Achilles

by Greg Boose

  “Where are they going?” Brooklyn asks.

  Vespa and Jonah look at each other. Neither knows what to do. Jonah then pulls Paul’s rifle out of the sand. He picks up the double-headed knife and stuffs it halfway into his pocket, and when he does, he feels the tiny white seeds pressing up against his thigh. He thinks of Tunick and the first time they met on the island. And then he thinks of the reef stretching over the water.

  “They’re going to the reef,” Jonah says. “The splitters are going to the island. That’s where the ship is.”

  “Well, shit. Let’s go, then,” Vespa says.

  The three enter the jungle and run along its edge as fast as their ravaged bodies allow. Jonah tells Brooklyn when to jump, when to duck, when to hold on tight. His mind races as fast as his feet.

  “Where are your rifles?” he huffs as Paul’s gun bounces on his back.

  “We lost them,” Brooklyn says. “We were trying to climb a cliff and we fell and we lost them.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Vespa growls.

  “But whose blood is that on your shirt, Brooklyn?”

  “We met a bear kind of thing,” she says.

  “With horns on his face,” Vespa adds.

  “And we killed it and ate it,” Brooklyn says.

  “And I got as sick as hell.”

  The needling behind Jonah’s eyes returns and intensifies, as if someone were trying to scoop his brain out through his nostrils with broken glass, and he has to close his lids every few seconds just to keep his feet moving. His knees, though, begin to buckle. Not yet, he thinks. Just give me a couple more hours. That’s all I need.

  After another ten minutes, after the sun has ducked halfway below the horizon and streaked the sky purple and gray, the three of them lie flat on their bellies on the sand. Jonah can still see, but things look grainy, and whites and yellows glow like ghosts. He and Vespa stare at the skeletal reef rising out of the water, winding its bony way across the ocean.

  “Where are the splitters?” Vespa asks. “No way they got that far ahead of us.”

  “We’re wasting time just lying here,” Brooklyn says.

  Jonah presses the riflescope to his needling eye, scanning the reef. He then rotates and looks back over the water to see if he can spot Tunick and the energizer, hoping they’re still far away from the island and the ship. Instead, he finds the splitters rowing frantically across the sea.

  “Shit,” he says. “Lark and Hess have their own raft. And they’re halfway there.”

  Jonah aims and fires, blasting a row of blue lasers over the water. His shots don’t even get close to the splitters. They’re too far away.

  “Let’s go,” he says, jumping to his feet. He races toward the water, Vespa pulling Brooklyn right behind, but just as his toes touch the sea, Jonah’s vision fades to a couple of bright pinpricks, and a second later, he can’t see a thing. Blackness.

  He’s blind. It’s over. His heart pounds in his ears, and he can feel his lungs gasping to come up with the air he needs to call out to the girls, but then there’s a quick flickering in his eyes, and his sight bleeds together. After a second of blindness, he can see again. Vespa and Brooklyn have already entered the water.

  Jonah pulls himself onto the reef and begs his eyes to keep working.

  After just a few seconds, Brooklyn wrenches her arm away from Vespa and drops to her hands and knees. “I’m going to slow you down too much. You guys just go.” She then starts crawling along the skeletal coral. “Seriously. Leave me here. I’ll get there. It’s just going to take me a while. Go!”

  Jonah doesn’t miss a beat; he reaches down and picks her up, swinging her onto his back. He then hands his rifle to Vespa.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she asks. “Leave me.”

  “Just shut up. You weigh practically nothing here,” he says, pulling her arms over his neck. “You’re like a backpack. Just don’t choke me.”

  And then they’re off, speeding over the glowing reef as Peleus brightens overhead, and as Jonah’s eyes adjust, he wonders what life is like up there, and if someone is about to find out. Brooklyn’s tiny breaths huff and echo in his ear, but she doesn’t say a thing except “okay” and “uh huh” and “thank you” as Jonah prepares her for jumps, stops, and turns. He considers telling her about his momentary blindness, his preview of what’s to come, but instead he keeps his mind on Lark, Tunick, and everyone else who might be waiting for them on the other end.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The island grows larger and larger, tall with shadows and wide with trees. The reef worms left and right, sometimes skimming the water and at other times rising several feet high. After a dangerously sharp turn, it looks like it’s just a straight road to the shore, and Jonah finds another wind, a wind above his fourth wind, a wind stronger than the supposedly unreachable fifth. Even with Brooklyn swinging from side to side on his back, and his grainy vision becoming more and more sensitive, he feels like this is the moment fate has kept him alive for. This, right now, is why his dad shoved him underneath the dresser during the earthquake, why he survived all the foster homes and then the crash. Maybe he was always supposed to save Brooklyn. That, and stop Tunick.

  Vespa squeezes past them, tightrope-walking the edge of the reef, and then she bounds ahead, rifle out. The reef finally comes to an end, and the silvery beach looks eerie in the moonlight. Vespa speeds up and launches herself high into the air, and she lands softly on the tide line.

  “Okay. Here we go. This is where we get off,” Jonah says. “Hold on.”

  “Please stick the landing,” Brooklyn says into his ear.

  He leaps high above the water, and when his feet hit the beach, he gently shrugs Brooklyn off his back. There’s no one in sight, and the three of them pad up the beach, heads down.

  They reach the base of the canyon in good time, pushing through choking leaves and thorny thickets of bramble. As Jonah looks for the best way up, Vespa covers the wind-blown jungle behind them. Then they begin to climb. Jonah, half-blind, pushes Brooklyn above his head and she sluggishly makes her way up. Then his hands stumble over some cracks, and he’s on his way, too. They reach the outer lip of the canyon, and a faint glow radiates from the center of the chasm, and it floats up in shards in Jonah’s vision until it melts into the night sky.

  “We’re here,” Jonah says.

  “So, we’re just going to slide down again?” Brooklyn says, coughing. He can hear the fear in her voice, and if it weren’t for the urgency of the moment, he’d second-guess it himself.

  “Just like before,” Vespa says as she stands on the lip of the canyon, the rifle rammed into her armpit.

  Jonah crawls with Brooklyn to the edge, and when he squints downward, he sees a blurry oval spacecraft at the very bottom of the canyon, almost a half-mile down. Yellow floodlights illuminate its base, and all around its hull, windows glow white like fire. His eyes cringe and plead with him to close, but Jonah can’t stop staring.

  “It’s down there. It’s really there,” Jonah says to Brooklyn. “We can see it.”

  The demic finds his wrist and squeezes it weakly. Then she coughs, and he sees blood in the corners of her lips. No more waiting. He shoves his thumb and index finger into his eyes, giving them one final moment of pressurized relief, and then he dangles his legs over the edge. Vespa does the same.

  Jonah reaches back for Brooklyn, but she recoils and says, “I–I–I’m going to stay here. I don’t feel very good. Something’s wrong.”

  Vespa and Jonah look at each other, and then at the ship. The Fourth Year nods and says, “Just don’t go anywhere. Promise us.”

  “I promise, as long as you rip off a piece of Tunick’s beard for me,” she says.

  “We’ll be right back,” Jonah says. He pulls out the double-edged amber blade from his pocket and squeezes its handle.

  “You ready?” Vespa asks Jonah.

  “Yeah.”

  She stares directly into his fac
e. “No matter what happens, Jonah, I’m happy I got to know you. I can act like a jerk and be all tough and whatever, but that’s only because it’s been a long time since I’ve met someone who seems to care about other people. Like how you care about Brooklyn and me. I think you’re really great, Jonah. Thank you.”

  “And I—” Jonah starts, but Vespa leans far back and shoots her rifle deep into the jungle behind them. Trees explode and the landscape catches fire, spreading the flames north.

  “Just a little diversion,” she says. “Now let’s go.”

  Rifle drawn, Vespa plunges silently downward, and Jonah follows. Their backs scrape and bounce along the bowl of the canyon. A swirling wind pushes on their shoulders and they travel faster than before, pulling blankets of rock with them. The lights below grow brighter, forcing Jonah to close his eyes for just a moment, and that’s when they meet their first ridge. Vespa stops, but Jonah’s knees buckle. He stumbles, pitches forward, and dives headfirst far away from the wall.

  Jonah flits and floats from side to side in the canyon like a dead leaf, his arms and legs stretched out wide, his jumpsuit billowing around him. Maybe Vespa yells for him, or maybe the noises in his ears are just life-flashing memories; it’s all so loud and bright and confusing. He’s a quarter-mile down now, and the ship starts to come into focus. It’s four or five stories tall, white with black stripes on its wings, and Jonah thinks he’s going to slam right into it when a powerful gust of wind whips him far out of the middle, bashing him into the canyon wall. He slides headfirst, his chest grinding into the rock. A narrow ridge suddenly rushes upward, and at the last second Jonah turns his body sideways. He stops and coughs and coughs and coughs until his lungs catch up to him. When he opens his eyes, he sees a fuzzy black circle high above him, the night sky so far out of reach he thinks he may never stand under it again.

  It takes a moment for Jonah to unravel the noises echoing below as human voices, but soon he can hear Lark shouting. Tunick shouts back, something about verve and payments. Jonah pulls himself to the edge of the ridge and watches blurry shadows circle each other in the ship’s floodlights.

  “You know this is my duty!” Tunick screams from somewhere near the base of the ship. “You know these are my orders!”

  Jonah sits and flattens his back against the wall, the double-headed blade scraping along the ridge. He takes a deep breath and whips his head up and around to find Vespa, but she’s not there. She’s not anywhere. Knowing she wouldn’t wait for him, Jonah runs to his right, but he doesn’t get ten feet before a blue laser blasts a section of rock inches from his face. Shards cut into his cheek, neck, and chest, and he twists away from the edge, covering his head. The shot came from behind.

  A familiar voice then echoes out of a cave: “You should have just listened to Tunick, Jonah.”

  Jonah narrows his eyes into the darkness. The white lights of a rifle barrel float just inside the cave. Then an outline of a boy begins to exit the shadows. He walks awkwardly, the insides of his feet sweeping the floor, and after a few more seconds, Jonah sees the bushy brown hair of Richter, the hacker who was sucked away from the cave entrance. Jonah can’t believe he’s still alive.

  “Richter?”

  The boy shoots again, and then he ducks back inside the cave, slumping in the shadows. Jonah flattens himself against the wall and watches the barrel of the rifle bouncing back and forth before steadying an aim right at his head. Without thinking, Jonah turns and throws the double-headed knife as hard as he can at the boy. He doesn’t see it connect, but he hears it; the sickening, suctioning noise echoes inside the cave.

  Jonah falls to his knees and takes in a deep, sucking breath. His lungs flex and harden and he can’t exhale; it’s as if the organs don’t know what to do with the balloon of air pressing against his ribs. He can’t believe he just killed someone. A boy younger than himself. He knew it was a possibility, but he didn’t know it would happen so soon, like this.

  Richter comes forward with the glistening knife buried in his stomach. He slumps and wobbles side to side inside the mouth of the cave, and Jonah finally releases a long burst of stale, suffocating air. The hacker takes another step and then tips forward, but instead of falling onto his face, Richter’s feet begin to rise above the ground. He’s…floating. Jonah smothers his eyes with his knuckles and takes another look. How is that possible?

  Richter’s feet rise another few inches, and Jonah doesn’t know if he should run and tackle him, or if he should turn and hide. But then the hacker suddenly drops flat to the cave floor, limp like a rag doll. The white lights of the rifle, however, somehow continue to float in the shadows. Then, to Jonah’s shock, another outline of a boy forms, this one lean and tall. The figure steps completely out of the cave, and all Jonah can focus on is the blond hair and the bruises on his face.

  “Sean?” Jonah whispers.

  “Yup,” the cadet says. “Really surprised to see you here after everything. You made it pretty far, Jonah. Pretty far. But then again, it helps that I purposefully didn’t shoot you last night in the jungle, right? I could have blown your head off, but Tunick wanted you alive. But I clipped that fat Bidson kid pretty good. Heard he didn’t make it.”

  Jonah looks from Richter to Sean, from Sean to Richter. What’s happening?

  “Oh, I found this guy all smashed up on the floor down there. Made for a handy good shield,” Sean says. He flips the hacker over with his foot. The knife sticks straight up into the air. “One of you guys push him over the edge, or what? That Brooklyn girl do it?”

  “What are you doing here? What’s going on?”

  Sean clicks on the barrel’s flashlight and shines it on Jonah’s face. “Well… Holy shit, Jonah. Your eyes look insane. You know that, right? You know they’re completely blue? Jesus. Can you even see me?”

  Jonah turns his head and makes himself into a ball. “Ruth said you were dead. You drowned.”

  “She thought I did. I know how to swim, though, smart boy.”

  “So, you’re the traitor? You’re Tunick’s brother who made us crash?”

  “I am,” Sean says matter-of-factly. “I am the poor brother left behind on Earth with momma.”

  “You killed so many people. You…you’re not some poor brother left behind. You’re a piece of shit.”

  Sean rushes forward and buries the barrel of his rifle into Jonah’s chest, right where his clavicle bones meet, and he pins him to the ground. He then crunches down on something in his mouth, and Jonah knows it’s verve. “I killed a lot of people, but not everybody, right? Right, right? Not all the kids. We were sure to take care of all the adults, though. Couldn’t have them around, doing to us what they did to Tunick and the others on Thetis. I don’t know if you heard the story yet, but Thetis is fucked up, Jonah. It’s so fucked up. So we’re going to Peleus. I’m sorry to hear you can’t come with us now.”

  Jonah stares up at Sean and thinks back to the first night on Achilles; how the cadet helped at the makeshift hospital, bypassing the adults to give water to the kids; how he was so focused on finding the energizer; how his face was yellow and purple with bruises, as if he were in a fight. Did the flight crew do that?

  “Now what?” Jonah asks. The barrel is hot against his skin. Adrenaline pumps into his bloodstream like never before, and for the first time in a while, his eyes focus without pain. Maybe this is their last moment before shutting down completely, he thinks. He drags a leg into a fighting position, but Sean stomps on his heel, holding it down.

  “Now, we take Aussie and Michael and Hopper and the others with us to Peleus where Tunick gets his new orders. And you die now, too. Just like—”

  A flash of blue light zips over Jonah’s head and explodes through Sean’s shoulder like a bolt of lightning, blowing him backward in a cloud of red mist. Jonah lies there paralyzed as Sean’s rifle falls into his lap. Jonah spins around to find a black speck sliding down the opposite wall of the canyon. When he looks through the rifle’s scope, he sees V
espa, her weapon lit and aimed at him. She’s moving fast.

  Jonah rolls onto his stomach and peers down over the ridge. A blue laser skims his hair and splits the rocks above him, raining boulders all around. The ridge to his right explodes, and a huge section slides down the wall, cutting off the entire direction. Another laser hits his rifle, spiraling it out of his hands in a thousand scalding pieces. Jonah has no choice but to run toward Sean’s cave. He jumps over the cadet’s body, still in shock that it was Sean who betrayed them. All for a drug. All for his crazy brother who thinks aliens give him orders. He watches Vespa reach a ridge and wave at him, and then she disappears into a cave.

  He makes his way to the back of his cave where it’s pitch black, and he walks right into a wall. Something in his pocket pushes into his thigh. The night-vision specs. Sean’s night-vision specs that Ruth gave him. Jonah slips them on and takes a deep breath, bracing his eyes for the brightness, but the pain is minimal. His luck is short-lived, though, when there’s no tunnel to be found.

  He walks back to the entrance and spots another cave on the other side of the canyon, but how can he get there after the ridge was blown away? He then notices that a narrow section of the opposite canyon wall leans inward on the left, cutting the distance between the two sides to maybe just fifty feet. There’s a ridge over there, a bit farther down the wall, and several caves connect with it. Jonah bets one of them has a tunnel to the bottom. He has to jump.

  “For Brooklyn,” he whispers. “For me.” Jonah backpedals into the cave. With a lump in his throat, he yanks the amber knife out of Richter’s belly and stuffs it into his pocket. When he touches the back wall, he counts to three and then explodes forward like a rocket. The mouth of the cave charges at him, growing larger and larger until he’s just a few feet away from the ridge, but then something blocks his path. It’s Sean, his arm dangling and twirling from just a stretch of skin, and he lurches at Jonah with an insane look in his eyes. The verve has taken over.

  At the last moment, Jonah fakes right and then darts left, never slowing down. Sean swings at him with his good arm but misses, and when Jonah’s feet reach the ridge, he leaps.