The Armor of God

by Diego Valenzuela

  “Dr. Logan wants to see you.”

  “Why did they send you?” he asked, and they entered the laboratories.

  “Besoe Nandi is in lockdown, and we don’t know yet for how long.” It hurt to hear that; Ezra had thought that he wouldn’t be able to pilot Nandi for a long time, if ever, but it was still difficult to hear his suspicions confirmed. “They’re going to have new responsibilities for now.”

  Guilt burnt through him again; he hadn’t considered how his actions had affected Sergeant Barnes and Dr. Mustang.

  They stopped a few feet away from Dr. Yuri’s office and she grabbed his shoulder. “Blanchard: I’m leaving you here, but before I do, there’s something I need to say: We are going to be okay. Your mother is working on a plan, and I suggest you do everything she says.”

  Her words remained like a cold wind in the empty hallway even after she walked away, her ponytail swinging behind her head. There had to be a reason why she was being cryptic, and imagined it was directly connected to the note he had received earlier.

  What was this plan, and whom did it involve?

  When Ezra opened the door to Dr. Yuri’s study, where he had taken all his counseling sessions since Susan’s death, he found the man sitting in the big red chair behind his desk. The room stank.

  “Dr. Yuri,” he said and waited for the man to notice him. It became immediately apparent that he was drunk and that he had spent some time crying. “You summoned me?”

  “Did I?” the man said, and shook his head before inviting him in. Ezra stepped inside and closed the door behind him. “Well, take a seat; I must have something to say to you.”

  Ezra took the comfy chair at the other side of the drunken doctor. He looked even weaker than he usually did, his lab coat almost empty in the shoulders and arms. A short glass sat on his desk. “What happened to your face, sir?” Ezra asked, looking at the swollen purple flesh under the man’s eye.

  “I figured you wouldn’t remember,” he said and laughed, before producing a bottle of liquor and another glass.

  He poured both and offered one to Ezra, which he immediately declined.

  “Go ahead; I know you like it,” Dr. Yuri said, laughing again and signaled at his nose ring before taking a swig he didn’t enjoy. “You’re just like Alice. We shared a drink, right here, just like this, the night before the explosion. She also refused at first, but then . . .” The man pushed the glass towards Ezra again. He took it and pretended to drink, but didn’t let the bitter liquid past his lips. “You gave me this new bruise, little boy.”

  Ezra shook his head.

  “You did. The moment you hatched from the Egg after the last mission. You went straight towards me and socked me in the face, like I was to blame for anything. You hit hard for such a little boy.” The man took another drink, and something corroded at Ezra’s insides, like it had been him drinking the liquid.

  Why was he calling him that? He had to know it hurt him.

  “I’m very sorry, sir,” he said, looking his fist, finally noticing a certain detail of pain in his knuckles, the kind left behind after connecting a punch. “Why did you call me here, sir?”

  “Your mother told you about Proposition Tomorrow. You know what’s at stake,” he said, and Ezra nodded.

  The man finished his drink, then finished Ezra’s, before opening his drawer again.

  But what came out of the drawer wasn’t the bottle: It was a pistol. The drunken man put it on the desk with a trembling hand, muzzle pointed vaguely at Ezra. “Sir, what are you doing? I thought only military personnel were allowed to carry weapons in Zenith.”

  “They are. This was my father’s—he shot himself with this very gun when I was about your age. I never really figured out why.” He grabbed the gun, finger on the trigger, and pointed it to his temple, laughing.

  Ezra got up. “Sir, stop it!”

  The man laughed and put the black and grey pistol back on the desk. “My father was military; I’m scientific. I think it’s obvious I don’t intend to follow in such a dumb man’s footsteps—this is just a reminder, little boy,” the man said, his voice increasingly slurred. “For me. One of the last things he—my dad—told me before blowing his head open was this: ‘tomorrow comes.’ I didn’t know if that was supposed to make me feel better after his death, giving me some kind of hope by reminding me that my life was not over. . . or if he was warning me about ‘tomorrow,’ like: ‘I’m doing this, little Yuri, because tomorrow will come.’ He made tomorrow sound like a monster that would come and find me.”

  The man laughed the laugh of a drunken fool.

  “And speaking of monsters, here’s something you wanted to know,” the man said and slid a document towards Ezra. Dr. Yuri had gone through the trouble of highlighting some lines in the dense report. All he could read, his eyes going from the document to the gun, was ‘Patient: Leonardo Crescent,’ ‘assuming the role of Subject Edward,’ and ‘fifteen days past Griever’s Point.’

  Ezra wanted to vomit. “Sir, I’d like to leave now.”

  “Of course you would. You’re still not ready, but it doesn’t matter anymore,” the man said and returned the gun, and the document, to his drawer. “What do you think we can learn from this pistol of my father’s, Ezra Patrich Blanchard? I think I figured it out: what my dad wanted to say was that it doesn’t matter what we do today, because tomorrow comes.”

  Ezra didn’t wait to be dismissed. Taking advantage of the man’s drunkenness, he escaped Dr. Yuri’s office, leaving him laughing alone.

  He stood motionless for several minutes in the labs, trying to understand what he had just witnessed, what he had just read. Jena’s father could not be Subject Edward; Jena’s father had been incinerated. He had seen the ashes himself. The document had to be a forgery. Ezra refused to believe otherwise.

  What could be happening that was driving Dr. Yuri to such madness? His mother had already let him know that if Proposition Tomorrow (a word he’d never see the same way again) failed, Zenith would cease to exist, and Roue would be left defenseless against the laani infected. They would become another memory like Kerek: just a scar in the form of an empty, ruined city.

  Kerek. The Helena Fork. Proposition Tomorrow.

  There is a plan.

  “I’m trying to remember the last time I saw you that you didn’t look completely miserable,” a voice brought him back to the labs. Ezra found Tessa standing by the door to the main hall, a smile on her face. “When you got here you seemed scared. During training you seemed insecure. Even after your successful test you had the Blues. The other day I found you crying outside the Director’s office. Now you’re here, looking like you’re surrounded by the walking dead. Have you ever been happy?”

  “Tessa . . . ,” he said, and an impulse he could barely control sent him to her arms. She had been a great comfort before the Shattering, and she was such again. Despite all her rhetorical questions she knew what Ezra was going through, so she hugged him back and put a kiss on his cheek. “I don’t know what to do,” he said.

  “That’s okay.” She caressed his hair. “You’ll know what to do when you have to do it. There have been crises in Zenith before, and at the end it always stands. I don’t blame you for anything.”

  “I’m so sorry,” he said and took a step back from her, ashamed. “I feel like I don’t even know you.”

  She smiled; it was so sweet on her face full of dimples. “Sometimes the solutions to our problems come at the end, without warning, without us knowing anything about them until they arrive.”

  Her words of comfort managed to make him smile, almost managed to make him forget the horrors of his reality.

  She took a step towards him and kissed him on the lips. She smelled of herbs. Her mouth opened to welcome his affections, and he gave them up to her.

  Solutions come at the end, he thought, as he walked back to the main hall holding Tessa’s hand. “I’m supposed to be back in my room,” he said.

  “I know; I’m
taking you there, if you don’t mind.”

  There was a combination of their sweat linking their hands together when he walked into the dormitories, trying to ignore some of the pilots’ angry, accusative eyes.

  The bull’s head of Besoe Nandi’s emblem on his dormitory door saw them kiss again. Ezra thanked her for her comforting words and entered the room.

  Inside, a group of four had congregated: Garros, Barnes, Kat, and Erin were waiting for him.

  Chapter 19

  A Tower of Fire

  That night, Ezra began to understand that there were plots being woven around him, plots that streamed from much grander schemes: plots only comprehended by the most determined minds, the kind that would benefit from even the most unfortunate and unforeseen circumstances.

  The group settled around Ezra’s bed to talk, but he couldn’t pay attention; his eyes would impulsively go to the camera staring down at them. “Don’t worry about the camera, Ezra—we’re invisible.”

  “You weren’t summoned by Dr. Yuri,” said Garros. “We had to drag you out of here to . . . tinker with the camera’s output. As of now, it’s only feeding looping video and audio of you sleeping and moving around the room.”

  “I apologize for the lies. All of them,” said Kat. “But you’ll understand why it’s important soon.”

  “I don’t like being lied to,” he said. “You should’ve told us the truth, not lie to our faces about making us kill things that used to be human beings.”

  “No,” said Garros. “Poole figured it out weeks ago, so did Akiva. You were going to find out when everyone agreed you were ready, and you obviously weren’t. These protocols exist for a reason, Blanchard. There are more important things at stake than your damn feelings getting hurt.”

  Ezra gritted his teeth. He could never find the courage to argue with Garros, so it was fortunate that he didn’t expect argument.

  “This is all Director’s Blanchard’s doing, Ezra,” Erin said. “Poole told us about what you found in Alice’s notebook, about the meeting she had with Dr. Logan and your mother the night before the accident.”

  “Where is she?” Ezra asked, looking at the horned helmet he had gotten as a gift on his first night in Zenith. It rested on Garros’ head, giving a strange tint of levity to the atmosphere that had invaded his dormitory.

  “She’s playing her part back in Roue, spearheading the campaign to keep Zenith going, but you should know that the plan she put together has to go on regardless of how Proposition Tomorrow turns out.”

  “What is this damned plan?” Ezra asked, grabbing the horned helmet from Garros’ head. “You keep talking about it, leaving messages under my door, but I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about! What does it have to do with Alice?”

  “Keep your damn voice down!” growled Barnes, effortlessly intimidating with his rumbling bass. “Remember no one is supposed to know we’re here!”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Your mother.” Erin had taken the role of a leader in a way beyond her elected status; it was a newly acquired confidence everyone else in the room appeared to respect. “She wants you to be part of something, so you need to tell us if you want to be—”

  “Of course I do!”

  “Cool your jets,” Garros said. “Joining means hearing a good part of the whole story, Blanchard, things most people even in Zenith don’t know. It’s going to put you in the very difficult position we’re all tangled in right now. It involves going against the government and the army, and risking our lives. You don’t have to do this.”

  “Just let me in. Please,” he said, not giving the matter the consideration it probably deserved.

  Erin took a deep breath and nodded. “All right then. Director Blanchard has a hypothesis, a very solid one: she thinks that things are changing with the laani, and that this change involves a greater threat than they’ve ever posed before. The strange behavior of the Flecks during the last mission gave her some credence: she thinks that the laani are no longer interested in infecting what’s left of humankind. Their plans have changed . . . or rather, advanced.”

  “What? How?”

  “I’ll explain like she explained it to us: when the laani got here, it wasn’t as a cloud of contaminants, or a bunch of Flecks; it was a much, much larger single living being. It dissolved upon impact, and the remains began mutating life on the planet, creating the Flecks we’ve been fighting out there. We don’t know what this thing was exactly, as the fallout of its arrival made it impossible to study its original form. We know it’s an alien parasite that found a livable home on this planet. There have been many names for this original being, but Dahlia Mizrahi called it Lys. Before she died, soon after the Creux began appearing and Zenith was created, Dr. Mizrahi began to notice strange patterns in how the laani acted, and predicted the exact behavior we’re seeing right now.”

  “You mean in the last mission? I saw them walking away from the swell—,” Ezra’s throat closed up. “From Roue, I mean. What were they doing?”

  “The Flecks are part of something much bigger and much more powerful, Blanchard,” Garros said, and paused, scratching the short hairs growing on his bald head, like sweat was making it itch. “What Dahlia Mizrahi predicted, what your mother is confirming, is that this god, this alien . . . ‘Lys’ . . . is putting itself back together.”

  Ezra squeezed the plastic horns harder, bending the material. “What happens if—?”

  “If it does? If Lys returns to its original form, it won’t matter if Zenith is still around: the Creux alone won’t be enough to fight it, and it will mean the end,” said Erin. “I know it sounds bad, but Dr. Blanchard and Dr. Mizrahi are sure that there is a way to defend ourselves, even if we can’t stop Lys from being reborn.”

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “We . . . we don’t exactly know,” said Erin. “When Milos Ravana was discovered, Dahlia Mizrahi and her brother found that there was something different about it. It was much more powerful than any of the others, but more importantly: it looked like it also was part of something bigger. Kat, maybe you can explain better than I can.”

  Kat nodded, keeping that contagious quality of despair that had hung from her eyes ever since she was transferred to work with Milos Ravana. “I’ll try, but I don’t know as much as I would like. Working with Milos Ravana directly comes with certain responsibilities. There are many things about that suit that are different. Telling you what I’m going to tell you can be considered an act of treason, and I will never forgive Director Blanchard for putting me in this position, but I have no choice.”

  Ezra didn’t know what to say. He felt an obligation to apologize in his mother’s behalf, but knew it would not bring Kat any comfort.

  “There are parts missing from Milos Ravana. Both Dr. Dahlia Mizrahi and her brother were sure that there were at least two extensions to it, and its structure suggests she was right. We’ve studied it and it’s rather obvious that there are components missing—parts that would multiply its already enormous power. She died trying to find these missing pieces, because she knew that putting together the Armor of God is the only way we would ever have of destroying Lys if it ever rose again.”

  As she talked, noticing how her eyes never met anyone else’s as if afraid of being judged, Ezra began to piece together what the plan really involved.

  “You remember the day I kicked you out of Milos Ravana’s docking chamber,” she said. “Maybe you noticed that there was no Synchronization Capsule inside the room. That’s because we were testing something new: placing the Capsule, and the pilot, inside the Creux. Everything we know about the suits suggests that it is the way they are meant to be piloted, but Dr. Mizrahi considered it was too unsafe, so the remote method was made a standard in Zenith, even if the Creux can’t wander too far.”

  Ezra understood, and Garros confirmed it for him. “If you’re doing the math, the entire plan doesn’t just involve saving Zenith—it involves leaving it. Your mot
her’s tried putting a team together to go and find the parts of Milos Ravana we’re missing. Alice was part of it, but now Erin took her place. I’m part of it, Kat and Barnes are part of it, Tessa is part of it, Akiva is part of it, and, for whatever reason, your mother wants you to be part of it as well.”

  The others left his room soon after the dizzying conversation that left him with far more questions than answers.

  His biggest concerns could be reduced to one question: Exactly what role did his mother expect him to play in this plan? Was he going to leave Zenith, or did his part involve him staying? Though only pilots could leave, considering it would be too unsafe to leave without the protection of a Creux, she had told him that he would be used as Zenith’s flag during the campaign to save it. He didn’t understand how he could play that role. The Shattering had been his fault.

  Ezra barely got any sleep that night as thoughts and images and half-remembered dreams swarmed his head, which was still distraught by the events of the day: the horrifying encounter in Dr. Logan’s office, his lies about the true identity of Subject Edward, and the meeting in his dormitory.

  As he lay on his bed, he stared down the camera. When the group left, Barnes had removed the bug that made it blind to the happenings of the room, so once more the camera looked down at him, letting someone, somewhere, know exactly what he was doing. Ezra wondered if that thought should be comforting; it was a strange way to fight off the loneliness he felt in being confined to a room, like an animal that had bitten the wrong hand.

  Ezra sighed and turned away. Even after hearing that there was a much greater horror looming on the horizon, one that was entirely unrelated to his direct involvement in The Shattering, he couldn’t avoid feeling shame and regret. He knew that the damage to Roue could’ve been worse, but that was no comfort; what if he had crashed against a building, or a school? He could’ve killed hundreds, maybe thousands, of citizens: the ones he was supposed to protect.

  He sighed again, and it was almost a whimper. Despite everything, he wished his expectations were wrong: he wanted to have a more direct role in his mother’s plan. He wanted to leave and help the others find the missing parts of Milos Ravana. He didn’t want to stay in Zenith.