Achilles

by Greg Boose

  “Here I come,” Jonah says again, bending his knees, holding both arms high above his head. He pictures the academy’s pool of blue water below him. This is just another dive, he tells himself.

  “Okay,” Garrett says. “Okay, okay, okay. You can do this, kid. You just have to jump far, though. Really, really far.”

  The cadet’s long legs spring and extend, sending Jonah through the tree in a long, graceful arc. He sails through the branches without being touched, and to his shock, he covers the ten feet with ease. When he finds himself over the opening, he pulls his legs to his chest and plummets. Jonah drops through the wooden tunnel, tipping backward halfway down toward the imaginary pool. His shoulder is pierced, and his back is scraped—he screams in agony—but he doesn’t open his body until he’s clear of the last branch. Then he whips his hands above his head and swings his legs to the sky, and Garrett’s arms meet the cadet’s upper back and thighs. The man grunts and wobbles backward, and together they fall to the ground in a cloud of black dust.

  On his stomach, Jonah reaches for his shoulder. He didn’t think he could be in any more pain than he was in five minutes ago, but here he is, feeling as if a pack of wolves were pulling and feasting on his back.

  Garrett pushes himself to his feet. “That was a hell of a jump, kid. I mean… Holy shit. You okay?”

  Jonah pulls his arm back to his chest and curls into a ball, trying anything to lessen the pain. He finally spits a glob of dirt and blood. “Not really.”

  “I bet. But hey, you’re alive, all right? You made it. Not a lot of people can…” Garrett trails off and walks a couple circles around Jonah as the cadet rolls onto his side. “Not a lot of people are alive, you hear me? I need to get back out there and see if anyone else needs my help. I need…I need to keep moving, or I’m going to fall apart. Okay? You understand me? I’m about to fucking fall apart here.”

  Jonah nods and wrenches his neck up to look up at Garrett, embarrassed but grateful. From his first memory, from his first foster home and first classroom, he’s hated asking adults for help. A suffocating blanket of humiliation covers him from head to toe as he watches Garrett walk toward the opening.

  The man stops and rubs his neck. “I don’t want to go back out there.” He turns with quivering lips, his hands in shaking fists. “Why me, you know? Why us?”

  He’s not sure if Garrett means the crash landing or the fact they survived. Neither makes any sense to Jonah, and so he just whispers, “I don’t know.”

  Garrett closes his eyes and takes a few breaths, and then smiles briefly. “That was a hell of a jump, Jonah Lincoln. I don’t know how you did that.”

  “Me neither,” he admits, struggling to his knees. “It looked impossible.”

  “Yeah, well, pay attention. Gravity is definitely different here.”

  “Can’t believe we made it to Thetis.”

  Garrett walks over and offers a trembling hand covered in dried blood. His face is small and creased with wrinkles and sadness. “We didn’t make it to Thetis, kid. We’re on Achilles, one of the moons.” The man pulls Jonah up with ease—almost yanking the cadet completely off the ground, sending lightning bolts of pain through his shoulder. They stare at each other another moment, and then Garrett solemnly walks back toward the hole in the wall, this time without stopping.

  Achilles? Dumbfounded, Jonah limps after him, but before ducking through the opening, he stops to look back at his destroyed sleeping level, the shredded tree, his fellow cadets. The guilt of not being able to save Manny has already set up camp in his mind, and Jonah knows nothing will ever uproot it. Somehow, he thinks, this is all his fault.

  The sunlight is blinding, and at first all Jonah sees are fuzzy blobs of whites and yellows, browns and blues. He covers his eyes with his arm and a rich, pungent smell rushes up his one clear nostril—a mixture of fire, sulfur, soil, and burning plastic. Shapes begin to separate and appear, and within seconds, he sees his toes are just a few yards from the edge of a sharp, hundred-foot cliff. Below stands a lush jungle that waves with neon colors and twisting columns of smoke. He instantly takes a few steps back.

  Jonah stares in disbelief at the gigantic red and black trees towering high above the rest of the jungle. From their thick bases to their spindly, crooked tops, fat yellow leaves the size of parachutes ring their trunks like floppy shirt collars. The outer edges of the leaves curl upward, holding gallons and gallons of what Jonah thinks must be rain. A strong gust of wind blows over the jungle and thousands of the leaves bend and spill their water into the thick canopy below.

  A large group of skeletal brown birds—or maybe they’re bats or bugs or something like dinosaurs—launch their drenched bodies out of the wet trees and fly off into the horizon, spinning around and around as they go. Jonah’s eyes follow them until they’re nothing but specks, and then he sees that beyond the trees is an ocean or a sea or a giant lake, a bright blue body of water so wide it seems impossible their ship didn’t crash into it. A few miles straight out, there’s a faint outline of an island. Way off to his right, a wide red mountain range looms so incredibly tall that Jonah can’t see the peaks, even on this cloudless day. They terrify Jonah, and he turns in the other direction to see an almost barren plain of ankle-high brown grass and a few porcupine trees. The air is hot and sticky, and standing there before it all, Jonah has a quick moment where he thinks he’s been sent back in time to a prehistoric era on Earth. But he’s on Achilles. No one’s ever been on Achilles before.

  “Jonah!” Garrett yells behind him. He spins to see the man shifting nervously from foot to foot near the module, still unwilling to rejoin the chaos. “Your face… It’s a mess, all right? Try to find one of the doctors, okay? I saw one walking around in a yellow coat. Find her.”

  Garrett jogs away without waiting for a response. Jonah turns back to the cliff’s edge. Below, a dense flock of small green discs glides in from the left, slapping their flat bodies hard against the tree trunks below with a resounding chorus of thwaps. Thwap, thwap, thwap. Jonah backs away and follows Garrett’s tracks around the module.

  The sight punches Jonah in the stomach. Among the thousands of flaming pieces of the Mayflower 2, dozens and dozens of mangled bodies lie spread out as far as he can see. Men, women, kids. Classmates. Strangers. Cadets and demics. Military officers, crew members, and teachers. Jonah’s gaze bounces from a severed arm to a headless man to a pile of four young girls. Blood and oil soak the brown grass of the plain. Twenty yards away, a woman with a dripping head wound pulls herself through the chaos with one arm. A tall, pale boy with bright blue hair shuffles close behind, hugging his shoulders.

  Jonah falls to his knees as he watches the injured try to separate themselves from the dead. Many of these kids were recruited solely to replace the ones who died on that field trip on Thetis, to improve the morale of all those mourning adults, to be the next generation. Now, someone is going to need to replace them.

  Like exploded eggs, shards of the white modules lie every which way. Fifty yards ahead, a man and a woman pull several dead cadets out of a smoking corner of Module Five. The back of one boy’s head is missing. Stumbling out of the same corner and holding his left elbow is a muscular kid named Griffin, a Third Year, who has the face of a lion shaved into the side of his orange hair. A demic girl sobs as she helps an older professor sit down in the shade of a tree, and next to them, a bearded man drags a large orange cylindrical piece of equipment away from a rushing fire. He moves quickly, lugging the orange tank right over a dead girl, pulling her along for a few short feet. Something detonates to his right, spewing blue-gray flames and debris high into the air, rocking Jonah onto his hands.

  Jonah orders himself not to cry. He grinds his teeth, pushing a loose incisor sideways, focusing on that pain instead of the blackness that claws at his insides. His eyes refocus on the wreckage, bobbing from body to body, eventually settling on Garrett, who staggers into the middle of the madness, unsure which way to go. He finally jogs
to the left, toward a woman cradling a young boy under a warped piece of the truss.

  The giant truss once looked like the big brother of the original Eiffel Tower in Paris: an intricate, narrow work of metal that widened at its base. It was supposed to be indestructible. It was also supposed to open and drop the parachuting modules safely to the ground like they were the seed heads of a dying dandelion. Now, though, it lies twisted, charred, and split open, and where there were previously nine inflatable modules tucked inside, only the front two remain. When the Mayflower 2 was launched over a year ago, sixteen land vehicles clung to the outer frame, all with their own parachutes. Only four vehicles remain attached and intact: three are rugged electric cycles, and the other is a tank-like truck with yellow treads and a mounted gun on top. Jonah looks over his shoulder, and in the distance, he can barely see where the ship originally made contact with the ground, discarding and destroying the other vehicles, leaving a trail of debris until it twisted and opened like a dying patient on a surgeon’s table.

  Smoke billows throughout the plain. A bloody man sprays blue foam on a smoldering module piece while two older cadets help a small girl out of its cloud-filled belly. Jonah orders himself to get off his knees, to help, to find the doctor in the yellow coat, to do something, anything, but he’s paralyzed from the view.

  He’s not the only one, though; on the periphery, several other kids and a few adults stare blankly at the carnage, trying to wake up from his or her nightmare. Something under the truss bursts into flames. Patches of grass fizz and detonate like firecrackers. A man screams for help, for anyone to please just help him, and it’s only then when Jonah focuses on this one voice that he finally moves. It’s as if he has no choice, and the man is yelling only for Jonah. He numbly gets to his feet and scans the wreckage. There. Right there. A short arm in a torn blue sleeve sticks out from under a piece of the truss, waving frantically. Jonah stumbles toward the arm as everything else fades away. It’s just him and this arm now. He locks in on it and keeps moving, but when he’s just ten feet away, a thick patch of grass near his feet begins to sizzle and pop, and before Jonah can run, it explodes, rocketing an empty launch seat into Jonah’s side.

  It’s as if he’s been blown to pieces, and he falls over like a tower of toy blocks. His head feels like it’s a hundred miles from his shoulders when it lands on something sharp and hard, and then he sees only whiteness, hears only a dull ringing. His mind bubbles with heat, and then the ringing disappears, replaced with the screams of everyone around him, including the man he never reached. Jonah rolls onto his back and tries to call out for help, but his mouth doesn’t move. A foot-long insect, a fuzzy yellow thing with red-tipped wings, circles his head and lands on his lips. Jonah tells his arms to swat it away, but they are lifeless, stuck to the ground like anchors. The bug stings his lips, crawls to his cheeks, and stabs him twice, and then it flies away, and all Jonah can do is let the throbbing pain radiate throughout his face until his eyes close and he’s asleep.

  Chapter Three

  A red beam crawls over Jonah’s left pupil, waking him with a jolt.

  “Don’t move,” a woman says. There’s a hand on his forehead. It’s small, cold, and trembling, but still it comforts Jonah, steadies his breath, and keeps him from sitting up. The red beam seems to shoot right into his skull, bouncing around his brain and into his throat. He tastes it. It’s metallic and gritty. Or maybe, he thinks, that’s blood and dirt. A second later, sounds rush into his ears as if someone has flipped a switch: fire rages somewhere nearby, an older boy sobs and kicks something plastic, and someone chants, begs, cries for someone to wake up. A man far off shouts for more water, and before Jonah can decide to help, the woman’s hand presses his head firmly to the ground. “You’re okay, Jonah, but just don’t move.”

  He tries to ignore the man sounding more and more desperate for water, but it’s impossible. Someone get him some water, he thinks. Please. He needs water. The red beam seems to carry weight on his eye, and as it crawls slowly downward, it drives Jonah’s eyeball gently to the top of his socket. The hand leaves his forehead and he hears an electrical whirring, and then something begins to suck debris out from under his bottom eyelid. The pain is barely tolerable and he locks his jaw and begins to count; it’s as if tiny hot forks dig and scrape the bottom of his eye. The woman seethes and sighs as she pushes the machine deeper under his lid. The pain doubles, and Jonah screams and pounds his fists on the ground. The man still yells for water. Jonah can’t believe no one has brought him any water. He rips handfuls of dirt up from the ground and tries to close his eye, but the woman pleads with him not to.

  “I know, I know. It doesn’t feel good, but just give it a second. Give it another second. It’ll feel much better then, trust me,” she says as the beam pushes his eyeball in the opposite direction. The top and the corners of his eye are suctioned, and he gets used to the pain. When the same attention moves to his right eye, the man finally stops shouting. Jonah just hopes that means he received some water, and not that he doesn’t need it anymore. “Jonah,” the woman says, “your nose is broken.”

  “I thought so.” He smacks his lips and wobbles his jaw back and forth, and then he remembers the fuzzy yellow insect that stung him before he passed out. To his surprise, his face doesn’t hurt. Much.

  The beam and suction finally end, and when Jonah closes his eyes, he’s amazed they’re relatively pain-free. The woman’s fingers crawl over his cheeks, behind his ears, and then around his neck. While her hands fumble the top of his spine, Jonah finally looks into the face that’s been hovering over his head. It’s Dr. Zarembo, or Doctor Z, as everyone calls her. Streaks of black dirt and dried blood cover her gaunt cheeks, perfectly outlining her thin, pale lips before continuing down her slight chin. Dark maroon hair falls from behind her ears, the ends black and melted.

  “Thank you,” he whispers.

  She smiles wearily. “You’re welcome.”

  His eyes drop to Dr. Z’s shoulders. She is wearing a yellow coat. The sight of it brings Garrett’s distraught face to his mind, and then Jonah remembers the blue sleeve sticking out from under the truss, and he sits up, knocking the doctor onto her heels.

  “Whoa. Wait,” she says. “Hold on. Just hold on. You’re still a mess.”

  He says nothing and looks past the doctor. The arm is no longer there, and a pit of regret and shame swells inside Jonah’s chest. His eyes sweep back and forth in hopes of finding a sliver of the blue sleeve when he sees Vespa Bolivar. The tall Fourth Year cadet struggles to walk backward between two fires as she drags three small boys across the dirt by their wrists. They’re dead. Like so many others, they’re dead. Vespa pauses midstride and wipes her cheeks with the back of her sleeve. He watches in complete awe. Vespa is one of the toughest cadets at the academy, and here she is crying, too.

  Jonah stares and thinks of the moment he first met her. It was his second week at the academy, and as a hazing ritual, the squibs—pre-First Years—were matched against Thirds in hand-to-hand combat. He remembers how Vespa stood barefoot before him—seemingly coming out of nowhere—wearing all black, the sides of her head shaved, with the rest of her black hair tied high above her head in a wild, uneven fountain. Her face was a perfect V, punctuated with an intense pair of deep-set green eyes. The other cadets began to chuckle and whisper, and Jonah just stood motionless, dumbfounded, paralyzed with intimidation. Vespa was shockingly beautiful, but at the same time frightening, and he’ll never forget how she looked him up and down and then laughed, right in his face. A whistle blew and she pounced like a tiger, twisting him around in a blur, slamming his face to the floor while locking him in a searing arm-bar. He can still feel his cheek pounding that sticky gym mat, the girl’s sharp knee digging into his lower back. That day, when she finally released him, when all the laughing died down and the instructor barked at him to get up, all he could do was cough a weak congratulation up at her. She just walked away without looking back, and that was the l
ast time he spoke to her.

  Dr. Z says something and taps him on the shoulder, but he continues to stare at Vespa holding the boys’ wrists and how the white sun shines off her black hair. He closes his eyes and pictures her grabbing him by his wrist, pulling him somewhere safe. He tells himself to get up and help her, but he just sits there in some deep-seated shame and anger he doesn’t quite understand, peeking over the doctor’s shoulder like a toddler at a zoo. Vespa turns and walks forward, her back now to the bodies. This seems to make her stronger, and her bare feet hurry along the brittle grass.

  “I didn’t help anyone,” Jonah whispers, lying back down. “There’s something wrong with me. There’s always been something wrong with me, but now…Manny’s dead and Blaire’s dead and all these people are dead and people were yelling and screaming and that guy wanted water so bad and I just…” he trails off. His thoughts fade and blur. Words come slowly. He feels like he’s back at the Pacsun home facing the twins, and they’re telling him to take off his shirt, or else. “There was a man who had an arm up and he was…I was hit by something and there was an explosion and I’m…I don’t even know.” Tears flood his eyes and stick to his temples. He hides his face in his hands.