by Greg Boose
THETIS
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1004
New York, New York 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 2018 by Greg Boose
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
For more information, email [email protected]
First Diversion Books edition October 2018.
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-63576-458-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-63576-457-4
LSIDB/1810
To Veronica and Juliette,
my two moons.
CHAPTER ONE
As the ship rumbles and roars and lifts off the beach, Jonah squeezes his armrests like a man dangling over a cliff. The plastic in his grip bends inwards, creaking and then popping until it finally cracks, and the sharp shards cut into his skin. The pain feels good. The pain distracts him. His fingernails pull back on the plastic until he feels warm blood covering his cuticles. He shouldn’t be on this ship. He needs to get off this ship. Before he screams. Before he sobs. Before the voices from the beach come back in his head and tell him to do things he doesn’t want to do.
The seatbelts crisscrossing his chest are the only things stopping Jonah from barreling into the flight deck and screaming at the pilot to let him out. He tries to undo the clasps, but his bloody fingertips slip and slide over the cold metal. Even if he could get a solid grip, the man who smells like lavender, who pulled him onto this ship and pushed him into this seat, locked his belts by typing in a long code near Jonah’s shoulder. It’s not fair; only he and Brooklyn—the two blind kids on the verge of death—have locks on their belts. The lavender man and a woman with a gruff voice and a terrible cough who says she’s a doctor must think they’re either contagious or dangerous, or both. He is dangerous, Jonah thinks. But in different ways. The voices on the beach say he’s been chosen for something. And he knows it’s not to be saved by these people from Thetis and then to live a happy, simple life in the Athens colony. They’ve chosen him for something bigger, something he can feel will hurt himself and others.
Even with the belts pinning him to his seat, Jonah lunges forward and tries to stand. Next to him, Vespa Bolivar gasps as if he’s just woken her from a bad dream.
“Listen to me,” Jonah whispers. “We need to get off this ship. Right now.”
Vespa sighs and pats his chest right where his heart pounds. “We’ll get off on Thetis, okay? Just try to relax. We’re getting saved, Firstie. Things…I think things are finally starting to work out for us. Screw Achilles. It’s over.”
A thousand pinpricks run over Jonah’s skin. It’s over? It’s just beginning. His belts finally give some slack, and he doubles over in his seat, bouncing there for a few seconds before shouting, “Let me out of here! Somebody let me up!”
“Jesus, cadet.” Vespa grabs his bicep with both hands. “Just sit still. You’re going to rip out your tubes. You seriously need to chill the fuck out.”
The ship banks right and the rubber tube sticking out of Jonah’s arm brushes against his cheek. He instantly panics, swinging his hands in the air like he just walked into a spider web. A bag hangs somewhere over his head, pumping him full of what the doctor on board says is the cure to his Sepsis Bimorphyria disease. He can only take her word for it. He has to. If he could see, if this disease from the wormhole hadn’t turned his eyeballs blue and eventually blinded him, then he wouldn’t have to. He also wouldn’t need to ask Vespa so many questions.
“What’s the medicine look like?” Jonah asks. “How much are they giving me? Is it too much? How much is left in there? What color is it?”
“It’s clear, I guess,” she says. “Looks like medicine.”
“But how much are they giving me? Is it a lot? Is it too much, you think?”
“I don’t know, Jonah. A bag’s worth?”
“But how big is the bag?”
Vespa stops answering. Her body heat disappears as she shifts toward the window, so he reaches for her hand, leg, anything, but she blocks him, softly pushing his hand away each time.
The ship stops and then bounces gently, hovering in one spot, and Jonah pictures the island below glowing with fire. He pictures the waves lapping at the beach, pulling and pushing blood and ash through the gray sand, leaving faint red and black lines all along the shore. Somewhere down there a herd of giant white spiders floats over the waves, their hairy arms intertwined, drifting along like a lost blanket. Jonah wishes he was with them, sitting on their backs, heading anywhere but Thetis.
The ship’s boosters chug and wheeze for a moment, and Jonah can’t help but think that at any second the engines will fail, and they’ll go down in flames like the Mayflower 2 did just a week ago. The ship’s going to tear through the jungle and rip apart, shedding bodies in every direction. They’re all going to die. Everyone, except maybe him. He’ll survive just long enough to blindly starve over a day or two. That’s been his luck. That’s been his life. But then the boosters get louder, the wheezes turn to roars, and the ship shoots forward like an arrow. Not up toward Thetis and the rest of the Silver Foot Galaxy, but straight ahead.
Jonah again reaches his hand out for Vespa and this time she takes it. “It’s okay; I think we’re headed for the crash site. I told them where it is. They need to see if there’s anything salvageable to bring back to Thetis. They were counting on a lot of our supplies, you know. I think us crashing really screwed them over.”
He’s both relieved and terrified to learn they’re not leaving Achilles just yet. Maybe there’s still time to abandon ship. Maybe when they land, they’ll let him out and he can somehow find his sheaf with his parents’ photo on it. Maybe he’s already had enough medicine, and his sight will return long enough for him to wander off into the jungle and die staring at it with his back against a tree and the sun on his face. Maybe he’ll eat some weird plant and he’ll be magically cured, and he can live here alone without anyone hunting him down. And maybe the voices will never come back.
“What’s it look like out there?” He asks.
“It looks like hell, Jonah. Just how we left it.”
He knows the valley below is charred and black, that they’re flying over dead bodies, some with symbols carved into their skin. Tunick and Sean carved those symbols, a warning to him and anyone else who survived the crash. That’s after the brothers tortured and killed two adults and wrote Run and Kids are free now on their shirts. He wants to run. He wants to land and the doors to open so he can run away and be free.
Jonah leans back and feels every bruise and cut on his body. He clenches his eyes and then opens them with a shot, testing the medicine dripping into his arm, hoping that if it actually does work it will be instantaneous. Still, he sees nothing but blackness and horrific, broken images from the past few days. He listens to the whirs and hums and beeps of the ship, the boosters that blast them forward. He listens to his friend Brooklyn groaning several feet away and to the lavender man mumbling coordinates before someone closes a door between them.
He wipes a bloody hand on his leg and fumbles his fingers over Vespa’s bare arm. He pulls her in and whispers as quietly as he can: “These people from Thetis flying the ship—you think they’re going to kill us? I think they’re going to kill us. Remember, Tunick and the Splitters said that T
hetis was a very bad place to be. They said—”
Vespa pulls away again. “Jesus. It’s over, Jonah. It’s over. Please just shut up and stop asking me everything. I need a moment, okay? I need a second to relax. I need time, too, you know. You’re not the only one going through some shit in their head right now.”
Jonah opens his mouth to speak, but instead holds his breath and focuses on his own thoughts, preparing to fight any alien voices that may be trying to speak to him. They came to him on the beach just before being “rescued,” the upside-down numbers and symbols racing through his brain, the lights crashing into his skull. He thinks about the dazzling display of colors the symbols brought, and then he thinks about the demonic voices that came immediately after:
“It’s you now.”
“We need you, you need us.”
“Eat the seeds.”
“We are Zion.”
Over his shoulder, Jonah calls out for the pink-haired hacker who disappeared in the portal days ago. “Kip? Kip, I need you.”
No one answers.
“Kip? Where are you? I need your help up here. Please.”
Vespa growls and then balls Jonah’s ripped collar in her fist. “Stop it. Just…stop it. Please. And you need to stop calling for Kip. Something’s…there’s something wrong with him. He looks weird. He looks…he looks messed up, Jonah. Like he’s older now and taller somehow and his clothes are all torn up. Even his hair isn’t pink anymore. When we get to Thetis and we’ve got a chance to settle down, we need to ask him what the hell happened when he went through that portal. Find out where he went and what he knows and what he saw.”
A door opens, and Jonah instantly smells the lavender man. Jonah leans his head into the aisle and waves his hands blindly in the air. “Where are we going? I can’t see what’s going on or where you’re taking us.”
The smell of lavender grows stronger, and he can suddenly feel the man’s presence right next to him. The man’s voice is low and wheezing and filled with sadness: “We’re looking for survivors, kid. Just like you.”
“Did Kip bring you here? The kid back there who’s not talking? How did you find him?”
“We found him on the other side of the island,” he says. “Surprised as you are to find him there, especially after everything we’ve been through with him. He was just standing there on the beach like an idiot with a wall of fire coming right at him. Hasn’t said a damn word.”
“Everything you’ve been through with him?” Jonah asks.
Vespa leans over Jonah. “Well, if Kip didn’t bring you to us, then how did you find us?”
“We picked up a signal from one of the homing devices from your ship—from one of the rovers—and we headed that way. Then we saw the fire and smoke on the island, and like I said, Kip was just standing there on the beach. We picked him up, and then we immediately saw you three, so now we’re going to comb the wreckage and look for survivors and the supplies you guys were bringing us. So, you all up to speed now? Can you shut up now so I can go back to doing my job?”
Hopper’s homing device, Jonah thinks. It still works. When it fell overboard while they were fighting the airplane fish, they all thought it sealed their fate. Now, if only Jonah knew if it has saved them, or if it has somehow dug their graves.
The ship slows down and begins to lower with a series of whirs and clicks. The air pressure changes in Jonah’s ears. When the door opens, he’s running and never coming back. He’s going to be free. But before Jonah can even ask for someone to loosen his seatbelts, the man gasps and then falls into a horrible coughing fit. When he finally catches his breath, he whispers, “Holy…Jesus Christ. What the hell is that? Who would…”
Jonah pictures the man with his nose to the window, staring at the half-mile stretch of wreckage. He replays the crash in his head, the way the ship slammed into the ground and how the huge modules spun off in different directions. He remembers the cadet Daniel being split into two by the black boulder tearing through his module’s wall, and then he thinks about Manny falling out of his seat and onto the porcupine tree. He thinks about his lost sheaf and his parents’ photo. He thinks about the snouts racing through the site and the demic sent sailing into the darkness after being hit. He thinks about all the dead kids. And he thinks about the cook hanging from the tree, twirling in the air like a lost toy. For the first time, Jonah is happy he can’t see.
“I said, What the hell is that?”
“We crashed,” Jonah mumbles.
“Shut the…I know that, kid. But I want to know what the hell it is you guys have been up to here. Because holy shit.”
Jonah’s ears pop as the ship lowers to the ground and the outer door opens. There’s a sound of an LZR-rifle coming to life. He finds Vespa’s hand and squeezes it, but she quickly pulls away and undoes her seatbelts.
“Wait. I’m coming with you,” she yells. Then, her hand finds Jonah’s shoulder, and she whispers into his ear, “Stay here. Do not go out there, Firstie. I’ll be right back.”
“No! Let me out! I’m coming with you! Please!”
“You want to stay here. Believe me.”
Sickness suddenly rushes through Jonah’s body; his stomach shrinks and twists, his limbs go stiff and unresponsive. He tries to grab Vespa as she squeezes past, to force her to unlock his belts and take him by the hand, but instead all he can do is bite the flesh of his shoulder and try to work past the panic. An image of Portis pops into his mind, the cadet who couldn’t stop biting his own skin after the wormhole. He’s on his way to the other side of Achilles right now with the Splitters and his friends. Or, he’s on his way to Peleus, the other moon, to find more verve. Or, he’s dead.
There’s yelling outside. Vespa and the man argue, and then new voices join in. Cheering voices. Angry voices. Jonah stops biting his shoulder long enough to yell, “Kip? Come here, come here. What happened to you in that portal? What did you see? Where did you go, man? Are they going to kill us on Thetis? Talk to me!”
No answer. There’s more shouting outside. Jonah recognizes one of the voices, but he can’t place it with the dozens of faces from the Mayflower 2 bouncing around inside his head. Then Jonah hears a pair of feet pounding up the metal incline and into the ship.
“Well, shit. Little Firstie here made it out alive, I see,” a boy says as he falls into a nearby seat. “Guess the weak survived, too.”
“Who is that?” Jonah asks.
“Cadet Griffin Bishop, Third Year. Total motherfucking badass. But you knew that.”
Jonah can’t help but smile. The cadet with the lion shaved into the side of his hair. He made it. He will know what’s going on.
“What’s happening out there? How many of you are left? How many people are still alive?”
“Christ, man, I don’t know. There’s just four of us. Me and three brave-ass demics. But there are…others who are still alive. Sort of.”
“What does that mean?”
“Firstie, I just got saved from a fucking nightmare, okay? Give me a tick.” Griffin then takes a deep breath before yelling: “Let’s go already! Let’s not just sit around here! More of them could still be coming! You all have no fucking clue what’s happening! None!”
Jonah painfully turns his body toward the boy’s voice. “More of who could be coming?”
“Fuck me. Your eyes, dude. Your eyes are totally blue. What the…”
“I know,” he says. “I’m sick. I’m sick, and I’m dying. So, just tell me what happened after we left. Please.”
“After you left? Jesus, man. That feels like so long ago, I don’t even know. That first night you left, we were sabotaged, man. Straight up trapped. Shit was just blowing up everywhere. We were getting shot at from all these different angles, from all over. Things were blowing up like bombs, everything was on fire, people were dying. I should have gone with you guys. We all should have left that night. I ended up running away with a big group of kids, and then we got se
parated, and then I just kept running. I’ve been hiding inside the jungle for days, man, with these three demics right here… Guys, right over here. Sit down. Hurry up. Sit down so we can go.”
More footsteps. More smells. More bodies falling into seats around Jonah. Then there is sobbing. Uncontrollable sobbing.
“Then what happened?” Jonah asks.
Griffin lets out a laugh. “Then a couple hours ago, some spooky, messed-up kids from Module Eight showed up. Remember that module that went missing during the crash?”
“I forgot about that.”
“Yeah, well, they just showed up a little while ago, and they didn’t say anything, and then they just started digging…and…” His voice rises, directed toward the front of the ship. “We have to go! Let’s go already!”
Before Jonah can ask another question, can say he remembers how angry Paul was when he found out Module Eight was still missing after the crash, he smells Vespa then feels her scoot past his long legs. She drops into the seat next to him and grabs his arm and gives it a quick, intense squeeze.
“What’s going on?” he asks.
Vespa takes a breath and then clears her throat: “There are some survivors. But, Jonah…I don’t know if it was Tunick or Sean or someone else, but someone dug up the bodies from the crash that we all buried, and they…they laid them out on the ground. In a pattern.”
“What kind of pattern?”
Vespa sighs. “A big crescent moon with three bodies balled up inside it. The same symbol from the caves.”
Jonah’s insides go cold. That’s the symbol Malix found carved into the adults he found on the beach. That’s the symbol that sent Kip through the portal.
“And,” Vespa continues with a shaky voice, “they took more of the dead bodies and lined them up and spelled out the words, ‘Don’t leave’ on the ground. It’s pretty messed up. It’s really messed up.”
“‘Don’t leave?’”
“It wasn’t us,” Griffin yells. “It wasn’t us, I swear to god. It was those asshole Module Eight kids who did that. I couldn’t stop them. I tried. I swear, I tried. I was yanking on their shoulders and punching them in their faces. They’re like zombies, though. There’s nothing we could do.”