by Greg Boose
He keeps his eyes on the wall and the drones zipping back and forth overhead. Forty-five minutes pass. But then smoke appears in the distance; a huge black and twisting plume spreads out like wings over the mountaintops. A few seconds later, the two drones monitoring the fence nearest Jonah suddenly take off toward the smoke. He hears shouting. He thinks he may even hear the gate open on the other side.
Jonah moves quickly, sprinting the last fifty yards to the wooden fence. He flattens his back against it, looks left and right and up, and then twists around and jumps straight up. He plunges the right knife hard into the wood and it sticks, leaving him hanging by one arm until he swings the left knife over his head and sticks it higher than the right. The toes of his shoes scramble over the boards until getting a slight grip, and then Jonah pulls himself up. He yanks out the right blade and plunges it higher. Then the left. In a matter of thirty seconds, his eyes peer over the spikes at the top. In the distance, the cloud of black smoke has gotten bigger, and he can see the tips of the flames dancing along the tops of two of the white modules. Good work, guys, he thinks. He counts five drones moving toward the fire. Below, Jonah watches villagers sprint back and forth among the tents and buildings. Mirker stands in the middle of it all with his hands on his hips. Two men face him and point fingers in different directions, arguing with him. Another man drives a cycle over to Mirker and jumps off and offers him the handlebars. Mirker swings a leg over the seat and speeds toward the gate, popping a brief wheelie along the way. He’s met by two idling rovers, and as soon as Mirker arrives, the gate opens halfway, barely allowing the three vehicles to squeeze through before closing with an echoing thud.
The moment the gate closes, Jonah pulls himself between two of the spikes and descends the inside wall just like he scaled the outer; he plunges the knives over and over into the wood until he can safely jump to the ground. As soon as his feet hit the black dirt, Jonah sprints behind the nearest tent. Voices come from inside, an argument between two women about never being able to leave the village, and Jonah runs to the next tent. He’s able to avoid the few remaining men in military outfits, sprinting and hiding, sprinting and hiding, and soon he’s close enough to the gate to see the red button high up on the wall.
Jonah shoves his hand into his pocket and rubs the verve seeds between his fingertips. He can’t believe he’s about to execute his plan. It’s a huge gamble; if it doesn’t work, he’s done for. Trapped. Maybe even tortured and killed. And then Vespa and Paul are done for, too.
He watches the gate for another thirty seconds, and when it’s clear, Jonah jumps into action. He sprints right for the huge doors, but then makes a sharp right turn toward the cement building next to it. He rams his shoulder into the door. The wood splinters and crashes inward. Jonah stumbles inside and sees the sheaf standing on the desk, a red ball cap next to it. He rips open the door to the hallway in the back.
It’s almost completely dark inside the hall as he sprints to the end. He gets to the last door on the left and squints through the bars in the window. There, rocking back and forth in the corner under a naked light bulb, sits Dr. Z.
“Dr. Z,” Jonah whispers.
The woman’s head jerks upright to stare at the wall in front of her.
“It’s me, Jonah.”
The doctor flips over onto all fours and crawls toward him. When she gets close to the door, she disappears from Jonah’s sight, but then her face suddenly pops up and appears in the small window with a sadistic grin. Her teeth are yellow and broken, and one of her eyes is black and blue, swollen shut with crusted blood. Jonah gasps and stumbles backward into the darkness. This is a mistake, he thinks. There has to be another way.
“You’re too late, too late,” she says in a grave voice. “They’re going to choose someone new soon.” She drums her dirty hands on the top of her head. “The tall boy with the hair. They want him. He wants to choose him now.”
Jonah clears his throat and takes a small step forward. He tries to reconcile this broken woman before him with the doctor who saved his life after the crash on Achilles. She couldn’t have been kinder back then, more concerned with everyone’s safety. He remembers how at the makeshift hospital, after another child died and was covered with a blanket, she spun around and launched a rock into the night sky with so much anger and defeat. She cared so much for everyone. She cared so much for him.
“Am I still chosen? Do they still want me?”
Dr. Z smashes her face into the bars of the window and when she laughs, spit covers her chin and drips onto the ledge. “Yes. They still want you. He does, he does. But you don’t listen. If you don’t listen, you don’t get to go.”
“Go where?” he asks.
“You don’t get to be their God. You don’t get to save the old boy.”
“Save who?”
The woman backs up a few paces and then slowly points all over the room, her trembling index finger following nothingness around her empty cell. “Them and him. Them and him. Them and him.”
She sees them right now, Jonah thinks. The two-headed ghosts. He whips his head back and forth in the dark hallway, wondering if he’s surrounded by them at that very moment.
As he watches Dr. Z continue to point and say “them and him” over and over, he knows time is running out. He’s not going to get the answers he needs from her. At least, not clear ones. Not right now. So, he says what he came to say: “Dr. Z, if you do something for me, if you help save my friend from the hospital here and bring her to me outside the fence…” He hesitates to say the next part, but then moves forward with his plan: “I will eat the seeds. I will listen to them or him or her or whoever you want. All of them. I will let them choose me.”
Dr. Z stops pointing and then charges at the window. Her one good eye shifts back and forth to stare into Jonah’s face to see if he’s telling the truth. “Free me and eat the seeds. Eat the seeds and listen to them. Listen to them and save us all. Eat the seeds, kill the red one.”
“I will only eat the seeds once you bring my friend, Brooklyn, to me outside the gate. Alive. Not until then.”
She laughs and then paces back and forth in the small cell, huffing and growling like a lion. Her lips move constantly, her head tilted toward the sky. She grumbles and argues with the air around her, and then she stops in the middle of the room and lowers her face to the ground where she stands silently for almost a minute. Jonah watches terrified; he knows he made a mistake. This isn’t going to work. She’s too far gone. All of this is too far gone.
“I will bring her to you,” she says with her face still aimed at the ground. “And then you will eat the seeds.”
“You bring me Brooklyn…and you bring me her medication and my medication, and then I’ll do whatever you need me to do.”
Jonah reaches into his pocket and retrieves the verve seeds that fell from Vespa’s pocket. He then holds them up to the window for her to see.
“Let me out,” she whispers. “Let us all out.”
Jonah closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Is he really going to do this? Is Brooklyn’s life really more important than his own? What if the seeds kill him? What if he never stops seeing the alien ghosts and they haunt him forever like Dr. Z and the Module Eight kids? He feels the air around him, knowing that these beings are there watching his every move. He opens his eyes again to see Dr. Z smiling at him with her broken teeth.
He pauses for one last second and then runs back down the hall and into the front room. Keys. He needs to find the keys. As he slaps his hands all over the desk and rummages through the pockets of the two jumpsuits hanging from a hook on the wall, Jonah catches glimpses of the sheaf’s screen rotating through different feeds. He sees the village from several angles: people darting back and forth into tents, the Module Eight kids huddling next to a section of the fence, swaying in unison. He sees outside the village, and the giant smoke plume widening, a shot from one of the drones moving in. No sign of Vespa and Paul.
He hopes they’re okay, running in this direction as soon as they set the modules on fire. Maybe he should have brought Vespa with him. Or Paul. No, he thinks, they would never let him eat the verve seeds and sacrifice himself.
His fingers touch metal in a jumpsuit pocket, and he brings out a small ring of rudimentary keys. The way they shine in his hands instantly reminds him of the metal disc that hung around Lark’s neck on Achilles. He had never seen that kind of metal before, until again just now. Jonah runs back down the hall and stops in front of the cell door. Inside, Dr. Z stands in the back of the room with her face to the wall. As soon as he puts the key in the lock, she spins around and marches toward him. He pushes the door open and the doctor walks right past him, turning into the hallway, never breaking her stride until she gets halfway down the hall. There, she looks up to the ceiling and holds her hands to her temples. She shakes her head, whispering, “Yes, yes, I will. I understand. If he doesn’t eat them, he dies. Yes, yes.”
Hearing this, Jonah’s whole body shakes, and it takes everything in him to say, “I need Brooklyn alive, and her medicine and my medicine. The medicine is in clear bags. Meet me in the trees right outside the gate.”
Dr. Z twists around and nods twice. Then she holds out a dirty palm and wavers back and forth. “One seed for me. One seed for me. To give me the powers.”
The cadet quickly digs into his pockets and finds the keys and then Vespa’s knives. He could end this right now, killing this woman and never worrying about her again. He could go rescue Brooklyn himself. The thought of him stabbing Dr. Z is too much, though. He finds and brings out the white seeds. He walks toward her and drops the largest one into her hand. A sick growl comes from the woman’s throat before she shoves the verve into her mouth and takes an echoing crunch. She raises her arms over her head and clenches her fists. The muscles in her neck are suddenly visible and pulsing. And then she turns and sprints down the rest of the hallway, disappearing through the doorway.
CHAPTER TEN
Jonah plunges the knives into the wall right next to the gate and starts climbing toward the red emergency button, but blue laser fire sends him crashing back to the dirt. He ignores the shouts for him to freeze, and he picks himself up and sprints along the fence toward the dark tunnel that got him outside in the first place. He just hopes the Module Eight kids aren’t there waiting for him.
He darts down an alley, and a man shouts for him to stop, and then another man joins in the call, but Jonah just puts his head down and takes a sharp turn between a cluster of yurts. He turns again and again, zigzagging between different tents and buildings, sprinting through the shadows of the farm building, catching sight of the three frosties stacked on top of each other. He runs right past a small group of villagers with their heads up and their hands flat above their eyes, watching the dark cloud of smoke rising in the distance.
The two men get closer, their heavy, laboring breaths just a dozen yards behind him, and so Jonah speeds around a yurt, circling around and around its circumference until he hears their confusion on the opposite side. He’s not only trying to lose the men but also trying to buy Dr. Z some time. Maybe even get a few of the guards from the hospital to leave and give chase. He pictures Dr. Z kicking down doors and roaring like a madwoman, fighting Mirker’s soldiers with everything she has. He pictures her draping Brooklyn over her shoulder, grabbing an armful of medicine bags, and then charging back out into the village with the verve blasting through her veins. How is she going to get outside the gate? he wonders. He should have thought about that. But if she got out once before with Paul, he thinks she can figure it out again. Especially with Jonah’s promise to eat the seeds hanging in the balance.
Jonah sees the telescope in the distance and tears straight for it. He flattens his back against the building’s cement wall and gathers his breath. His heart beats in his throat as he whips his head around, trying to get his bearings. Which way is the tunnel from here again?
Voices come from his left and Jonah quietly rounds the building until he’s in front of the door. He tries the handle, but it’s locked. He reaches for the knives in his pockets to pry the door open, but instead his fingers find the keys. With trembling hands, he tries three different keys until the fourth one clicks when he turns it. A second later he’s inside, locking the door behind him. Jonah crouches against the door, putting as much weight on it as possible. Whoever follows him is now just on the other side. He sees the shadow of a face peering through the window, and then he hears the handle being turned. But when they realize the door is locked, they leave to look elsewhere.
Jonah puts his head in his hands, wondering how he’s going to get out of there. When he looks up, he sees the telescope rests at a different angle than before; in fact, it’s facing the complete opposite direction, and near the top of the huge tube five long panels stick out of it like flower petals open at midday. Time is running out. If he’s not in the trees waiting for Dr. Z when she shows up with Brooklyn, there’s no telling what she’ll do. To Brooklyn. Or to him. But he can’t help himself and jumps in the rolling chair under the lens and presses his face against it. Then he lets his fingers crawl over the sides of the lens until he finds the right switch.
Like a sheaf coming to life, the lens expands and curls around his head, and then a red and gray ball appears in front of his eyes. It’s small, the size of a fist, but still, Jonah can tell this isn’t Peleus. And he knows it isn’t Achilles. He finds the zoom function, and soon the object grows closer and closer until he sees red mountains and green rivers and then moving waves on a rust-colored coastline. His fingers try to zoom even closer, but they hit a different button, and the telescope begins to move by itself, shifting a couple inches down and then to the left. When it stops, Jonah presses his forehead against the lens as several triangular shadows form in his view. The image gets sharper and sharper until it’s unmistakable. Pyramids. He’s looking at pyramids in a desert. He’s instantly reminded of the pyramids in his visions when the Module Eight girl grabbed his hand outside of the tunnel. And of the triangles carved above the stick figure in Everett’s sphere. Who built these? And where is this?
And then, moving in and out of the giant shadows of these pyramids, Jonah sees thousands of tiny figures. They go in every direction, some in groups and some off on their own. Jonah tries to zoom in for an even closer look, but it won’t go farther. But then the telescope shifts again under its own control—just slightly—and Jonah watches the red landscape crawl to the right and up a mountainside, and when the telescope stops and focuses, Jonah gasps and falls to the floor, knocking the chair over in a resounding clang. With held breath, he gets up on his knees and presses his face against the lens.
“What the hell?” he whispers to himself.
Carved into the mountainside is a giant crescent moon with the three circles sitting inside it. The same symbol that has been haunting him for a week, following him from Achilles to Thetis to wherever he’s looking at now. Using the digital specs on the periphery of the lens, the symbol appears to be over five hundred yards long. It must have taken someone years to make. But why? And by who?
The light in the telescope building changes; a man’s face appears in the window, his hands cupped to his temples. When the man sees Jonah inside, he shouts the word “keys” over his shoulder and then tries to ram the door in. Jonah gets to his feet and runs a circle around the room, looking for another way out, but finds none, and so he hides next to the door with his fingers reaching for Vespa’s knives. His shoulder hits a switch, triggering a motor somewhere that shakes the whole building. The ceiling separates and a second later Jonah stands in a ray of sunshine.
The man rams the door again, this time splintering the wood, and Jonah pushes off the wall and jumps right at the telescope. He wraps his arms around the tube and quickly begins to shimmy his way up. Vespa’s knives push out of his pockets and fall before he can reach for them. They hit the cement floor with an echoing chime. “Damn
it,” Jonah whispers. He’s twenty feet off the ground when the door breaks away and a half-dozen men charge into the room. They dive for the papers and monitors on the desk, checking for what’s been taken.
“Where the hell did he go?” asks a pudgy man with a tuft of white hair on the top of his head. He stands directly over the knives. “Check the cabinets! Come on out, Jonah. Mirker’s asking for you. We’re not going to hurt you. He needs your help, son.”
Without making a noise, Jonah pulls himself higher and higher along the telescope until he leaps out of the crack in the ceiling like a rabbit darting from its borough. He lands on the roof just as one of the men looks up, missing him by a second.
“What the fuck?” the pudgy man yells. “He can’t just disappear! And shut this thing off already. Pick up those papers. Call Mirker.”
“He’s not answering,” another man says.
“Then someone go get him!”
A click echoes from the room and a motor begins humming below Jonah. The roof begins to shake and pinch together. He leaps out of the way and then drops to his stomach and crawls to the edge of the roof. A tall man bursts out of the broken door and charges toward the hospital, barreling through a couple of small children playing in the grass.
From the roof, Jonah can see everything, and no one can see him, save for drones, but there don’t appear to be any around. They must all still be at the fire, which continues to add more and more smoke into the black cloud spreading across the sky. The peaks of the mountains in the distance remind Jonah of the pyramids he saw through the telescope lens. And that reminds him of the giant symbol carved into the mountainside. The image haunts him. He needs to know what it means. Before he eats a seed, if he ever gets outside, he’s going to demand Dr. Z tell him everything about the symbol, once and for all.
The pudgy man with a tuft of white hair leaves the building flanked by three other men. They stop a few feet from the doorway and huddle together, and Jonah scoots back a few inches to remain hidden.