The Armor of God

by Diego Valenzuela

  “Can you at least tell me what it is you’re expecting of me?” Ezra asked.

  “We expect you to change the face of the world,” she said.

  Those words wouldn’t have had as much weight if they had come from anyone else’s lips, but coming from Mizrahi, they were tidal waves. Ezra closed his eyes and whispered to himself: “This can’t be my destiny. This cannot be my destiny.”

  “You’ll find it very much is,” Dr. Mizrahi said and rose to her feet.

  Ezra’s jaw hurt as he followed Akiva and Jena out of the office. He hadn’t expected to see Susan again (at least not that day), but found her waiting in the hallway, apparently for him. She greeted Ezra with a sincere sympathy and affection in her eyes that reminded him of his mother.

  When he was younger, Ezra’s adventurous nature—something time had stripped him of—had earned him more injuries than any child should have. Stepping out of every hospital room and doctor’s appointment, he’d find his mother, who would receive him with those comforting eyes that made the pain of any medical tribulation vanish.

  Though Susan couldn’t hope to have that power, she was still a welcome sight.

  “Are you done?” she asked, and he suspected she already knew the answer.

  “I’ve just been informed I won’t really be done anytime soon.”

  Dr. Mizrahi started walking towards the elevator. Jena and Akiva went after her. “We have work to do, Blanchard. Time is precious around here, so we can’t waste it. We have work to do,” she said.

  “Guess I’ll see you later,” Ezra said to Susan as he joined the others by the elevator door.

  “No, actually I’m going with you,” the corporal replied just as the elevator announced its arrival with a chime. “I volunteered to apply today’s test.”

  In a polite gesture Ezra would have never thought to do, Akiva held the elevator door open for Dr. Mizrahi and Susan, who thanked him and called him a gentleman. When Ezra and finally Akiva stepped inside, the elevator felt a bit too crowded.

  “Today’s?” Jena said. “Are we coming back tomorrow? Because I am supposed to visit my dad in the D-District hospital. He has an appointment in the afternoon and I need to be there with him.”

  “You’re doing the subject proficiency tests today; it will take you about two hours if you don’t hurry,” Susan said. “But you do have to come back tomorrow for the physical tests. I’m sorry, Jena.”

  Jena nodded, disappointed.

  “I’m sure you’ll be done in time. I’ll do what I can to make sure you can get out of here as quickly as possible,” said Susan, and Jena nodded again.

  “What test is it?” Akiva asked.

  “The Moreau: the standard for starting higher education,” Susan replied. This detail seemed to give a lot of confidence to Akiva, but not to Ezra. He was familiar with the Moreau test, if only by name, his family having been pioneers in implementing it all throughout Roue, but he had never taken it himself.

  “I’m not prepared for a proficiency test—Moreau or not,” Ezra said nervously. Should the exam assess his aptitude in subjects such as mathematics or science, even if on a basic level, he was sure he’d embarrass himself.

  “What? Your family created the Moreau standard,” Jena added. “The test itself should be a joke for you.”

  Maybe that was a way out. Maybe, should he perform poorly enough on these tests, he could be deemed unfit for Zenith and its supposedly privileged level of education and training.

  “It won’t be a problem, Ezra. We just want to know where you stand so we know where to place you in Zenith. Testers with poor results are just enrolled in remedial classes for a while, but I’m sure that’s not going to be the case with any one of you.”

  Well, I hope you like surprises, Ezra thought. Or at least disappointments.

  Dr. Mizrahi took Ezra, Jena, and Akiva to a lab in the third floor. During the walk, Ezra had tried to make Jena smile again, telling her he was certain she wouldn’t miss her dad’s appointment at the hospital. He wasn’t sure of his words, of course, but he could tell they at least sounded confident. He succeeded; she smiled.

  He ventured a bit deeper into the matter. “So, is your father okay?”

  “Well,” she replied. “I’m not sure. Doctors say he doesn’t have long to live.”

  Ezra felt like his heart stopped for a moment. “I think that qualifies as not okay,” he said awkwardly.

  She finally showed a full smile. “The problem is that they’ve been saying that for years. He has a condition in his lungs that cannot be cured. It’s supposed to get progressively worse for a few months before taking the patient’s life, but my dad’s body is too strong for it.”

  “That’s good!” Ezra said.

  “I don’t know. He’s in a lot of pain—he can barely breathe, can’t do any of the things he liked doing before. Then there was this one thing he said,” Jena said, and Ezra was no longer sure he had done well in asking her about her father. “One time last year, he took the wrong medications, and the mix had a strange effect on him—it made him act like he was very drunk. He told me that he really wanted to die but was holding on because of me. When I tried to talk about him after the drug’s effects passed, he didn’t remember anything about it. I didn’t tell him what he said.”

  Despite appreciating Jena’s candor, Ezra now regretted having brought up the subject. It was painful to hear. “I’m sorry,” was the only thing he could say.

  Akiva and Susan had been listening too but didn’t say a word.

  When they sat down in the lab, Dr. Mizrahi produced a machine similar to the one Private Bullring had used to draw Ezra’s blood that morning. It seemed heavy, and she had to hold it with both hands to keep it steady.

  “Uncover your neck,” she asked Akiva, and he removed some of his hair to expose a thick neck. With no warning or hesitation, Dr. Mizrahi pressed the machine against his skin. It must have hurt, because Akiva was so surprised he yelled out a word a gentleman wouldn’t use.

  Dr. Mizrahi looked at the machine for a moment as it read Akiva’s blood sample. After a few seconds, it displayed something on a panel, and it made Dr. Mizrahi nod.

  “Compatibility confirmed,” she said and removed a tiny cartridge from the back of the gadget before replacing it with a fresh one. Dr. Mizrahi moved on to Jena, machine pointed at the girl’s neck.

  Jena didn’t have to be asked: she removed her long hair as though she was preparing to style it into a ponytail. Ezra bit his lip when he saw how long and slender her neck was. Everything about her was alluring and beautiful.

  When the machine took her blood, Jena barely winced. The machine began to analyze it.

  “Your father,” Dr. Mizrahi said, waiting for the results. “Is it pneumastratis?”

  “Yes. How did you know?” Jena asked.

  “Your description; other than the laani, there aren’t many diseases left at all,” the doctor replied, and smiled. “Compatibility confirmed. Now Jena, I don’t want to give you any false hopes, of course, but I want to let you know that there is a lot of research—a lot of research—being made to battle viruses like the one that causes pneumastratis.”

  “Thank you,” Jena said, but she didn’t sound sincere—she had abandoned hope for a cure long ago.

  Dr. Mizrahi again placed a fresh new cartridge in the machine to test Ezra’s blood. Like Jena, he exposed his neck without being asked and let the machine approach with closed eyes.

  From the others’ reaction, he didn’t expect it to hurt quite as much. It felt as though he had been stabbed with three nails that went halfway through his neck. His entire body tensed, and when the blood was drawn, he opened his eyes.

  Dr. Mizrahi stood in front of him, waiting for the machine to confirm Ezra’s compatibility. Ezra wanted to pray, desperately wishing the machine would say he was just a false positive.

  He’d say good-bye, and leave. He’d go back to his small apartment, he’d go to sleep, and sleep through all the ne
xt day, and then he’d—

  “Compatibility confirmed.”

  Dr. Mizrahi stayed in the lab in order to do some business that she didn’t share, so it was Susan who led the trio out of the hospital wing, across a courtyard that was busy with soldiers in training, and into a new building.

  It felt like every soul in the military base knew who and what they were. Soldiers stopped their training, their sport, their conversation, or their game, just to see the trio pass by. Ezra did what he could to avoid eye contact with any of them.

  One hour later, Ezra had before him a thick booklet filled with words and symbols and numbers he could barely recognize. It was just as he had feared: he was not prepared for a test and would embarrass himself.

  Quick glances at Akiva and Jena let him know that it truly was only a problem for him, as they seemed to be breezing through the test, barely reading each question before answering. He couldn’t even identify some of the math problems.

  Susan’s eyes were heavy on Ezra. She looked intrigued and disappointed. How could a Blanchard be stumped by a test like this? She wasn’t the first to be.

  He looked away from her, pretending he was thinking over one of the questions. The classroom was so huge it was almost funny. At least one hundred and fifty desks, arranged in neat rows and columns, filled the floor space of this giant chamber.

  Another hour later, Akiva and Jena were standing next to Susan, whispering a conversation and waiting for Ezra to finish. Luckily for him, there were sections of the test where he wasn’t completely lost. History was a subject he had always liked as a child in Primary, so that section was a breeze. He miraculously managed to answer a lot of the basic mathematic equations, and felt his way through physics and biology. Chemistry was a disaster, as was Civic Law.

  Maybe he wouldn’t do so badly after all.

  “Ezra, you failed,” Susan told him twenty minutes later, after passing his test through a computer that scanned Ezra’s answers. “62 percent.”

  That’s failing? He thought.

  “You didn’t do that on purpose did you?” Jena asked him, as surprised by Ezra’s underachievement as the other two.

  He almost wanted to lie and say he had failed on purpose, but she had been too honest with him earlier, and he owed her the same courtesy. “I wish. Maybe now you’ll begin to understand why I emancipated from my family.”

  “Hold on,” Akiva said, waiting for his results. “Your family didn’t kick you out for not sharing their . . . intellect, did they? I thought Tara and Patrich Blanchard were like . . . saints, or something.”

  “They are,” Ezra replied. “It was my own choice. They didn’t want me to go.”

  Akiva regarded him with what appeared to be sympathy, but Ezra wasn’t sure; his face was hard to read. Thankfully, and to save them from a silence that would have surely been very awkward, the computer finished reading Akiva’s results.

  “Ten laps: I did better than you,” Jena quickly said before Susan had a chance to share Akiva’s results.

  “Twenty. You’re on,” he replied immediately, like he had been waiting for the wager to be proposed. Jena shook his hand.

  Susan humored them and gave his exam back to Akiva. "96 percent, Davenport. Not bad. Anything above ninety exempts you from every basic class.”

  Akiva thanked her and began to read the detailed results, which were broken down by subject. “Aced all except math. Only got 91 percent.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Ezra said and regretted it. He had just met Akiva; what made him think he could talk to a kid twice his size like that? Thankfully, Akiva’s response was a laugh and not a fist to the throat.

  Susan received Jena’s results as the computer was still printing them, and looked at them. She smiled and handed the sheet of paper to Jena. Jena’s face was unreadable when she saw and then showed the results to Akiva, never letting Ezra, who was very curious about their wager, see them.

  “Ah. That's that, then,” he said.

  Ezra had no idea which one would be running laps, and it was stupid how interested he was.

  “Either way, you’re both above any remedial classes,” Susan said and looked at Ezra. “You are not. We’ll have to place you in remedial Math, Civic Law, Physics, and Chemistry for a while before joining the others.”

  Ezra sighed in defeat. “Might as well. I haven’t been to school for at least a year.”

  “Well that explains it,” Susan said, and didn’t ask the reasons behind this choice to put his education aside. “We might be able to find a tutor within Zenith; the instructors won’t always have the time.”

  But before Ezra could say that he didn’t know anyone who could tutor him, he saw Akiva’s eyes light up with excitement that could only mean one thing. “Can I do it?” he said.

  “Oh, yes!” Jena joined in. “That sounds like so much fun.”

  “Wait, what? Are you serious?” Ezra said, looking at Susan.

  The corporal regarded the other two and looked at Ezra. “Well, your test results qualify both of you, I suppose. I’ll have to confirm in Zenith, but if Ezra doesn’t have a problem, guess he can choose one of you to be his tutor.”

  “Hooh boy,” Ezra muttered.

  Akiva and Jena looked at him, each hoping to be picked. “What do you say?” Jena asked.

  He wanted Jena, if only so he could get to know her better and spend more time with her, but was afraid to put his ignorance on display; he didn’t want Jena thinking he was stupid. Akiva was obviously smart as well, and just as valid a choice, but choosing him would mean intellectually rejecting Jena.

  Burn my guts, why did they put me in this position?

  “Either is fine by me,” he said in what seemed like the only diplomatic escape. “You guys decide.”

  At this, they looked at each other. Ezra had made the right decision to avoid choosing altogether. He didn’t know who had gotten the best score in the test, anyway; that would probably help them choose.

  “All right, then. We’re done for today,” Susan said. “If you want to go home, you can go home now, but your physical test is tomorrow at eight in the morning, so make sure you’re here in time or else we’ll go looking for you, and you don’t want that. If you’d rather stay in here, we can provide you a dormitory for tonight.”

  “I’ll stick around,” Akiva said. “I want to get to know the base a bit better.

  “Me too,” Jena said.

  “I’ll go home,” Ezra added.

  “All right. Jena and Akiva, please come with me. Oh, and Ezra, you have a visitor waiting outside,” Susan said. “Go back to the main entrance, where you came in this morning. And make sure you’re here for the physical test tomorrow.”

  Ezra nodded, more concerned about the supposed visitor than he was about the physical test, in which he’d also make a fool of himself.

  Ezra walked across the army base, squeezing himself between dozens of soldiers and scientists making their way to their respective nightly activities. All of them were bigger than he was.

  I don’t belong here. I don’t belong in Zenith. I don’t belong in the army.

  Finding his way out was no problem at all—not only was his mind good at mapping space, no matter how new it was to him, but he also had a particular drive to find the exit.

  Yet he knew that, in a way, he would never find it. This was his life now.

  As though fate was trying to create some cruel and poetic contrast, Ezra found himself facing his old life standing at the main entrance of the base.

  “Oh, Ezra!” she said immediately upon laying eyes on him.

  He was surprised, but Ezra hugged his mother so hard, he almost cried.

  Chapter 3

  The Outsider

  Before that night, Ezra didn’t know how much he had missed the house he grew up in, and something was telling him that it was the last he’d ever spend there.

  He of course couldn’t know this, but he was right.

  Earlier he had shared dinner with his
parents, and it had been difficult to sit through for all involved. Ezra hadn’t seen his parents since the night he decided to leave the family, so it was very awkward and painful for him. It was hard to imagine what they were feeling. He was glad neither of his sisters was home.

  “We were told this morning,” Tara said, finishing a bowl of chicken salad. “Eliza Mizrahi called me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ezra said and put a piece of meat in his mouth. He hated to admit how good it was. He hadn’t eaten decent food in too long; he understood why his father had asked him why he looked even thinner.

  “Why are you apologizing, son?” his father asked, getting up to gather his and his mother’s empty plates. “We’re proud.”

  “Why? I didn’t do anything to earn it.”

  “We’re proud and happy you found meaning to your life—even if it was more . . . imposed than found,” his mom said before putting her salad plate aside and taking a sip of tea. “It’s important for parents to see their child find a path. It’s a relief and a blessing.”

  Ezra looked down at his plate, a knot in his throat.

  They were proud that he would become a soldier? Maybe they had never actually expected him to follow in their path. Like his mother, whose family name they all took, nearly all children born with Blanchard blood had grown to become scholars and scientists of great renown. In a society like Roue’s, where intellect was celebrated, that had turned them into icons. His older sister had both been born with the Blanchard gift, and was presently being trained to follow in her parents’ footsteps. Even his eight-year-old sister was already displaying sparks of genius in the field of music.

  But Ezra had never shared that gift, or an interest in the intellectual life. He had been an adventurous brat—curious and inquisitive, but not one of above average intellect. He had always felt like a disappointment, and, perhaps a bit too late, this was the first time he realized that it had all been just his insecurity; his parents loved him for who he was.

  “Son?” his father said. “What are your thoughts?”

  “I don’t want to do this, Dad,” he said, and felt his voice beginning to crack.