by Greg Boose
The door suddenly slams open, its lock ripping out of the frame, and there stands Mirker with his right foot extended, dust billowing between him and Jonah.
“There you are, boy.”
Jonah’s eyes dart from the man entering the room to his sheaf near the doorframe and up to the space in the roof where he escaped before.
Mirker flexes his jaw. “I’m going to need you to come with me. There’s some activity that you need to be accountable for. And I want everyone to watch.”
Jonah pulls out the handgun and aims it at Mirker’s chest. “Back off. Now. Or, I swear I’ll blow your head off.”
The man chuckles and raises his huge hands. “You’re going to blow my head off? Where did you even get that gun? Because to me it looks…kind of broken.”
Jonah rubs the trigger with his sweaty index finger. Don’t let him know he’s right, Jonah thinks. Stay strong.
Mirker takes another step forward, his hands still up. “So, where did you find her? I know that’s the captain’s gun because of the markings on the barrel there. See those three scrapes going down the side of it? She put those on there after shooting three ribbers who flew into the village and attacked us during our first month here. Tejas showed a lot of muster that day. A lot of leadership. Took three of those fuckers down with a shot apiece. It was quite the spectacle. So, where is she? She dead? Hiding in some cave talking gibberish like that Everett boy when he showed up a couple days ago in the sphere we were building for you?”
“I killed her,” Jonah says as he takes a step back. “I shot her after she told me everything that you guys were up to. About the other planet, all the stuff you’re hiding from Earth. She told me what you guys were going to do with Zion. She told me you were going to sacrifice me. And that’s when I shot her with her own gun.”
Mirker keeps moving forward until he stands next to the telescope lens. “You don’t have the balls, kid. You found that gun. And maybe you found her dead somewhere, but this one is for sure: you’re no killer.”
“She wasn’t on your side, you know,” Jonah says. All of these lies come to him as he opens his mouth, no real plans developing in his head aside from biding his time. “She was communicating with the kids on Achilles the whole time. She told me she was talking to your sons. And if you want to know what they were planning together… Well, look into the telescope right now. Look into it and you’ll see exactly what I mean.”
Mirker squints at Jonah and cocks his head; it looks like Jonah has told him enough things close to the truth that Mirker seems to take him seriously. The man looks down at the moving telescope lens and then back at Jonah. “Promise not to shoot me with your broken gun when I take a look? And if you even think about coming at me, well, kid, I’ll put you down faster than you can say your dead mother’s name.”
That makes Jonah take a step closer and raise the gun to the man’s smiling mouth. If he can’t shoot it off, he’s willing to try to punch right through it.
“Hold that thought,” Mirker says. And then he quickly dips his face into the eyepiece. After just a second, the man presses his hands on either side of the eyepiece and pushes his face harder into the machine. “Holy shit. They’re coming back. Those little fuckers are coming back. My boys.”
Mirker stands up straight, and the look in his eyes is that of both rage and excitement. It’s possible he thinks his sons are alive and well and coming to see him, or it’s possible that when they arrive he knows the chaos they will bring. After all, the ship could be filled with a dozen kids high on verve, raving mad with superhuman strength. The man’s eyes shift to the monitors behind Jonah. Jonah twists his head to take a quick look at the screens, and there it is, the ship that once sat at the bottom of the cavern on Achilles—the prize that everyone was trying to win—enters Thetis’s atmosphere with streaks of blue fire speeding off its nose.
“They’ll be here in a few minutes,” Jonah whispers. He finds that he’s terrified at the news himself. There’s enough going on here already. Enough madness. Enough mystery. Enough people to defeat to bring order to the colony. He can only imagine what a verved-out Krev, the towering wolfish boy, will do once the ship’s doors open.
Mirker squints at the screens and grinds his teeth so hard that Jonah can hear the enamel crack. The man twists around and takes a step toward the door, but then turns back at once to snatch Jonah by the neck single-handedly. His grip is incredible; Jonah slams the butt of his gun down on the man’s wrist, but it only makes him squeeze harder. As he’s pulled through the door, Jonah whips his hands at his sheaf stuck to the charging station at the doorframe, but he can’t reach it in time. Mirker pulls him into the bright sunlight and tosses him forward with such strength that Jonah stumbles and falls face first into the ground. The cadet pushes himself up and tries to scramble away, but Mirker’s grip finds the back of his skull and squeezes.
“You try to run, I don’t care if you’re supposed to be sacrificed or whatever, I’ll kill you like a street dog, and we’ll all eat you for dinner.”
The pressure on the back of his head is debilitating; he feels like a basketball with the air being squeezed out. Jonah can’t focus his eyes anywhere, sees blurs of villagers’ feet jumping out of his way. He hears people shout at Mirker to stop, to stand down or face the consequences, and then Jonah hears Mirker laugh and tell them to follow him, that there’s something everyone needs to see.
Finally, Mirker tosses Jonah onto his stomach and slams a boot down onto his back, pinning him helplessly to the ground.
“Someone help me!” Jonah shouts. “Get him off of me!”
Ariel Abbasi’s mother in the blue and yellow headscarf pushes through the crowd, shouting, “Mirker, just stop! These are our children! These are our own!”
“Shut the fuck up about this kid!” Mirker barks. “You have bigger things to worry about. I was just in the observatory, tracking down this piece of shit here, and right there on the monitors and in the telescope, I saw our stolen ship coming this way. The kids are back. The same kids who almost took this colony down with their addiction and recklessness, they’ve just entered our atmosphere and they’re coming back right now. Who knows who they’ll kill this time.”
Jonah strains his head to look at the crowd around him. He looks for Vespa and Paul and Brooklyn, but they’re not there. That means they’ve escaped, or they’re already dead.
“Don’t believe me? Look up!” Mirker yells. “Look right there!”
There’s a resounding gasp from the crowd. One man says, “I can see it. Look.”
Ms. Abbasi raises her arms over head. “Ariel! She’s coming home!”
“She’s not coming home. It’s Armitage and the whole lot of them. So, I suggest you arm yourselves with whatever you can find, and hide,” Mirker says. “I’ll take care of this. And nobody touches my boys. Nobody touches Sean and Tunick. I’ll handle them.” He then points to several men in the crowd, including the man with the red cap and the bald man with the scar on his face Jonah met in the first rover exploration. “You guys are coming with me.”
The bald man practically bounces on his feet in excitement. “Good. Because I’ve got some unfinished business with a couple of those kids. That Lark girl better not be on that ship. Not after what she did to me.”
“She’s all yours,” Mirker says.
The man rubs the scar on his face and laughs.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The crowd scatters in every direction—some waving down the ship, hoping their children or friends have been rescued from Achilles, others disappearing in tents or running for the far corners of the village. Mirker rips Jonah up to his feet and then shoves his lips into Jonah’s ear and says, “You’re coming with me, too. Maybe we won’t have to sacrifice little Jonah Lincoln after all. But I still may need you for something special.”
Jonah stumbles forward just as the ship’s thrusters pierce the air. He twists around trying to locate it, and then there
it is—coming from beyond the southern mountains—a black speck with red lights blinking on its wings. The blinking speck turns into a small blinking triangle, and then the small triangle grows bigger and bigger as it swoops toward the ground, barreling right through the black smoke of the modules.
Jonah tries to run, but Mirker snatches him by the wrist and wrenches it behind his back. “Just wait, just wait.”
The ship comes right toward the village, its long silver nose shining in the sunlight. Jonah shields his eyes and remembers when he spotted the ship in the canyon back on Achilles. It was one of the last things he saw before he went blind. And then he and Vespa battled Tunick amongst the fire and spider carcasses until Vespa finally plunged a knife into Tunick’s side, killing him. How is Mirker going to react when the ship opens and they tell him his sons are officially dead? Then again, they may not even know.
Mirker grabs a rifle from one of his men and presses its scope up to his eye. The ship’s wings wobble as it comes closer and closer to the ground. At first, Jonah thinks it’s going to zip right by and land near the forest and they’ll have to chase it in the rovers, but it looks like the ship is headed right for them, aimed directly at the village.
“They fucking better pull up soon,” Mirker says.
But the ship keeps growing and growing in the sky until Jonah thinks he can see the windows in the front. It’s slowing down, but not fast enough. It’s supposed to hover and land standing straight up, but the pilot doesn’t seem to have that in mind. It’s going to try to land on its belly.
“Holy shit,” the bald man whispers. “They’re going to crash right into us.”
“Move!” Mirker shouts. He turns and runs, pulling Jonah toward the western fence. His men follow close behind, covering their heads as the ship screams straight toward the village. Its nose blasts right through the top of the northern fence, knocking the black logs down like toys. The ship sways and skims over a row of tents and the hospital building before banking to the left. The right wing clips the top of the Woesner Telescope, flinging the huge tube out of its building, sending it spinning end over end across the village. The ship’s nose finally hits the ground and grinds along, taking out dozens of yurts and two water wells.
The ship’s tail swings to the right, and the ship grinds to a stop just before hitting the southern fence. A huge cloud of dust sweeps through the village, the wake of the ship covering everything in dirt and smoke and noise. Jonah can’t even see the spacecraft for a few moments, but when the air finally settles, shadows dart out of its open tail.
“Go, go, go!” Mirker screams.
Jonah doesn’t need to be pulled along; he runs right with the men, pulling ahead of the bunch. He has no idea who he’s about to encounter—Hess, Christina, Aussie, Hopper—but he wants to get a look at the ship. He wants to see if it’s still usable after a crash like that.
He sprints around the vegetable garden, sticking his hand into the rows of corn stalks as he zips by. Mirker is right behind him, shouting his sons’ names, for everyone to hurry, to not shoot until he says they can shoot. They speed past the farm building and its pens empty of animals. And then there’s the ship, fifty yards long, dented and blinking and sputtering smoke from its thrusters. Thick dust fills the area as two slow-moving shadows descend the ramp’s tail, leaning on each other until they make it to the ground where they both fall to their hands and knees.
“Sean? That you, Sean?” Mirker yells as he sprints past Jonah. When he reaches them, the man slides on his knees and immediately pushes both figures over onto their backs to see their faces, and then runs up the ramp shouting for his sons.
Jonah reaches the two shadows lying on their back, squinting through the dust until seeing the withered bodies of Lark and Camilla, the two girls who found Brooklyn and Vespa on Achilles. The two girls who double-crossed him and left him for dead.
Camilla, the once stoic and muscular young woman with dark skin and a cloud of beautiful black hair, looks nearly green with sickness. Her arms are thin and bony, her face bloated and lined with deep purple veins. The girl’s cloud of hair is now half missing, patches of her raw scalp blanketed with dust. She’s barely breathing.
Next to her, Lark slowly moves her hand from her side until she finds Camilla’s leg, resting it there while she tries to catch her breath. She no longer has the thick band of purple running across her temple and over her eyes and nose like a superhero mask. The large silver circle still hangs around her neck on a rope, though, its greenish brown metal dull in the dust cloud. Her braid of long brown hair lies above her head on the ground like a dead snake.
“Who’s with you?” Jonah asks. “What are you doing here?”
It takes Lark a moment to recognize him, and when she does, her eyes widen and she lets out a short chuckle that turns into a hoarse cough. “Jonah Lincoln. We’re here…we’re here for you, Jonah.”
The rest of Mirker’s men run by and scramble up the ramp. Jonah hears them argue and scream, and then metal hits metal. Something falls and shatters. Someone fires a rifle and Jonah sees its blue beam in the ship’s window.
“You have to listen to Hopper. Find him,” Lark says as she reaches for Jonah’s hand. “We went back for you, but you were gone.”
“Hopper’s here? You went back for me?”
“I can’t believe we actually made it.” Lark smiles and then rolls onto her side and pulls herself up to Camilla. She rests her head on the girl’s chest and interlaces her fingers with her girlfriend’s.
Mirker’s voice bellows from inside the ship: “Where are my sons? Fucking tell me!”
Jonah jumps over Camilla’s body and puts his face inches from Lark’s. “Where’s Hopper? Hey? Lark?”
Lark doesn’t answer him; she lets out a huge sigh of relief and hugs Camilla tighter. Camilla’s head rolls on the ground toward Jonah, her eyelids fluttering before finding his face.
“You weren’t supposed to leave yet,” she says.
“Leave Achilles yet? Why?”
“We saw it, Jonah. We saw you, what you’re supposed to do. Now you have go to the pyramids on the other place. Or Earth dies…everything dies.”
Jonah falls back onto his heels. After taking the verve, in his visions inside the tip of the pyramid, Jonah saw a picture of Earth get cut in half and then explode. After a second, though, the picture moved in reverse, the pieces of the planet coming back together.
“What exactly did you see?” Jonah asks.
She gives him a weak smile and then closes her eyes, rolling her head back the other way and appears to fall asleep. Jonah places a hand on her bony shoulder to wake her up but immediately pulls it back; her skin is freezing to the touch. Behind him, Mirker’s voice continues to echo in the belly of the ship, demanding answers and barking orders. Jonah stands and can’t decide where to go next, to check out the ship himself or to run and find Vespa and the others or to hunt down Hopper, when he sees several small shadows run toward the farm building. He takes one step toward the ship, hears another round of rifle fire, and then runs for the building.
He reaches the door just after it clicks shut. He rips it open and charges inside and practically runs right into the end of a long wooden black table, one of dozens in a row spanning the entire length of the building. The tables are topped with monitors and medical equipment and dissected carcasses of alien creatures enclosed by containers. Dozens of doors line the left and right sides of the room, some with windows, others with bright yellow warnings scrawled across their wood. A door closes somewhere halfway down the building, but Jonah can’t tell which one. He races along the tables, knocking over a tall bottle of blue liquid containing a six-legged, owllike creature stripped of its feathers and beak. The glass shatters on the floor, and the owl creature immediately begins to move, scraping its sharp feet along the slippery concrete until it meets the wall and flips onto its back.
Jonah twists around to see a door far down on the left crack
open an inch and then close. He runs straight for it, peering in the window only to see the yellow capstones sprinting back and forth in their pen, their long arms dragging limply behind them as they search for rocks. Jonah is about to check the next door over when he sees a black shoe pull out of sight. The person must be right next to the door on the other side of the wall.
He knocks softly. Again. And then, “That you in there, Hopper? It’s me, Jonah. Camilla said I’m supposed to—”
The door opens quickly, and a hand grabs Jonah by the collar, pulling him inside. Jonah suddenly stands face-to-face with Jules Hopper, the hacker who betrayed him and his friends on Achilles and joined forces with Tunick. Days ago, Jonah would have attacked him on sight, but now he needs him for answers. The boy looks haggard, as if he’s been lost underground for a week with no food or sunlight. Dark bags hang under his eyes like half-moons and several layers of sweat cake his cheeks and wispy black mustache. He stands over a huddled and silent Michael, the demic with long brown hair who once was Hopper’s main target. The boy hugs his knees to his chest and rocks back and forth with his eyes focused on the floor in front of him. The sour smells wafting off of their skin make Jonah take a step back and cover his nose with his arm.
“Can’t believe we actually found you, ya freak,” Hopper whispers. “The man of the hour. We went back to the crash site looking for your ass, but apparently you were already here doing your thing. Hell of a hitchhiking move.”
Jonah doesn’t know what to say. He just stares at him in disbelief, and then looks down at the huddled demic at his feet and asks, “Hey, Michael? Are you okay? Did Hopper do anything to you? Did he hurt you? Where’s Aussie? Is Portis still alive?”
Michael doesn’t respond; he just keeps rocking back and forth until reaching out and setting a limp hand on Hopper’s pant leg.