by Greg Boose
He jogs along the water’s edge, crushing bugs that screech and release a foul odor under foot, and ducks under a pack of jumping orange discs with glowing eyes. After ten minutes, Jonah gets to the end of the space and sees it’s just like the opposite side: a steep wall of wet stone. He has no other option but to see what’s beyond the trees.
What little light there is dims as Jonah takes his first steps amongst the mushy, black trunks. The ground is almost as soft as the bark of the trees, and he has to march his feet high and keep moving unless he wants to get stuck in place. His shoulder brushes against a thick, spiny stalk of a large plant, and at the touch, the stalk shrinks and shrivels to the ground, no taller than a couple inches. In fact, everything he touches in the forest immediately alters its state: stalks shrink, leaves curl inwards, thick yellow vines drop to the ground and turn to ash, all mixing with the mucky ground that continues to suck on Jonah’s shoes. It’s as if he’s a wizard controlling the area around him, creating a path with a wave of his hand.
The smells are overwhelming, and the farther he pushes into the forest, the thicker the air gets. It isn’t five minutes before he finds the back wall of the space. His hopes of getting out shrink like the plants he touches. He takes a deep breath and turns right, moving quickly, his fingertips trailing along the wall’s slick surface. He gets to a small clearing covered in short yellow grass, much like the leaves creating the canopy above. Is there another level below this level? If he steps into the clearing, will he fall right through?
He carefully sidesteps the grass, pressing his back into an enormous soggy tree trunk, soaking his clothes. He rounds the tree, marching his feet in and out of the muck, but when he gets to the other side, his feet stop moving. There, half covered in leaves and mud, is a human skeleton.
• • •
Jonah doesn’t know if it’s one of the rebel kids from a year ago—one of Tunick’s friends hooked on verve who maybe got lost and fell in the waterfalls—or if it’s a recent deserter from the village, but it wears a half-eaten blue jumpsuit. Above the body, Jonah sees long lines of the bark stripped away. All those marks on the trunks near the lake must be from the person trying to escape. As he watches a fat black bug with red legs crawl up the skeleton’s chest and into the nasal cavity, Jonah falls to his knees in despair. If this person—perhaps a highly trained cadet or experienced soldier—couldn’t get out of here, how is he supposed to?
Jonah realizes he’s sinking into the ground and marches his feet out of the muck. He takes a deep breath, grabs ahold of the torn collar and pulls the body through the forest until reaching the edge of the lake. There, he lets go and falls to his hands and knees, his chest heaving in grief. The only thing that brings his breathing back to almost normal is feeling his sheaf in his pocket. He sits back and pulls the device out, brings up his family photo, and then stares into his dad’s eyes until two more battery percentages disappear. And then he turns back to the skeleton and roots through its pockets with shaky hands.
Soon, Jonah finds himself holding a key ring, a small blue handgun that simply sparks instead of firing, and a rolled up mini sheaf that doesn’t turn on. He shoves them all into his pockets and stands, only to pace back and forth next to the body for several minutes. Light dwindles in the cavern, yet it’s somehow getting warmer and even more humid. The birds drop into the cavern at an alarming pace now, flocking together in swirling tornados, fighting, screaming, darting into the darkness. A large group of the creatures with the fake flowers on their bellies float below in the water, feasting on the birds by the dozens.
Jonah looks down at the skeleton, apologizing for dragging it out into the open like this, near so much noise and carnage, and that’s when he notices the thick rectangular shape in a pocket on its right shoulder. He unbuttons the flap of the pocket and pulls out a small pad of waterproof paper. It’s covered with scribbling and diagrams and lists, and most of it is crossed out or annotated with frantic notes in both Spanish and English. He closes the pad and turns it over, and that’s when he reads the name “Cpt. Julia Tejas” on the back cover. He stands in disbelief; it’s the original leader of the Athens colony. Mirker chased her away when he found her putting explosives around the village. And this is where she ended up?
Screams from the birds grow louder, completely filling the cavern, and Jonah looks up to see the flock has expanded into a thick black cloud hovering just over the surface of the lake. The noise is unbearable, and Jonah says a fleeting goodbye to Captain Tejas as he runs toward the clusters of crystals with his hands over his ears. He turns to look back only to catch the birds swarm Captain Tejas’s body and completely cover it up. To his horror, they lift her off the ground and slowly fly her up into the canopy. The birds push her into the leaves where she sticks, her left arm dangling below her like a cutoff rescue rope. A second later, the canopy glows with long electrical creatures racing to the captain’s body. They light the woman up like a Christmas tree, and a few seconds later, the snakes or insects or whatever they are, wrap her up and pulse as one. The cavern brightens and brightens until a flash of light blasts from the woman’s body, sending Jonah running down the hill toward the crystals for cover.
He dives into the clusters, worried the birds are following him, worried they’re going to sweep him up and feed him to whatever consumed the captain. But he’s all alone, and the ground beneath him is dry and sandy and cool to the touch, unlike anything else in the cavern. All around him, the crystals emit a low hum, radiating the final rainbow shards of sunlight shining through the opaque rocks above. Some of the crystals are as thick as the trees on the other side of the hill, while others are the size of baseball bats, and some smaller formations look like patches of grass just breaking from their seeds. Jonah slowly sets his back against a large crystal and is surprised by how cool it is; it’s a nice relief from the sweltering cavern darkening around him. He starts to flip through the small notepad.
Captain Tejas’s handwriting is legible and coherent on the first dozen pages, mapping out the village, writing about plants and animals, drawing their pictures with great detail. On one page, there’s a sketch of a small bear-like animal with a see-through belly with what looks like another bear inside. “Kangaroo Grizzly?” is written next to it with a smiling face. He flips through more and more drawings and field notes, all the while wondering why she didn’t just draw them on her sheaf so it could be shared with everyone in the village and back on Earth.
Halfway through the pad, though, Jonah sees why she didn’t want to share her notes. Mirker’s name starts popping up. Often. Captain Tejas started to watch Mirker closely, writing on a crinkled piece, “Mirker getting aggressive with others. Spent several minutes berating the purple team. Pushed Lt. Freeman to the ground. Time for him to go. But mutiny?”
Jonah thinks back to his first conversation with Mirker while he lay in the hospital bed, how he said she went crazy right after the kids left with the ship, but these notes are months before that happened.
He flips farther into the notepad until reading, in all capital letters: “MIRKER PLANNING ON GOING TO ZION. MUST STOP HIM BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY. DON’T TRUST KIP ANYMORE.”
Mirker wanted to leave for Zion? The planet Jonah saw through the telescope? To Jonah, it seemed like Mirker wanted nothing more than to be the leader here on Thetis. To become its dictator. He wants to leave? Does he want to take others with him, or will they all just stay here and breathe Thetis’s poisonous air? And how can she not trust Kip anymore when she never even got a chance to meet him? Kip was on the Mayflower 2. Was she in communication with him while he was on the ship?
The last third of the notepad is barely legible, covered in doodles and words scratched out and a few thoughts that go nowhere like: “Achilles moon dark like” and “Food must be tasted for food” and “New gloves that hurt.” And then, on the second to last page, are several of the Cs with the three circles inside. They’re drawn perfectly with sharp edges and the righ
t proportions. Every time. And then under one of the symbols, written so small that Jonah has to squint and hold the page up against the nearest crystal, he reads: “Jonah Lincoln.”
Jonah stares at his name, and then his eyes crawl over the captain’s symbols. He flips the page over, looking for more, looking for anything. And then, Jonah sees an indentation in the paper where the ink stopped working. It’s a short arrow pointing to Jonah’s name, and at its beginning, it says, “Sacrifice.”
Jonah shoots to his feet and shoves the pad into his pocket with trembling fingers. Mirker and Tejas had planned to sacrifice him? Did the alien ghosts tell her to do that? But in his vision, the aliens—or whatever he wanted to call them—need him to get to Zion. They didn’t seem to want him sacrificed. They appear to want him alive.
There’s a noise on the other side of the hill. Jonah ducks behind a large cluster of crystals, ready to run from whatever creature is about to appear with a dozen birds in its mouth, but to his surprise it’s not one of the beasts from the lake looking for dessert. He sees the top of someone’s head. Seconds later, he sees it’s the tall Module Eight boy with the long, uneven hair. He’s hunched over, no doubt ruined by Jonah’s fists. Next to him walks the small girl with the space between her teeth. They both went over the waterfalls before him. Have they been down here this whole time? They stand at the top of the hill motionless, their eyes and mouths closed. Jonah holds his breath and ducks down even farther, waiting for them to charge toward him screaming. But instead, they slowly reach for each other’s hands and then march down toward the crystals together.
He thinks he can get the drop on them, taking at least one of them down. But with what? The commander’s gun is useless. But they don’t know that. Jonah slips the gun into his hand and continues to move between the crystals, his reflection multiplying a hundredfold. But as he’s backing through a grouping, he steps right in the middle of a low-lying cluster, breaking several of the crystals off at the base. The boy and girl turn their heads and open their milky eyes.
They release hands and the girl steps forward. “Enter through the exit. Exit through the entrance.”
Jonah whips his head up at the water falling from the crack above. Is that what she means? To go back through the crack in the riverbed that brought him down here?
He aims the gun at her face. “What do you want from me? What the fuck do you want me to do? I’ve done everything they’ve asked me to.”
The boy lurches forward with his cracked sternum and bloody face. “It’s my turn now. You will now follow me.”
Jonah aims the gun at him. Then her. Then him. Neither flinch. The boy straightens his back with a series of disgusting cracks coming from his chest, raises his arms to his sides and stretches them out wide to touch a cluster of crystals on either side of him; his wingspan is enormous. The only other person he knows with that kind of wingspan is…himself. For the first time, Jonah notices just how similar their bodies are. Jonah has maybe a couple of inches on him, but other than that, their builds are nearly identical.
“Have your turn, I don’t care,” Jonah says as he begins to backpedal up the hill. “Go ahead and do what everyone wanted me to do. Be their God or whatever. Be sacrificed. Do what the voices say to do. Enter through the exit. Look for door four. Kill the red one. Let them keep your fingers. Do whatever you want because I’m just…I’m just a kid. I’m just a kid, and I just wanted to live here and not be a part of…anything like this.”
The boy drops his arms and moves slowly after Jonah, stopping only to bend down and grab two broken crystals from the ground. They’re the size of baseball bats and he clenches them hard in his fists. “They will only choose me if you die. So, you have to die.”
Jonah reaches the peak of the hill and looks over the steaming lake barely visible in the waning light, trying to decide if he should jump in or not. When he turns back, the boy is just dozen feet away from him, the tips of the crystals dragging through the soft ground creating crooked lines in his wake.
Jonah aims the gun at the boy’s broken chest and says, “This is your last chance. Leave me alone.”
“You have to die.”
The boy raises both crystal cudgels high above his head, their tips dripping black muck, and he strikes them down at Jonah at the same time. Jonah blocks one with his right wrist, but the other strikes him in the side of the neck, sending him to his knees. The boy whips a crystal down at his forehead, but Jonah is able to catch it inches from his temple. The moment his hand wraps around it, Jonah’s thoughts and fears and anger disappear, replaced by flashing images of this boy’s life: playing baseball in the rain with his sister; blowing out candles on a cake, surrounded by a dozen young faces; a woman pulling back the covers to his bed and shouting for him to get to school; kissing a girl behind a dilapidated house; hugging an older couple who hand him an envelope before walking into a white building; sitting in the dining module on the Mayflower 2 next to a fast-talking Sean Meebs; and then a vision of the boy’s hand reach for a large black rock, touching it right next to a dozen other hands. The images quickly disappear, and Jonah looks up to see the boy struggling to pull the crystal from Jonah’s grip. The cadet’s other hand forms a shaking fist and he rockets it up into the boy’s throat. A distinct crack echoes around them, and the boy falls limply to his knees, his milky eyes rolling back into his skull, and then he tips forward, his face slamming into the wet muck.
The boy slides headfirst toward the lake, stopping just inches from the water, and when Jonah turns around, the girl with the space between her teeth stands right next to him.
“You found what you needed down here,” she says. “Now you must exit through the entrance.”
“What did I find?” he asks.
“What you needed.”
Jonah runs his hands over his pockets, feeling each item for a second before moving to the next one. Is she talking about the gun? The ring of keys? Or is she talking about the small notebook with symbols and gibberish and his name on it? He also feels his sheaf, and for a second he thinks about showing her everything on it, photos from the ship, scenes from Earth, anything to break this spell she’s been under for a week.
The girl points up at the crack in the ceiling where the water falls and the birds descend. “Go.”
Jonah doesn’t wait to hear anything else; he runs down the embankment, stopping at the bottom to check on the boy who still lies motionless with his face inches from the water. Carefully, he reaches for the boy’s wrist and checks for a pulse. He’s relieved to find a faint heartbeat. He flips the boy on his side so he can breathe, and then with the toes of his boots, Jonah kicks the two crystals out of the boy’s hands. Jonah picks them up and wheels around, still unsure how he’s going to get into the canopy and beyond. He sees the long marks Captain Tejas left on the tree trunks as she tried to climb them. Perhaps she was led into this cavern with a purpose, too, he thinks. He hopes she wasn’t tricked into falling down here just to pass along a ring of keys or notebook to a future Jonah. They could have made that exchange over a friendly lunch in the village.
Jonah walks over to a huge tree and touches its slimy bark, which immediately falls to the ground in a pile of mush. Thinking back to how he was able to scale the fence of the village with Vespa’s knives, Jonah raises one of the crystals above his head and plunges it into the exposed wood. It sticks solid. Encouraged, he jumps and plunges the other crystal into the trunk, and it sticks, too. He tests his weight, hanging by his hands, and then he yanks out the first crystal, pulls himself up by the other, and plunges it back in, higher up. This might work, he thinks, and within thirty seconds, Jonah is a third of the way up the tree. The slimy bark covers his jumpsuit, weighing him down, dripping off his boots, but he keeps going.
The birds notice his ascension and swoop over his head, shrieking and spitting at him. He swings the crystals at them as he moves upwards, but they aren’t scared off. In fact, more flock to him with every swin
g, and when he’s over halfway up the trunk and can actually start to see tiny slivers of the sunset through the yellow leaves above, the birds begin to slam themselves into his sides. One of the crystals cracks and then shatters in his palm, and for a second Jonah hangs from just one hand. The birds continue to pelt him, pushing him sideways on the tree, and he finally can’t hold on any longer. He falls, only to wrap his arms around the trunk where he slides straight down, pulling sheets of bark with him. He thinks about Captain Tejas and her broken neck and how he’s about to meet a similar fate, but he lands in a pile of the stripped-off bark and rolls right onto his knees. Thirty yards above his head, the birds circle rapidly, churning into a thick tornado.
Jonah covers his head and runs for the hill. The girl no longer stands there, but the tall boy still lies unconscious near the water. Jonah leaps over his body just as the tornado of birds slam against his back, and he falls right next to the boy’s side. Frantic, Jonah digs into the soft ground and throws handfuls of muck at the birds, and soon he begins to sink into the hole he’s creating. The tall boy’s body eventually rolls over the hole’s edge and falls right on top of Jonah, blocking him from the onslaught. Jonah catches his breath, his head swimming with options. Should he dive into the lake and face whatever is under the water instead? Should he run back up the hill and find the girl and shake her until she tells him what to do? Should he break off new crystals and start his tree climb all over again? Just as he decides on looking for the girl and grabbing some crystals at the same time, Jonah feels the weight of the boy disappear. He uncovers his head to see the birds lifting the boy off the ground, just as they did with Captain Tejas’s body. Jonah gets to his feet and jumps, grabbing ahold of the boy’s ankle. The birds struggle at first to keep rising, but they recover and keep going, bringing Jonah with them. As he rises over the steaming lake, Jonah looks for the girl, but she’s nowhere to be found. It isn’t until they are just about to reach the canopy when Jonah locates her: she’s rotating slowly, face down in the water, until a giant pink bubble rising to the surface opens up, sucking her inside. The bubble glows bright and then it opens back up with a sickening noise, releasing the girl’s bones and clothes.