Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

by Temi Oh

  JUNO

  T-MINUS 12 HOURS

  AFTER JUNO HAD BEEN driven back to the space centre, she and the rest of the crew returned to a different kind of fray. Reporters were gathered at the gates, their cars parked all the way up the street. The driver had to take them around to a side road and up through a shadowed back entrance where directors, police and public relations officers were gathered.

  They were ushered immediately into separate rooms. Required first to give a statement to the police, and then the Astronaut Office, the school’s directors and finally to undergo a psychological assessment and mental health screening.

  By the time the gruelling round of tests was over, Juno emerged from the windowless room to find that the sun had set long ago, that night was marching on, and yet the launch felt more distant than it had three weeks ago.

  Before Juno was sent for an inspection in the medical exam room, a technician led her towards a cubicle with a bathtub and shower and said, ‘Twenty minutes, and make sure to scrub under your nails’ before he closed the door,

  Juno was glad to climb out of her clothes. The day had been so humid that when she peeled off her T-shirt the air was ripe with the smell of her body. She sat on the porcelain edge of the tub and watched the water gush out of the tap. Her hands were shaking.

  She ran the water so hot that it scalded her feet at first. But she gritted her teeth and surrendered herself to it, letting herself slip down until it lapped over her head.

  There would be no bath on the Damocles. Just as there had been no baths in the dormitories at Dalton. Only spartan shower cubicles and lukewarm water. If she launched tomorrow this would be her last bath before she and her sister could swim into the hot springs in the mountains of Terra-Two.

  Although Juno wasn’t sure they were going anywhere anymore.

  She held her breath under the water until her body screamed for oxygen and then she held on longer still, until the pain of deprivation squeezed her lungs in a vice. Finally, she lost control of her legs, her knees unbuckled and her feet smacked the side of the bath. She jolted upright and came up gasping like a newborn, splashing in blind panic and scrubbing suds from her eyes.

  Was there a worse way to die?

  She had seen a picture of a drowned boy on the front page of a newspaper the previous June. His head had been half-submerged in water and in the midsummer temperatures putrefaction had already begun. Algae had attached to portions of his little body, multiplied and formed a living layer of slime around the side of his mouth and the hollows of his half-open eyes . . .

  An hour earlier, when the police had asked her what happened, Juno had to remind herself that she hadn’t actually seen anything. By the time Juno, Poppy and the public affairs officer reached the Embankment, it was the chattering throng that had told her what happened.

  Someone’s just died. Some girl.

  The girl. That girl’s an astronaut.

  Just jumped in.

  No, she fell in. My kid saw her.

  The girl from the magazines. The girl from the news. One of them, anyway.

  Looked like an accident to me.

  If suicide looks like an accident . . .

  When Juno climbed out of the bath she felt the ground shift under her feet and she had to reach out for the handrail to stop herself from slipping. The mirror was fogged up, and it was a relief not to catch a glimpse of her own reflection. She had been awake now for almost twenty-four hours and the day was far from done.

  ‘Are you ready?’ A little tap came on the other side of the door.

  ‘Yes.’ Juno pulled on a white cotton bathrobe and stepped out into the medical exam room. It was filled with the familiar acid smell of antiseptic and the citrus tang of floor cleaner. Two suited flight surgeons stood near a trolley. Juno had been in the same room earlier in the week for a pulmonary function test and a bone density exam. A nurse had clipped her nails down so far that they bled and just before her bath that evening she had been swabbed again for contaminants.

  ‘Can you step into the scanner please?’ said the first man, indicating the door. Juno walked slowly towards it, taking care not to let her wet feet slip on the ground.

  She climbed out of her robe and crept through the door. The cold of the room was a shock to her bare skin, and the hairs along her forearms stood on end. ‘Please hold your arms out and place your feet on the markers below,’ buzzed the voice of one of the doctors over the intercom. Juno could not see them examining her naked body on the other side of the wall. She looked at the indicators on the ground and placed her feet upon them, stretching out her arms like a gymnast. Any contaminants that remained on her body would fluoresce under the light.

  She had heard the stories about astronauts who were decertified the morning of the launch after failing an eleventh-hour medical examination. In the closed air system of a spacecraft, viruses spread rapidly and threatened the success of a mission, especially during long-term missions such as theirs, where medical supplies were limited and protracted exposure to radiation would eventually weaken their immune systems.

  Juno thought about Noah and couldn’t help imagining his hands leaving marks on her body, little pockets of bacteria.

  She’d heard the Thames described as a ‘biohazard’; after heavy rain it acted as an overflow for the city’s sewers, and Astrid had come into contact with it. What if Juno was certified to fly and her sister wasn’t? The thought of facing the darkness of space alone filled her with panic.

  ‘Are you all right?’ A voice over the intercom.

  ‘Y-yes.’ Juno swallowed deeply and straightened her back. Now was not the time to break down. She was an astronaut. Now was the time to show the supervisors that she could shoulder anything and still do her job. ‘I’m fine, sir.’

  ‘Here comes the flash.’ A mechanical voice counted . . . four, three, two . . . ‘Close your eyes.’

  Juno squeezed them shut – one – and even then she could still see the flare. Her eyelids lit up pink for a few seconds and the beating capillaries in her retina flickered red. Her nerves screamed for an instant, but she gritted her teeth against the pain. When she opened her eyes again her vision was bleached green and her skin stung as if she had been sunburned.

  ‘Well,’ came the voice of the second doctor, ‘you’re all done. It didn’t hurt much, did it?’

  Juno let out a breath that she didn’t know she had been holding, stepped out into the exam room and pulled her robe back on. ‘Only a little,’ she agreed as the spots in her vision began to fade.

  Outside, the doctors were huddled over a monitor, checking the readouts from the scanner, which were scrolling up the screen.

  ‘Um . . .’ Juno lingered in the middle of the room, the cold creeping up her calves. ‘When will I find out if I’m certified to fly?’

  ‘That depends on the results,’ one of them said.

  ‘It depends on whether I was exposed to anything today, right?’

  ‘Amongst other things.’

  ‘Um . . . do you think you could tell me—’

  ‘Look, it’s not really our decision.’ The doctor turned around to face her. Above his mask, his tired grey eyes were all Juno could see. ‘We just run the tests.’

  Juno nodded and left the exam room, water dripping down her neck. She took the shortcut back to her dormitory, via the emergency stairwell in the side of the building, but when she pushed the heavy door open she was surprised to find Poppy and Astrid huddled on the shadowed landing. Poppy was wrapped in an identical bathrobe, and her wet hair hung down her back like rats’ tails. Astrid was sobbing hysterically, the kind of desperate wailing that Juno had only heard when they were children.

  ‘You can’t let them see you like this,’ Poppy hissed. Her eyes kept darting over the banister and down to the exit, as if she was worried that one of the police officers stalking the grounds might throw open the door at any moment.

  ‘You didn’t see her,’ Astrid wailed, making no effort to wipe away the
tears skidding down her cheeks. ‘The way she looked when we got her out of the water. She wasn’t breathing. We were holding her. And I think she broke something, her arm was all bent back at the elbow, like it—’

  ‘Please stop.’ Juno shuddered. Her voice came out louder than expected, every sound amplified up the long stairwell, and both the girls let out a yelp of surprise.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Juno lowered her voice a little and stepped forward. The lights in the hall were motion sensitive and the bulbs on the wall beside her came on with a clink. ‘But it’s bad enough without you telling us—’

  ‘Bad enough for you?’ Astrid glared up at her sister, her eyes bloodshot and unforgiving. ‘Where were you, Juno? Where the hell were you?’ The last words reverberated off the walls.

  ‘I was . . .’ Juno bit her lip. She didn’t want to tell anyone about her experience in the Flight Garden with Noah.

  ‘Hey, you left us,’ Poppy said. ‘Juno and Noah and me. You and Ara just ran off. I was wandering around the museum on my own looking for all of you before the PA officer told me there’d been an accident and it involved you three. I thought you’d been run over. I was terrified.’

  ‘Okay.’ Juno took a deep breath. ‘Look, you guys, this isn’t the time. We have to do what we have to do.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Astrid’s eyes were raw and swollen from rubbing them dry.

  ‘You know,’ Juno said, ‘when we practise emergencies in the simulator and eight different things are going on at once and we’re sweating bullets . . . the only way to get through it is to think about the next thing. The thing right in front of you. Not what we could have or shouldn’t have done. This is an emergency. And we’ve lost someone. But if we don’t pull it together we’re not going anywhere tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s what I’m talking about,’ said Poppy. ‘If they see Astrid in this state there’s no way they’ll clear her to fly tomorrow.’

  Juno chewed on her lip. ‘Has she had her interview yet?’ she asked.

  Poppy nodded. ‘It went on really long, apparently. They really ripped into her.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ Juno said.

  ‘That’s not even the worst of it,’ Astrid said. ‘It was like they didn’t even care. They just want to know who’s to blame.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying.’ Poppy lowered her voice. ‘She has to get it together or we’re all in trouble.’ Her eyes darted nervously up and down the staircases. ‘We have to say we had nothing to do with it.’ Poppy swallowed and turned to Astrid. ‘Say it was all Ara’s idea.’

  ‘It was all her idea,’ Astrid said.

  ‘So . . . you just went along with it. Ara always had a way, a weird way of getting people to do what she wanted.’ Poppy’s use of the past tense was jarring.

  ‘How can you even think about this stuff?’ Astrid began to cry again, and wiped the back of her hand against her nose, spreading a shiny trail of snot from her wrist to her index finger.

  ‘Juno – please.’ When Poppy looked up, Juno saw that she was on the edge of breaking down as well. ‘I don’t want to get into trouble for this. I don’t want to be prosecuted or forced to stay.’

  ‘Forced to stay where?’ Juno asked tentatively, but Poppy’s eyes spilled over.

  ‘Here! On this planet. In this country. I thought I did, but I don’t. My life isn’t like yours. I don’t have picture-perfect parents to go back to. I have things. Things I thought I’d leave behind—’

  The whine of the door opening echoed loudly up the stairwell and all the girls froze. Juno’s breath caught in her mouth as she heard the sound of heavy shoes coming up the steps.

  ‘Hello?’ called a voice. ‘Who’s there?’

  She saw the top of his head first, his frizzy dark hair, and then he came up to the second landing and spotted Astrid and Poppy huddled like frightened children. ‘Girls?’

  ‘Commander Sheppard,’ Poppy said with the breathlessness of a schoolgirl.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ he asked

  It was still strange to see their commander in civilian clothing. Juno was used to seeing Solomon Sheppard wearing a spacesuit or the navy and red uniform jumpsuit of the UK Space Agency. He was a quiet but imposing astronaut, a former child prodigy and then the youngest man to travel to Mars, where he had scaled Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system, with an international team. When he returned they made a movie about his life. The first time Juno had met him was at a scholars’ dinner when she was sixteen. Sheppard had returned that summer from another nineteen-month mission and when he’d abandoned his knife and fork at the end of the meal, a couple of the girls squabbled over them like drumsticks tossed out after a concert.

  Tonight, however, his eyes were bloodshot with fatigue.

  ‘Nowhere I can touch,’ Poppy said quietly.

  ‘Eliot was hurt.’ Juno suddenly realized that the last she had seen of Eliot had been in the police car parked on the Embankment.

  ‘He has been treated for the injuries he sustained by the medical officers, and he’s currently undergoing a psychological assessment to ensure he can be cleared to fly. As will you, Astrid.’

  Poppy nodded, then asked quietly, ‘Are we in trouble?’ They all looked up. Sheppard’s face darkened.

  ‘Yes. A terrible thing happened today. We lost one of our own. I don’t think I need to tell you that regulations are set down to keep you all safe. When I heard the news that you left the Interplanetary Society, I was beyond disappointed in every one of you. But all I can think is that this has been a trying couple of months for everybody, even for the senior members of the crew who have served on missions before. You’re all so . . .’ he bit back on a word, ‘it’s easy to forget that you’re just young people.

  ‘I don’t know what the directors will decide. But if you are certified to fly on the mission after all, I need to know that a breakdown of order like this will never ever happen again. Our mission is about teamwork and responsibility. We need to be able to trust each other, because out there we’ve only got each other. Our lives depend on everyone following the code of conduct strictly.’

  Juno nodded. A heavy knot of shame twisted in her stomach and none of them could look up to meet his eye.

  ‘Anyway, you all have somewhere to be. Astrid, you’re late for your medical inspection. Poppy and Juno, dinner has been prepared for you in the refectory. From this moment on I want to know where each of you is, from now until launch tomorrow. The freedom you had here – which you abused today, with tragic consequences – was a privilege and not a right.’

  With that, their commander left, and Juno watched as her sister followed him up the stairs, leaving her and Poppy alone in miserable silence. Poppy was clearly as frightened as she; shadows dark as bruises were spreading under her eyes. She was shivering in her bathrobe and her feet were bare.

  ‘What do you think will happen to him?’ Poppy asked. She was still whispering as they made their way out of the echoing stairwell and towards the refectory. Juno had to lean in to hear her.

  ‘Eliot? I don’t know,’ Juno said finally, after a moment’s consideration.

  ‘He’s being interviewed right now, I think.’

  ‘It’s not like we know what will happen to any of us at this point.’

  ‘Well, I’m pretty sure he’s a goner,’ Poppy said.

  Juno cringed at the word. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, his best friend slash girlfriend just jumped into a river.’

  ‘It wasn’t his fault.’

  ‘I’m not saying it is, just . . .’ Poppy lowered her voice conspiratorially, ‘everyone thinks he had something to do with it. Him and—’ she cut herself off with a startled glance at Juno.

  ‘My sister.’ Juno finished the sentence with bitterness in the back of her mouth.

  When they reached the edge of the refectory, smells of food, of roasting meat and warm bread, reminded Juno of the emptiness in her stomach. And yet, once she entered, she couldn�
�t bring herself to eat any of it.

  ‘No one is like Eliot,’ Juno said, thinking of the way he had looked earlier that day, in the back of an ambulance, river water pooled around his Converse trainers. His eyes shiny and vacant. He was the only member of the Beta that the UKSA had personally head-hunted; it struck Juno as unlikely that he would be kicked off the programme at this late stage.

  ‘But Astrid . . . ?’ Poppy asked quietly. They shared a frightened look. ‘Why do you think she did it? Ran off like that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Juno looked down at her plate. Dinner that night was supposed to be a treat. The kind they served for school dinners on Fridays or at the end of term. Burgers smothered in ketchup with a side of thinly sliced fries. ‘All I can think is that Ara must have just convinced her to go. You know that way Ara has . . .’

  ‘She can convince anyone to do anything.’ Poppy put a chip in her mouth. ‘There’s a word for it in French,’ she said. Juno sighed. There had never been an evening that she was less interested in Poppy’s linguistic musings. ‘Folie à deux. Madness shared by two. Like, infectious madness. The kind that makes you make a terrible decision and not think twice about it at the time. Only, all three of them escaped, so folie à trois, or folie à plusieurs – madness of many—’

  ‘Poppy.’ Juno’s eyes narrowed with a quick pinch of irritation.

  ‘Would you go without her?’

  Juno couldn’t even imagine it, going to Terra-Two without Astrid. ‘There is no thought more horrible,’ she said. They lapsed into a grim silence, like defendants waiting for the jury to return, listening to the sounds of cars pulling up and leaving outside and footsteps in the corridor.

  Finally, Poppy flung down her cutlery. Juno watched it clatter across the table. When she looked up, Poppy’s face was wet as she shoved her chair back and rushed away.

  ‘Poppy?’ Juno called after her.

  ‘Maybe this is just what she wanted,’ Poppy shouted back. ‘To ruin everything. Did Ara have to do it this way? Did she have to take all of us down with her?’