATCHING CREUX:
The computer loaded.
It kept loading.
All eyes went to Alice when thirty seconds passed and the matching Creux was not displayed, but she seemed to be just as confused as the rest of them. Alice looked back at the observation deck and raised her hands, asking if something was wrong.
Then the computer shut down and rebooted.
After a tense and confusing minute, Akiva’s information appeared again and finally . . .
CREUX MODEL NUMBER C-02. CODENAME: MILOS RAVANA
ALSO KNOWN AS: THE ARMOR OF GOD
Chapter 6
Assimilation
Akiva was taken away and for the rest of them, there was waiting. Then they waited some more, always in silence. What did it mean for Akiva to be matched with Milos Ravana? Was it a death sentence, like Dr. Yuri had suggested during the orientation lecture?
Ezra was too afraid to ask.
When enough hours had passed, Alice finally joined Ezra, Jena, and Poole in the lab, three heavy-looking bags in her hand. Her face was unreadable to specifics, but Ezra could tell that she was upset. “Don’t worry about Davenport,” she said. “The machines can be wrong. There will be tests to make sure everything went right, but nothing will happen to him.”
“What’s—what’s in the bag?” Jena asked.
“Your welcome packets. They were supposed to be delivered in your dormitories, but you were also supposed to be with the others, having a welcome party right now, so I might as well give them to you right here.”
Garros had actually meant what he said, it seemed, and a party was supposed to be thrown for the new arrivals. Ezra had hoped he would have that chance to get to know the others better, so it was hard to hear there would be no such thing for them.
Alice peeked inside one of the bags. “Okay this one’s for Poole,” she said and handed it to her. “This one’s for . . . Jade Arjuna, that’s Crescent. So here’s yours, Ezra. Besoe Nandi. Welcome aboard.”
He took his bag from her. Just a quick glance told him there were three books (the one at the front was called ARMED FORCES OF ROUE // ZENITH HEADQUARTERS // MEMBER & EMPLOYEE HANDBOOK), two cards, a sheet of paper that looked like a letter or a memo, and two patches of different sizes. He grabbed the smaller patch and looked at it.
It was the logo of his Creux: BESOE NANDI, written in playful red letters over the abstract shape of a bull’s head.
“It goes on your right breast,” she said and poked the empty spot on Ezra’s uniform. “Confirm you have all the following items please: one welcome letter from Dr. Yuri Logan and Dr. Eliza Mizrahi; two Creux insignia patches: one for the chest and one for the back of your uniforms; one Zenith handbook; one copy of ‘From First to Omega: What We Know About The Creux’ by Dr. Dahlia Mizrahi; one blank journal; one dormitory keycard; one ID card. You all set?”
“Yes, ma’am,” they all replied after checking the contents of their bags.
“All right. Go to your dormitories and get changed for dinner and drinks. The others are getting desperate, so be quick about it.”
“Drinks? What about Kiva, ma’am?” Jena asked.
“Kiva will join us when his situation is sorted out. I talked with Dr. Yuri and I’m not going to deny you the pleasure of the one welcome celebration you get. I recommend you bring your patches to dinner. It’s tradition to have them placed during the celebration.”
Ezra looked at Jena and they smiled at each other. The idea of being celebrated was so thrilling, they almost forgot Kiva’s situation. Poole, however, didn’t seem interested and appeared to be in dire need of sleep.
He didn’t expect her to be much fun at a party anyway.
A sense of great elation filled his belly as he, Jena, and Poole made their way toward the dormitories, following color-coded signals on the walls. He had expected to meet with the other pilots in the dormitories, but they ran across no one; maybe the celebration had already started and everyone was already in the dining hall.
His sense of excitement increased as they finally reached the dormitories, which were located inside a completely separate three-story building.
The bottom floor was largely empty, consisting mostly of what could be called a recreation room. There was a folded gaming table, colorful couches, tables topped with magazines or books, and vending machines full of refreshments and junk food.
“All three of you will find your dormitories in the third floor,” Alice had said, so they took two flights of stairs to find a dizzyingly colorful hallway.
The dormitories were not assigned by pilots but by Creux. Down the long hallway, there were seven doors on the left and six on the right, each one displaying the colorful logos of all the Creuxen, starting from C-14: ABSOLUTE OMEGA (Alice’s) immediately to the left, and ending with the empty C-26: NEON INDRA at the very end.
C-15: ROSE XIBALBA, Poole’s Creux, was the first door on the right. She stopped before it to stare at the pretty pink emblem on the door. With one shaky hand, she inserted the keycard onto a slot and the door hissed open, sliding into the wall. It was dark inside. Poole stepped in.
“I’ll see you later,” she said, and her door slid shut.
“Is she okay?” Ezra asked.
“I don’t know,” Jena replied. “All I want to know is what will happen with Akiva. Maybe it’s worrying her too.”
“I’m sure he’ll be all right,” he replied with a smile Jena returned. “Let’s check out our rooms.”
Four doors down, they came upon theirs, and were delighted to find out that they would be neighbors. On the right, the bull’s horns emblem of BESOE NANDI, with the added words THE MINOTAUR in red underneath.
At the opposite side of the hallway, Jena’s door and her Creux’s emblem: C-22: JADE ARJUNA. “It’s so beautiful,” she said, touching the green image with her hand. Beautiful it was, and appropriately feminine, as opposed to the brutish and intimidating nature of Ezra’s, which didn’t match him at all. “I guess I’ll see you in a few,” she said.
He smiled again, and the excitement in his stomach rose to an almost painful extreme. Ezra turned around and pushed his keycard into the slot. The door slid into the wall, and he stepped inside.
The room was divided in three sections: a large master bedroom for Ezra, a full bathroom, and a smaller bedroom with two empty bunk beds. His initial thought was that it was a guest room, but it was far more likely that it was the sleeping quarters of his crew. He was glad his room was separate—he’d prefer the privacy.
The whole place was made and decorated to emulate the Creux’s colors: red, and blue, with touches of silver and yellow. Even the bedspread and the lamp on his desk were painted with these concordant hues. There was a childish charm to the whole setup. He liked it.
Hurrying up to join the others, whom he was anxious to meet and maybe share a drink with, he took a shower and got dressed in his uniform. Almost forgetting to take the Minotaur patches for his uniform, he walked outside to find Poole waiting outside his door.
“Ah, hello,” she said. “Blanchard, I—”
“Were you waiting for me?” he said as the door locked itself into place behind him.
“No, I just got here. I didn’t want to go down there by myself.”
“All right. Have you heard from Akiva?”
She shook her head. Ezra wondered if he should knock on Jena’s door so they could get going together. “I’m sure he will join us later. Would you mind escorting me?”
“What about Jena?” Ezra asked.
“She already left.”
That was disappointing. He couldn’t expect Jena to wait for him if she was anxious about the celebration
, but it would have been nice to walk in next to her. Poole offered him her arm and he reluctantly took it, uninterested in the possible romantic implications but not wanting to appear rude.
“So is your room also drenched in your Creux’s colors?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “Yours?”
“I don’t like it. By the way, Blanchard I’m sorry I was rude to you. Sometimes it’s hard for me to make new friends, and I had been a bit lonely in the base. I would like us to be friends, if that’s okay with you,” she said, and he found the contrast between her behavior now and yesterday somewhat off-putting.
“Yeah. We’re going to be working together. I think it’d be good to—”
“So why did you fail the Moreau?” she interrupted him.
He didn’t know what to respond, so he remained quiet as they reached the stairs and began walking down the two flights to the ground floor.
“I know you didn’t really fail. You’re a Blanchard. I didn’t know that. I was wondering what your strategy was. There are small bonuses with every promotion, so maybe you wanted to capitalize on that. Or did you just want Crescent to tutor you?”
“Poole, I think you got it wrong. I just didn’t—”
“Ezra?” he heard Jena’s voice yell from upstairs. “You there?”
Ezra immediately stopped. “I’m down here!”
Jena came running down the stairs and joined them, looking beautiful despite the uniform that mostly hid her body. She had done her hair in a tail, an arrangement Ezra hadn’t yet seen in her that really flattered the shape of her head and her beautiful swan-like neck. “No, just got out of my room—it’s so pretty. All the colors. Apparently we share dormitories with the crew.”
“Yes. We will,” Poole said, letting go of Ezra’s arm.
Jena looked at Poole with a smile that told Ezra she could pick up something that maybe he couldn’t. Why had Poole lied about her? He wanted to believe his optimistic instinct that she had just made a mistake.
“Let’s go, then,” Jena said, and they walked together to the dining room.
When they walked in, the celebration was well on its way, making them think it was more an excuse for the others to drink, rather than to celebrate the new arrivals. They had been standing at the doorway for several seconds before they were even noticed, and it was Erin who with a loud drunken scream let everyone else know that the object—or rather, the reason—for their festivities had finally arrived. Everyone joined Erin with a loud happy roar, and Garros came out of nowhere to pick Ezra up easily and put him over his massive shoulder like a wounded soldier.
“Fellow tank!” Ezra heard Garros say as the huge man took him to the counter of the dining hall, where a colorful assortment of drinks waited to be consumed. “We gon’ get tanked, son!”
Oh, please no, Ezra thought. He wanted a celebration, certainly wanted to befriend the other pilots and crew, but didn’t want to get “tanked”: an expression he had never heard but was sure he could deduce the meaning of.
Garros put him down and placed a small glass of a red liquid in his hand. He smelled like a gutter flowing with beer, but there was some actual affection in his eyes—camaraderie, maybe. “Do it man! Do it!”
Ezra looked around at the expectant faces, which included Jena, then at the drink. Was this allowed? The music was loud, the people were even louder; there was no way this party was happening in secret, so did it mean it was—?
The drink went down his throat with a sweet sting and a strong aftertaste. Another roar. Ezra could feel its effects almost immediately.
He liked drinking, but didn’t have too much experience with it; he was sure his tolerance would be minimal, so when Garros put another drink in his hand, clicked it with one of his own, and downed it, Ezra knew he would be in trouble.
After that, the night began to become a blur he regretted the next day. He had heated and friendly conversations many of the other pilots, shared drinks, family histories, and was receptive to advice, tips, and even what felt like flirtatious looks from Erin.
There were two people with whom he spent most of the party: first, Garros, who seemed to be extremely excited about having “another tank” in the team, as after the destruction of a Creux called Ursa Atomis, Garros’—Quantum Ares, of whom he talked as though he was talking about his best friend—had been left as the only Tank-class Creux.
“But not anymore, man. Now The Minotaur’s come home, man,” Garros had drunkenly repeated many times. He was one to repeat himself, also asking Ezra “Where’s your friend—the one who didn’t drink the shake?”
“Dammit, Parks, stop asking,” Alice had said at some point. “I already told you Akiva got matched with Milos Ravana. He’s still in the labs.”
As the leader of all the pilots, Alice’s presence commanded respect, even from the gigantic Garros, who had repeatedly laughed at Akiva’s fate, saying “The Shake, man. We told him it’d be bad luck. I distinctly remember Tessa warning him!”
The second person with whom he spent most of his time was Alice herself. Ezra tried to stand up straight and avoid looking drunk in front of her, but she never seemed to question his behavior and more than once encouraged him to have another drink, assuring him that it would be the last chance in a long time that he would have this type of fun.
Sometime in the middle of the celebration, Ezra’s inebriated mind had come up with one strange thought that appeared to be extremely convincing: He was happy.
More so than any other time he could remember, he was happy: happy to be an undeniable part of something big; happy to be regarded with respect from older and bigger and smarter people; happy to finally visualize what his life would be like.
His mother’s words returned to his mind: “All this pain you’re feeling will disappear in Zenith, once you know exactly what that new life is going to be about.”
You were right, Mom.
“So who is it,” Ezra asked Alice at some point of the night. “Who is it you told me wanted to pilot my Creux?”
“Sergeant Barnes,” she had replied, inviting him to take a seat. She appeared to be tired. “You know that ring he uses? In his nose? Yeah, he’s just a big old fan of Nandi.”
“Nandi—so why is it called The Minotaur?”
“Well that’s just the nickname Zenith gave it. You’ll see. Nandi’s big, bulky, has these two huge horns. He’s a badass.”
“But how do you know?” Ezra asked. “I thought they had been vacant.”
“Oh they haven’t been piloted, but we study the Creux enough to extrapolate everything about them. We’ve seen all twenty-six Creuxen in action in simulations. We know how all of them work even before we find their matches.”
“So can you tell me about Milos? Why isn’t Kiva celebrating with us?”
“He’ll be here soon,” she said and turned around to look at the other pilots. Garros was drunkenly dancing with Erin, picking her up and tossing her into the air like a child. Ezra thought Garros was too drunk to be tossing people around; someone could get hurt. “But Milos is a bit of a touchy subject. Milos has taken more lives than any other Creux. There seems to be something vicious about it—like it wants to kill. I don’t know. There’s a process called Assimilation—no, wait. I shouldn’t talk about that right now.”
“No, please do,” Ezra said.
“Sorry, Ezra. It’s a bummer you’ll learn about when you’re not drinking. The point is that Milos has been matched with four others, just like Akiva was matched today. All four of them died the moment they tried to pilot the damn thing.”
“So what’s going to happen to Akiva?”
“Dr. Mizrahi and Dr. Logan will test the crap out of him. There’s always a chance the four other matches were errors in the computers, and that Akiva is the real match. He’ll train with you and Crescent and Poole. If every test he takes confirms he’s a match and can pilot Milos safely, it will be a bright day in here because Milos is the most powerful thing you can imagine. So powerful,
it’s the only reason he wasn’t destroyed after killing so many people. If there’s even a slight chance he can be piloted, we need him here.”
“What if he can’t pilot him?”
“He’ll stay here in Zenith, but not as a pilot. He’ll probably be trained as a crewmember for another Creux. He can’t leave and go back to being a civilian.”
“Who can’t leave?” He heard Kiva’s voice come from behind them like he was cued.
“There you are,” Alice said and got up to greet him. “Want something to drink?”
“Please,” he said, just as he was noticed by the rest of the pilots, who rushed to greet him, chanting RA! VA! NA! in what, considering the Creux’s grim past, seemed in poor taste.
RA! VA! NA! MI! LOS! RA! VA! NA!
Kiva didn’t seem to mind. He looked tired, but still accepted a drink from Erin’s hand and a big hug from Jena. Kiva raised his glass for a cheer and downed it.
Ezra woke up the following day feeling like he had been thrown from a moving train. His head was being pounded by an invisible sledgehammer, and every hit was made worse by the incessant knocking on the door.
An instinct of panic told him he had overslept. He hadn’t been told what it was he had to be up for—or, in a more terrifying thought, didn’t remember it. Looking outside told him it was less than an hour after dawn, which put him at the end of only about three hours of sleep.
Ezra lumbered towards the bathroom, splashed water on his face and hair to try to appear less like a corpse, and opened the door. Akiva was waiting at the other side.
“Wow, you look awful. Oh, look: My room is bigger,” he said and walked inside. “I’m here to warn you. In ten minutes, Barnes is coming to take us for some training. I’m not sure what it is, but you better be ready. I already told Jena.”
The Armor of God Page 8
