by Greg Boose
The encounter with Dr. Z rolls back and forth in Jonah’s mind. She said he was chosen to be their God. Whose God? To the people here on Thetis? Or to these two-headed ghosts that everyone is seeing? Jonah raises his hand from his chest and stares at the verve seeds. They’re no bigger than his thumbnail, pebbled and rough on one side, and on the other they’re smooth and chiseled from Dr. Z’s teeth.
He brings one of the seeds close to his lips and holds it there, inches away. He knows what will happen if he eats it; he remembers the mania and the visions, the rays of lights appearing out of his chest, the sudden burst of strength and self-confidence, the inability to feel pain or follow a rational thought. Jonah rolls the seed down the bridge of his nose and over his cheeks as he thinks back to Tunick’s cave where Hopper and Michael became best friends, where Portis forgot he was shot and bleeding to death in the jungle, where Aussie and Christina begged to be punched because it sounded fun.
There’s only one bulb hanging in the yurt, but its light reaches every corner, and Jonah crawls his eyes slowly over the floor. Are the alien ghosts in there right now, circling him? Are they walking right through the walls, aimless like clouds? Are they walking right through him? Jonah waves his other hand wildly at his side to ward off any spirits that might be nearby, and he wonders what he would have done if he were Paul that night he found Module Eight and the kids touching the black rock.
A list in Jonah’s mind keeps getting longer: find Griffin, check on Brooklyn, get into the telescope building and try to get a peek at Achilles and Peleus, avoid the Module Eight kids until he knows how to connect with them, talk to Freeman about Mirker, stay away from Mirker, tell Vespa everything he’s heard, find Kip to help him uncover some of the mysteries of the symbols in the cave he fell into, and so on and so on.
Jonah brings both hands back to his chest just as the door opens and Matteo marches in with his clipboard. He sees Jonah lying there and tosses the clipboard onto his own hammock and drops down into the chair. The boys stare at each other for a few moments before Matteo says, “So, uh, you do know you’re supposed to help out around here, right? That’s kind of the deal for being chosen to live here?”
“I know,” Jonah says. “I’m just…trying to figure things out. Been a busy day.”
“Yeah, well, look, you better start contributing soon before Mirker and some of the others hear that you’re just hanging out in here doing shit. They run a pretty tight ship. Or, at least they try to.”
Jonah tries to shove his hands into his pockets, but it’s difficult to do because of the way the hammock practically wraps around him, and the three verve seeds he tries to hide fall to the floor. Matteo leans forward to get a look at what it is, and before Jonah can jump to the floor to grab them, Matteo has them in the palm of his hand.
“Shit. Not good, Jonah,” Matteo says as he backpedals toward the door. “This is…not good. This is bad.”
“Someone gave them to me just now. I haven’t even—”
And then Matteo is out the door.
Jonah untwists himself from the hammock too quickly and crashes to the floor. “No! Wait! I wasn’t going to eat them!”
The cadet bursts out the door and then pauses, looking both directions for Matteo. He needs to get to him before he finds Mirker. Jonah can’t be locked up like Dr. Z. Or worse, with her. To his left, several villagers slowly walk toward the middle of the village, their heads down and their shoulders slumped. A small drone hovers over them as if herding them toward a pen. On his right, Jonah sees a group of teenagers heading toward the garden. No sign of Matteo. He runs to his right and toward the hospital, looking up and down the alleys for his roommate. Jonah turns right and makes a looping circle back to the center of the village.
“Matteo?” he yells. “Has anyone seen Matteo?”
He receives a few shrugs and blank stares from those around.
“Shit,” he seethes.
He takes off running again, and when he rounds a line of tents, Jonah sees the Indian woman leaving the telescope building. She has her head down, talking into her sheaf. Jonah watches the door to the building slowly close and then crack back open; it didn’t lock behind her. Then, far off on his left, he spots Matteo running toward a group of men with his clenched hand held over his head. Jonah takes a few steps toward Matteo and then stops. He knows he won’t get there in time to defend himself properly, and so he turns and runs in the opposite direction. By the time he reaches the door to the telescope, the woman is out of sight. Jonah pushes the door open with the heel of his shoe and backs inside. He pulls the door shut and locks it.
Jonah slaps the doorframe for a light switch until his hand finds a flat, cold square on the left. The moment his fingers touch it, a dim light overhead hums to life. He spins to find a rolling chair sitting directly below the lens of the giant black telescope. All around the room, monitors on dusty tabletops stare blankly at Jonah, their screens dark or showing a blinking cursor asking for a password. He knows he doesn’t have a lot of time, thinking that the moment he touched that square near the door, security was on its way. The cadet jumps into the rolling chair and sails into the nearest table, crashing against its leg. A few monitors blip to life showing photos of galaxies and stars and a sphere that Jonah immediately recognizes as Achilles. These are just desktop background images, though, with blinking cursors appearing in the middle. Jonah stares at Achilles and its huge ocean and jigsaw continents and hazy purple atmosphere, and instead of trying to figure out where the Mayflower 2 crashed or locate the tiny island where Tunick hid his ship, Jonah pushes himself away from the table and rolls back directly under the lens of the scope.
The lens is warm against his eye socket. Nothing. Completely dark. Either the telescope is aimed at a giant black hole, or it’s turned off. As his eyelashes brush the glass, Jonah reaches up and wraps his hands around the metal tube, looking for knobs or buttons or anything to turn it on. A group of people run by the building, the crackles of walkie-talkies following behind. Jonah leaps out of the chair, sending it spinning across the room, and he hides in the farthest corner under a table. He pulls a wastebasket in front of him just as hears a key ring jingle, and then the knob on the door begins to turn. A large shadow appears in the doorframe. It just stands there silently, as if waiting for Jonah to give himself up. The cadet cradles the wastebasket, making himself as small as possible. Finally, the shadow backs out of the building and closes the door with a click.
Jonah waits several minutes before moving, and as he sits there crouched under the table, he looks into the wastebasket. It’s full of crumpled papers scribbled with crossed-out calculations, lists of numbers and measurements, hand-drawn pictures of planets and landscapes. He pulls a few papers out and quietly flattens them against the floor, and as his eyes crawl over the numbers and pictures, he quickly realizes how little it all means to him. He sits back in frustration and his foot accidentally tips the wastebasket over. Dozens of torn pieces of paper spill out from the bottom. Jonah immediately starts to line them up.
It’s an easy puzzle; within a minute, Jonah has the pieces of paper in order, and even in the dim light, he recognizes the hand-drawn circle of Achilles. There’s an “X” scratched onto the right-hand side of the moon, and next to it are coordinates and the words, “Mayflower 2.” And next to the larger “X” is a smaller “X” with a dash mark pointing to the letter “T.”
Jonah stares at the drawing and the markings, and it isn’t long until he realizes the “T” has to be for Tunick. The Athens community knew where Tunick and the Splitters were located? And where the Mayflower 2 went down? But how? The crash site is on the other side of the moon, and there’s no way the telescope could see it. Is there a satellite orbiting Achilles that he doesn’t know about? Jonah crawls out from under the table and gets to his knees to look at the images stuck on some of the screens. There’s nothing there to help him connect the dots. He digs back into the wastebasket and pulls out more piece
s of paper, putting them together in an instant. As he slides the last piece into place, he finds the word “Zion.” He stares at it in disbelief. Zion? That’s who Tunick said was killing everyone on Achilles, the name the Splitters said Tunick used for himself. And then, just before the ship arrived from Thetis, the voices in his head shouted, “We are Zion.”
Jonah stares at the name for a solid minute before feeling his hands and feet and heart again. He gathers up the pieces of paper and stuffs them back in the basket.
He needs to go. He needs to find Vespa and Paul. Quietly, Jonah rolls the chair back under the lens and tries looking through it one last time. Still nothing but blackness. Before opening the door, he makes sure everything is where he found it. He knows once he steps back into the village, he’s going to be accosted and interrogated, possibly thrown into a cell where Mirker will try to beat information out of him, but if they found out he was snooping around in the telescope building and saw something he wasn’t supposed to, then they may just kill him. He cracks the door open and sees no one is around, but just as he’s about to make a run for it, he realizes he has nowhere to run to. His own yurt is off limits now, as is every other inch of the village, and he doesn’t even know where Vespa’s tent is. There are drones constantly hovering overhead. He’s sure there’s been an announcement to report him upon sight. Still, he can’t stay in here. There’s only one place to go now: outside the gate.
Jonah slips out of the door and keeps his back flat against the wall of the building, slowly circling until he’s facing the direction of the guarded and locked gate. It’s at least two hundred yards away. When the coast is clear, he sprints, not stopping until he makes it to the garden where he dives into the rows of corn and quietly crawls to the edge of the plot.
“Hey,” a whisper comes from his left. The cadet slowly turns his head to see a tall girl with long blonde hair wearing a black jumpsuit. Behind her stands a small group of kids, each of them looking pale and scared and desperate.
Jonah shakes his head and puts his finger to his lips. He doesn’t need this right now. He doesn’t need whatever problem they’re about to make for him. He sticks his head outside the stalks of corn, but the girl and the others advance in a tight group. Two men suddenly jog by with rifles in their arms, causing Jonah to duck back inside the stalks. The group of kids gets closer, and Jonah turns and waves them off, but they still come.
“Please. Get away from me. Go,” Jonah whispers as he watches faraway villagers mill back and forth between the tents. A small drone zips over the farm building. How is he going to get to the gate without being seen? And even if he does, how is he going to get through the gate?
“Where are you going?” the blonde girl whispers.
“Don’t worry about it,” Jonah seethes. “Please, just leave me alone.”
“Take us with you,” a boy of about twelve says. His hair is half shaved, long in front and buzzed in the back. His face and neck are marked with bruises, some new and some old and fading.
Jonah sits on his heels, bouncing with anticipation. “Look, I’m in trouble, and if they find me I’m pretty much done for. I can’t take anyone with me. But I don’t even know where I’m going. I need to get outside the gate, but I don’t know how.”
The blonde girl nods to the other kids and quickly they stand around Jonah and start to examine the corn on the stalks, blocking him from view.
“We know how you can get out of here,” the girl says. “It’s close by. But if we show you, we get to come with you.”
“If you know a way out of here and want to leave, why don’t you just leave? Just go yourselves.”
A tiny girl with short black hair quickly ducks down next to Jonah. The rest of the group squeezes together, hiding the both of them. The girl digs her knees into the ground and places her small hands on her thighs. “I talked to your friend Brooklyn.”
Brooklyn. He needs to take Brooklyn with him. And Vespa. And, he can’t believe he’s thinking this: Paul, too.
“She told me about what you did on Achilles,” the girl says.
“She did? How is she? She’s awake? Can she see? Is she still blind?”
“She’s still blind, yeah.”
Jonah falls onto his butt and sets his head on his knees. Poor Brooklyn, still blind and waiting in that hospital, her eyes probably just as blue as the day they arrived. He knows he has to bring her with him. Or, at the very least, come back for her.
“What did she tell you?” Jonah asks the girl.
“She told me how brave and strong you are, and if there was anyone who was going to figure out what’s going on around here, it was you. And we need someone to figure out what’s going on around here.”
“They found something,” the boy with the half-shaved head says. “Something big.”
“What do you mean?”
The blonde rips an ear of corn off of a stalk. She takes a long, wheezing breath before saying, “We’ll explain more when we get outside.”
Jonah grabs a handful of soil and squeezes it through his fingers, the black dirt falling back to the ground like worms. In fact, when he looks closer at the thick coils of dirt smooshing out of his hands, he sees tiny red worms escaping its clumps. As soon as a worm hits the ground, it unfolds in two different directions, like miniscule “Xs” that slowly crawl back into the shadows. Jonah looks up and through the kids’ feet to see dozens of boots running this way and that way. He hears the drones overhead. He has no choice.
“You get me out of here, and you can come with me,” he says. “But I can’t promise you I’ll be able to figure anything out around here. You probably know more than I do.”
“What about our trackers?” one of the girls says. “They’ll find us.”
“Trackers?” Jonah asks.
“We all have tracking chips in us. You do, too,” the blonde girl says. “In our hands.”
Jonah looks at the back of his hands but doesn’t know where to start; his hands are covered with scratches and bumps and bruises. “Where?”
“We’ll show you on the outside,” the boy says before jumping to his feet and disappearing. A moment later, he’s back with a large wooden wheelbarrow. A couple of the other kids stand and begin to shovel a nearby mound of the black dirt inside. Jonah can hear each of their lungs straining with the work. They do it as slowly as possible, seemingly waiting for the right moment…
“Now,” the blonde girl whispers. “Get inside.”
Jonah doesn’t hesitate, he army crawls over to the wheelbarrow, and in less than a second, he’s inside and curled into a ball. Large clumps of the black soil immediately fall on top of his legs, the shovels working so fast they blur over him. Soon, his entire body is covered, and a few small hands reach in and carve out his nose and eyes so they’re the only parts of him exposed. He can feel the tiny worms crawling all over him, up his sleeves and pant legs. Dozens slowly make their way under his collar and onto his chest. He wants to jump out and rip his clothes off. He wants to scream. But instead, he continues to lie there.
He watches the purple and white sky move as he’s wheeled down a nearby alley. They turn left, right, another left. The worms move up his neck and start investigating his ears and lips. Just as he can’t take another second, the top of the wall comes into view.
“Okay,” the blonde girl says. “Get out. Hurry. Now.”
Jonah pushes himself out so quickly that the wheelbarrow tips over, and he rolls onto the ground where he slaps his hands all over trying to rid himself of the worms. He rolls a few more times and finds himself on top of a square piece of wood.
The blonde girl bends down to pull on the wood and it opens on hinges, revealing a deep hole. “Maintenance crawl space. Don’t touch the pipes down there, they’ll burn you or cover you in…” She looks over her shoulder at Jonah, and then past him. “Shit.”
Jonah turns his head to see the kids from Module Eight huddled together just fifty feet away. The
y stare at Jonah and the others for a moment before walking straight toward them, the tall boy with the uneven hair pointing directly at Jonah.
“Get in,” the girl says, pushing Jonah toward the hole. “Now.”
• • •
Jonah punches the door above his head twice before it swings open into the blinding brightness with a vibrating clang. He pulls himself out of the hole and immediately crawls to the outside of the fence and flattens his back against it. To his right, the wall disappears after just a dozen yards, angling around the corner, but to his left the wall looks to go on forever. It takes a moment for the sounds of the forest to reach his ears: creatures howling, chittering, and singing, geysers exploding and splashing water all over the trees, branches shaking, rocks rolling over each other. While he waits for the blonde girl and the others to pop out of the hole to take him who-knows-where, Jonah reaches into the chest of his jumpsuit to pull out several more of the red worms, whipping them to the ground where he stomps his boots on them and grinds his toe back and forth. Then he flips his hands over, again looking for an incision where a tracker might be embedded, but nothing stands out among all the scratches on his skin.
“Come on,” Jonah whispers at the open door. “Let’s go, let’s go.”
Finally, he hears someone climbing the wooden ladder. They are moving too slow, though, and Jonah knows it’s only a matter of minutes before a drone floats over the fence and spots him on the outside, or a patrol unit comes running around the corner on his right. He needs cover. He needs to move. He pushes off the wall and runs and slides over to the hole on his knees. He reaches his long arms down into the darkness.
“Hurry, come on,” he barks into the hole.