The Armor of God

by Diego Valenzuela

  How could Ezra feel so strong and so vulnerable at the same time? The thing was still writhing when Ezra got to Nandi’s feet and felt the energy converge in his horns before shooting a vicious blast. It exploded, leaving only a twitching lower half.

  Ezra yelled. Nandi roared. He was scared, drunk with its power.

  He tried to launch another blast, but his core, or his horns, or his arms, wouldn’t respond.

  “Ezra, it’s dead!” Garros said. Ezra didn’t hear. He tried to shoot again, but the warm energy in his back turned into pain.

  “Ezra!” Erin yelled.

  “Stop!” Poole yelled.

  Then, he was on the floor again. Besoe Nandi rolled, ready to charge and shoot and destroy the enemy—

  Quantum Ares stood over him. He had been knocked down by his own teammate. “Blanchard, do you want your core to overheat?!” Garros roared into the communications link, his giant Creux towering over Nandi. “Don’t charge your blasts to the top unless you have to!”

  Still on the floor, still immobilized by the overwhelming sensations of fear and exhilaration, he looked around at the battlefield. Only two Flecks remained alive, both in front of Milos Ravana. All around them, there were piles of dead flesh and pools of brown blood.

  Akiva’s Creux outstretched his arms to the skies, completely unfazed by the Flecks biting and clawing and charging at its formidable body. Milos Ravana’s hands shot a blinding beam of yellow light that stretched upwards to forever. He brought the beams down in one powerful motion, like a hammer. The two remaining Flecks were crushed. Ezra could hear them scream, as if in pain, just before dying. He was glad they were only Flecks; he would be horrified to hear such painful howls from anything else.

  Don’t trust him.

  After their return, Erin gave them twenty minutes to go to the dormitories and shower before debriefing.

  Every moment of the battle, which lasted no longer than one hundred and twenty seconds, replayed in Ezra’s head as he furiously scrubbed his body, ridding it of a taint that wasn’t really there. It was as though his mind had forgotten nothing this time: Every sensation that he couldn’t feel as Nandi, he felt as Ezra. He felt the fear of seeing those monsters snapping their jaws at him. He felt the titillating joy of being strong. He felt the shame of being overtaken by that strength and then being subdued by Garros.

  But most of all, he felt alone. He needed Nandi’s voice in his head.

  Ezra needed to go back down and make amends for his mistakes. He knew he could be a better pilot; he only needed to know what would combat really entail, and now he had, and he was ready.

  “What would you say you did right?” Erin asked to the group in general, but no one answered. Between Erin and Garros, the big screen displayed an image of the lifeless world from which they had just returned. The entire mission had been recorded from Phoenix Atlas’ perspective so they could study its every beat. “Guys, it’s not a trick question. What would you say you did right?”

  “We got rid of the Flash,” Jena said. “Which was . . . our objective?”

  “Yes. That you did, and efficiently,” Erin said, fast-forwarding through some of the recording. “There were fifteen Flecks, and we only had to take care of one, which means you as a unit managed to kill fourteen in under three minutes. Not bad at all for your first battle operation.”

  “Who killed the most?” Akiva asked.

  “Uh . . . It’s hard to tell from the recording, but as far as I could tell, you did. You got six, Blanchard got three, Jena got three and Poole got two,” said Erin, looking at a report in her hand. Akiva smiled, self-satisfied.

  “Considering the power of your Creux, I expect you to do twice as well next time,” said Garros, and looked at the others. The recording was paused just before Erin tore the mound. “Did you notice something you didn’t do right?”

  No one said anything. Ezra knew the answer: he had become caught up in the action, forgot the limits of his Creux. He could have been hurt, could have hurt the others.

  “Not one of you applied any of the team strategies we’ve studied,” Garros finally said. “You all fought for yourselves, never using your team’s abilities to your advantage. Even you, Poole—your Creux is mainly a Support Class, and you killed two of the things instead of protecting your team.”

  “I apologize,” said Poole.

  “Don’t; this is a learning experience,” he said. Ezra thought Garros was taking some of Erin’s space as leader of the CDS. He was imposing his thoughts and giving a lecture Erin was supposed to give. He wondered why she didn’t mind; there was no apparent resentment. “Honestly, it’s very impressive, your instincts. Killing someone with a shield also gets the job done, but that’s not what shields are for. You need to learn to use your Creux’s unique abilities. You need to study them and see how they can interact with your teammates’. I was looking forward to seeing the arrow-and-horns combo. What happened?”

  “I thought about using it,” Jena said. “But the opportunity wasn’t there. I didn’t want to shoot Ezra in the head.”

  “Nandi—not Ezra. And Ezra, what happened with you?”

  “I got carried away,” he said, embarrassed. “It won’t happen again.”

  The lecture continued, and they saw the battle as Erin had seen it. He was surprised to find what a remarkable change such a simple perspective shift made. Nandi’s movements looked awkward and clumsy. His kills didn’t even seem entirely deliberate—he looked like a raging animal throwing kicks at random and coincidentally scoring.

  It was a relief to see that both Jade and Rose looked as graceless as Nandi. The only one that didn’t was Milos Ravana. Akiva had been training almost twice as much as the other three in order to have a full command of his powerful Creux, and it showed—his movements were measured and precise, the versatility and power of his T-Core devastating.

  Ezra knew that he could’ve taken all fifteen Flecks if he wanted.

  Don’t trust him, Nandi had said. Ezra suddenly remembered—it’s one of the things he had forgotten from his time in Nandi. Why was the Minotaur suspicious of Milos Ravana? And why did it terrify Ezra so much?

  When the meeting was over and they were dismissed, Poole discreetly grabbed Ezra’s hand as he attempted to leave the labs. He turned to her and, using only her eyes, she pointed towards the Conference Halls.

  “We shouldn’t waste time.”

  Ezra nodded.

  “Where are you going?” asked Akiva, as he walked out of the room with a smile.

  “Nowhere, just meeting with—with my mom, in the labs,” he lied. “What about you?”

  “I got another training operation out there,” said Akiva. “But I’ll see you guys for dinner?”

  Ezra looked up at Akiva to check his expression and thought that he seemed sincere in his affability. Maybe all the hours he had put into training in Milos Ravana had convinced him that the accident that killed Alice and Susan hadn’t really been his doing—maybe he no longer cared about Ezra and Poole’s investigation uncovering some unflattering truth. “Yes, of course. See you later, Kiv.”

  Akiva smiled again and excitedly ran out of the labs and into the Docking Bay.

  The only one left was Jena, who didn’t approach Ezra and Poole until Kiva was out of sight. She was nervous, picking at the skin of her nail beds and biting her lip. “Guys, are you—what are you really going to do?”

  “I have a meeting—”

  “Don’t lie,” Jena said. “Have you discovered something?”

  Ezra was hesitant to speak. Like Akiva, Jena had made it clear that she didn’t want them to keep investigating. It was Poole who spoke up. “Yes,” she said. “The night before the test, First Lieutenant Nolan had a meeting in one of these rooms.”

  “With who?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Ezra said. “Please don’t tell Akiva.”

  “No, Ezra, I won’t. I want to help you,” she said.

  “What made you
change your mind?”

  Jena looked around to ensure privacy. “Can I tell you guys something, and you don’t tell anyone, at least for now?” They both nodded, and she continued, lowering her voice. “When we were down there, inside the Creux in the dead body . . . my Creux kept talking to me. She said all these things, some of them didn’t make sense.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Ezra. “Nandi spoke a lot too.”

  “Wait, listen. One of the things that I could understand clearly . . . she told me something that scared me a little, and I don’t know if I should say something to Erin. She told me not to trust Milos Ravana.”

  Ezra didn’t know what to do. After Jena revealed that Jade too thought The Armor of God was not trustworthy, he was put in a difficult position. Should he tell that Nandi felt the same way, or should he keep that information to himself?

  Milos was a very powerful weapon—too powerful not to be used, especially now that humanity was beginning to take back some terrain from the laani. Neither Ezra nor Jena were capable enough to truly read the thoughts of their Creux to dig deeper into the matter. Maybe there was a miscommunication; maybe they didn’t know the whole story.

  But he still had his doubts about Milos’ involvement in Alice’s death. Nandi and Jade were only reinforcing those doubts.

  Poole had sat by the computer terminal in Conference Hall B while Ezra filled Jena in on Alice’s notebook, the drawings, and the clues that brought them to this room. Then, Jena and Ezra discussed the earlier operation, trying to better prepare for the next, which was only two days away. Despite the uncertainty created by Jade, Jena seemed to share Ezra’s excitement and anticipation. Poole was still impossible to read.

  “Ezra Blanchard, do you remember the date?”

  “One day before the incident; it was a Friday. Their meeting was at 1930 hours.”

  Her fingers hovered over the keyboard with the grace of a piano player, swiftly clicking the keys, never making a mistake. “This meeting room was booked at that time. It was booked by Dr. Yuri Logan, who met with . . . yes, with Alice Nolan and—oh.”

  “And?”

  “It was your mother,” Poole said and invited him to look into the computer screen. “Dr. T. Blanchard.”

  Ezra took a step back, looking at the names on the screen, and Jena joined them. “But my mom—she didn’t arrive in Zenith until a week later.”

  “What do you suppose she talked about with Alice?”

  “I don’t know. Something that scared the hell out of her,” Ezra said.

  “There are database searches,” said Poole. “During the meeting they looked into the Zenith and Roue Army information database for some records. There’s a map to Kerek.”

  “Kerek?” asked Jena

  “Another domed city like Roue—well, it was a city, but it was taken over by the laani a few decades ago. My crewmember, Dr. Mustang, he was born there. Why would they search for a map to Kerek?”

  “I don’t know, Ezra Blanchard,” said Poole. “They looked for some other data: Milos Ravana, Fall of Terria, Dahlia Mizrahi, and . . . something called the Helena Fork.”

  “What’s that?” he asked, and scratched at the skin of his nose, which was still tender.

  “I don’t know, Ezra Blanchard,” she said, typing into the computer. “I don’t have access to their database, and the local network doesn’t return any results for that.”

  “The Helena Fork,” repeated Jena. “It sounds like a place, doesn’t it? Like a junction, maybe of a train or a road.”

  “That night, after the meeting, Alice was concerned about the future of Zenith, maybe of all of humankind. Whatever this Helena Fork is, and whatever they’re looking for in Kerek, they are related,” Ezra said. “I need to talk to my mother.”

  “You said Alice doodled some stuff during the meeting. Maybe that was the Fork?”

  “No,” Poole said, shutting off the computer. “It was an isosceles triangle with circles over each angle. And one of them—”

  “Was blacked out? The one at the top?” Jena finished for her, drawing the shape with her fingertip on the table’s surface. “Akiva draws it all the time. On his notebooks and books. He says it’s something he saw on Milos Ravana. His training has been really different to ours, much more hands-on. He told me last week they’ve taken him down to the docking bay to see The Armor of God in person. He said that drawing is engraved all over the Creux—on its heel, its chest, its back. I don’t think it’s on any of the other Creuxen.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Jena said. “Maybe one of the crewmembers does.”

  Ezra, Jena and Poole walked out of the conference room and walked towards the docking chambers. Akiva was deployed in another training operation, so his crewmembers would be there. “His military crewmember, Kat—she used to be part of Nandi’s crew. If she knows anything, she’ll tell me,” said Ezra.

  They walked down the long hallway that had been heavily damaged during the explosion. The walls were decorated by black ribbons, tributes from Zenith employees and pilots in memory of the four who lost their lives. Seeing them and remembering the moment of the explosion still made his legs feel weak.

  There were voices coming from Docking Chamber 2, the one assigned to Milos Ravana. The three of them approached carefully and listened in. “He’s still at over 95 percent. Wait, no, hold on—what was that bleep in the synch field?” said one of the voices.

  “Nothing.” He recognized Kat’s husky voice. “Just a reflex. He’s doing fine.”

  The door was ajar, and Ezra slowly pushed it open. “Excuse me, Kat?”

  There were four people inside the room and they all reacted with the same surprise and panic when they saw Ezra, Poole, and Jena at the door. “Blanchard, what the hell are you doing here?” Kat shoved the trio out of the docking chamber. “You can’t be here!”

  She slammed the door shut. Ezra had been in others’ docking chambers before and the crewmembers had never been so secretive. “What the hell was that about?”

  When he turned around, Jena and Poole were almost all the way to the end of the hallway, back in the labs. He joined them.

  “Ezra Blanchard, didn’t you see?”

  “See what?” Ezra asked, confused. “I didn’t see anything! Kat shoved us out!”

  “You really didn’t notice? Has that thing on your nose made you dull?” Jena protested.

  “You don’t need to make me feel stupid, just tell me,” said Ezra.

  “Milos Ravana was deployed, Ezra Blanchard, and Akiva was piloting. But didn’t you notice that there was no synchronization capsule in the chamber?”

  Chapter 16

  The Golden String

  “Why can’t I talk to my mother? It feels like I need to make an appointment with her,” said Ezra.

  “Well . . . you do,” replied Dr. Yuri.

  “She said I could visit anytime.”

  “She was wrong,” the gangly man said in a way that made him sound impatient—he wasn’t as good a counselor as Susan had been. “She’s an important woman, Ezra. I believe she met with Governor Heath and General Adams earlier this week; she could still be with them. What is this about? Anything you can share with me?”

  “Not really,” said Ezra and sighed. “Is she even here?”

  Dr. Yuri shook his head. “She was here for your battle operation but left soon after. She’ll be back in Zenith in a day or two. What do you need her for?” He shook his head and removed his glasses. “I’m sorry—that was a stupid question.”

  Ezra hesitated for a moment. “Have you ever heard of the Helena Fork?”

  Dr. Yuri cocked his head and raised an eyebrow. “What is that?”

  “I was hoping you’d know,” Ezra said.

  “I don’t listen to popular music, sorry; only the classics,” he said. “So how do you feel about the operation?”

  Ezra only spoke because he knew he was, in a way, obligated to. “Proud, but also embarrasse
d. I did better than expected, but I don’t like how . . .” He looked for a word to reflect his feelings.

  “How you felt content? Comfortable?” Dr. Yuri found it for him. The man had spoken to countless other pilots, and could easily predict Ezra’s feelings. “You’re embarrassed by not feeling guilt in killing Flecks?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know they’re just Flecks, but they looked too much like animals—like living things. I think I remember two of them screaming when Akiva killed them, but I’m not sure if it did happen or I’m just making it up.”

  “It’s an understandable feeling,” Dr. Yuri said. “I showed you Subject Edward to make it easier. Seeing what those Flecks you’re fighting can do to an earthly body made it easier for you to understand why they need to be eliminated, didn’t it?”

  “It scared me,” said Ezra. He still resented their trek to the research labs.

  “It’s important for you to question those things, Ezra—to set your mind on the act of killing, because even a microscopic organism can be difficult to kill for some. Did you think about what I asked you down there?”

  “Too much,” Ezra said. “And yes, I think killing something like that would be a mercy.”

  Dr. Yuri smiled in a strange, self-satisfied way. “I’m glad you understand.”

  “Doctor . . . you asked me to imagine Subject Edward could have been someone I knew, someone I loved. Was that true?”

  The man removed his glasses again and looked at Ezra with strange intensity. “Would you want me to lie to you, if it was?” Ezra shook his head. “Are you sure? You could be fighting inside Subject Edward soon, in another one of your missions. Would you really want to know if it’s someone you loved? Killing the Flecks keeping it alive would result in its death. What if we discover a cure for the mutation? What if it could return to what it was before?”

  “Why are you telling me these things?”

  “I’m not trying to torture you, Ezra. It’s your duty to go out and kill those things. You have a right to know what your actions could cause,” Dr. Yuri replied, calmly. “You came here as a kid, and we had to keep some things from you, like how we keep the existence of the Creux from the citizens of Roue, because they’re still not ready to accept their existence. It’s been two months: do you think you can handle the truth behind what you’re doing here in Zenith?”