The Armor of God (34 page)

Hours after his mother left the room, a sheet of paper was slipped underneath the door. Ezra walked towards the dormitory door and saw the empty room of his crewmembers. Barnes didn’t sleep there, but he wondered where Dr. Mustang was, and to what degree was he being held responsible for Ezra’s actions.

The door was locked from the outside. “This is a fire hazard!” he yelled to no one.

Ezra picked up the piece of paper and unfolded it, not knowing what to expect—as the cause of the biggest crisis in Zenith’s history, he was surely not the most popular person within; it could very well be an insult.

But it was no such thing; just a drawing and a few words:

There is a plan.

Your gonna have to be patient.

Their not gonna win.

Some of us still like you.

‘Some of us,
’ Ezra thought.
That’s nice.

He didn’t know a single person in Zenith who would write a note so poorly. The sketch of an isosceles with circles drawn over the angles added mystery to the note. The only people that had seen that drawing, or would find it meaningful, were Poole, Jena, Akiva, Dr. Yuri, and his mother. Had one of them misspelled the words on purpose in an attempt to veil their identity?

Ezra ripped it apart and threw it in the garbage, sure that the vigilant eye of the camera hadn’t seen it at all.

A plan,
the note had said. Could it be referring to the campaign to save Zenith, and Proposition Tomorrow? No, the note seemed too carefully crafted to convey a secret message; the campaign was no secret, and this appeared to be.

He felt useless; as the cause of all of it, it should be him working to fix the problem. And yet, he was secluded to this dormitory, surrounded by the angry eyes of a red and blue bull that seemed to judge him.

Trying to escape the Minotaur, at least for a few moments, Ezra took a shower. He immediately saw that there was no working hot water, and commended whomever was responsible for their creative and passive-aggressive punishment.

He couldn’t escape the Minotaur or its labyrinth; as every drop of cold water washed down his body, he thought about every operation, every meeting and every class. He began to piece together the puzzle behind their lies, how Garros hated to describe the terrain—he was making up lies about being inside a dead body fighting a virus, when in reality they were just outside of Roue, killing monsters that had once been human beings.

He had never felt more stupid, or angrier.

It is easy to lie to you . . .

When he walked out of the shower and dressed in his increasingly tight uniform, he found his nose ring on the nightstand. He took it, feeling its weight: so minute in his palm yet so substantial in his heart. He put it on, and it still hurt.

A knock on the door startled him, and he hurried to open it. At the other side, he found someone he didn’t expect: Kat. “Blanchard,” she said. “You’ve been summoned.”

Walking next to Kat made him feel safe; she was not a very big woman, but had such a powerful stance, such perfect posture as she walked, it made her look dangerous, and she probably was. It was a welcome feeling, because it was difficult not to feel vulnerable when every other pair of eyes they saw on their way wanted him dead. “I want you to know, Blanchard; not all of us blame you for what happened.”

“I know,” he said, and wondered if the note was hers—she worked for Milos Ravana’s crew; she knew of the drawing on its armor. “Thank you, Kat. Where are we going?”

“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.”