Free The Unfinished World (The Armor of God Book 2) by Diego Valenzuela Page B

was it. I’m still not sure it isn’t.”
    They had set out of Zenith with the objective of finding Akiva Davenport and his Creux, Milos Ravana—the uniquely powerful machine which could be the key to saving humanity from extinction. And the Creux they had found, freed from its prison under earth and water by the combined efforts of Jade Arjuna and Phoenix Atlas, looked too much like the Armor of God. Of course all Creuxen had similar physical traits—their colossal size, humanoid shapes, armored exterior—but this even shared some of Milos Ravana’s more unique details, with only some significant differences.
    “Some of its armor is missing,” said Ezra, noticing how many segments in the Creux’s body, particularly on the sides of its torso, and its shoulders, did not reflect the moonlight. “It looks like dead skin underneath—like in Nandi’s joints, under his armor.”
    “Yes, it’s not wearing full armor. Tessa’s—”
    Ezra cringed at the mere mention of the traitor’s name.
    “—and Jed’s—do you remember Jed? The bald pilot who got burnt in an accident before you arrived at Zenith? His Creux, Nebula, was light as well,” she said. Throughout the conversation, Erin had not yet peeled her eyes from the Creux. “Some are like Nandi, Omega, or Ares—heavily armored.”
    “I remember Jed,” said Ezra, the name invoking another unwelcome memory. He had met him under terrible circumstances, having accidentally walked into his hospital room in Zenith, only to find the pilot recovering from horrible burns sustained during a mission when his Creux overheated.
    “It looks older to me,” she said. “Unfinished. Like an early model. Maybe it’s been here a while.”
    “Do you think—I mean, the reason behind these islands in the desert.”
    “It’s because of a Creux?” she said. “Yes, I think so too. You know, the Creuxen’s core is filled with the self-renovating energy that fuels them, that gives them their abilities. There was that gas down there. That stuff repels the Laani. But, you know what that means? People could actually live here, Ezra. Maybe we didn’t need to dome as much as we thought.”
    “So in every oasis—?”
    “There’s a Creux, yeah,” she said, and got up, looking at Ezra for the first time and offering her hand to help him up. She shrugged. “That’s what I think, at least.”
    “Should we name this one?” Ezra asked, half joking.
    “It already has a name— Lazarus ,” she said. When he was about to ask if she had christened the Creux herself, she went on: “It’s written on its foot. Come on. See for yourself.”
    Erin was like a child with a new toy when she led Ezra across the wet canal where the river used to be. The suction of the mud almost cost him his boots, but Erin appeared weightless as she walked through, and climbed out to the other side, closer to the enormous battle machine.
    “Look,” she said, approaching the thing’s left foot. Unlike Nandi or Ares, whose feet were thick boot-like pieces that rose all the way to its knees, made to hold the machine’s enormous weight, this one had much thinner feet, tipped with sharp-looking talons similar to those at the ends of Phoenix’s boot pieces.
    On the side of its foot, at the level of the circular parts of the ankle, the name LAZARUS had been branded onto the armor in large, sloppy letters.
    “ Lazarus ,” Ezra said. He liked the name, even if he had never heard it before, and didn’t know what it meant. “I thought the people who discovered the Creux gave it a name. How come this guy already has one?”
    “Who knows,” she said, smiling. “I had never seen a Creux being excavated; it’s very secretive stuff, when one is found. They never involved the pilots in any way; they only brought them to Zenith and began studying them and waited for a match. We didn’t even see them in the flesh until they were ready to be used—we only saw them in the sims. It had been a while since any