Thetis--The Deep Sky Saga--Book Two

by Greg Boose

  Jonah steps forward instead of backward. He did what she asked; he ate the verve. He saw the visions. He heard the voices. He just needs the time to decipher them. Now, though, he does what he wants. And what he wants now, what he feels in his gut and possessed mind, is to destroy this woman.

  Dr. Z bites down on a seed and spits a long strand of white saliva down the front of her jumpsuit, and then she lowers her head and charges. The Module Eights take her lead and run right after her.

  Jonah lowers himself to one knee and clenches his fists. He wants this fight. He’s been waiting for this fight. Dr. Z reaches him and swings, but he explodes from his knee and tackles her around the waist. They crash through the trailing huddle of kids like a bowling ball, rolling over a small boy who gets his arm smashed against a rock. Jonah hears his arm break, but his focus is entirely on Dr. Z, who quickly gets to her feet.

  A girl jumps on Jonah’s back and scrambles up to his shoulders where she bites the top of his head. Jonah reaches up and he immediately reaches over his shoulders and yanks her off by her neck. He holds the girl up to his face and roars, covering her freckled face with his spit. He wants to punish her. He wants to end her. He plants his feet to launch her over the cliff, but his mind pops and clears for a split second. She’s just a kid. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s just a kid, just a kid, just a kid. Before the verve can regain control, Jonah places the girl back on the ground and shoves her in the opposite direction.

  Two more of the Module Eights jump on him, but Jonah spins around and around until they lose their grip and bounce away. That’s when Dr. Z pounces; she gets his neck in her grip and slams her heel down onto Jonah’s foot, buckling him to his knees. The woman squeezes with all her might, the verve making her ten times stronger than a normal person. Jonah yanks on her wrists, gasping for air, but she has leverage and pushes him flat on the ground. Dr. Z then scrambles onto his chest and sits there, choking Jonah with a smile on her face while several Module Eight kids stand expressionless around him. They’re allowing her to do this. He thought he had a mission to carry out for them, but maybe the entrance through the exit—what they’ve been asking for—is Jonah’s death.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Jonah tries to roll onto his side, but Dr. Z only squeezes harder, laughs louder. Her eyes roll into the back of her head as white drool drips from her lips and into his left eye and ear, rolling down into his collar. The huddle of Module Eights above him gets tighter, their temples touching each other’s as they wait for Jonah to either die or finally give in and join them. Red and black dots begin to clog his vision, and Jonah knows it’s not the verve, but the last thing he’s going to see.

  Dr. Z’s body suddenly shifts on top of him, and her fingernails scrape along Jonah’s throat, clawing to stay there. Jonah takes a huge gasp of air. His vision returns just in time to see Griffin’s foot connect with Dr. Z’s stomach, loosening her grip. The cadet takes a giant step back, and with a Module Eight girl’s arms wrapped around his waist trying to yank him away, he kicks with all his might, knocking Dr. Z off Jonah.

  Jonah flips onto his stomach and crawls away to catch his breath. A small fist quickly tangles itself in Jonah’s hair and yanks back violently, but he’s able to swat it away and get to his feet.

  “Jonah,” Griffin wheezes.

  Jonah looks back to see Griffin struggling in Dr. Z’s arms near the edge of the cliff. She turns to stare Jonah in the eye as she bites down on a seed. She then drives her fist into Griffin’s side, doubling the boy over, knocking something shiny from Griffin’s pocket. Jonah couldn’t mistake it: his sheaf.

  Dr. Z tosses Griffin over her hip, sending the Third Year rolling toward the cliff. The boy goes over the edge, only to save himself by sticking his hand into a crack. “Jonah! Help!”

  Jonah sprints toward the cadet, but three Module Eight kids jump on top of him, slowing his sprint to a staggered walk. Dr. Z watches with a snarling smile as she backs up a few steps and places her foot on Griffin’s hand.

  “Dr. Z!” Jonah pleads. “Please stop. You’re a doctor. You’re supposed to be helping us. This isn’t you! You aren’t this! Get the voices out of your head and get back to being Dr. Zarembo from Earth. You are not the verve! You’re our friend!”

  Something sparks behind Dr. Z’s eyes at his plea. She shakes her head and stands up straight, confused for a moment, as if she doesn’t know where she is. Griffin struggles to hold onto the cliff below her feet, and when she looks down to see him, she gasps as if surprised. It’s working, Jonah thinks, he’s getting through to her.

  Dr. Z watches Jonah stagger toward her with the Module Eights hanging on for dear life, and then she looks back at Griffin who is beginning to climb back to the ledge. He reaches a bloody hand up for the doctor to take, whispering, “Please.”

  She reaches down and takes the cadet’s hand, and as she leans over, a long strand of white drool drops from her lips. Instinctively, Dr. Z sucks it back up into her mouth and cocks her head back. Her shoulders shudder, and she falls to her knees with closed eyes, still holding Griffin’s hand.

  “Hold on!” Jonah shouts.

  He’s just a few feet away from Griffin when Dr. Z opens her eyes. She looks over at Jonah, and her cracked blue lips form a devilish smile, sending shivers down Jonah’s spine.

  “No!” Jonah yells. “Don’t!”

  Dr. Z lets go. Griffin falls, his eyes as wide as the moons orbiting above. Jonah shrugs off the kids from his back and dives to the edge and reaches out, but his hand merely grazes the lion shaved into the side of the boy’s head. The cadet plummets without a word or movement, a bird killed in flight. Jonah watches Griffin fall, fall, fall, until the boy is out of sight. There are no waterfalls directly below him. No pools to catch him. Only rocks.

  Jonah sits back on his heels in shock. His hand touches the rolled up sheaf on the ground, and he shoves it into his pocket without thinking. He stands on wobbly feet and stares at Dr. Z, amazed that she is this far gone, this far out of her mind.

  A pair of kids grab each of Jonah’s arms, pulling them behind his back. Dr. Z looks down at her hands as they clench into fists then reaches into her pocket and pulls out two long knives. Jonah recognizes them immediately as Vespa’s, dropped below the telescope. She must have fought for them. And won.

  Jonah backpedals toward the water, dragging the four kids with him. He tries to wrench his arms free, but their grips are too strong. Dr. Z follows closely with a knife pointed right at his chest. “We keep the fingers.”

  Jonah thinks about how Sean had him cornered in the canyon on Achilles, how the barrel of his rifle lit up just inches away from his chest. And then just before Sean pulled the trigger, a laser blasted through his arm. Vespa’s laser. Jonah scans the forest for Vespa and Paul, hoping they’ll burst through the trees with Mirker’s gun and find an open shot. But they’re not there. They’re not coming. This time, he has to save himself. He bends his knees and leans forward, bringing himself just inches from Dr. Z’s blade, but then he swings his arms forward at the same time he leans back, slamming the four kids holding onto his wrists together in front of him. The knife pierces one of the boy’s sides and goes all the way in. Blood instantly spills out of his mouth as he falls to his knees. The boy looks up at Dr. Z to say something, but Jonah doesn’t stick around to hear it. He whips his arms like ropes and escapes the other’s grips, and then he turns around and jumps into the water.

  “No!” Dr. Z shouts. “We keep the fingers!”

  The warm water rises to Jonah’s chest as he swiftly pushes his feet along the slimy pool floor in long strides. Dr. Z jumps in right after him, her one knife swinging back and forth over her head as she gives chase. The Module Eight kids jump in, too. The water rises over their heads, but they move quickly, slogging along the floor toward Jonah and the doctor.

  Jonah dives underwater, swimming as fast as he can. Almost immediately, though, a strong current shoves him sever
al feet off his path. He rises to the surface to catch his breath, but as soon as he does, another current hits him, pushing him over the edge and into the waterfall.

  He goes over headfirst, screaming, waving his arms, and it feels like an eternity before he crashes into the next pool. The falls above shove him deep underwater until he’s pinned to the floor. Jonah pulls himself along by his hands until he’s able to breach the surface. But as soon as he does, he’s swept up by another current and thrown over the edge.

  Every ten seconds, Jonah falls into a new pool only to be swept up and thrown over again. He loses his bearings, concentrating solely on getting a breath of air when it’s possible. A few times underwater, some last dregs of the verve in his blood surges through his body, giving him just enough energy to survive the next crashing falls and the next pool of currents that scrape him along the rocks. He bounces into a few warm, furry objects, opening his eyes to find the pig-faced creatures bobbing all around him.

  After several more falls, Jonah finds himself hugging two of the small creatures to his chest, using them to stay above water. He’s completely drained of energy, floating aimlessly in a bubbling, hot pool. Jonah lets go of one of the animals and watches it rotate lifelessly in the water, its small face smashed and oozing green blood. With his trembling free arm, Jonah swims to the side of the pool and hoists himself onto a rock and coughs and coughs and coughs. He lets go of the other animal, and it quickly jumps back in the water and splashes around. Jonah flips onto his back and squints upward. All he can see are hundreds of waterfalls spilling down the side of the cliff. No Dr. Z. No Module Eight kids. No Vespa or Paul or Brooklyn. A wave of panic suddenly hits him as he thinks about Griffin falling to his death. The boy saved Jonah’s life up there on the ledge. And for that, Jonah will be forever grateful.

  Jonah pulls himself out of the water and hugs his legs to his heaving chest. He looks for a path back up the cliff, or a cave entrance behind the falls, but to his dismay, the only place to go is down; two more falls crash below him and empty into the river running through the valley. Birds circle the mouth of the river before, one by one, they dive into the water and never resurface. A slanted slab of rock borders the river’s left side, and on the right side, tall yellow grasses wave in the wind for a half mile.

  I can hide in the field, Jonah thinks, and come up with a plan there. Jonah takes a deep breath and then slowly reenters the hot pool. He raises his legs and lets the water push him toward the edge, then over he goes. He does the same thing in the next, hotter pool, going with the flow instead of fighting it.

  Jonah goes over the last waterfall, a twenty-foot drop, and enters the river feet first. He bobs in the current for a moment with his head above water, trying to catch his bearings while the birds circle above him. Several of them dive into the river just in front of his face and he finally gets a good look at them—they’re no bigger than his feet, shiny with short, waxy wings and the curly heads of sea horses. When the birds don’t resurface from their dive, Jonah panics and swims frantically downstream, worried they will attack him underwater at any second. Suddenly, an incredibly strong current pulls him downward as if anchors are tied to his ankles. Jonah swings his arms over his head, searching for anything to grab, but the pull is too strong, and he looks down just in time to see the long crack on the riverbed sucking everything down into it. His fingers scrape along the warm rocks as he is pulled through.

  Jonah finds himself plunging down another waterfall, a gigantic one that empties into a lake as big as several football fields. Jonah’s diving training from the academy kicks in at the very last moment, and he puts his hands over his head and straightens his leg just before hitting the surface. As soon as he enters the steaming lake, Jonah swims to the surface with an enormous gasp, but the air is musty and sulfurous.

  The light is faint, but there’s enough of it for Jonah to see the rocky edges of the lake. He swims with all his remaining energy, terrified that the water is swarming with the birds or other hungry creatures just below the surface, circling him, just waiting for the moment to strike. He pulls himself out of the water and collapses on his stomach. He feels the sheaf in his pocket digging into his outer thigh, relieved that it’s still there.

  Jonah sits up and watches the waterfall pound the lake, amazed he survived the fifty-foot drop. He sees the long crack in the ceiling he slipped through, and he also sees that the birds that dove into the river didn’t disappear; they are down here now, circling the middle of the falls in a massive flock before zooming off to the far end of this enormous, underground chamber. Some of the birds break from the flock, though, rocketing straight up into the dull yellow ceiling where they cry and wiggle and push through before disappearing completely. It takes Jonah a moment to realize that they are actually pushing into the long, yellow grasses of the field on the right side of the river above. He also realizes that the field of yellow grasses isn’t a field at all, but rather a thick canopy created by the long, spanning branches of the thousands of charcoal-colored trees growing all around him.

  Getting to his feet takes a full minute, but eventually Jonah makes his way to one of the trees and leans against it. Its trunk is soft and mushy, and at the touch of Jonah’s shoulder, the bark sheds to the ground in a watery mess.

  As more and more birds pass through the chamber overhead with a cacophony of cries, Jonah pulls his sheaf out of his pocket and takes a deep breath. Slowly, he unrolls the device in front of his face, studying it for cracks or broken edges, and then gives it a slight nod. Instantly, the sheaf curls inwards and expands, doubling its size to sixteen inches. The date and time float in front of his face in three dimensional figures: 19 OCT 2221, 0108 GMT.

  It’s been nine days since crashing on Achilles, nine days since he’s held this device in his hands. The numbers fade and disappear, instantly replaced with text scrolling at the bottom: “WELCOME BACK, JONAH. WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO SCAN YOU?”

  “No,” Jonah says, hanging his head. He doesn’t need to be analyzed right now, to know when the last time he slept was or how his brain is functioning. He doesn’t need to know if he has a cold or abnormal blood pressure. He doesn’t need to know if he’s in any more trouble than he already is. And most of all, he doesn’t need to know right now, at this moment, if his eye disease is back.

  Jonah quickly checks the battery and sees that Griffin must have charged it at some point because there’s fifty-one percent left. What a relief. And then, without waiting another second, Jonah drags a tiny icon from the desktop to the center of the screen and nods again. The icon expands into a photograph, and then there is his father smiling at the camera, looking much different than he did in Jonah’s twisted, verve-induced vision just an hour ago. In the photo, he leans over Jonah’s exhausted mother in her hospital bed. Both of their eyes look so bright and white and happy. His mother holds baby Jonah to her chest. They all look so fresh, yet so tired. They all look ready to start their new life together as a family.

  Tears fill Jonah’s eyes, blurring his vision. He misses his parents so much. He’s never even spoken a word to them, but he misses them incredibly. Jonah pulls the sheaf up to his face and hugs it there. The warmth of the device feels good. Knowing his mother and father are touching him, in some way, feels even better.

  “I love you,” he whispers, pulling the sheaf back. He stares at the photo for another few seconds before removing it from the screen. Five percentage points have already disappeared from the battery. At this rate, he’ll eat up all the power in ten minutes. Knowing its light will come in handy soon, Jonah rolls the sheaf back up and shoves it into his pocket. He sits down and stares at the birds swirling overhead as they decide to either further explore the cavern or return through the canopy.

  That’s it, Jonah thinks. I can get out of here by climbing through the leaves. He gets to his feet and looks up at the charcoal-black trees that loom over him. He won’t be able to wrap his arms around them; their trunks are thicker than
most of the yurts back at the village. And because their bark is so mushy and slides right off, he can’t just scale them. He’s going to have to find another way up to the canopy, or simply another path out.

  The humidity sticks to Jonah with every step as he walks back and forth along the embankment of the underground lake. To his left, down a slight decline, hundreds of crystal clusters reflect sunlight into the space, sending thousands of rainbows in every direction. A tall rock wall stands beyond the crystals with water streaming down it. Jonah sees it’s impossible to climb, and so he runs back the other way, noticing for the first time that a few of the trees along the lake have gashes of their trunks missing, as if some animal tried to scale them for a few seconds and then slid back down to the ground. Whatever tried to climb these trees is large, Jonah thinks. Almost as large as he is. And it must still be in here.

  A noise in the water causes Jonah to spin on his heels, and he watches in awe as a jet-black animal with a wide, pebbled head breaches the surface of the lake. It groans and flips onto its back, showing off its long belly covered in what look to be a dozen flower buds that open up to bright red and pink blossoms. The beast is as long as a great white shark or a canoe, and it floats in a quiet circle for a few seconds until several more of the beasts rise out of the water and flip over to reveal their flower-covered stomachs, too. The animals hold onto each other with alligator-like arms, and soon it looks as if there’s a small island of beautiful flowers just floating in the lake. In less than ten seconds, a small flock of birds from the waterfall circle the ersatz island before landing to inspect the flowers. In unison, the beasts’ belly flowers snap shut and capture the birds; more than twenty of them shriek to be let go, flapping their wings, pecking with their short beaks. But the flowers hold tight, and slowly the beasts’ heads bend toward their bellies and out come long white tongues that wrap themselves around one bird at a time, pulling them into their huge mouths. In a matter of minutes, the birds have all been eaten and the beasts have flipped back over and disappeared under the surface. Jonah shudders to think that he was just in that lake with those things. What else is in there?