Achilles

by Greg Boose

  These feelings fade, though, and Dr. Z’s words come back to him from the night at the makeshift hospital: “No one is happy in this galaxy right now, I assure you.”

  The whole colonization effort from Earth sounds like a failure. Thetis, if he can believe anything the others said, is a failure. Achilles is forever ruined, after all the misery and death here. No human was meant to go through that wormhole.

  Then, over Jonah’s right shoulder, he hears a low buzzing. It’s soft at first, like a swarm of bees, but soon the buzzing grows louder and louder until it’s so loud it feels like it’s coming from inside his own head. His teeth rattle. His tongue rolls back into his throat. Just when he thinks his head is going to explode from the pressure, the buzzing slows into something that feels electronic. It breaks into a repeating pattern of static. Fearing it’s one of the spiders or something worse, Jonah feverishly pushes away from the tree and stumbles into a boulder. He scrambles over it and crouches into a ball, waiting for the noise to disappear, but the buzzing follows him, popping and changing pitch. Jonah stands and swats his arms wildly over his head, hoping to kill its source.

  “Get away! Go!”

  The static consumes him. And after a few seconds, it paralyzes every muscle, leaving him standing still and helpless. Through his blindness, he sees a speeding line of glowing symbols and upside-down numbers. They’re green, blue, and white. The line repeats over and over behind his eyes, and it’s mesmerizing. The numbers then flip over, and the symbols crash together in a dazzling display of colors. And that’s when he first hears the voice.

  “It’s you now.”

  Jonah chokes at the sound of it. The voice is demonic, gravelly and robotic, and there’s no denying it’s coming from just a few feet over his head. Whatever it is, it’s floating over him like a ghost.

  “It’s you now,” the voice repeats.

  “Tunick? Tunick, is that you?” Jonah pleads. He’s suddenly able to move again, and he punches at the air, but his fists touch nothing, and he trips headfirst into a thick shrub. He thrashes in its sharp branches, rolls and bites and claws his way back toward the tree, and then he flips over shouting, “Vespa!”

  “It’s you now.”

  The voice follows him as he circles the trunk. He finds the amber knife in the ground and slices in every direction. The voice chases him, repeating itself several more times. A new line of symbols and numbers appears in his head, and then the floating voice says, “We need you. You need us. We need you. You need us.”

  “What? Stop! I don’t need you! Who are you?”

  “We need you. You need us.”

  Jonah falls to the ground and covers his head. “I’m hallucinating,” Jonah mumbles. “I’m just sick. I’m dying and I’m hallucinating and my brain is…”

  Another line of upside-down numbers zips behind his eyes. More symbols crash together. There’s a pulsing cloud of static between his ears, and the next sentence sends a series of chills down Jonah’s spine.

  “We choose you now.”

  “No! Please, stop.”

  “We choose you now.”

  “Stop it! Vespa! Where are you, Vespa?”

  Jonah stuffs his fingers in his ears, but it doesn’t make a difference. The voice booms inside his head: “WE CHOOSE YOU NOW. EAT THE SEEDS.”

  The words paralyze him. He knows it’s not Tunick. It’s not anyone.

  He wants to believe that the voice is coming from another cadet, that someone’s trying to scare him, or maybe it’s one of the splitters left behind, but he just can’t convince himself. The voice is too strange, too unworldly. His only hope is that it’s all a hallucination. It’s not an alien ghost, he tells himself. That’s impossible. Tunick was crazy. Wasn’t he?

  “Who is this?” Jonah finally asks in a shaky voice.

  “We are Zion.”

  The answer propels him into a dizzy frenzy, and he jogs in a blind, stumbling circle, unsure of what to do. Jonah leaps into the air, determined to destroy the voice. He jumps what must be over ten feet straight up, but his knife connects with nothing but the sky. When he lands, his ears pop and hiss, and a new line of incoming symbols and numbers stops and disappears, leaving him alone in the dark with his blindness.

  “Zion?” he whispers.

  There’s only silence. The static cloud he felt so strongly just seconds ago has lifted. Jonah waits a moment and the only thing he hears is his own heartbeat. Then he crumples to the ground in exhaustion where he falls asleep.

  • • •

  “Jonah?”

  The sound of his name wakes him, and he feels the weight of a hand on his ankle. He blindly pushes away, swatting the air and growling. His neck crashes into a tree and he lifts his legs to kick whoever it is.

  “Hey, hey, hey. It’s me, Vespa. Relax.”

  It takes him a moment to believe her, to find comfort in her presence. “Vespa? Where were you? Didn’t you hear me yelling?”

  Vespa sits down next to him. “I was looking for Brooklyn. You know that. And no, I didn’t hear you yelling. Why? What happened?”

  “I think I heard…” He doesn’t know what to say. That he thinks he heard what Tunick heard? That an alien ghost spoke to him through numbers and symbols from inside his head? The more he replays the events, the more he convinces himself he imagined it.

  “What did you hear?”

  “I…thought I heard someone talking to me,” he admits. “I think I’m getting sicker. I think I’m going crazy.”

  “Jonah, I can’t find Brooklyn anywhere. She’s gone. I feel awful. I don’t know where she is.”

  Jonah sits up straight. “She has to be here somewhere.”

  Vespa puts a hand on his chest. “You saw those spiders… I’m worried that one of them…”

  He pictures his friend trampled by the spiders on the ridge, or hanging from one of their mouths. “So, you think…you think she’s dead?”

  “I think we’re all dead,” she says. It sounds like she’s been crying. “Come on. Let’s get to the beach. This entire island is going to be burnt to a crisp in less than an hour.”

  Soon, sand slips through Jonah’s toes. As they walk in silence, the voice from earlier bubbles in his mind, but it’s getting harder to replicate. It must have been a nightmare.

  Vespa gasps.

  “You see Brooklyn?” he asks.

  “Jesus,” she whispers. “No, I don’t see her, but there they are. Way far out there on the water, those things are bobbing up and down.”

  “What things?”

  “The spiders. They’re all holding onto each other. Like a huge white blanket. It’s kind of… This is going to sound weird, but it’s kind of beautiful.”

  He sighs and squeezes Vespa’s hand. It’s a nice thing to hear. In fact, it’s almost overwhelming to hear. Somehow, there’s still beauty in all this chaos, even if he can’t see it. Those things are out there, just trying to survive, possibly crossing an entire ocean as one. Some will probably die, but others will keep swimming.

  “Vespa?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Promise me you’ll get off this place.”

  “I can’t promise that,” she says, dropping his hand. “That’s a stupid thing to ask, Jonah. That’s like me asking you to promise me that you’ll see again.”

  Jonah opens his eyes, but it’s as black as it is when they’re shut. “Well, I’ll keep trying to see. I’ll keep opening my eyes until the moment I die, okay? I promise. So if I can do that, then you can keep trying to get off this moon, or at least promise me that you’ll just keep going. Like, keep living. Do something here. I don’t know what. You said your life was kind of shitty back on Earth, just like mine was, and that you volunteered for Thetis because you wanted to see the one thing that was able to ruin your dad’s life, and yours.”

  “And here I am,” she says. “It’s still ruined. It’s beyond ruined.”

  “Well, maybe it is today, and maybe it’ll feel like it’s ruined for a whil
e, but maybe one day it won’t feel like that. And then, I don’t know, maybe the discovery of Thetis will be worth everything.”

  Her arms are suddenly around his waist. The hug is tight and dizzying, and he can feel the heat of her body on his chest. She rests her cheek on the bottom of his neck. Vespa will keep going, he thinks. This is her promising without having to say it.

  Vespa then gasps and ducks out of his arms. Before Jonah can say a word, she shouts, “Brooklyn! Over here! Oh my god, it’s Brooklyn! To your left!” Then, to Jonah: “I can’t believe it. She made it. She’s walking out of the jungle right now.”

  Brooklyn yells something back, and he can hear Vespa racing off toward the smoke and fire. Jonah lets out a sad laugh. Even if he and Brooklyn die from the disease, she’ll have them for a little longer. And maybe there are more splitters in the jungle. Maybe there are others. Maybe Vespa will be okay.

  Suddenly there’s a whooshing sound high over his shoulder. At first he thinks it’s his nightmare, the alien voice returning, but it’s different. It grows steadier, louder, and Jonah realizes it’s manmade. It’s the ship. It’s Aussie and Michael and Hopper. They’ve come back.

  Vespa runs back toward him screaming. She grabs his arm and swings him in a wide circle. “Oh my god! Oh my god! They found us! Hey! Hey! Right here! Right here!”

  The noise grows louder.

  The whooshing turns into a wall of noise.

  “Help!” Brooklyn yells nearby.

  Jonah pulls Vespa toward him and finds her smooth head between his hands. “What if they’re back to kill us? What if that’s why they’re back! Because of Tunick?”

  “But they’re not back!” she yells. “It’s not them!”

  The wall of noise lowers from the sky until it feels as if it’s right in front of him, just a few dozen feet away, and his mind goes as blank as his eyes. A blast of air flaps his melted jumpsuit around his body. He falls to his knees and finds Vespa’s ankle. He rips her down to the sand. “Who is it? Who is it, then?”

  “It’s…” She waits. A high-pitch whirring screams, and then it pops and slows down. “It’s…” she says again. He’s suddenly warm. Is he in some sort of light?

  “Who?” he shouts.

  “It’s…it’s Thetis.”

  Vespa’s words march back and forth behind his eyes. Her small hands hook under his arms, and she pulls him to his feet.

  His first instinct is to think of Tunick and to run, to run into the water and swim all the way to the spiders and hold on and float where they float. After everything he’s heard, even if half of it was rooted in truth, Thetis is a death trap.

  Jonah stumbles in the opposite direction of the noise, knowingly walking toward the fire. Tunick and Lark and everyone escaped for a reason, he’s sure of that now. And you don’t escape if you’re happy, and you don’t escape just for a drug. Something else is happening on Thetis, and he thinks it might be better to just die now. To die here.

  But then he hears Brooklyn’s voice cutting through the noise. She’s celebrating with the others. She’s been through everything he has, even worse, and she still sees Thetis as her salvation, a place with a cure. Could she be right?

  “Kip?” Vespa says. “Oh my god.”

  “What?” Jonah begs.

  “He’s on the ship. He’s in the window. Kip’s on the ship!”

  “How could he be…”

  Brooklyn laughs in disbelief. Then she starts to sob. “He can’t be here. You said he…”

  Vespa shouts, “The portal must have sent him to Thetis! He brought them here! He brought Thetis!”

  Jonah pictures the pink-haired demic waving in the window, and he feels a smile cross his lips, but then, to his horror, the buzzing static from the jungle returns to his ears like a tornado, this time quicker, louder, more aggressive. The symbols and numbers bounce behind his eyes, and then the demonic voice booms and flattens him against the sand.

  “We choose you.”

  “Please stop,” Jonah pleads.

  “EAT THE SEEDS.”

  Jonah starts to cry. Then there’s another hissing sound from the ship and Vespa is on top of him, her arms wrapped around his neck. “We need help! We need medical attention! Her and him right here! Over here!”

  Vespa hugs him tightly as a man from the ship shouts back. Jonah can’t hear what he says over Vespa’s cheering; the buzzing voice still echoes in his skull. She yanks him to his feet and pulls him forward.

  “What’s your name?” a man shouts in his ear. Jonah can smell him, the soap on his skin, the mint from his mouth.

  He’s afraid to answer.

  “He’s Jonah!” Vespa says. “I’m Vespa Bolivar. We’re cadets. Everything’s fucked up.”

  “We’re aware of the situation.” A thick arm slides under Jonah’s armpit. He wants to wrench himself away, but he doesn’t know what direction he’d go. He hears Brooklyn say she’s blind. He hears her say that he’s blind. Someone pats his back and in a few steps, his toes touch something cold and metallic.

  He’s escorted up an incline. The air changes and cools, and the noises fade into a series of whirs and hums and beeps.

  “Vespa?” he asks over his shoulders.

  “Right behind you, Firstie!”

  “Brooklyn?”

  The demic laughs and coughs somewhere behind him. The man holding him up veers him to the left. He’s dropped into a vinyl seat that pulls on his sweaty skin. “Stay here.”

  Before Jonah can move, safety belts are clicked over his lap and chest. It causes him to panic and he whips his shoulders up and down until Vespa grabs his hand and sits down next to him. Her sigh is louder than anything on board. “We made it. We fucking made it.”

  “But is this a god thing?” he asks. “Should we stay or get off? What do they look like? Does it look like they want to help us or like they’re going to hurt us?”

  “Help us, Jonah. They’re already treating Brooklyn. It’s over. We’re going to Thetis.”

  “We are?”

  “Yes.”

  Jonah hears Brooklyn coughing and whips around as if he could spot her. A man and a woman mumble, and Brooklyn agrees to something. Vespa says, “They’re putting a mask on her. They’re putting her to sleep. It’s okay.”

  “Everybody please take a seat,” a man says. “We’re happy we found you. We didn’t know if there were any survivors. We’re very sorry all this happened.”

  “What took you so goddamn long?” Vespa asks.

  “We got here as soon as we could,” the man replies. “I wish we could have gotten here sooner. Believe me.”

  Jonah hears the engines come to life, and the ship begins to rumble. Vespa rests her head on his arm. He leans back in his chair and lets his mind clear. The smell of food wafts by his face and he opens his eyes to the blackness. He’ll always keep his eyes open. That’s all he can do.

  END OF BOOK ONE

  Acknowledgments

  The idea for Achilles started taking shape in 2011, and back then it was simply called The Space Crash Book. And here’s a little secret of mine: I’ve never actually crashed anything in space. Heck, I’ve never even been to space, if you can believe it. I know! Okay, that felt really good to get off my chest. Burden, lifted. Finally.

  So, I’d first like to acknowledge the space experts (who have also not crashed out there, thankfully) who sat with me and listened to my ideas and told me I had some interesting takes, but then would lean in and say, “In reality, it would be more like…” Thank you to Glenn Law, a systems director in the Civil and Commercial Launch Projects Group at Aerospace who not only helped me figure out the structure for the Mayflower 2 ship in the book, but also for inviting me to watch a Mars rover launch from the control room in El Segundo, an experience I’ll never forget. Thank you to NASA’s Jerry Miller who talked to me about gravity and moons and the mysteries of the galaxy. And a big thank you to Werner Däppen, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at USC, who entertained my ideas with pa
ssion and humor before getting down to the theories of black holes and space travel. Also, thank you to my friends Mark Wind and Nancy Profera for introducing me to some of these experts.

  So many people have my deepest gratitude for their hard work and support while putting Achilles together:

  To my literary agent, Wendy Sherman, for taking a chance and diving into the Young Adult book world with me years ago, for always talking me down when I get upset or too excited about a certain email or meeting, for protecting and supporting me during my ghostwriting days, and for being professional at all times and becoming a secret role model to me as my writing career moves forward. Achilles would not have a leg to stand or crash on if it weren’t for Wendy, and I can’t thank her enough.

  To Jaime Levine and everyone at Diversion Books for getting excited about Achilles and holding my hand through the edits, for listening to my ideas and gracefully steering me in the right direction, and for the guidance on the two sequels I’m currently tearing my hair out over. I am lucky to have Diversion on my side and wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

  To my immediate family, and bear with me, there’s a lot of them: my parents, Bill and Rita, for supporting me in more ways than one and respecting my passion for writing; my siblings, Eric, Alan, Sara, Brad, and Matt, for sharing their excitement or opinion on whatever silly things I’ve published over the years; my in-laws, Kristin, Gabrielle, Matt, Chris, and Sarah, for always asking how my writing is going without their eyes glazing over; my Uncle Ron, for showing more genuine excitement for me than I deserve; and to my daughters, Veronica and Juliette, for sneaking up behind me to hug my neck while I type away and for begging me to tell them in great detail what happens in Achilles, which helped me better mold the story while surely giving them nightmares for years to come.