by Greg Boose
The jungle is alive with animal calls and shaking leaves, but there’s no sign of Tunick. Maybe Bidson’s death grip still holds. Bidson saved him. And now Jonah needs to go back to save the others, to somehow convince them to come with him. He’ll go after Aussie and Michael first, he decides, and work his way up to Hopper. But first he needs a weapon, and maybe a moment to clear his head of the verve once and for all. He still sees streaks of colors, blues, reds, and yellows, floating and combining into thin clouds that he walks right through. Some colors seem to shoot out of his chest like arrows, trailing long lines of neon that climb the banks and disappear into the trees.
To the south, mountains loom above a wispy level of haze, and that’s the direction he heads. He doesn’t want to go too far, just far enough to recuperate and make a plan to rescue his friends. He stumbles along the loose stones, his fingers prodding his nose and massaging the back of his skull. Every thirty seconds, he stops and listens for Tunick. Nothing.
Then, out of the line of trees to his left, a giant bat or bird thing, with tentacles swirling out of its belly, swoops low in the embankment and circles the air just ahead of him. It shoots straight back up into the trees, trailing a stench so foul and dense that Jonah collapses, gagging on the toxic fumes. At first he thinks it’s another verve hallucination, but the pain in his lungs is much too real. With his collar over his broken nose, he has no choice but to climb out of the cloud and back into the jungle. He’s dizzy and confused, crashing into tree trunks with an uncontrollable cough. He can’t see anything, but the stench seems to follow him, and he’s forced to keep moving. He’s making too much noise, he knows, but there’s nothing he can do. Then his foot doesn’t find any ground, and he falls back into the embankment.
Tunick’s voice constantly swirls in his head, talking about the “older ones,” verve, the energizer, splitters, being chosen. He mulls it over, but then his mind goes blank when he remembers that Tunick’s brother may have been on the ship. Does Jonah know him? Is it Griffin or Paul or one of the demics? Is it Hopper? Jonah pulls on his hair in frustration; on top of everything, he doesn’t know if he can trust a single word Tunick has said so far.
He crawls up the embankment and pulls his legs to his chest. Yellow beams crawl out of his toes and dip into the valley, only to disappear when he shakes his head. Which way is Tunick’s cave? His heart shrinks when he realizes he’s lost. How far did he actually stumble?
Jonah begins to heave with disappointment in himself. He’ll never find his way back to that cave. But maybe he can get back to the crash site and bring reinforcements, if there are any to be found.
He grabs a felled branch; it’s four feet long with a sharp point, and he taps it against his ankle as he leans forward to look for the mountains. He’s about to slide back into the embankment for a better view when he hears footsteps. His toes grip a smooth rock, and he picks it up. The spear and rock aren’t a match for Zion and his gun, or Tunick and his rage, but at least they are something. His only chance is to get the jump on whoever it is, and so he crawls farther back into the shadows and waits.
Then, directly across from him on the lip of the embankment, a round face with a patchy black beard pushes through the top of a bush. His deep-set eyes shine in the pale moonlight, searching back and forth. Jonah stares with held breath, thinking the man looks oddly familiar. Is this Zion?
After a few seconds, the man silently exits the bush, wearing only a tattered pair of black pants, with a huge amber knife tied to his left rib. In his hands are two thick bundles of weeds dropping soil from their roots. Before Jonah can decide if he’s friend or foe, two more people step out of the bushes. To his surprise, it’s Paul and Ruth, both covered in dirt and looking haggard. LZR-rifles hang from their backs.
“Shit,” Paul seethes, sliding down into the embankment. Jonah relaxes, and he’s about to ask for help, but he stops himself at the last second. It’s slight, but definite; there’s something different about Paul’s eyes, the way he moves. He looks frantic, even more frantic than when he begged Vespa not to go west.
“Get out of there, cadet. Right now,” the man says to Paul. “They might shoot you instead. They’re not going to let this kid live for much longer. He’s seen too much now.”
As soon as he hears his raspy voice, Jonah recognizes him. He’s Armitage Blythe, the boy from the videos on his sheaf, the academy’s brightest star from the first ship. The last time Jonah saw him, he was pulling a large section of bark away from a tree on Thetis, revealing a nest of white worms that took flight in an inky cloud. And then Manny told Jonah to turn off his sheaf, and then they crashed.
Armitage Blythe was famous for skipping his third year to fight alongside the first wave of US Marines invading England. Jonah never met him in real life, but officers played videos of Armitage several times a semester, boasting how far the recruit had come from being a weak little pacifist to being the smartest, quickest warrior they’d ever trained. Armitage was the first cadet to make the original Mayflower’s list for Thetis. And now here he is. On Achilles.
Paul jumps back up into the jungle. “I told you we should have just grabbed the Firstie back there. This is ridiculous. We don’t need bait for this.”
“Yes, we do. But even if we don’t grab the boy, I’ve got something much better anyway,” Armitage says. “Zion is not getting off this moon, I swear.”
Wait, Jonah thinks. Zion is trying to get off the moon? And they want to use Jonah as bait? And why is Ruth here? He crawls backward and ducks behind a cluster of giant flowers. But then Ruth sees him. He freezes and waits for her to yell. She and Jonah stare at each for a moment, and then she mouths “Go.”
He doesn’t hesitate and runs without looking. The ground declines quickly under his feet, and he tumbles head over heels down a steep hill, bouncing off roots and saplings and through a thorny patch of weeds. White light pours out of his mouth and nose like water, flooding over the ground before disappearing. He loses his spear, his rock, and his sense of direction by the time he stops moving.
“Down here!” Paul yells from the top.
Jonah hears them scurrying down the hill. He knows as soon as they use their night-vision scopes, he’s as good as caught. And what then? Jonah is now convinced that Paul is Tunick’s brother, that he strung the professor from the tree and wrote those words on his chest and set fire to the Support Module and caused all this chaos. Didn’t he disappear that night to go look for Module Eight? Wouldn’t he have the ability and opportunity to overpower the adults with the Third Years he took with him? And didn’t he argue with the cook at the makeshift hospital just hours before she was found dead with her neck slit? Jonah crawls over a large boulder and makes himself as small as he can on the other side.
They’re close. One person shuffles past, breathing hard. Paul curses somewhere far in the distance, allowing Jonah to take in a lungful of air.
Then, jumping right on top of the boulder he’s hiding behind, Ruth surveys the jungle through her scope. “Just be quiet,” she whispers. “Listen to me.”
Jonah hugs his legs even closer to his chest. He shakes away a new hallucination of lights coming on.
“Sean’s gone. Dead. We made a raft and he fell in and I couldn’t save him.” Something drops onto the back of Jonah’s neck. He moves his fingers over it and realizes they’re glasses. Sean’s night-vision specs. He puts them over his eyes and the jungle lights up in several shades of greens and grays. Fifty yards away, up on the slant of a hill, Paul creeps in the opposite direction with his scope to his face.
“I went back to the site. The place was burned down, and I couldn’t find anybody alive, so I stayed in one of the trees until that Armitage Blythe guy showed up last night. He wants to kill somebody named Zion. Hell-bent on it. And I’m going to help him.”
“Good,” Jonah whispers.
Ruth jumps off the boulder and stands right in front of him. She slowly rotates with her rifle up and out, pretending to be searching fo
r him. “No, not good, Firstie. Zion holds some sort of key to getting off this place, but Armitage, he never wants to leave. And I don’t know if I do, either, after hearing about Thetis. If he kills this Zion guy, that threat of leaving is gone. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Ruth!” Armitage barks. He’s practically on the other side of the boulder. Jonah holds his breath and ducks his head. Should he just stand up and say he’ll help them find Zion? He wants the guy brought to justice, too. In fact, he wants him dead. But what if it’s a trick?
She steps right up next to Jonah so the toes of her shoes are pressed against his shins. “What?”
“Move already! He’s not here.”
“Fine.”
“You know what? Fuck it. Forget this kid. We’re going double back and will flush Zion out ourselves,” he says. “So move. Now.”
“You know, you’re a lot more charming on film,” she says, giving Jonah a slight nudge with her toes. She circles around the boulder.
“Watch your mouth,” Armitage grumbles.
Jonah watches the three of them bound up the hill and out of sight.
He stands and moves to his left, and then he stops and wanders to his right before sitting down on the boulder. A chill runs across his shoulders. He feels lightheaded and nauseous. Vomit appears in his throat and makes its way up to his molars, but he fights it back for a few seconds before it rises again and explodes past his lips in a cloud of sweet and sour. He watches it dissipate in the air, turning into floating green and gray pixels, and then he tears off the night-vision specs and lies back on the cold rock. He coughs and extends his arms over the sides as if he’s been shot in the chest. Small patches of morning sky bloom through the leaves, changing from yellow to blue to purple to yellow again, and as his sweat coats his skin, it sinks in that he can’t go back to the wreckage for reinforcements. He’s still on his own, and no one’s going to help him get back to Tunick’s. He should never have let Vespa and Brooklyn go west without him. That decision will go down as the one that ends his life.
He’s going to die. They’re all going to die. For the first time in days, as his body seems to melt into the rock below him, it finally sinks in. The sky changes to purple and then lightens again, but his mood has never been darker. There was always a glimmer of hope before, but he doesn’t feel it anymore. His body stiffens yet feels loose inside, as if his organs swim past each other, attempting to trade spots. His stomach flattens and slides through the spaces of his ribs, his heart swings from the bottom of his spine, and his lungs swell into his shoulder blades. As the verve or his sickness ebbs and flows behind his eyes, the colors and visions keep coming and coming. Rays of neon light shoot out of his chest. Cloudy blue figures float inches from his nose. Globs of orange and red fall from the trees like leaves at the end of autumn. He rolls to his side and tries to get to his feet, but it’s like he’s a punching bag pummeled off its hook. His promise to never stop moving west shatters all around him.
His eyes close. For the first time he can remember, as sleep approaches, he doesn’t worry about what could happen to him, or who might be nearby. If Zion sneaks up behind him and slits his throat while he sleeps, so be it. If Tunick rams a thousand verve seeds into his mouth, that’s what happens. And if the Pacsun twins were to miraculously show up with their burning rocks, Jonah would have to welcome the new scars.
“Who cares anymore?” he whispers to himself. “Come and get me.”
Chapter Fourteen
He sleeps for hours, spread out across the boulder as if he’s fallen from the sky. The jungle wakes and moves through its morning, and Jonah rolls through a series of dreams until breaking from his sleep like a fish breaching water. He sits up with a jolt, gasping for air, startling a large pack of bright red animals swaying overhead, tall on spindly, twenty-foot-long legs. Their bodies are fat like pigs, but they have rodent faces, with narrow tusks that branch out and curl high above their heads. They stare down at Jonah with beady yellow eyes, leaves stuck in their big mouths, and then they bellow in unison and bounce off on their five thin legs that compress like coiled springs. He watches the last one disappear and then lies back down; his head feels like cement.
After a few minutes, Jonah climbs off the boulder and kneels in a carpet of spidery red weeds. He needs food. He needs water. He needs a plan. His sickness seems to have receded for the time being, and his body feels thick and strong after the hours of sleep. He can feel the verve still buzzing below his skin, but he doesn’t mind it; in fact, it gives him the energy he needs to get to his feet. As he stands, hazy blue shadows rise from the back of his hands and float in place until he tells himself it’s not real.
He wobbles on his legs and realizes he no longer feels like waiting and dying. He feels like fighting. But which way should he go? He knows it could be the difference between life and death for not only him, but for Aussie and Portis and Michael and Ruth and everyone else. And that’s when he feels the verve gently rising through his body and blanketing his brain, growing hot just below his hairline. And then, on top of the red spidery weeds at his feet, a thick white line flashes in his mind, pointing up and over the hill. It’s there and then it’s gone. And then it’s there again. Jonah doesn’t hesitate; he jogs up the hill.
At the top, Jonah stops and concentrates on the jungle around him, and a moment later, another white line flashes in his mind. It dips into the embankment, rises back over the other side, and veers to the left. He shakes his head, and the line disappears. Then he laughs and tells himself he’s gone crazy and that this must be the final stage of his disease, that’s he’s actually still down on the boulder dreaming and dying. With just the one shoe on, he stumbles down the embankment, climbs to the other side, and turns left.
The jungle buzzes with insects, rattles with fat beasts bouncing and fighting on high-up branches, and drips with oozing fungi and tinted water. Jonah runs after the white lines that appear at just the right times, showing him narrow passages and hidden hillsides. Even though he’s hallucinating and his eyes hurt as if someone were pulling a needle back and forth behind his sockets, this all feels right. He just doesn’t know where he’s leading himself.
Finally, after a half hour of crashing through the trees and stumbling over several hills, Jonah barrels into a diamond-shaped clearing dotted with dozens of large black boulders. He slows to a walk, and when he reaches the center, he stops and waits for the next white beam to point him to his destiny. He rotates, heaving for air, his hands planted on the top of his head. Then it comes, flashing for less than a second, a white line aiming at a group of porcupine trees more than a hundred yards away.
Before Jonah can take a step, though, one of the black boulders to his right starts to move. It sways back and forth and then shuffles forward, connecting with a larger boulder. Jonah thinks he’s hallucinating again and shakes his head. But the rocks still move. Also, the rocks have hair. Matted, black wool. Suddenly the larger boulder plops hard onto its side and grunts, and Jonah sees the huge, pebbled mass of wet skin and its one giant nostril. His vision tunnels and his stomach drops. Snouts. He’s standing in the middle of a sleeping snout pack.
The white flash comes again, pointing at the far-off trees. He backpedals and then takes a few steps forward. Should he go back the way he came and circle around through the jungle, or go straight for the trees and through the pack? Ten feet in front of him, another snout unfurls and drops its long, wet nose onto the ground. A line of yellow froth drips from its nostril, pooling in the sharp brown grass, and then Jonah watches the edges of the cavernous nostril furl and unfurl, furl and unfurl, faster and faster. The beast grunts and flips over onto its lion-like paws, its nose pointed in Jonah’s direction. He doesn’t even think; he just runs.
He aims straight for the porcupine trees, chugging his arms, flattening his palms, grinding his teeth. He just needs forty-five seconds, forty, thirty-five. But almost immediately the entire pack is on its feet, howling, blindly
waking up to his smell. Jonah lowers his head. Grinds his teeth harder. Runs faster. He’s just twenty seconds from the trees.
A huge snout appears on his left, running right alongside him, growling and huffing. Deflating on top of its nose is one of those beet-red mushrooms, blowing the long hair from its four milky eyes. Before Jonah can dodge it, the beast gets in front of him and stops, lifting its hindquarters. Jonah’s chest and face hit the snout’s stiff back, and his fingers get tangled in its wool. He yanks himself backward, ripping out two handfuls of fuzz and oily blood. The snout roars in pain and whips its giant head at Jonah’s chest, unhinging its lower jaw. Two rows of rotten teeth rock into place, and they begin to shift along the gums and grow. The beast’s muddled eyes rise out of its skull on their dripping yellow sticks like spoiled lollipops.
Jonah turns to get away, but he’s rammed hard from behind, blasted right into the first snout’s face. His elbow swings down and smashes one of the beast’s rising eyes, snapping its yellow stick with a loud crack. The white ball drops onto Jonah’s bare foot, spraying juice on his ankle. He shouts and jumps backward, and the snout howls and rears up its two back feet in a furious rage, spinning and spinning, kicking the air. Jonah ducks one paw, but the other hits him directly in the throat. He stumbles, gagging, and that’s when he’s rammed from behind again, sailing right underneath the spinning snout’s claws.
Jonah rolls and stands, only to find himself facing five smaller snouts with dwindling mushrooms on the tips of their noses. Judging by their sizes, they have to be cubs. In fact, they’re about as big as he is, maybe even a little smaller. The porcupine trees are just thirty yards behind them. He can see the clusters shining on their branches. A faint white beam flashes on the ground, snaking around the pack, directing him there. But how is he going to get past?