Ezekiel glided closer to Malichai. “What about his leg?” He sounded grim.
Rubin looked up then. He shook his head. “The truth is, I just don’t know. We’re working with something none of us has ever seen before. Joe and Amaryllis worked on that bone twice before I got to it and already the fracturing was severe.”
“Because he had to fight a supersoldier, Rubin,” Ezekiel pointed out. “It wasn’t like he was lying in bed twiddling his thumbs.”
“Zeke,” Malichai said softly. “This isn’t anyone’s fault. Rubin just spent hours trying to save my leg. If I have one at the end of all this, it’s due to his work.”
“I know that. I do. I’m sorry, Rubin,” Ezekiel apologized immediately. “This is just hard to understand. We’ve been using Zenith, and no one’s had a problem. He used it before on that same leg and didn’t have a problem.”
“We don’t actually know that,” Rubin contradicted. “The pitting in the bone could have started then, just maybe not as aggressively. Like a buildup of an insect’s poison in the system. That happens with some insects. The first time you’re fine. The second time makes you sick. The third time kills you.” He tipped up the water bottle and drank more.
Malichai was grateful to see that some of the lines of strain were beginning to recede from his face. “Let’s just get to what you think the chances of my keeping this leg are, Rubin, and be real. I want to hear real.”
Rubin nodded. “I don’t know any other way to be. You shouldn’t be putting any weight on it. We’re going to have to watch you all the time. Joe and Amaryllis will have to be vigilant, checking to see if the hairline fractures start returning even with you babying the leg. If you have to move around, you have to do it on crutches, keeping the weight entirely off the leg. I meant what I said. I think you should be sidelined for this entire mission, but I know that’s not going to fly with you, so it’s the control room with your leg up.”
“Then what? So I rest it. So I stay off it. What is that getting me, Rubin?” Malichai asked before Ezekiel or Joe could tell him he didn’t even get to be in the control room. Or the van, as it would more likely be.
“I don’t know.” Rubin sounded tired and very discouraged.
Malichai had never heard that low, velvety voice so worn. He avoided looking at Ezekiel. His brother knew Rubin every bit as well as he did. If Rubin didn’t have a clue how to save his leg, no one did.
“We have to rely on the three brilliant minds to figure out what the hell is going on and how to counteract it and hope that they can do it before whatever is causing this accelerates the damage faster than the three of us can repair it.” Rubin’s eyes suddenly met his. “Can you take the pain, Malichai? When it’s eating through your bone like that, can you take the pain?”
Malichai felt the other members of his team looking at him. His brothers. He felt their compassion. Their anger. Their feelings of helplessness. He felt all those same emotions. Already, his hand was rubbing at the knots on his hip, the knots that formed from trying to ease the ache that was always present in his leg. That ache that would slowly accelerate into a steady pain until it was so bad he could barely think.
He thought of the alternative. That soldier in the street, the one with the sad eyes and the vacant face and no leg, begging for food, just for something to eat. It had been cold and Malichai had been shivering continuously, but Ezekiel had stolen a jacket for him. The soldier had a jacket but no blanket. There were blankets in the space they claimed as their own. There was food. Malichai had made his way there, rolled up his portion of the food in his blanket and returned to the soldier and offered it to him.
At first the man refused to take it, gently shaking his head, not wanting to take from a kid on the street who didn’t have much more than him. Malichai had insisted. When he got home that night, he didn’t tell Ezekiel what he’d done, but refused to share Zeke’s food. When he was shivering so much from the cold and Zeke had snapped at him to get under his blanket, he’d done that, because when Zeke got pissed, you just obeyed.
“I can take it, Rubin,” he said. He’d grown up on the streets. He was tough.
18
Malichai thought he’d seen everything. He’d been all over the world. He’d gone to various countries during their celebrations, some with strange rituals and unbelievably extravagant and gorgeous costumes, he’d even seen—on television—the strange and wonderful Comic-Con and Dr. Who conventions, with their seas of people dressed in various attire fitting the themes of their favorite pop culture hero or heroine.
What he’d not seen before was the mixture of people from countries around the world coming together dressed in everything from suits to sarongs, women covered in veils from head to toe, and men with turbans and others dressed in nothing but board shorts and sandals. There seemed to be a lot of smiles and nodding, some tried talking in signs; others spoke in halting English or other languages to try to communicate, but they tried.
He noticed phones were out and many people were using apps to translate what they wanted said. He watched the monitors closely. It was impossible to say one person stood out in the crowd because of the way they were dressed. The mix was so strange, with people from different countries dressed in more traditional clothing and some in more religious garb in order to show their solidarity with what the conference was all about. Ideas. Just people bringing together ideas on how to better understand one another and their cultures.
Malichai’s job was to identify any of Callendine’s men moving through the crowd. The SEAL team had placed vehicles equipped with jammers if needed to stop the remote detonation of any bomb Callendine or his men might set off. If Callendine saw the vehicles out front and around the sides of the building he would know immediately why they were there, but that couldn’t be helped. They could only hope the bombs were all about remote detonation, because if they weren’t, each bomb would have to be defused. They would have to find every one of them. All team members were looking for bombs in or around every support beam, primarily the major ones.
He hoped they were wrong, but he had a bad feeling, that nagging one that always told him he was right. He didn’t like knowing, but that radar had saved not only him but his fellow GhostWalkers on more than one occasion. He kept looking through the bank of screens, watching carefully not only for Callendine’s crew—and he had faces taped to the van’s whiteboard stretched just above the bank of screens—but also to catch glimpses of Amaryllis, just to know she was safe. He hadn’t seen her in the last few minutes and that made him antsy. He despised that he was sidelined. It didn’t matter how important Ezekiel told him this job was, and he knew it was; he wanted to be there, where the action was—and watching over Amaryllis.
“Anything?” Avery, one of the techs assigned to watch as well, asked.
“Not so far,” Malichai said. “This is like looking for a needle in a haystack. How do you do it all the time?”
Avery was considered one of the best techs at gathering information. The other team members spoke of him with admiration and respect. Malichai knew the value of a man who took his time and double-and triple-checked all information for his men in the field. He never stopped until he had them back safe at home. Avery was that man. He was also the man who would sit patiently in a van for however long it took, looking into a bank of screens until his eyes wanted to bleed until he discovered the enemy and how best to stop them.