cloaked in mystery and under an oppressive rule - Thetis (The Deep Sky Saga #2) by Greg Boose

Surrounded by terrifying new landscapes and creatures, Jonah and his friends fight to save the colony and restore order to the planet.

Description:

Published: October 9th, 2018

Lost meets The 100 in this action-packed YA science fiction series.

Blind and broken, orphaned teenager Jonah Lincoln reluctantly boards a rescue ship bound for the planet Thetis, but not before it picks up a few more surprising and dangerous survivors from the massacre on the moon Achilles. 

After regaining his sight, Jonah sees the gated colony on Thetis is just as he feared–cloaked in mystery and under an oppressive rule with no one to trust–and that outside the walls, it’s even worse. 

Surrounded by terrifying new landscapes and creatures, Jonah and his friends fight to save the colony and restore order to the planet.

EXCERPT

The gray grass under Jonah’s boots pops and shatters with every step. He follows the adults into the trees, stepping where they step, bracing his hands where theirs just were. It’s hot and sticky, and his gray jumpsuit clings to his skin like wet tissues.

“We found the yellow jacket right over there,” the woman says, pointing to the bottom of a large, twisted tree. “Showed up in our headlights while we’re headed back to camp.”

Jonah stares at the tree and the blood on its trunk, wondering why they didn’t leave the jacket where it was for evidence, or immediately investigate once they found it. He also wonders whose blood it is. Did Paul wake up and attack Dr. Z, ripping her jacket off and then chasing her into the forest? Or did Dr. Z carve up Paul’s skin with some new message to warn the others?

He stumbles past everyone, making his own path, and soon finds himself standing on the edge of a cliff. Half a mile below, thousands of geysers erupt in the valley, creating an enormous cloud of green mist that hovers overhead, blocking out the sun. The cliff Jonah stands on goes on for miles and miles, almost completely circling the valley. Way off on his right, a series of waterfalls descend the cliff into a giant pool that narrows and funnels into a twisting stream, cutting right through the geysers on the valley floor.

“You see those little black dots in all those waterfalls?” the woman asks as she comes up behind him.

Jonah thinks he might see some black specks in the water when he squints but can’t be sure.

The woman holds her sheaf out in front of Jonah’s face and turns on the camera. She raises her chin, triggering the zoom function, and suddenly it’s as if they’re hovering right above a waterfall halfway up the cliff. On her screen, small horned animals with squashed, pig-like faces bob up and down in the water above one of the falls. There are hundreds of them, maybe thousands. And they go over the falls seemingly without worry, plummeting with their short arms held above their heads. The woman zooms in even closer on a couple of the animals, following them all the way down the cliff, down waterfall after waterfall, and when they finally reach the giant pool at the bottom, they go underwater and never resurface, disappearing without a trace. Her sheaf scans the pool’s surface and then follows the stream cutting through the valley. Not one of the animals floats through. Thousands keep coming down the falls, and then they’re gone.

“Are they…Dying? Are they killing themselves?” Jonah asks.

“Maybe,” the woman answers. “But we don’t know for sure because we can’t find any bodies. They just,” she snaps her fingers, “go away. Even with our drones, we can’t figure it out. Yet.”

Jonah watches for a few more seconds before his eyes are drawn to a splattering of blood near his feet. There’s more to his left, and he quickly starts to follow it down a ridge that hugs the cliff’s edge.

“Yo, Firstie,” Vespa says behind him. “Wait up.”

The man with the ponytail suddenly pushes past Vespa and then Jonah, descending the ridge in a jog with series of loud, hacking coughs, his head still nodding, his rifle bouncing on his back.

“He lives for this kind of stuff,” the woman says as she drops in line behind Vespa. The bald man takes up the rear, whistling and clicking his tongue as if this is just a walk in the park.

“Does he keep nodding because of the…What’s wrong?” Vespa asks.

“It’s from the wormhole,” the woman says. “He hasn’t been able to stop moving his head ever since we went through two years ago. Even does it in his sleep, from what I’ve heard.”

The ridge continues to descend and curve left, ending at a large, circular space dotted with cave entrances. As Jonah comes down the final steps of the ridge, he doesn’t know where to look: at the half-circle of black doorways punched into the stone, or at the small sculptures all around him; rocks of all sizes and shapes are stacked on top of each other, balancing and wobbling in the swirling wind that sweeps through the area.

“Who the hell made those?” Vespa asks.

A low groan comes from one of the caves. The man with the ponytail whips his gun off his back and looks through his scope, nodding and bobbing the barrel of the rifle from cave to cave until pointing at one on the left. “He’s in there.”

TOUR SCHEDULE

Goodreads ** Amazon ** iTunes ** Barnes&Noble ** Google ** Kobo

About the author:

The fourth of six kids, Greg Boose grew up on a large produce farm in northeast Ohio. He received his undergraduate degree from Miami University, and then later received his M.F.A. at Minnesota State University Moorhead where he focused on screenwriting and fiction. He lives in Santa Monica with his two young daughters.

Website ** Goodreads ** Twitter ** Instagram

Author's Giveaway

a Rafflecopter giveaway