Achilles

by Greg Boose

  Wind plugs his ears and pushes on the backs of his legs. He whips his arms at his sides like helicopter propellers, doing whatever he can to clear the distance. The opposite wall keeps coming toward him. When he makes it halfway across, he pumps his legs straight out in front of him and leans back like he’s on a playground swing. Blue lasers split the air around him, but the ridge gets closer, closer, closer, and he tucks himself into a ball and begins to flip upside down. At the last moment, when he knows he’s not going any farther, he unfurls and blindly reaches out his arms. His fingers touch stone and grind against it for several seconds before finding a grip. His body slams against the wall, and his shoulders are in agony, but he stops falling. He opens his eyes to find himself hanging from the ridge. He just leaped fifty feet.

  Amazed, he pulls himself onto the ridge and rolls into the wall. He stands and looks back across the canyon, and to his shock, Sean comes flying out of the cave with his arm flopping at his side. He jumps. The cadets lock eyes as Sean sails into the middle, but when the boy travels another dozen feet, he begins to plummet. He opens his mouth in a tortured, silent scream, and then he hits the wall far below, face-first, snapping his neck so far back that his skull nearly touches his waist.

  Jonah turns and sprints into the first cave he sees. Luckily, there’s a tunnel at the back, and as soon as he enters it, the path steadily declines. With the double-headed blade now in his hand, he moves faster and faster toward the bottom of the canyon. He wants to yell for Vespa but stops himself. Dozens of tunnels begin to appear on either side of him, sometimes directly above his head. They’re only a few feet in diameter, and sticking halfway out of them are pulsing white sacs lined with thick veins, dripping with clear liquid. They look like living, breathing balloons. Like eggs. He hurries along with his shoulders sideways.

  The tunnel winds like a circular staircase. The floor is perfectly smooth and wide, and Jonah realizes this section is manmade, different from the rest. The tunnel flattens and a light that seems as bright as the sun appears at its end, and whatever reprieve his eyes had leaves as fast as it came. The needles are back, but now they’re two-foot spikes. Jonah rips off his specs and fumbles blindly along with his hands on the wall.

  A high-pitched whirring comes from the exit. There’s shouting. He thinks he can hear Tunick. He definitely hears rifle fire. Then he hears something that makes his stomach drop: an engine roars to life like a marauding lion. The ship, Jonah realizes. It can’t leave. Not without Brooklyn. Not without him and Vespa. Not to Peleus or to the other side of the moon. He rams a palm into his eye and staggers toward the lights. It can’t leave. It can’t.

  A thruster whines and coughs until it’s a howl, and a smoldering heat pushes past Jonah, turning the tunnel into an oven. More rifle fire. More engines whining and coughing and howling. More heat. He tightens his grip on the knife and steps out of the cave, forcing his eyes open. Everything’s a blinding yellow for a few seconds, and then blobs of orange painfully start to form. An invisible hand slams into his shoulder, and he spins and falls in a whirlwind of sound and color. Someone yells above him, but the voice blends in with the engine noise.

  “Don’t leave!” he shouts, but he can barely hear his own voice.

  Vespa’s voice barks into his ear: “I’m going to try to get inside it!”

  “Wait for me!” Jonah shouts, but he knows she can’t hear him.

  Her hands are on his back and he tries to straighten up, to show her he’s okay and ready to fight, but she must know he’s either blind or in too much pain, because she pushes him back into the mouth of the tunnel. He staggers two steps inside before something rams right through his shins and his legs are swept out from underneath him. He falls on his face, and then something as large as a dog skitters over his back with what feels like several spiked feet. More come, their feet digging into Jonah’s back and legs, and he finally rolls to the side of the tunnel and flattens himself against it. He cautiously pulls the specs up to his face and gasps.

  A wave of giant white spider creatures race down the winding path, their matted fur dripping wet, their mouths cluttered with tusks that curl at their tips. The white, pulsing balloons, he knows, have opened. The creatures crawl over each other to exit the tunnel first, giving Jonah no choice; he turns and runs back onto the canyon floor where the heat is so intense he can feel parts of his jumpsuit melting. He dives to the right, against the wall, and squints up to watch hundreds or thousands of the spiders exiting every cave lining the bowl of the canyon. They climb straight up the sides toward the top ridge, and he yells out for Brooklyn, as if he could actually warn her, but he can’t even hear himself.

  The yellow floodlights click off from the middle of the floor, and the air pops in his ears. Where’s Vespa? Jonah directs his attention to the ship. It’s moving. It lifts a few feet off the ground, its thrusters dissolving the growing space below them into waves of heat and mist. Several fires come to life on the canyon floor. Jonah screams. His eyes scream. His body screams. The ship rises a few more feet, and then like an elevator, it slowly climbs to the top of the canyon.

  The spiders speed upward even faster, as if the glowing ship were their queen, and some actually spring from the ridge to grab a hold of it. Each one misses, though—the ship must be too high—and they fall wildly with their legs waving. Then either the swirling wind blows them back to the canyon walls where they start to climb all over again, or they drop all the way to the fiery floor, splitting open like melons. Jonah ducks back inside the cave to avoid being smashed, his neck still straining to watch the ship.

  Jonah grips the edges of the entranceway. The ship hovers a little higher and gets a little blurrier. The spiders stop jumping for its hull. And then in a column of flat red clouds, it’s gone. Everything is numb, even his eyes. He stands there and waits for the ship to come back, or even to circle around, but the red clouds simply separate and fade away.

  It’s over. He’s going to die here. Any hour, he’s going to cough blood like Brooklyn, and then he’s going to waste away on a moon he was never supposed to step foot on. If only he had his sheaf. If only he could see his parents’ faces one more time. That’s what he’s going to do, he decides right then and there. He’s going to go back to the crash site, find his sheaf, and then go blind staring at a life he never knew. Then he’s going to die.

  Fire and dead spiders line the canyon floor. Just in front of him, one of the creatures has landed halfway into a crackling line of flames, its spindly front legs crisping and curling down into its smooth belly. Jonah stares dumbly as its abdomen catches fire. He then drops the knife and turns sluggishly around into the darkness of the tunnel. Is Vespa on the ship? What happened to Brooklyn up there? Is there any way she survived?

  Vespa’s voice rings out on the canyon floor, stopping Jonah in his tracks. He grabs the knife and sprints past the burning spider. Where is she? Is she still here?

  “Vespa!” he shouts. “VESPA!”

  He runs back and forth until he sees them. Inside a dwindling ring of fire, there, with his back to Jonah, stands Tunick, looking up into the sky. He’s black with soot, his whole body shaking with raging disbelief. Under his foot lies Vespa, her hands wrapped around his ankle.

  Jonah forces his eyes all the way open—he’s done with the pain, he’s pushed past it—and he charges with the amber knife. Tunick never sees him coming; Jonah leaps and hooks one blade deep into the man’s side, and then rips the knife back with the other end. Tunick stumbles forward, and Vespa pulls up on his ankle at the same time, tripping him to the ground.

  Tunick flips over and sees Jonah. A crazy smile comes to his face. “Smart boy. I knew you’d come back.” He winces as he examines the long L-shaped wound under his ribs. Blood crawls down his side and over the small green sack on his hip. “Where’s my little brother, Sean, smart boy? Tell me he made it on board. Because if he didn’t, we’re all dead, dead, dead. Earth, as well as everyone on it, is dead. That’s what they told me. Tha
t’s the plan.”

  Jonah opens his mouth. Maybe he’ll tell him Sean was on board, that he closed the door himself, making sure his brother was left behind. He could tell him Sean secretly hated him and never believed he could talk to a race of alien ghosts. That he went to all these lengths just to see him suffer. After all, Jonah thinks, wouldn’t it be appropriate if Tunick never knew the truth?

  “That traitor Sean is your brother?” Vespa asks. “I shot him. He’s dead.”

  Tunick twitches, and then as if by instinct, he puts his fingers into the green sack at his hip, but his hand goes right on through the bottom. It’s empty. The bag is ripped. He starts to laugh, but it turns into one continuous soul-draining wail. Then he stops and wheels around and around as if someone has said his name. He stammers at a section of the sky, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Zion, I can still do it. No, I can. I can do it from here. We don’t need Peleus. We don’t. Please!”

  Jonah adjusts his grip on the knife. He’s sick of Tunick’s insanity. They have to finish him off before he gets another wind. At that moment of clarity, Jonah’s eyes pop with what feels like tiny detonations. It’s something he hasn’t felt before, a pain he doesn’t know how to push past. He watches as Tunick searches the ground feverishly while still mumbling over his shoulder. Vespa rushes over and kicks him so hard in the wound that his body lifts a few feet off the floor.

  “Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter anymore! You idiots just killed us all!” Tunick wails. He gets to his feet and swings for Vespa’s head, but she ducks and drives her fist into his chin and a heel into his gut. He merely steps backward, right to the edge of a fire that has found new life. Her blows hardly faze him. Who knows how many verve seeds are pumping through his blood?

  His eyes pulsing in pain, Jonah stands next to Vespa and points a blade at Tunick. “Are we still free? Do you still want us to run? Because I’m never going to run again. Because of you and Sean and your stupid hallucinations and all the rest of them, I’m the furthest thing from free. I’ll never be free.”

  Jonah lunges with the knife, but as he does, his vision disappears. It just shuts off, as if someone has thrown a switch. There are no shadows, no blurry figures. There is also no pain. The moment it happens, Jonah knows it’s permanent.

  The knife is knocked out of his fist, and an invisible hand grabs the back of his neck. He’s pulled forward, and then Tunick’s bony knee hits his sternum. Jonah’s suddenly on his side, dirt coating his lips, feeling absolutely weightless. It’s like he never left his launch seat, and he’s still in the module, hanging above the spear-like branches of the twisted tree.

  “And you,” Tunick growls. The ground next to Jonah’s head comes alive with circling footsteps. Vespa grunts and growls. A great struggle happens above him. Flesh hits flesh. Something rips. Vespa screams in pain and Tunick laughs. And then Vespa gasps for air, as if she’s being choked.

  “Stop!” Jonah shouts. He rolls onto his back, trying to work through the throbbing in his chest. Vespa gasps louder. The ground scrapes more frantically, and Jonah can picture her heels kicking for a grip. No, he thinks. If anyone survives this, it’s Vespa. Jonah rolls toward the noise, and when he does, he feels several small objects pressing into his leg. He digs his hand into his pocket and pulls them out.

  “Tunick!” he shouts, waving the seeds above his head. “I’ve got verve! Come get it!”

  The struggling stops, and Vespa gasps and coughs. He hears Tunick rushing at him. Jonah listens for the nearest patch of fire and tosses the seeds right for it.

  “NO!” Tunick roars, running in the same direction.

  And then Vespa belts out a scream, and Jonah hears flesh hit flesh, and then something falls into a crackling fire.

  Tunick’s screams are indecipherable. Jonah knows he’s in the fire, maybe tangled with a spidery corpse, and he’s not only feeling pain, but he knows he’s going to die from it.

  “Enough!” Vespa barks. A blade scrapes against the ground, and then a few seconds later, the man’s screams abruptly stop, and all Jonah hears is the fire and the wind and his own heart beating in his throat. A small hand falls on his forehead, and then Vespa’s face is on top of his, temple to chin. He doesn’t move. He feels her lips brush his cheek and listens to her breath slow down until she calms herself enough to say, “He’s dead. Let’s go.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The tunnels smell of smoke and sour egg sacs, and the walls are hot to the touch. Jonah holds Vespa’s elbow as she tells him how the seeds landed right at the edge of the fire. All she had to do was kick Tunick in when he crouched down. “He still somehow got to his feet. He walked toward me, completely on fire, and so I stabbed him in the heart with your knife. And then I twisted it.” Her voice isn’t celebratory or proud. It sounds like she’s come to terms with what the ship leaving means for not only him and Brooklyn, but also for herself. This is her future. This island. This continent. This moon.

  They worry about Brooklyn, how fast it will take them to reach her. That’s if she’s still there. If she wasn’t trampled and killed by the spiders. Vespa picks up the pace and Jonah asks, “What about Aussie and Michael and Portis? And what about Hopper?”

  “They’re on board,” she says, huffing. “That asshole Hopper was the first up the ramp, the coward, and Krev was right after him. Lark and her girlfriend made it, too. They were all chomping on verve, fighting me, fighting each other, fighting Tunick, who was going crazy looking for his brother. That piece of shit, Sean. I can’t believe a cadet would do that.”

  Jonah doesn’t respond. He doesn’t understand the ties that bind families; he never will. That kind of love and bond has forever been absent in his life, and it will surely remain absent during these final few days he’s alive.

  “There were others down there, you know,” Vespa says as they jog down a new tunnel. “Other kids from Thetis. They got on board. About five or six or seven of them. I never even saw them until they bolted out of the caves and ran up the ramp like a bunch of rats. I shot one in the leg, but I didn’t see what happened to her.”

  Jonah pictures Hopper, Aussie, Portis, and Michael in their seats, rocketing to Peleus or the other side of Achilles with a bunch of addicts, maybe with Portis’s sister, too. Are they happy to have been chosen for the journey? Are they laughing with Hess and Krev and the others at the opportunity of a new beginning, or are they frightened beyond belief, hoping to escape the moment they have a chance?

  “Maybe Aussie and Michael will come back for you,” Jonah says. “Maybe they’ll steal the ship and come back here to help. Maybe even Hopper will come. You never know.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” she says. Then, after a long pause, she asks, “How are you feeling?”

  Jonah doesn’t answer right away. He takes a moment to assess his body, to feel every cut and bruise and broken bone. His shoulder wound burns as if an animal were feasting on it. One, maybe two, of his ribs are broken. Something is terribly wrong with his left knee. He feels run over. Crushed. Wrecked. And on top of it all, he feels absolutely and utterly hopeless. “I’m okay,” he whispers. “Just a little tired.”

  “And your eyes? You’re totally blind now?”

  “I think so.”

  She squeezes his hand. “I’m so sorry.”

  Outside, Jonah feels the cool wind and hears fire raging in the distance. The smell of smoke permeates the air. So much for a diversion.

  “Where are the spiders?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. Not here. I don’t see them anywhere.”

  They slowly circle the base of the canyon, going in the opposite direction of the fire, looking and yelling for Brooklyn and anyone else left behind. Then Vespa sits him down next to a tree and gives him the knife, and she bounds upward to check the ridge.

  Jonah sets his head against the bark of the tree. It’s rough like sandpaper but molds to his skull like a pillow. He can’t help but notice the smell of the tree; it’s smoky yet intensely sweet, and in a da
ze he wonders if it’s some kind of fruit tree, or if it’s drooping with giant tropical flowers. He pushes away from the trunk of the tree and looks up at its branches to see if it actually has fruit or flowers but…nothing. Just blackness. He forgot. He punches the ground and then digs his knuckles deep into his sockets, forcing his eyeballs this way and that, hoping to ignite something, to somehow reconnect the wires, but when he pulls his fingers away, there’s just nothing. No real pain. No sight. Not even a floating white circle from the pressure.

  What else can he do? Is there anything else he can try? He rocks himself forward and attempts to stand but gives up, and instead he replays the scene of Sean trying to make the fifty-foot leap. He sees the cadet’s wrenched face, the way his arm flaps every which way above him like a punctured kite. He sees Tunick running along the reef. Tunick sitting in front of the fire. And then his mind wanders to Manny’s thumbs unclasping his belt in the module. The boy falls. Then he sees his own narrow escape through the branches. Garrett. Dr. Z. The snouts. The professor hanging from the tree. Run. He ran. And this is where he is.

  But then, for the first time, Jonah recognizes something; an odd thought squeezes through all these flashing scenes of death and panic and betrayal, and it expands and rushes over him, coating his entire body with warmth. Even with all this, the disease and the blindness and the crash and the constant fear if he’s going to survive the next minute, he realizes that some of these people from the past four days actually cared about him. Not in a pitiful way, either. Not because he didn’t have any parents or he lived on the streets. They seemed to genuinely care about him in a way someone is supposed to care about a friend or a brother. He did make connections. Aussie and Brian. Definitely Brooklyn. Dr. Z and Garrett and Michael. The faces circle his mind and then Jonah holds back a sob when he thinks about how Bidson sacrificed his body for Jonah’s escape. And then there’s Ruth, a girl he didn’t even want in his camp because he thought she was insane, and here she kept him safe on the other side of that boulder and gave him the glasses. And Vespa. Vespa, Vespa, Vespa. She not only saved him countless times, putting herself in danger to keep him alive, but unless the disease has totally eaten away at his brain, he thinks she might actually like him. That’s never happened with a girl before. Maybe Achilles didn’t only take. Maybe it gave a little, too.