Achilles

by Greg Boose

  The star shoots a green beam across the cave, landing directly above Vespa’s head. She dives and rolls into Bidson’s legs, knocking him onto his stomach. Michael runs for the ridge outside, and Aussie shrieks and yanks on Jonah’s arm. He lowers his weapon, captivated, waiting patiently for what’s next. Suddenly the star itself blasts away from the wall in a rocky explosion, trailing a thin metallic tube behind it. The star punches through the opposite wall with such force that the cave shakes and Jonah falls onto his back.

  A crooked fissure crawls up and down the wall, and slowly the rock begins to separate. A few seconds later, Jonah sits in front of a doorway.

  “Duuuude,” Portis moans.

  “What the freaky fuck?” Hopper asks from a corner of the room.

  Vespa touches Jonah’s back. “You okay?”

  The opening is dark, and the cool air rushing out of it rolls over his skin like water. Vespa turns on the light of her rifle and aims it inside the opening. They see something long and white and shiny stretching the width of the floor.

  Jonah ducks into the room, getting in front of Vespa’s light. His long shadow paints the domed ceiling like a ghost. All around him, lining the walls and up above, there are hundreds of the same circle-tipped stars, but there are also double squares and stacked Vs, repeating dots and sectioned boxes, and dozens of other symbols that remind Jonah of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

  Someone brings in the lantern and the room brightens just in time for Jonah to sidestep the long white object on the floor. It’s about four feet wide, connecting the western and eastern walls, and it shimmers like milk.

  “Nobody touch anything,” Vespa whispers.

  “Am I the only one who thinks this is the coolest thing any human being has ever seen?” Michael whispers.

  “I do,” the youngest hacker says. “Absolutely.”

  “Should we even be in here?” Portis asks. “Like, seriously? I don’t think we should be in here.”

  “I’m thinking the same thing.” Malix runs his fingers over the symbols on the wall. And then, out of nowhere, the cadet stops in his tracks and almost falls over. His face grows white, and then he spins around to run, only to charge right into Bidson and land on his back.

  “We have to go!” Malix shouts. “Get out of here! We have to get out of here right now!”

  “What’s wrong?” Vespa shouts.

  Malix crawls toward the door. “Just run! I’m telling you!”

  Jonah doesn’t feel the same panic. He doesn’t want to leave. This room feels like the only safe place he’s ever been. “Malix, just wait.”

  Malix doesn’t listen. He gets to his feet and barrels past Aussie. But when he tries to dive out of the room, he bounces backward and screams as if he’s been shocked. That’s when Jonah sees the faint curtain of white light covering the doorway. Malix then runs into the light at full speed and again bounces back into the room. He grinds his forehead along the ground and begins to sob.

  “Dude, what’s going on? What’s wrong with you?” Portis asks.

  “Guy’s freaking flipped.” Hopper sighs.

  “It’s a force field,” the youngest hacker says at the doorway. “Incredible. I can’t believe we’re actually seeing stuff like this.”

  Vespa kneels and carefully places a hand on Malix’s back. “Cadet? Talk to me.”

  Jonah makes eye contact with Vespa and then turns to examine the room. The ceiling is twenty-five feet high, and the way the walls curve at the top and then at the floor, it’s almost like they’re all standing in a sphere with a few feet of dirt on its floor. The sense of comfort is almost overwhelming to him. Why does all this feel okay?

  “We’re going to die,” Malix whispers, lifting his head. “We’re next now.”

  “What do you mean?” Vespa asks.

  “The signs. They’re the same ones. The ones near the door with three circles inside the letter C. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. We have to get out of here.”

  “What about them?” Jonah asks, spotting several of the symbols here and there along the curved wall.

  “Are you saying you know what they mean?” the hacker asks.

  “The night when Sean and I went off on the beach,” Malix says, sitting up. His breathing intensifies. He closes his eyes. “We were maybe a mile away. We came to all these huge rocks and we couldn’t get by, so we got off the cycle and climbed up to see what was on the other side.” He grinds his teeth and opens his eyes, staring right at Jonah. “We found four of the adults from the ship. Dead. Lying there on the rocks. And they looked tortured. Their faces were all torn up.”

  Bidson falls to his knees. Aussie stuffs her hair into her mouth and begins to cry. Jonah doesn’t know what to say.

  “Who was it?” Michael asks.

  “I don’t know,” Malix says. “I have no idea. But they had stuff on their shirts, too. More messages.”

  Vespa stands. “What did they say?”

  “Two said, ‘Keep Running.’ Another one said, ‘We’re Always Watching.’ And then the last shirt said, ‘Tell Anyone and You’re Next.’” Then Malix points to one of the symbols: three circles inside a C. “And they all had that symbol up and down their arms. Burned into their skin. All over them. I’ll never forget it.”

  Jonah spins on his heels, taking it all in. His blood runs ice cold while his skin pops with heat. But then it all washes over him. Calmness returns, and again he finds that he doesn’t want to be anywhere else. Even with the news.

  “Okay. Okay, okay,” Vespa says. “Nobody touch anything, especially those circles in the Cs.”

  Malix wipes his face. “But how are we going to get out of there? We have to get out of here, or we’re next. I’m next, aren’t I? It’s me. They’re coming after me. Oh, shit.”

  No one responds. Aussie picks up a rock and tosses it at the curtain of light in the doorway. It ricochets back at her feet.

  It’s suddenly obvious to Jonah. “The only way out of here is to touch something.”

  “He’s right,” says the hacker.

  “So then, Captain Dipshit,” Hopper says. “When are you going to touch that big white thing over there and kill us all?”

  “Nobody’s touching anything,” Vespa says. “Let’s just think for a second.”

  “This is so messed up,” Bidson says.

  The hacker walks into the middle of the room, right next to Jonah, and rotates with his young face skyward. “There are a lot of patterns here. Lots of them. The way all the symbols are laid out, it’s saying something or painting a picture or telling us how to get out of here. I’m just trying to figure it out.” He jabs his chubby finger at different points at the ceiling, his pink hair glowing in the lantern light. He mouths numbers to himself until a scowl appears on his round face. “They’re not prime numbers, for one thing, and they don’t seem to have a noun-verb sentence structure, which makes sense, but I don’t—”

  “And it’s not map of any solar system I’ve ever seen,” Bidson adds.

  “Maybe it’s…” Michael drones.

  Hopper shoulders Michael out of his way. “Hold on, people. I got this.”

  The cadets watch silently as the demics look for a code, each of them starting and stopping sentences, pacing, counting, arguing and shaking their heads. Suddenly the hacker with the pink hair runs to the eastern wall and touches a hollow diamond with a square inside. It takes him a second before trying to twist the square. When he does, there’s an audible click.

  “No,” Malix moans.

  Vespa points a finger at him. “I said don’t!”

  Jonah considers stopping the boy but doesn’t. He wants to see what happens.

  The hacker ignores the protests and runs across the room and twists the squares inside two more diamonds. Without stopping, he jumps over the white object and does the same to three more of the diamonds stacked vertically on top of each other. More clicking fills the room.

  “Now! Someone needs to jump up and turn the one at the top!”<
br />
  Everyone looks at the ceiling, and directly in the middle is another hollow diamond with a square. Jonah crouches down, but just before he’s going to leap, Portis darts in from the right. “Stand still, big guy!”

  “No! Don’t!” Malix yells.

  Bidson stiffens a second before Portis runs up his back. The cadet launches himself off the demic’s shoulders and flies toward the ceiling. He reaches the diamond and twists its square, hanging for a moment by his fingers, and then Portis falls and catches Bidson’s floating arm before hitting the ground. Everyone waits for another door to open, for the white object to transform into a giant demon, for the adults to show up and congratulate them on passing some sort of test. But nothing happens. Just more clicking.

  Then Jonah sees them. He darts toward the door and the four diamonds next to it, and turns their squares while Malix yanks back on his shoulders, begging him not to. All the clicking stops. And then the entire sphere begins to shudder.

  Immediately, every touched diamond begins to glow green, and a moment later, the long white object on the floor comes to life. The milky material has begun to flow from east to west, like a moving walkway. A faint white energy field appears at the ceiling.

  “Jesus. Now what?” Portis asks.

  “Let’s just stop touching stuff for one goddamn second,” Vespa growls. “Let’s get Brooklyn and Christina and slow down. We have no idea what we’re doing.”

  But Jonah thinks that he does know what he’s doing. He has some sort of déjà vu, as if he’s been here before. He picks up a large stone.

  “Stop,” Vespa warns him.

  He doesn’t listen to her, running to the eastern wall and throwing the stone into the moving material. As soon as it touches the milky surface, it shoots across the room. When it reaches the other wall, it doesn’t bounce back; the stone just disappears.

  Hopper runs over to Jonah. “Hell no.”

  “A portal?” Michael whispers. “That’s like—”

  Suddenly the stone falls from the energy field at the ceiling and bounces quietly on the floor. Vespa and Jonah make eye contact, and he can see she’s starting to lose it. They were never trained for something like this.

  “Whoa,” Bidson says, laughing.

  “Where do you think it went?” Aussie asks.

  “Um, the ceiling,” Portis says. “Pay attention.”

  “I mean, where did it go before it came back?”

  No one has an answer. Hopper drops the stone back onto the white material and they all watch it do the same exact thing, disappearing at the wall and reappearing at the ceiling. Malix catches it and turns it over in his trembling hand.

  “I don’t get it,” he says.

  They try bigger rocks, smaller rocks, rolling them this way and that on the white material. The same thing happens over and over, and the curtain of light at the doorway doesn’t leave. They’re still stuck there. Frustration takes hold, and Hopper tries touching other symbols on the walls, but nothing changes.

  Finally, the pink-haired hacker walks over to the eastern end of the white object. He then turns to the room with a look of desperation on his face. “From the moment I heard the adults were killed down in the jungle, I’ve been waiting for my turn. To be killed. To die. It’s all I think about. I’ve actually been waiting for all of us to die. It seemed…inevitable. And it still seems inevitable, with the way things are going. So, as a man—or a boy, I guess—of science, I can’t just waste an opportunity like this.”

  Before anyone can react, he steps on the white object. His feet are swept out from underneath him, and he shoots across the room on his back.

  “No!” Bidson shouts.

  Jonah breaks into a sprint, trying to cut the boy off from the side. This feels wrong. Everything else has felt right, but this feels terribly wrong. He moves quicker than he thought possible, and he dives just as the boy zips in front of him. But he’s too late. His arms close around nothing.

  Everyone runs to the middle of the room, their heads up and waiting for the boy to appear and fall. A second passes, and then another one.

  “Come on,” Jonah says. “Come on!”

  “Where is he?” Aussie asks.

  “This isn’t good,” Vespa whispers.

  Ten more seconds pass. The hacker doesn’t fall. Malix runs over to the eastern wall and drops the stone onto the white material. It shoots halfway across the room and then stops. The whiteness goes still. The energy field at the ceiling pulses and then disappears. The doorway is clear, too. They can leave. The kids are free now.

  “Start it up again! Hurry!” Vespa yells.

  Jonah bolts for the nearest hollow diamond to turn it on again, but to his shock, it’s not there anymore. There’s just a flat section of rock.

  “They’re gone,” Bidson says from the other side of the sphere. “Those symbols are gone.”

  Jonah looks up at the ceiling. The diamond in the center is missing, too.

  “Find another code, then!” Vespa shouts. “One of you demics figure it out! Now!”

  The demics study the walls and ceiling in panic, but no one finds anything. Michael digs his fingers into any star he can find. Jonah claws at the walls, pleading with the stone to give. Still, nothing happens.

  “I didn’t even know the kid’s name,” Portis says as he runs his hands through his thick hair. “Jesus. How did I not know his name?”

  “It was Kip,” Hopper says.

  “Kip.” Jonah repeats the name several times. The feelings he had about the sphere five minutes ago have faded. He no longer feels comfortable or safe in there. “Where the hell did Kip go?”

  Shouts sound outside the sphere’s door, and they all stop and look at each other. Then, as a group, they sprint through the opening, hoping to see Kip and his pink hair.

  They see no one, but then Jonah hears Brooklyn shouting from the back of the cave.

  “Just go! Move!” she barks.

  A gruff, unfamiliar voice answers her, and Jonah and Vespa pull up their rifles.

  “Brooklyn?” Vespa shouts.

  “Yeah!” Brooklyn yells back. “We’re coming around the bend! Get ready for this shit!”

  Michael aims the electric lantern into the dark recesses of the cave. Christina appears, backpedaling with the barrel of her LZR-rifle lit, raised head-high.

  Then they all gasp.

  “What the—?” Malix asks.

  “Whoa. Holy shit,” Hopper whispers.

  A tall, shirtless man no older than twenty walks into the light with his hands up. He’s thick with muscles, from his navel to his neck, and his copper skin is dirty and covered in scratches, some new, some old. His hair is a fountain of blond matted coils that explode in every direction. He wears torn, grime-covered shorts, a small green sack hangs from his hip, and his feet are bare and gray. His dilated green eyes bounce all over the cave. A long, scraggly beard curtains his cheeks and chin, and as he continues to eye the group before him, his jaw moves constantly, like he’s chewing gum. Then he fumbles his fingers over his lower lip, bows deeply, and spits a glob of white liquid to his left.

  Jonah readjusts his rifle, unable to breathe. It’s no one from their ship, he’s sure of it.

  “Who the hell are you?” Vespa asks. “And where’s Kip?”

  Still in his deep bow, the young man whips his arms out wide and rubs the tips of his fingers together. “Who am I? What’s my name? Right, right. I have manners, I assure you. Call me Tunick.”

  “I don’t care what your name is,” she barks. “I want to know who you are, what you’re doing here, and where you’re from! How can you be here? And what happened in that room and where’s the boy?”

  Jonah is dumbstruck, waiting for his brain to catch up with his heart rate. The man starts stomping his left foot. “Of course, of course, of course. I come in peace, I assure you.”

  “We found him in a nearby tunnel,” Brooklyn says, entering the cave with her gun aimed at the man’s back. “Bastard was wal
king right in your direction.”

  Tunick stands up straight and touches the ends of his dirty dreadlocks. A sadistic grin appears on his cracked lips for a second, and then he stuffs a finger in his mouth, biting on his nail. His voice is manic, alternating between mumbles and loud, drawn-out words. “That’s because I was coming to meet you. You were here, and I was coming from back there. You crashed and I saw it. I’m Tunick. I live here. Well, not here, in these caves, because that would be crazy.” He twists around, and the cadets tighten their grips on their rifles. “Spider-y things live in these caves. Giant white ones. No, I wouldn’t sleep here. I don’t live here. I’ll show you where I live.”

  “Where’s Kip?” Aussie asks.

  “Kip? Is that your dog?” Tunick laughs. “You brought a dog? Good, good. Let me take the good dog home with me. We’ll give him bones. I have so many bones at home.”

  Jonah steps forward. “We’re supposed to be the only humans here. Where are you from?”

  “Originally? Originally, I’m from Dallas, Texas. Grew up there. So hot in Dallas. Waaaaay too hot. Not like in these cool caves. It’s nice in here. But there are spider-y things. Big white ones. They’ll bite ya. Gobble ya right up.”

  “How is this possible?” Michael asks.

  Jonah breaks his stare, lowering his gun. “You came from Thetis, didn’t you? From the Athens colony. You were on the first Mayflower ship.”

  “Ha! I was!” Tunick laughs. “You’re a smart boy. That’s exactly what I’m looking for. I was hoping you were smart kids. I’ll show you where I live. I can show—”

  “Shut up for one second, damn it! How did you get here?” Vespa demands.

  “I crashed, too.” Tunick flattens a hand and sways it over his head like an airplane. He then juts his hand straight down into a nosedive. “One year ago. Or has it been longer? Two years? We stole a ship, we stole a ship. Me and a bunch of other smart kids from Thetis. We stole a ship and we crashed here.”

  “That’s not true,” Malix says. “All the kids died in that field trip accident. On that field trip to the Polaris Mons. It was reported all over Earth. None of the kids survived. That’s why we’re here.”