Thetis--The Deep Sky Saga--Book Two

by Greg Boose

  A small hand fumbles for his, and when its fingers wrap themselves around his palm, Jonah feels a jolt of electricity shoot up his arm. He screams as lightning pops in his throat and hits his brain with a repeating, pulsing wave of static. Suddenly, his head feels too big, too full, as if it’s about to rise off his shoulders like a balloon. Pink and purple blobs float in his vision, bouncing into each other, eating each other. And then the blobs blow away like sand in a storm, disintegrating in every direction before several yellow, double-headed figures appear and circle around him. They glow like light bulbs with fuzzy outlines, or with no outlines at all somehow, and they constantly change shapes, moving from a dozen feet taller than he to no taller than his waist.

  The fingers grip his hand so hard it feels as if his skin is going to be pulled right off. The lightning inside Jonah’s body intensifies, and his back goes rigid, his vertebrae lining up as if fused together, and he falls backwards like a felled tree, pulling a small boy onto the dirt who, in turn, pulls up a teenage girl. Jonah’s brain stops popping for a second, just long enough for him to recognize the kids as Module Eights.

  The two kids slowly get to their feet with their hands still held together, and the boy refuses to let go of Jonah’s hand. A new wave of electricity runs up Jonah’s arm and he begins to writhe on the ground. The circling yellow figures slow their pace around him, and then one breaks off and floats right through Jonah’s body, bringing an icy chill to his throat.

  The boy dips his blank face down to Jonah’s until their noses touch. Jonah can’t break away. He can’t even turn his head. The boy pushes his nose harder into Jonah’s, and his eyes vibrate as he says, “Door four.”

  A moment later, the girl has her face smashed against Jonah’s cheek. Her lips are ice cold as they open and close on his skin, repeating: “Door four, door four, door four.”

  Another yellow ghost breaks from the ongoing circle and passes through him. His body goes numb. His mind sharpens, and then a tunneling stream of colors overtake his vision. His eyes are open, staring right back into the boy’s, but all he sees are flashes of reds and blues and yellows. It’s almost as if he’s back in Tunick’s cave with a verve seed clinking against his teeth. Then the flashes begin to swirl and flatten out and create sharp lines. He sees…a giant pyramid. He sees several giant pyramids in the middle of a vast, empty landscape.

  The voices of the boy and girl cut through the visions, repeating, “Door four, door four, door four.”

  In his mind, the pyramids rise from the ground and rotate, and then they rush toward Jonah at an alarming speed. More noises cut through the vision: heavy breathing, the ground scraping near his head. Then, right before he hears a bone break, there’s a familiar voice: “Let. Him. Go.”

  The pyramids vanish, and the lightning suddenly stops running through his body, and the circling figures disappear just as quickly as they arrived. Jonah sits up gasping for air, and after shielding his face from the sun, he sees Vespa standing over him, her boot planted directly on the Module Eight boy’s wrist.

  “You okay, Firstie?” Vespa asks.

  Jonah can’t find his voice as he pushes himself up to his knees where he immediately falls back on his butt. What just happened? Did he just see what Paul saw back on Achilles? He must have. There were ghosts. All around him.

  Vespa puts even more weight on the boy’s wrist, and Jonah watches in horror as a white shard rises out of the boy’s wrist with a pool of blood. The boy doesn’t make a sound or a face, as if he doesn’t feel a thing. Vespa then wheels back her other foot to boot the girl in the chest, disconnecting her hand from the boy’s, sending her rolling away in cloud of black dust.

  The blonde girl from the garden pops her head out of the hole and reaches up to grab the side of the wooden door. Her eyes are as wide as Peleus and Achilles overhead. “You need to go. Now. More are coming. There’s something they built down there that you should see. Just go half a mile that way down in the trees. Follow the path.” She points over their shoulders and into the forest. “Come back for us. Please. And get rid of your trackers.”

  Before Jonah can say a word, the girl pulls the door shut.

  Vespa reaches down and yanks Jonah to his feet. “Let’s move.”

  “But we can’t. We’ll be tracked by some kind of implants in our hands somewhere. They’ll know exactly where—”

  The cadet pulls a knife out of her pocket and quickly examines her hands. Her thumb moves something in the back of her right hand and she immediately places the blade to it. Without hesitating, she slices open her skin and digs out a small green microchip with the knife tip. She holds it in front of Jonah’s face and it glistens with her blood. Vespa is about to fling it to the ground when Jonah says, “Wait. They’ll figure out you removed it, or they’ll think you’re dead.”

  “That’s not a bad thing,” she responds.

  But Jonah carefully grabs the chip off the tip of her knife and then bends down to the boy on the ground. With a held breath, Jonah forces the chip into the open wound on the boy’s wrist, squeezing it under the broken bones sticking out of his skin, doing everything he can not to vomit.

  “What about you?” Vespa asks.

  Jonah shows her his scarred hands. “I don’t even know where to start.”

  Vespa snatches his hands and squeezes his skin until she feels something that makes her nod. She places the blade to his skin and asks, “You ready?”

  A drone sounds somewhere nearby.

  “Just hurry.”

  Vespa makes a tiny, careful incision and digs out the green chip. She holds it between her fingers and asks, “Where do we put it?”

  The small Module Eight girl gets to her knees and stares at the cadets, but before Vespa can make a move toward her, something tickles Jonah’s arm and then a cluster of red worms falls out of his shirtsleeve.

  “Give it to me,” he says

  Vespa keeps staring at the girl. “But…”

  He takes it from her hand and slowly smashes the small green chip into the cluster of worms. It sticks to one and it squirms away.

  “Now, let’s go,” he says.

  Vespa charges forward, stopping only to boot the girl in the side, sending her rolling away, and then the two cadets run into the forest.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Pushing through the forest with Vespa is much easier than cutting through the jungle on Achilles with a group of kids in tow, Jonah thinks, but he sure could use one of the electric cycles or LZR-rifles they had on the moon. They move quickly, though, darting between black trees whose trunks shed off in massive sheets the moment they’re touched, sending columns of dust into the air; climbing over boulders as soft as sponges that suck on the bottoms of their boots; and dodging hundreds of low-flying creatures that look like pink jellyfish with snail shells. Water constantly bubbles out of unseen pockets in the ground, soaking their boots and pant legs, and twice they step on active geysers, barely escaping being shot into the tops of the trees.

  Jonah wants to fill Vespa in on everything he’s learned, but she’s too fast and too angry, always several feet ahead of Jonah, making it impossible to have a conversation. At the same time, he doesn’t know how much he should tell her. She’ll think the Zion stuff is crazy, that the ghosts he’s seen and voices he’s heard mean he should go back for more medicine. Maybe she’ll turn on him, leaving him behind.

  They continue in the direction the blonde girl pointed them, and eventually Jonah and Vespa come to a huge waterfall feeding a glassy pool hundreds of feet below. That pool spills into another waterfall that sends water into another pool and another waterfall, and it goes on like this for what looks like forever.

  “On the left,” Vespa says, her hands on her knees. They’re both completely out of breath. “Look. There’s a path right there. Some of the Athens people must have carved it out.”

  With his hands on top of his head and his chest heaving for air, Jonah scans his eyes alo
ng the cliffs of black trees and exploding geysers until he sees a narrow road cutting through the vegetation, a path that could only have been made by a human. Overturned trees and rocks edge the road that winds its way toward the valley below, and as Jonah follows its path, near the bottom he sees a large gray structure sticking out of the trees. The roof looks curved like a dome, and it must be fifty feet tall.

  “You think that’s what that girl was pointing to?” Jonah asks.

  “Probably. But I’m getting some major déjà vu standing up here. I mean, didn’t we just do something like this about a week ago?”

  “You mean standing on the top of a cliff with me and we’re about to head west without knowing what the hell is out there?”

  “We’re heading south, I think, but yes,” she says as she takes her first careful step down the cliff. “That.”

  Jonah continues to stand there, watching Vespa’s black hair shine in the bright white sun as she finds a way along the side of the cliff toward the road. He remembers standing on top of that cliff on Achilles with Vespa and all the other kids, how Paul looked terrified and begged Vespa not to go because of something he saw—the circling yellow ghosts that Jonah himself just saw—and how he and Brooklyn watched the marine layer of clouds crawl toward the beach that seemed so far away. Brooklyn. She should be there right now with them, muttering her smart remarks, kicking ass, showing him what real bravery is like.

  He takes a shaky first step after Vespa and asks, “Have you seen Brooklyn lately? How is she?”

  Vespa stops moving and puts her hand on a large pink boulder that appears to suck on her fingertips. She immediately pulls her hand away and wipes it on her jumpsuit. “Not well. Not like you.”

  “Damn it. What do her eyes look like?”

  “The same, Jonah. Blue. Blind. They’re the same. And she doesn’t seem to feel any better, either. But she woke up, which is something. I honestly don’t know if…”

  Jonah catches up and sets his foot on the boulder, allowing it to suck on the bottom of his boot. Within a couple of seconds, his treads are cleaned of any dirt or loose rocks. “You don’t know if what?”

  She picks a long, spindly black branch up off the ground in front of her and launches it into the valley below like a javelin. The two of them stand silently as they watch it twirl end over end in the swirling wind until it disappears into the tops of the distant trees.

  “You don’t know if what?” Jonah repeats.

  “Christ, Jonah. If she’s going to live. If she will survive. What did you think I was going to say?”

  “I was hoping something different,” he mumbles.

  They walk in silence along the crumbling cliff, stopping briefly to watch an insect that looks like a slimy green piece of paper inch its way down a tree trunk. When it folds to pull itself along farther, Jonah sees three smaller ones fold and inch their own way along the back of their mother or father or big brother. Or, perhaps, Jonah thinks, they’re stuck to the back of their enemy. Is that what he’s doing on Thetis? Stuck to a planet that wants to kill him as he inches along with Vespa and Brooklyn and a few others?

  After a half hour, they make it to the narrow road and immediately pick up the pace. Jonah knows a drone could rise overhead and spot them at any moment, or maybe there are remote cameras stuck to the nearby trees, or maybe there is a laser perimeter set up to trigger a cage to pick up more animals for their experiments. Jonah thinks about the red worms he shoved his tracking chip onto, hoping they’re still alive so Mirker and the others believe he’s still near the village.

  The road zigzags around boulders too big to move, and as they get lower and lower into the canyon, the gray structure they saw up on the cliff is completely invisible. And when they reach the end of the road, they find themselves out of breath, facing a thick wall of the black trees.

  “Which way is that thing?” Vespa asks as she rotates on her heels.

  Jonah jumps off the road and pushes a few yards into the trees on the right. Ducking this way and that way, he sees slivers of the domed structure. It looks as if it’s made of cement, making it one of only three cement buildings on Thetis. Why would they use such precious construction material on something so far away from the village?

  “This way,” he calls, and within minutes, Jonah and Vespa stumble out of the small patch of forest and find themselves in the shadow of the sphere. Immediately, the hairs on Jonah’s arms rise. He takes a step backward and lowers his eyes to the ground in fear; he knows exactly what it is they’re building out here: a portal, just like the one on the island where Kip disappeared. Just like the broken dome of Tunick’s cave.

  “It kind of looks like…” Vespa mumbles as she circles the cement base. “Is it an observatory, like for another telescope?”

  “Observatories usually go on top of mountains, not down in valleys,” Jonah says as he follows close behind. As they get near the opposite side, he sees a large doorframe cut into the wall. “Honestly, I think this is another portal, like the ones on Achilles. That means…Vespa, that means they know what’s going on with all the symbols and portals and…”

  Jonah freezes in the open doorway and all of his thoughts disappear. The same carved symbols he saw on Achilles cover the inside of the dome, but these have obviously been made with human hands and tools, their lines far too shallow and uneven. At the bottom of the sphere, sitting in a ball with his head up and staring at them, is a thin boy of Asian descent. He looks familiar to Jonah, but he can’t place him immediately.

  “Holy shit!” Vespa yells. “What are…who are you?”

  The boy closes his eyes and sighs in what looks to be relief to see the two cadets. His knees carelessly drop from his face, and he leans his head back against the wall with an echoing thud. Black dirt covers the boy’s neck and face, and his bare chest heaves with slow, painful breaths.

  Another second passes. And then Jonah recognizes him. They met on Achilles.

  “His name is Everett,” Jonah says as he takes a cautious step inside the sphere. He doesn’t get the same overwhelming feelings he got on Achilles when he entered a portal. “I met him right before I found you and Brooklyn with Lark and Krev and the others. He and Hess followed me after I escaped from Tunick, and they forced me to open up a portal on Achilles. And when I got it working, I pushed him onto it. He disappeared and didn’t come back.”

  “Until now,” Vespa whispers.

  “How long have you been here?” Jonah asks the boy.

  Everett raises his trembling hand to show them five fingers, and that’s when Jonah sees a thick plastic cord cuffs his wrists together. Another cord tethers him to a hook drilled into the base of the wall. A couple feet away from the boy sits an old tray of food scraps and an overturned cup.

  Vespa jumps to the boy’s side. “You’re being held in here? Someone is keeping you here? Who?”

  The boy opens his mouth, but no words come out. He then points to his throat and shakes his head.

  “You can’t talk? You lost your voice?” Vespa asks as she pulls a small blade out of her jumpsuit pocket. She puts the blade to the plastic cord around his wrists, but just as she’s about to cut it, Jonah sets his hand on hers.

  “Wait. Just wait.”

  Vespa stands up straight. “We have to free him, Jonah. He could die out here.”

  “Just let me think for a second,” Jonah says as he paces back and forth. “He and Hess threatened to kill me. They blackmailed me. They tried to sacrifice me and use me as an experiment, to see what would happen when I went through the portal. They were prepared to kill me, Vespa. They didn’t give a shit about me.”

  Everett’s eyes widen, and he shakes his head furiously in his defense, but Vespa puts her knife back in her pocket and sits down against the opposite wall. “So, what, we’re going to just leave him here to starve and get eaten by something? I mean, someone has him in here as a prisoner, Jonah.”

  “You know, I bet those guys
coming back the morning Paul went missing with Dr. Z, they were down here messing with him. Remember they said they were delivering breakfast? Maybe Everett has some answers they need. Maybe he has some answers we all need.”

  “Maybe he does,” a man’s voice says from right outside the door. Before Vespa can get to her feet, Mirker walks inside with his fists on his hips, his broad shoulders pulled back like wings, his long gray beard blowing in the wind. He looks both pissed and pleased to see Jonah and Vespa inside.

  Paul stumbles through the doorway with his wrists held by a plastic cord. He falls to his knees right in front of Everett and collapses onto his chest. Dried blood and fresh wounds cover his head.

  “Paul!” Vespa jumps to his side and cradles him in her arms. A quick bolt of jealousy shoots through Jonah, but he shakes it off.

  Mirker pulls a blue handgun out of a side holster and scratches his beard with it. “Little Everett Hwang here stole my best ship a year back, didn’t you, boy?”

  Everett draws his knees up to his chest and looks down.

  “So, you two think you can cut out your tracking chips and we wouldn’t find you, huh? Think you’re pretty smart?”

  “There’s two of them inside us,” Paul coughs. “They put two chips in us.”

  “Now, Cadet Sigg, where did you hear a silly rumor like that?” Mirker asks as three men appear in the doorway holding rifles.

  “You know, I can’t exactly remember. Someone in the village told me, I think—someone who really hates your guts and thinks you’re a shitty leader—but that’s not really narrowing it down at all, is it?”

  Mirker barks incoherently and kicks Paul so hard in the stomach that he rises off the ground and rolls on top of Vespa, pinning her onto her back. Mirker steps toward the cadets; his rage suffocates the room, causing Everett to curl up into a ball and cover his head. He has seen this before.

  Jonah jumps in front of Vespa and Paul, casting a tall shadow on the wall. He doesn’t know what he’s going to say or do, but he knows he can’t just stand there and watch Mirker hurt anyone else.