The Unfinished World (The Armor of God Book 2) (2 page)

She inspected his body for new changes in physiology, and was soon joined by the director of Project Lazarus, who had begun to oversee her work. She hated to be micromanaged, but she understood the process was not a simple affair, and needed as many eyes as possible to ensure any degree of success.

“I expected it would have grown some more by now,” the director said.

“The more substantial changes won’t happen until he goes down,” she replied, and he sneered, as though the concept of this being holding on to his humanity was amusing. “I’m tempted to do it now that he’s asleep. He would never know.”

The man nodded. “I’m inclined to recommend doing just that. We don’t have time; the change has to happen soon. He needs to be finished.”

“Perhaps you don’t understand the nature of the Helena Fork, but I assure you time is the only thing we have to spare,” she said, and uncovered the subject’s chest. Its redundant musculature had begun to increase; it was one of the main reasons behind his weakness. It had grown heavy, but not strong. His lungs could not handle his body mass.

“I understand they have time; but we don’t,” the man said, and he had a fair point.

She covered the subject again, and looked at the director, wondering how it was that he had grown so fat when resources were so scarce. “I said I was tempted, but the laws don’t allow—”

“It’s admirable that you want to shade him under laws meant to protect humanity.”

“He will not stop being human until he stops being human,” she said, and he laughed at the tautology. “I refuse to take that step, but you’re welcome to do it. Considering how much these subjects are sacrificing for us, I’d rather die knowing I kept a shred of respect for them.”

“I have larger concerns,” he said. “Come to the observatory. We’re inducing sleep, and I expect you to increase dosage of the L-Strain from this point onward.”

She followed him out of the laboratory, giving the subject one last glance before leaving him behind to his eternal sleep.

“I’ve lost track of these subjects,” he said, and they climbed the stairs to the observatory, where they were likely to remain for several hours. “Which one were we looking at just now?”

“The subject no longer has a name, sir.”

He sighed, apparently tired by her persistence to still regard these subjects as humans. “Yes, but I understand the people down in Development have names for each. What is this one called, Doctor?”

“Yes,” she sighed. “His file reads: Subject Asterion.”.

Chapter 1

Welcome Home

I wonder if he realizes that we’re probably never going back.

The ghosts had been speaking
those words for what might have been years. It was difficult for him to understand the passage of time when everything around him was so utterly senseless. He had grown used to chaos and its treacherous schemes, but now it appeared to have gone as far as invading his one haven: dreams.

Ezra Blanchard, a youngster who for a few months had been an army man, opened his eyes, and the world hadn’t yet changed. He could barely get up, having scarcely gotten any rest—truly, it had been days since he had rested. In fact, he was sure the only moments in which his body could get some respite was when it was nested inside the Apse of Besoe Nandi, the Minotaur.

His reluctant other half.

Too bad his mind would still be restless when piloting Nandi, as it required his constant attention to command its enormous body. Controlling the Creux was not easy—it had never been, not even when he was just training, and no one expected him to perform beyond his level of skill and understanding. Back then, he had shown promise as the pilot of Besoe Nandi, but then everything changed.

It was his fault, even if the others tried their best to convince him otherwise.

And no amount of training had prepared him for this journey, and all of the fighting. Every time the group was on the move, they would fight monsters. He was tired of fighting and he was tired of walking, even if it was on the red giant’s legs. He only wanted to get to where they were going, or go back home.

We’re probably never going back.

It was Garros’ voice he had heard while sleeping, he realized. Still, he didn’t know if it was something that had actually been said, or just a part of his increasingly pessimistic dreams.

He sat up on the grass and tried to focus. The sun was setting behind a serrated, red horizon, but there was shade, provided by the four enormous humanoid shapes lying flat on their backs at the fringes of the oasis.

Seeing the sun—or the sky for that matter—was a rarity. He had never seen it, having grown inside the domed city of Roue, and had always imagined it would be more beautiful than this.

Upon its arrival several centuries before, the Laani had changed the world in too many ways. The divinity had died, and in its death had begun to turn its inhabitants into creatures in its own shape—perhaps as means of living on. It destroyed the flora, and altered its atmosphere into something that could bear no life except its own.

Now, there was a blanket of thick clouds masking the sky and blocking out the sun. It seemed to be more present at night, when temperatures dropped; in the days they had been travelling, Ezra was yet to see the stars.

No wonder the planet was almost dead. Ezra wasn’t sure it could be salvaged, even if they completed their impossible task, and the Laani was defeated.

“You’re not going to get some sleep?” Erin asked him. The petite blonde, appointed leader of their small outfit of four, sat on a large rock not far from him. Her feet were naked on the grass, enjoying the touch of the moist blades between her toes.

These oases were a mystery. After leaving Zenith, the facility in which they met, where they had trained together, they had come upon several of them. Amid scattered remnants of long-dead settlements, there were patches of rich land. There was grass and trees, some even bearing fruit. In some of them, they had even found birds nesting on tree branches, and some strange, small animals they had never seen or even heard of before. Garros liked to hunt and eat them.

For reasons none of them could yet puzzle out, there were segments of terrain that appeared to be entirely unwilling to accept that the virus had taken hold of the world. These closed ecosystems were memories of what it used to be like—and it used to be beautiful. Having never experienced nature such as this, it was always difficult for him to leave the green to step back into the gray.

“Yes, I was trying,” he said and got up. “You woke me up.”

“We did?” Garros said, and it was a rhetorical question; he didn’t really care.

“I wasn’t getting much rest anyway,” Ezra said and got on his feet, looking up at the orange sky through the small window in the clouds. It appeared to be dawning.

“Tell me about it,” Garros said. Back in Zenith, this huge man had always taken care of his appearance; he exercised, shaved his head regularly, and kept his beard as neat as his spotless uniforms. Now, the only habit he kept was the exercise, which appeared to slightly curb a bad temper he had seldom shown before. The hair on his balding head had begun to grow out; his beard was shaggy, thick and uneven, his uniform torn and dirty.

And so was his, and Erin’s. Things like clean clothes, or even a truly full stomach, had become unreachable luxuries to them—they were on a critical mission to find a friend and then save humanity; their comfort was not a concern. The feeling was altogether new to all of them; having lived their entire lives in Roue and Zenith, they had never gone wanting in terms of basic comforts.

“I found more of those fruits, whatever they are,” said Garros and dropped five pieces of fruit on the grass. They were big lumps of sweet pulp covered in a yellow peel—something that didn’t exist in Roue. Eating these fruits was one of the few things that would lift his spirits, at least a little bit. “Eat up if you’re tired of the Zenith rations as well.”

“Yes, I am,” Ezra said and began peeling one of the fruits before taking a big bite and licking every last drop of its juice, which left sticky remains on his mouth, and the thin hairs that had begun to grow around it.

“There is a small pool behind the tree line, by the way,” Erin said and took a bite from the fruit in Garros’ hand. “You might want to take a bath. You haven’t bathed in a while, and not every one of these has fresh water.”

“She means you smell like hot garbage,” Garros said, taking almost half of his fruit in one ridiculously large bite.

“I know,” he said. “Where’s—”

“She’s taking a bath,” Erin replied, and rubbed her eyes, exhausted. She seemed ready to collapse.

“I’ll go with her, then,” he replied and walked towards the trees. It was difficult to admit that his friendship with Garros and Erin, which had been so strong back in Zenith, had degraded significantly since leaving it. He still liked them, and knew he needed them, but now, more than anything, there was resentment.

They didn’t
believe
him.

They didn’t believe that he saw what he saw during his last moments in the facility. The horrifying scene had played in loops in his mind since that day: Ezra, trapped inside the Minotaur, helplessly seeing two of his friends and teachers get murdered in cold blood by a betrayer.

Sometimes, in his dreams, he would crush the murderer using Nandi’s powerful fist, and those were the times he wished he could have done something when he had the chance.

How could they not believe him? Why would he lie to them?

Thinking about it still forced him to unconsciously clench his jaw so hard it hurt.

Ezra crossed under a small patch of tall trees, and it was cool beneath their rich branches. At the other side, there was a small slope leading to a body of water.

It was hard to tell where the water was coming from. There were mountains nearby, but no visible river leading to this island in the desert, this oasis. It also looked fresh, like the rest of this capsule, unaware that the world around it had died. Ezra’s hypothesis was that maybe there was a clean network of tunnels beneath the crust, but he had no way to know for sure.

When he came closer to the water, he finally saw her.

Her clothes were scattered by the edge of the blue pool: the full Zenith uniform, boots and socks. She was submerged all the way to the shoulders, long, dark hair sticking to her slender back.

He had been staring for at least half a minute when she finally turned around and noticed him standing there.

“I’m almost done here,” she asked him. “I thought you were asleep.”

“I was,” he replied and began to strip to his underwear. “Or at least, I was trying.
They
woke me up.”

Jena chuckled. Out of all of them, she was the only one whose personality had remained almost intact. “Holding a grudge and resenting them is only going to make everything a lot harder.”

“It’s not a grudge,” he said in a way that betrayed his words, and stepped into the water. It was very cold, and he knew that going in slowly would be more difficult. He took a deep breath and submerged his entire body, feeling like the coldness of the water would crush him.

When he emerged, Jena laughed again. “I should’ve warned you; it’s cold.”

He was shivering, but she appeared to be very comfortable. He wondered why. Swimming was a new experience for both of them. Outside of baths—an absolute luxury in a city where every drop of water was recycled, and one only a family like his could have—he had never experienced anything like this.

“It’s not a grudge. I don’t understand why they don’t believe me—”

He paused and looked into her eyes.

“Wait, tell me something.
You
believe me right?”

It was something he had not asked her yet, having always assumed that she did. Now that she was taking a few moments to reply, it became obvious that she didn’t know what to say, and the answer was clear.

“Please tell me you believe me—dammit, why would I make this up!”

“You wouldn’t. No one thinks you are,” said Jena, and handed him a piece of cloth doused in herbs to scrub himself with. “You just need to understand how it sounds to their ears. They’ve known Tessa for years; you expect them to believe that she would just kill two people, two of our friends, at face value?”

He felt the acid in his stomach boil.

“Don’t get angry,” she said, reading his expression with ease. “They told you already, Ezra, and I agree with them. We don’t think you’re lying, but—”

“It wasn’t a hallucination,” he grumbled, looking away from her at the thick clouds above; day was finally breaking.

“You know how the Creux plays with your head,” she replied. “Remember how we keep hearing things and words, and how at first we would forget some things we saw while we were piloting. It takes a while for us to get used to it.”

He had already heard this attempted explanation, but he didn’t believe any of it. Ezra knew what he had seen, and how horrible it had felt to see it, and do nothing about it.

“You know . . . there’s nothing I want more than to believe that what you’re saying is true,” he said, scrubbing his chest under the water so hard it hurt. “I would really just love to think that it didn’t really happen—that Tessa didn’t kill Barnes and Kat and probably Dr. Yuri too—like when you wake up from a nightmare. I can’t, though. I know when something’s real, and
that
was real. I saw their blood, I saw their faces, I saw—”