Achilles

by Greg Boose

  They squint where Vespa points. Jonah sees the dark opening. In fact, he sees several caves punched into the layers of colors. That’s when he notices that one side of the canyon lip is charred black, as if torched by something. What caught fire all the way up here?

  “Go down there? You’re crazy! We’ll die!” Richter shouts.

  Portis swings his rifle onto his back and lays a scarred hand on the hacker’s shoulder. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

  “On the count of three, we hold hands and slide on our backs down the edge!” Vespa shouts. She sits up and everyone does the same. “When we hit the ridge, run to the right and get in the cave! It’ll work! Trust me!”

  Vespa grabs Aussie’s hand, and Aussie takes Jonah’s. “Here we go! One!” Jonah takes the youngest hacker’s hand. “Two!” The rest of the kids hesitantly connect, and then Vespa screams, “Three! Now!”

  Together, the chain of demics and cadets scoots to the crater’s edge. Jonah looks into the black hole below, hoping to see its floor so that he knows it isn’t just some bottomless abyss. He doesn’t find it, but something in the middle of all the blackness, just where the light fades away and everything goes dark, catches his eye. It shines for just a second, like a magnifying glass catching a reflected hint of sunlight, but then Vespa plunges downward with Aussie, pulling Jonah over the edge.

  The First Year yells and yanks down the hacker who pulls Christina, and soon all eleven kids scream as their backs scrape and bounce along the inner bowl of the canyon. With the lesser gravity and the blasting wind, they travel slowly, but it only makes the descent more terrifying as they have too much time to think. A swirl of lightning shoots into the opposite side of the crater, severing off a large chunk of red rock that plummets like a wounded bird. Then the soles of Jonah’s mismatched shoes suddenly hit a ridge and he stops descending. He pitches forward, wobbling on his sore knees, until Aussie and the hacker pull him back against the wall.

  “Now run!” Vespa shouts. She twists and runs along the crooked, narrow path, her left hand holding onto Aussie, her right always touching the wall in front of her. Jonah squeezes the boy’s wrist and runs as fast as the girls in front of him will allow. His lungs feel like they are about to explode. A gust of wind slams them all into the wall, and the raindrops no longer bounce off; they explode against the kids like tiny bombs.

  Vespa dives into a jagged cave entrance, whipping Aussie inside. Jonah slams his knee into the rocky frame but safely rolls inside and out of the way of the incoming train of kids.

  One by one, they enter the cave. After the pink-haired hacker goes in, Christina, Bidson, Michael, Hopper, Brooklyn, and Portis dive into the shelter. Then Malix comes into view. As soon as the cadet sets a toe inside the cave, he breaks off from Portis in front of him and Richter behind him. A rain-filled gust of wind sweeps across the entrance, picking Malix’s legs off the ground. He falls onto his chest and claws his way toward Brooklyn’s outstretched arms, but Richter doesn’t make it; he’s sucked away from the cave with horrified brown eyes that instantly burn themselves into Jonah’s memory. Just like that, he’s gone.

  Hopper staggers forward. “Richter!”

  Vespa runs over and snatches the back of Malix’s shirt, pulling his face up to hers. “You let go! Why the hell did you let go?”

  Malix’s face changes from relief to shock, and he looks over his shoulder and then around the cave. “What?”

  “He’s gone!” Aussie screams. “You killed Richter!”

  “You let go!” Vespa shouts. She pushes his face into the cold stone floor and then moves to the entrance, grabbing the upper curves of the frame, anchoring herself with a wide stance.

  “But I didn’t let go!” Malix yells. “I swear! I had him the whole time!”

  “You did let go!” Hopper shouts. “We all fucking saw you let go! You just killed Richter, man! You killed him!”

  Vespa marches back inside the cave, stopping to kick Malix in the ribs on her way past.

  “But I had him,” Malix groans. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  Aussie holds her head in her hands and walks in a small circle, stumbling over Michael. She then turns to the whole group and screams at the top of her lungs: “This is a disaster! Can’t you see how much of a disaster this is?”

  Jonah curls into a ball and stares at the cave’s mouth. At this rate, they’ll all be dead in another couple days.

  • • •

  After an hour, once the storm lessens to a devilish howling, Brooklyn and Christina quietly volunteer to explore while the others eat and rest. The cave, fifteen feet tall at its highest point, twenty-five feet at its widest, runs deeper than any of them could have imagined. When the two girls return to offer a tour of the tunnels they’ve found, no one moves, so they disappear again into the maze.

  They agree to rest for an hour or two, that whoever is following them would never find them in this cave. At least not right away.

  Malix sits near the opening with his head against the wall. No one asks him to isolate himself, but everyone seems happy he does. He punishes himself every few minutes by walking out along the ridge to look for Richter. Portis sleeps nearby, facing the wall.

  The demics huddle together behind an orange rock in the shape of an hourglass. An electric lantern sits at their half-circle of feet, casting shadows on the wall that, to Jonah, look too much like gravestones.

  Next to Jonah, on the opposite side of the cavern, Vespa hugs her arms around her shoulders. She pretends to sleep but opens her eyes every time Malix gets up, then again when he sits back down.

  “I think we should go back,” Jonah finally says to her.

  She doesn’t open her eyes, but her nose twitches.

  “I know you’re awake, Vespa. Listen to me. Aussie is right. This is a disaster, and I think we should go back to the crash site before anyone else dies.” He doesn’t believe a word of what he says next, but he says it anyway. “Maybe everyone’s okay back there.”

  The cadet raises her lids and stares at Jonah for a few seconds before saying, “They’re dead. You and I both know it. There’s nothing to go back to. And if we go back, then all our kids died for nothing.”

  “If we don’t go back and see what happened up there, then the rest of us are going to die for nothing. We’re going to die. Can’t you see that?”

  “I thought you were sick. That you’re going to die unless we don’t get off Achilles in, what? Twenty days?”

  Jonah is speechless.

  “Right? You’re sick? You’re dying?”

  “How did you know that?” he whispers.

  “Sean told me,” she says. “He said he overheard the doctor telling you the other night. You have some kind of blood disease.”

  At the makeshift hospital, Sean must not have gone very far, Jonah realizes. He heard everything.

  Vespa sits up and then shuffles over until their shoulders touch. When Jonah doesn’t respond, she sighs. “All right, Firstie. Talk to me. About something. About anything, I don’t know. Tell me why you’re here. Why were you going to Thetis?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he whispers.

  “I want to know. Humor me.”

  Jonah looks down and picks at the rips in his green jumpsuit.

  She cracks her neck and says, “Well, fine, I’ll tell you why I volunteered to go, and then maybe you’ll enlighten me.” She lowers her voice and faces him. “I haven’t told anyone this before, so fucking keep your mouth shut. This is between you and me. So, when I was eleven years old and they said they discovered Thetis, my dad went crazy. He got obsessed with it. And when I say he went crazy, he literally went crazy. He’s actually in a mental hospital right now, and that’s where he’ll probably always be. He doesn’t even know I was on the Mayflower 2, he’s so nuts.” She waits for a response from Jonah, perhaps some sympathy, but he keeps his lips sealed. If his father were alive, even if he were in a mental hospital, at least he could visit him. Ve
spa continues: “My dad was this super religious guy. A Jesus freak. My mom was, too, before she died.”

  Jonah nods at her, hoping to indicate he knows how that feels, that his mom is dead, too. She nods back.

  “My dad went to church every morning, prayed before every meal, and he even—man, this shows you just how insane he was—he had my sister and me baptized on five different continents in case we ever traveled to one of them when we were older and died. We had crucifixes in every room, in our car, sewn into our clothes, and on top of all that, look. Look at this stupid thing.”

  To Jonah’s surprise, Vespa hooks her finger in the collar of her shirt and pulls it down to the top of her breasts. In the faint light of the lantern, Jonah draws his embarrassed eyes along the curves of her skin, from left to right and then from right to left, pausing each time at the smooth, dark area between the tops of her breasts. It could be an attack from the sepsis, but he suddenly can’t breathe. He doesn’t want to breathe. A burning sensation appears between his shoulder blades and rages down over his torso. Then with her other hand, Vespa points to a faded blue tattoo over her heart. It’s a small crucifix.

  “He did this. Personally. To me and my little sister.” She releases her collar, and with it, Jonah’s lungs. “Hurt like hell.”

  “He did that?” he manages to say.

  “Yeah. My little sister had hers removed a few years back, but I… Well, anyway, my dad put so much faith in God and how God created the Earth and all that was good and bad on it and all the other stuff, that he was absolutely floored when they discovered Thetis. Another planet just like Earth? Not created by God? After hundreds of years of satellites and space probes and the Iranian mission to Ceres and, what, the launching of the Gilpin Telescope, they found the wormhole, and then twenty years later, on my eleventh birthday, they hit it just right to shoot out near Thetis.”

  “And Achilles,” Jonah mumbles.

  “And Achilles. Right. And Peleus, and the rest of this whole stupid galaxy. At first, though, when they brought back pictures from Thetis, my dad said they were fake, that God created one Earth, and blah, blah, blah. A few weeks later, after more and more pictures were released showing all the animals, he slightly changed his tune and said we weren’t meant to explore outside of God’s kingdom, that Thetis was Satan’s playground and a bunch of other stuff. That’s when he tattooed us, during all that. And then one night, out of the blue, he up and renounced God completely and said he’s an atheist. A month later—and here’s where he started to go really crazy—he told people he was from Thetis. And he said he wanted to go back. That he’d collected the information he was after on Earth and it was time for him to go home.”

  “Soooo…your dad said he was an alien?”

  “Affirmative,” she whispers, stretching a few black strands of hair into her mouth. Jonah can see she’s nervous, that she’s rethinking the conversation altogether.

  “So why did you come to Thetis then? After all that, I mean, why would you volunteer?”

  The hair falls out of her mouth. “To prove something to my father, ultimately. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I’ve come to terms with that part. I mean, yes, exploring and colonizing another planet is an incredible opportunity, a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing, but aside from my little sister who lives on the other side of the country with our aunt, there was nothing for me back home. Life was kind of shit before I got a scholarship to the academy, as you can imagine. But I think I volunteered for this mission so quickly, so fast, because I wanted to see with my own eyes the one thing, the one discovery, that ruined my dad’s life, and mine and my sister’s. I wanted to see if it was all worth it.”

  “Nothing’s worth having your family broken apart,” Jonah says.

  “Yeah, well, I wanted to be sure.”

  They fall silent for a few minutes. Aussie leans out of the demic huddle and takes a long drink of water. The others look to be asleep. Even Malix has nodded off at the entrance, his head balancing on his knees.

  Jonah stares at Vespa and gains some confidence. He clears his throat and his eyes shift upward. He finds a small hole in the wall high above Bidson and studies it as he finally speaks: “I’m a coward. That’s why I’m here. I volunteered for all this because I was scared to join the military at eighteen. Because that’s definitely what my future held before I got offered the Thetis trip.” In a low, shaky voice, he continues, “I don’t have any family. I don’t have a mom or dad, they’re dead, and I don’t have siblings or anybody else. Not even any real friends. Once I graduated from the academy, I couldn’t think of anywhere I could go, or anyone whom I could go anywhere with, if I could think of a place to go. And the thought of shipping off to England to fight in a war I don’t really understand or agree with, I just couldn’t do that. So I volunteered and was somehow—I don’t know how or why—selected. But I ran, you know, just like I’m running now. I’m just a coward with nothing going on, and I was hoping to reinvent myself on Thetis. Be someone else, as stupid as that sounds.”

  “When did your parents die?” Vespa asks. She drapes a hand over her knee. His eyes flash from the hole up on the wall to her hand to her beautiful green eyes, and then, for some reason, back to the wall. There’s something magnetizing about the hole near the ceiling. It’s perfectly symmetrical, like a five-pointed star with circles or bubbles at its tips.

  “Jonah?” Vespa asks.

  “Hold on,” he says, standing. Like a broken dam, regret rushes through his veins with every step he takes away from her. This is why you don’t have any friends, he thinks. This is exactly why.

  “What are you doing?” she whispers.

  Jonah picks up the lantern and holds it high above his head. The light hits the star directly, and it seems to glisten as if wet, and then he thinks he sees a quick flash of green at its most northern point. He moves closer and practically stands on top of Bidson’s legs; the demic’s floating right arm pushes against his stomach, but he doesn’t care. The star flashes green again.

  Bidson and the other demics grumble and wake up, shielding their eyes from the lantern.

  “What the hell, man?” Hopper groans.

  “I need you to move. Sorry,” Jonah says to Bidson.

  The oafish boy squints and complains that he just got the spot warm, but he rolls away so that Jonah can get to the wall.

  “What are you doing?” Michael asks.

  “That’s what I want to know,” Vespa says. She leans against the opposite wall. Jonah feels terrible for walking away from her when she was at her most vulnerable, but the star…

  “Don’t you guys see it?” Jonah asks, pointing at the hole twelve feet up. “There’s a star or something up there. That can’t be natural, right? Someone must have made it, carved it out?”

  Hopper circles around. “Well, now that is pretty freaky.”

  “Maybe the adults did it?” Michael asks. “Maybe they’re leaving clues for us. Maybe we’re supposed to know what it means so we can find them. Like a code we have to crack.”

  “I somehow doubt they wouldn’t just write us a note or draw us a map,” Vespa says.

  They all gather around Jonah, leaning back and forth to get a better look. Malix and Portis stagger over silently.

  “Why is it wet?” Bidson asks.

  “I have no idea,” Jonah says. Then, without thinking, he crouches, leaps, and touches the star’s southernmost tip. The rock is slimy and soft, like a sponge. As soon as his feet touch the ground, he hands the lantern to Michael and turns to Bidson. “Do you think maybe I can stand on your arm so I can get a better look? If it’ll hold me?”

  “Let’s give it a shot.”

  Hopper laughs, but no one else says a word as Jonah climbs up Bidson’s back and pushes the boy’s arm down, testing it. It pops right back up. Gently, Jonah stands on it like a swing, and Bidson’s arm dips for a second before the fused muscles raise Jonah to the perfect height.

  It’s as if someone has stamped
the wall or carved it with a precision laser; the edges of the star are sharp and perfect, and its depth is the exact same at every inch. The whole thing is no larger than Jonah’s hand, but staring at it face-to-face, it feels as if it were bigger than the sun.

  “So?” Hopper asks. “You going to make out with it, or what?”

  “What’s it look like?” Bidson asks.

  “Like a star with circles on its tips, I guess,” Jonah says. He extends an index finger and touches the exact middle. The rock gives and depresses like a pillow, and slime coats his nail. The middle section pulses white for a second and then his hand begins to tingle. He balls his fingers into a fist and looks down at the kids below, wishing he knew what to do.

  “Jesus. Let me up there,” Hopper says. “I’ll figure this shit out.”

  But Jonah looks back at the star. He’s oddly drawn to it, as if he was always meant to find it. The tingling in his hand intensifies, and it only feels better when he stretches his fingers wide. It’s then he notices how exact the sizes are; his open hand and the star couldn’t be a better match. He doesn’t think about it; he just does it: he pushes his fingertips into each of the five circles, and when the rock starts to suck on his skin, he pushes them deeper and deeper until they touch something hot. It burns and he yanks his hand out, and then something inside the star clicks.

  “Let me down!” Jonah yells. “Now!”

  Bidson pushes away from the wall, and Jonah jumps, landing on Portis, who shoves him off as if he were contagious. The star keeps clicking, getting progressively louder, and the cadets whip out their guns. Everyone backs away, but no one knows where to go.

  “What do we do?” Michael asks.

  “Brooklyn! Christina!” Vespa shouts over her shoulder and into the tunnels. “We’re leaving! Now!”

  Suddenly the star glows green and it begins to shake inside the wall, sending dust and rock to the floor. Jonah beats his tingling hand against his thigh and puts the star in the middle of his scope. He’s ready to shoot, but knows he won’t. Something in his chest tells him this is what’s supposed to happen. And he can’t wait to see what does.