Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

by Temi Oh

  ‘Wait!’ Eliot shouted. ‘Slow down!’ But Ara wasn’t listening; she gathered speed, ducking around glass display cases. Astrid followed her as she rushed around the base of a decommissioned space shuttle, almost toppling visitors. So strange, to see these members of the public. Uniformed schoolchildren, pregnant women pushing prams.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Astrid shouted, taking care not to slip on the linoleum.

  ‘Somewhere great!’ Ara shouted over her shoulder. Astrid followed past the museum’s gift shop, up spiralling flights of stairs, their laughter crashing off the marble walls.

  ‘Come back,’ Eliot said, just before he disappeared behind another tour group.

  Astrid chased Ara through a deserted fire exit and out into the blinding daylight. She didn’t realize that they’d escaped until they had.

  ‘This?’ she asked.

  Ara stopped running and leant on her knees to catch her breath. As Astrid’s vision cleared, she gazed around. Ara had led her to the children’s playground at the back of the building. The wooden benches were still wet from the morning’s rain, the ice cream stall shuttered, play-horses sunk into the AstroTurf, heads reared as if drowning.

  ‘This,’ said Ara, and pointed past the low wall of the playground and beyond the road to the wind-whipped river. She said it as if she was giving it to Astrid. ‘We have an hour. Let’s go for a walk. Let’s take what we can.’

  ‘But . . .’ Astrid hesitated. ‘What about Eliot?’

  ‘He’ll find us.’

  ‘We should probably stay indoors.’ Astrid glanced back through the fire door at the darkened stairwell.

  ‘Astrid, don’t you want to do everything you never did before? Or at least one thing?’

  Astrid’s arms were prickling with goosebumps.

  She wanted to go.

  She knew what she should do. She should go back into the building and wait for the other astronauts to arrive. She should rejoin her sister and Poppy and Eliot and plant her sapling . . .

  ‘Astrid?’

  . . . and yet, she had only one life. And she was tormented by how lovely the sky was, with the sun spearing through the clouds, and the pavements glittering.

  How would she explain it to the Astronaut Office when she returned? Or to herself an hour later? Or in the years that would follow? How would she explain the mistake she was about to make?

  Ara vaulted the fence on the other side of the playground and strode into the road, forcing two drivers to swerve, both cursing out of their windows. Astrid had a second, as another car passed, to choose between staying or following. She glanced back at the Interplanetary Society. The unlit corridor was like a dark maw, leading to a life away from everyone she loved. And, for one wild minute, she didn’t want it at all.

  She had sacrificed her whole childhood on the altar of diligence and obedience and hard work. So couldn’t she steal back this day? This one hour, and keep it for herself?

  Astrid chose her friend. She darted in front of a red bus as the lights changed and raced after her.

  They grabbed each other’s hands, hysterical with delight, marooned on a traffic island amongst the cars. This was the most they had seen of the world in over a week, and the sounds were an assault on her, the roar of tyres on tarmac like waves smashing rocks, her pulse a snare drum.

  The green man lit up. Ara dashed across the road and into a throng of people.

  ‘We have an hour,’ Astrid reminded Ara as they ran.

  The rain had stopped and the wet pavements sparkled in the sunlight. Astrid and Ara ran by the Thames, deliriously free. Months of sprinting across the grounds at Dalton meant that they were at their peak of physical fitness, barely out of breath as the white stuccoed houses flashed past, as Tate Britain appeared and then disappeared behind them. They headed into throngs of tourists in plastic-bag ponchos, photographing Big Ben, the Palace of Westminster, protesters gathered on Parliament Square.

  They could see everything when they reached the bridge. The low buildings to their right, clustered around the British Interplanetary Society, then on their left was the London eye, the South Bank, the Shard like a broken tooth in the distance.

  Amongst the crowd, a woman in harem pants was blowing giant bubbles with two sticks. Astrid watched as rainbows slid across them, and little children bounced with delight at the sight of their own warped reflections. The bubbles were so big that, when they burst, they made a splash on the ground.

  ‘Why do you think the bubbles are so interesting?’ Astrid asked.

  ‘Because they only last for a few seconds,’ Ara said, as a small girl let out a thrilled yelp, jumping up to touch the shining edge of the thing and missing every time. ‘Imagine if, instead of bubbles, that woman was blowing balls of see-through plastic that didn’t cost much and lasted forever.’

  By the time they reached the South Bank, Astrid was eager to head back. If they ran they could do it in twenty minutes. But Ara was distracted by the busyness. She kept slipping in and out of the crowd, pausing often to look at the street performers. One dressed as Charlie Chaplin doing tricks for pennies, a skinny teenager covering Jimi Hendrix songs. Ara emptied her pockets, chucking coins and a few crumpled notes at him with a laugh. ‘It’s not like I need them anymore,’ she said.

  Astrid was distracted by the food trucks, the ones selling footlong hotdogs, Neapolitan ice cream, nuts that smelt like burnt sugar, boiling in vats of caramel. Only she couldn’t eat anything. With each minute that passed, her stomach knotted with dread.

  ‘Ara.’ She grabbed her friend’s wrist before she could turn on her heel again. ‘We have to go.’ Her voice growing stern. ‘I’ve had enough.’

  The pulse in Ara’s wrist throbbed wildly. She shook herself free, and smiled.

  ‘This isn’t a game,’ Astrid told her. Ara pressed her palms against Astrid’s cheeks and brought their faces together, for a second, in a kiss. Her mouth tasted bitter as aspirin and there was a film of sweat on her upper lip. Astrid closed her eyes and, when she opened them again and drew in a surprised breath, Ara was running away.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she shouted after her friend.

  ‘I’m not going back!’

  All Astrid could see was her red skirt as she raced down the bank, her black hair like a comet’s tail behind her.

  She headed across the bridge and Astrid had to sprint to keep up, ducking and weaving past people on the walkway and calling apologies after her. She took a sharp turn down a crowded road, past the subway, which was belching steam in the May heat, into one end of Embankment station and out the other, to the crossing facing the Thames. Ara had vanished. When Astrid stopped running, her head was spinning and she pushed a hand against the strain in her chest, dizzy and panting in the humid air.

  She groaned in frustration. This was getting away from her. She considered making her own way back to the BIS building, but could she go without Ara?

  She headed in that direction anyway, back along the river. They had thirty minutes.

  The warmth of the afternoon surprised her. It was late spring and the wind was hot as flesh. Astrid followed Victoria Embankment, where the river was the colour of rust. Then she stood for a long while, trying to memorize the city’s skyline, before she heard a voice behind her.

  ‘Juno . . . ?’ She felt the cool of a shadow across her shoulders and turned around to find Eliot. ‘I mean . . . Astrid. Sorry, it’s hard to tell you apart . . . from behind.’

  Astrid exhaled with relief. ‘What are you doing out here?’ she asked. Eliot looked as if he’d been struck by lightning, his eyes wide.

  ‘I was looking for you, and Ara. We need to get back.’

  ‘You ran after us? All this way?’

  ‘Yes. I lost you in the museum, then I saw you running up the road. Tried to catch up. Lost you on the South Bank.’ He swore, leaning against the railings to catch his breath. ‘This isn’t funny.’

  ‘I know,’ Astrid said, and suddenly it wasn’t at all
.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asked. ‘You could get in trouble. You could get sanctioned. Or not cleared to fly. Astrid, don’t you want to go to space?’ The question cut her. Of course she wanted to go. Wanted nothing more. And yet, what was she doing here? Why had she done this foolish and reckless thing? Her own motivations frightened her.

  ‘Let’s find Ara and head back.’ Eliot glanced around wildly, as if he might find her behind him, or across the road. ‘Ara?’

  ‘I lost her. Should we go back without her?’ The silence between them, then, was horrible. Going back without Ara didn’t feel like an option. ‘Maybe she’s there already,’ Astrid ventured finally. ‘This is probably all a huge joke to her.’ And she imagined her in the society’s library just as they spoke, bent double with laughter. ‘If we keep going in that direction—’ she nodded ahead of her, back the way they had come, ‘. . . we’ll probably bump into her.’

  She turned around and headed in that direction. Eliot followed without protest. Of all the members of the Beta, Eliot was the boy that Astrid knew the least. He was a year younger than the rest of them, seventeen, although he looked fourteen. His teeth were gappy and small, as if he’d somehow managed to hang on to his milk teeth. He was a robotics genius who had grown up in wales and the only student to be personally head-hunted and invited to join the Dalton training programme after winning an engineering competition run by Imperial College London. Famously, he’d written a computer programme that could predict the probability of a planet bearing ‘life’. He’d been twelve when he’d joined and still scored perfectly in almost every exam. However, many had believed he would not be chosen for the Beta because of how poorly he consistently scored in every psychological evaluation and team exercise. He flinched when anyone but Ara touched him, and had to arrange his chips in order of length before he could eat them.

  They had almost reached Westminster station when they both heard a scream. A gathering of people by the side of the road. A car accident maybe? A cyclist crushed under a wheel?

  Eliot inhaled sharply and turned. Following his gaze to the edge of the river, Astrid noticed that a small group of people were gathering, looking down a flight of narrow steps that led to the Thames.

  ‘What is it . . . ?’ Astrid asked, but Eliot was walking quickly, then running, towards the low wall above the water.

  ‘Call the police . . .’ one woman said, rummaging in her handbag for a phone.

  ‘. . . an ambulance . . .’

  ‘. . . it’ll be too late – there must be someone around here who can . . .’

  When Astrid approached, Eliot shoved his phone at her. ‘Use it . . .’ he barked, then vaulted over the rusting gate blocking the steps that descended into the black water. A couple of people shouted, but none of them moved to stop him.

  There was a body floating in the river.

  She only recognized it was Ara a minute later, when Eliot emerged from the water gasping and grabbing at the railing. Astrid stood at the top of the steps and watched – gripped with disbelief – as Eliot scrambled and slipped at the bottom, heaving Ara’s limp body with one arm and clutching at the railing with the other.

  ‘Help! Help me!’ he cried out. Astrid’s muscles unglued, and she climbed down as fast as her trembling legs would allow. It was difficult; each step was coated in a slippery green-black slime. Every time Astrid moved, her foot threatened to fly out from under her and she pictured herself flailing, crashing down the steps and slipping into the river.

  Eliot was having the same trouble. He was half-blinded by river water and tears and his trainers slipped across the stone. He almost buckled under the weight of Ara’s body. Her head was lolling back on her neck, her fingers grazing the ground.

  Astrid grabbed onto the railings and reached out her free hand to grab one of Ara’s arms, and together they hauled her up to the pavement.

  It was only when Astrid let her friend’s body fall onto the asphalt that she noticed how thin Ara was. Her waterlogged skirt hung halfway down her thighs, exposing her knickers and the harsh angles of her pelvis.

  ‘Does anyone know first aid?’ one onlooker said, but Eliot was already flicking wet hair out of his eyes as he checked for signs of life, her breathing, her pulse. They had learned how to do that in physiology. The memory took on a grim reality then, as Astrid remembered Ara playing dead in her school uniform as her partner checked her pulse. It tickles, she’d spluttered, her face red with giggles she failed to swallow down.

  ‘Call an ambulance . . .’ someone shouted, and three people confirmed that they already had.

  ‘Don’t touch her,’ another person said, ‘looks like she’s broken something.’ Her body was twisted unnaturally on the ground, one arm bent outwards. Astrid shuddered. It didn’t look as if moving her would make any difference – her jaw was slack, eyes yellow and half-open.

  SHE DIED IN THE ambulance. It seemed as if she would make it for just a little while, when she was breathing again and puking up the black water, her lips and teeth stained as if she’d been chewing on charcoal, but her heart had stopped before the paramedics could rush her off to the hospital and before they had time to hold Astrid and Eliot back to keep them from watching her body slump on the gurney.

  Looked like poison, one of them said; something in her body before she jumped. Her stomach was filled with it.

  Astrid had never seen someone die before – Ara was the first. From then on, when she recalled their final day on Earth, her friend’s twisted body was all she ever saw. And the message they found later on Eliot’s phone. A text that she had sent him, which everyone would go on to consider her suicide note. It was what she had said earlier that day to Astrid, what the reporters quoted: Everything is beautiful. Everything hurts.

  T-MINUS 15 HOURS

  ‘DID YOU SUSPECT THAT Ara Shah was suicidal?’ Dr Maggie Millburrow asked in the car on the way back to the space centre. Astrid sat in the back, squeezing her fists into her eye sockets and trying to scrub away the haunting memory of the previous hours.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said through tears.

  Whenever she closed her eyes, she played the day back. Had Ara appeared nervous? When they danced together in the storm that morning? Ara’s hands had been hot in Astrid’s palms and later she’d discovered her being sick in the bathroom. When they had escaped from the BIS building, her pulse had been throbbing through her fingertips. Had she been suicidal then? Or had it happened later when they skipped along the bridge by the South Bank – had the windswept river called after her? Perhaps she had never made the conscious decision to jump. Perhaps the notion had struck her, lightning-quick like inspiration, impossible to refuse until the dark water closed over her head and invaded all the hollow places in her chest.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Astrid said again, opening her eyes to find the city disappearing in the rear window.

  ‘What were you thinking?’ Millburrow asked. ‘Running off like that?’ Astrid had to admit that she didn’t know. She could not explain stepping from the safety of the society building and traipsing into London with the thoughtlessness of a sleepwalker. She’d just followed Ara, as she always had.

  Astrid was sick with regret. Over what had happened to Ara but also over the very real threat that hung over her and her crewmates – that they would no longer be cleared to fly. That the launch would be delayed. Or suspended.

  The UKSA would find someone responsible for what had happened. And, during the drive back, Astrid could not push away the horrified thought that it would be all her fault, that if the mission was suspended and she was kicked off the programme – Earthbound and disgraced – there would be no forgiveness for her. She had already heard whispers about ‘breach of contract’ and ‘criminal proceedings’ . . .

  When she returned to the space centre, Astrid had stepped out of the car to find a small crowd was gathered in the half-light of the drive. Dr Golinsky – Dalton’s lead medical officer – in her white coat, their school�
�s provost, Professor Stenton, and directors of the astronaut’s office. Astrid’s stomach was heavy with dread as a woman in a grey suit ran towards her. ‘You saw it, didn’t you?’ she asked, the car’s headlights illuminating the gooseflesh along the side of her neck. She peered into Astrid’s eyes as if she thought that if she looked close enough she might be able to see the incident herself.

  ‘I didn’t exactly . . .’ Astrid turned her gaze down to her feet. ‘I just saw her body. In the water.’

  ‘After she fell,’ Professor Stenton said, stepping from the shadow of the doorway, ‘it looked like an accident, didn’t it?’

  ‘Well, the thing is, I didn’t really see—’

  ‘But if you had to guess,’ interrupted a man in a lab coat, ‘you’d say she fell. She wasn’t suicidal.’

  ‘No,’ Astrid said. ‘I didn’t think she was. She seemed happy. And we would have known, right? We’re her friends.’ She shook her head. ‘We would have known if she was unhappy.’

  ‘Exactly.’ A public affairs officer stabbed a painted fingernail at Astrid. ‘We would have known. We would have detected it. So she must have fallen.’

  Astrid nodded. ‘She must have . . . she fell,’ she said, looking away as if she could see it already. The twist of an ankle, the snap of the railing, Ara’s final look of surprise as her soles left the earth. ‘I think she fell.’ Maybe Ara only realized what happened once her body hit the water.

  ‘An accident,’ Dr Golinsky said. ‘A tragic accident.’

  ‘These things happen,’ said a supervisor, his glasses flashing in the headlights. ‘That’s the sad thing.’

  These things do happen, they agreed.

  They announced this to the shouting reporters gathered at the gates, hurling questions through the bars. It was an accident, they said, even at the press conference a few days later, after it was revealed that Ara’s combat boots had been discovered under a bench on a bridge, pushed neatly together, the laces tied up, neon pink ankle socks scrunched inside like oysters in a shell.