“I stopped recording five minutes ago,” SABRINA said. “Weird glitch or something. Whoops. Oh, here we are. Back online. So strange when that happens.”
Three minutes, nine seconds.
Two minutes, forty-one seconds.
One minute, fifty-eight seconds.
Five seconds.
Four.
Three.
Two.
One.
The portal blinked into existence, silent and vast. Jillian expected more noise, more drama, more something—but no. It wasn’t there, and then it just was, glowing gently against the dark green evening sky.
“Home again, home again,” SABRINA sang. “Decontamination protocol, here we come.”
Carrying everything between them, they stepped toward the portal together.
One day, nine hours, fourteen minutes later.
The first thing Jillian noticed about her parents’ hospital room was that it smelled like flowers. As the door slid shut behind her and Aunt Alex, the source of the smell became clear. Over by the window was the biggest bouquet of daylilies Jillian had ever seen, all the colors of sunrise and sunset and flame.
“Weirdest thing,” Jillian’s mom said. “Never gotten flowers from a dead person before.”
Jillian blinked, thinking she must have heard this wrong. “Huh?”
“Check out the card,” her dad told her.
Jillian crossed the room to the window and plucked the card from the bouquet.
Welcome back to Earth
from another who’s been away.
—Meredith
“That’s from the woman you met out there?” Aunt Alex asked, reading over Jillian’s shoulder. “That missing surveyor from a few years ago?”
“I can’t believe you found her,” Jillian’s dad said. “She’s a legend. She pretty much single-handedly invented SABRINA.”
“It’s more like she found me,” Jillian replied. “Well, she had some help.”
Jillian’s mom shifted uncomfortably, and Aunt Alex dashed over to help her with her pillows. “We watched some of the footage from the expedition,” she told Jillian as Aunt Alex poured her some water, “but there are some gaps in it where SABRINA’s recording went wonky, and anyway, we’re both dying to hear your side of it. You must have had one heck of a week.”
A week, Jillian thought. No matter how often she reminded herself, it still came as a shock. She couldn’t tell whether it felt like forever ago she’d gone through the portal to 80 UMa c, or just yesterday. “Yeah,” she said at last, “I guess I did.”
“We’re really sorry,” her dad said. “We’d hoped it would be an adventure, but we had no idea it would be quite so much of one. We’d planned more along the lines of: collect some alien plants, show off our cool tech, have space picnics, sleep under alien stars. Like those camping trips we never get to take you on. Weren’t really figuring on”—he gestured widely at the hospital room, then winced and lowered his arms again—“this.”
“You saved our lives,” her mom added. “I know you know that, but it bears repeating. You always think as a parent, it’s your job to protect your kid, but you literally saved both our lives and then kept them saved. Again and again and again. I just keep rewatching some parts of SABRINA’s footage, but I’m still not over it. It’s unbelievable what you did. Really unbelievable.”
Jillian felt a smile quirk up one side of her mouth. “Well,” she said, “I had some help too.”
“I think next year,” her dad said, “when it comes time for Take Your Kid to Work Day, we all just call in sick and go to the movies. Sound good?”
“Works for me,” Jillian’s mom said.
“I second that,” said Aunt Alex.
Jillian’s dad must have noticed her silence. “Jillian?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Will there be parasites next year?”
“Now that we know how to have SABRINA check for them,” her mom said, “we wouldn’t go if there were. We’d go someplace we absolutely knew was safe, or they’d have to send a different team. We can’t put ourselves both at risk like that again. It was a bad call.” She paused, wrinkling her brow at Jillian. “Why?”
“We can go to the movies anytime. But we still haven’t had a camping trip in space.”
They said their goodbyes, and then Jillian and Aunt Alex left so that Jillian’s parents could rest.
“The doctors said they should be discharged in about a week,” Aunt Alex said as they walked up to the hospital parking lot to find her car. “Guess it’s the usual stay at my place after all.” She gave Jillian’s shoulder a playful bump. “But that gives you loads of time to tell me all about your big space adventure. I mean, if that’s okay. I don’t want to make you talk about things you’d rather forget, you know?”
“Nah,” Jillian said, “it’s cool. You want me to start from the planet? Or the lab?”
“Oh, the lab for sure,” Aunt Alex said. “I’ve never even seen inside. Let’s pick up a pizza on the way back, and then we’ll have all afternoon to catch up on . . .”
Jillian glanced over. “Something wrong?”
“Oh,” Aunt Alex said. “No. I just noticed your pin. I like it. Is it new?”
Jillian reached up to the collar of her jacket and brushed the pin. It was a tiny octopus, glowing blue-white like a distant star. It was intricately detailed, right down to the suckers, clinging to Jillian’s jacket with six arms while the other two hung loosely, moving slightly in what was almost definitely the breeze.
“Thanks,” Jillian said. “Yeah, I just got it, actually. It was a welcome-home present. From a friend.”
AFTERWORD
I usually write books for adults and teens, but my mom always told me I should try writing a book for kids. It took me a long time to do it. I thought it was a good idea but had no clue what to write about. Eventually I realized I had a lot of loose bits of stories that didn’t belong to any books yet. I wanted to write . . . something . . . with mind-control parasites, and . . . something . . . with an artificially intelligent shape-shifting nanobot swarm. And . . . something else . . . that involved a survival story, and . . . maybe something . . . in space.
The way I always write books goes like: come up with a bunch of loose ideas, then glue them together and see what happens. The story itself usually comes about organically, out of the motivations and actions (and occasional very bad ideas) of the characters, once I get to know them in my head. But the loose bits of stuff are always the framework, such as they are.
Once I had all this stuff together(ish), I asked my son Julian if he wanted me to put him in a book. He said yes, so my next question was: is it okay if I make the character based on him a girl? There are so many science fiction adventure stories with boy protagonists, and very, very few starring girls. He was totally on board with that, so I had him pick out a name that sounded a bit like his. He picked “Jillian.”
There’s a lot of my son in this book. He loves survival stories—Hatchet by Gary Paulsen is the classic, so if you like survival stories and you haven’t read that one, check it out!—and he loves science and camping, and adventures. He also has anxiety, which sometimes gets in the way of his love of these things.
Jillian has anxiety, just like him. I’ve been frustrated for a long time by how books and movies usually show anxiety in kids as analogous to shyness, where in reality anxiety can look very, very different. The most socially outgoing kid in the world can still have debilitating anxiety. Anxiety in kids can look like:
extreme grumpiness
extreme quiet
overthinking! absolutely! everything! out loud!!
fidgetiness (my kid will literally rip hangnails back to the cuticle)
mixed messages (I love this/I hate this)
shutting down/zoning out/lack of interest
sudden fixating interest
sudden gregariousness
asking the same question eleventy billion times
All of this is totally normal with anxiety! But without that representation in books and movies, and with the insistence of portraying anxiety as shyness, full stop, it was actually really difficult to figure out those behaviors in my son. He worked with some therapists who diagnosed him with a generalized anxiety disorder, and reading up on it made a lot of stuff make a lot of sense. I decided to be as patient as humanly possible with the mood swings and the zoning out and the overthinking narrative and the million, billion questions, and as he got older, he learned some coping mechanisms to help him get through anxiety episodes. He’s come a really long way, and I’m super proud of him. But I have anxiety too, and I always have, so I realize he’s in it for the long haul, just like Jillian and me. And I don’t view it as something “wrong with him” to be “cured.” All our brains are wired a little differently. It’s what makes us unique.
Still, I felt it was important to write a book that represented a kid with anxiety in the way that I had seen it firsthand, and for her to realize her own strength as the story progressed. At the time of writing, Julian was eleven (like Jillian!) and struggling a lot with second-guessing his own abilities and relying on people to figure things out for him, so I wanted my main character to be put in a position where there were no other people to figure things out for her, and she would get stronger and stronger as she realized what she was capable of.
When I was a kid, and I was overthinking literally everything out loud at my mom, she used to tell me to pause and think about—really think about! In detail!—the absolute worst thing that could come of whatever it was I was so fixated on. When I was learning to swim, for instance, she’d say: Okay, what’s the absolute worst thing that could happen? And I’d say: Well, I’ll drown, obviously. And I’d start thinking about exactly what that would feel like, and how scary it would be, and my whole mind would start spiraling. And she’d say: Well, maybe someday (no point in sugar-coating things for anxiety kids. THEY KNOW), but not today, you won’t, because I’m right here! Do you think I’d let you drown? And then my logical brain would have to kick in—anxiety kids are GREAT at logic! Remember the overthinking?—and I’d realize, Well, no, of course my mom won’t let me drown in three feet of water in a public pool with a lifeguard sitting right there. Anyway, that’s ridiculous. And that slapped my anxiety brain down a few notches for a few hours, and I learned how to swim. And by learning to swim, the chances of my ever drowning dropped dramatically!
Sometimes the absolute worst thing is honestly pretty bad. The world can be scary. But if you have anxiety—like Jillian, and Julian, and me—then you probably already know that. What I’m here to tell you is that no matter how loud and persistent and imaginative your what-if brain is, it’s usually wrong.
One last thing: I probably couldn’t have written this book, or any book, if I didn’t have anxiety. The same what-if brain that loooves to come up with worst-case scenarios to scare you with? It’s the same thing you do when you’re trying to put your book characters in tricky situations that they have to figure out how to solve. My anxiety has messed with me my whole life, so I figured out how to make it work for me. Kind of like a superpower you have to learn how to control.
Lastly, and maybe most importantly? I read somewhere that almost five million kids in the United States have anxiety that’s been diagnosed by a doctor, and probably more than that many who have undiagnosed anxiety. And that’s in only one country! So the thing to remember is, anxiety can be terrifying, and frustrating, and really, really, really hard to deal with—but you’re not in this alone. If you think you have anxiety, talk to a parent or a teacher, and you can figure out how to fight it—and maybe how to make it work for you—together.
acknowledgements
Thanks to my mom, who taught me to read, and my dad, who got me reading science fiction. Also to the rest of my family and all my friends for their support over the years. And to my weirdo cat, who isn’t (probably) going to read this, but there’s a lot of her in SABRINA, so I didn’t want to leave her out. And speaking of SABRINA, its name comes from a brainstorming session with Dan Stace, who kept throwing cool adjectives at me, and then I sat and stared at a wall for three hours until I figured out which ones I wanted to keep, which ones I wanted to add, and how best to put them in order. Teamwork! And of course to Kate McKean, best agent ever. I had the general idea for this story a while before I thought of a good reason why Jillian would be going to space with her parents in the first place, so I asked Kate and it took her about two seconds to come back with “It’s Take Your Kid to Work Day!” Problem solved. Like I said. Best agent ever.
Lastly, thanks to you for reading! I hope you enjoyed Jillian’s and SABRINA’s space adventure as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact me at www.nicolekornherstace.com. I’d love to hear from you!
Nicole Kornher-Stace is the author of the Norton Award finalist Archivist Wasp and its sequel, Latchkey. Her short fiction has appeared in Uncanny, Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, and many anthologies. Her latest novel, Firebreak, is an adult SF thriller forthcoming from Saga in 2021. She lives in New Paltz, NY with her family. She can be found online on Twitter @wirewalking.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Afterword
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Jillian vs Parasite Planet Page 22