by Temi Oh
LEFT ALONE IN THE refectory, Juno let her meal grow cold before abandoning it and walking over to the glass doors at the far end of the room. Moths were flinging themselves at her reflection, attracted to the bright lights of the dining room, which seeped out into the unlit grounds and across the dim stretches of land they had skipped across that morning. Through the gloom, Juno thought she could see her own laughing self, dancing with Ara that morning in the rain.
She pulled the door open and stepped outside. The grass, which had baked under the sun all day, filled the air with a hot earthy smell that Juno inhaled deeply, and then she closed her eyes to pray.
Would you go without her?
It was possible that Astrid might not be cleared in a medical inspection. Juno knew that the incubation time of a virus could be anything from one day to a couple of years. Even as she stood in the garden, tiny strands of genetic code could be hijacking her sister’s cells or slithering into her bones to lie dormant for months. Rhinoviruses – such as the common cold – could live up to forty-eight hours on touchable surfaces, such as handrails and doorknobs, lift buttons and light switches, counters and coins passed from one hand to another. What lived in London’s rivers? Juno rubbed down the goosebumps on her arms and decided silently that if Astrid couldn’t go then she would not either.
A helicopter beat in the air above her head and Juno squinted up at the navy sky, drawn from her worry with a jolt of recollection. The world outside was astir. Everyone in the country was waiting to see if the launch would go ahead.
Juno headed out onto the gravel path behind the space centre, just glad to feel a tepid breeze at her back. As she turned the corner of the building, floodlights exploded behind her and the ground rumbled. Juno spun around in alarm to find herself in the path of an oncoming car, the tyres spinning so fast they skipped sharp little rocks at her ankles. Diving out of the way, Juno tumbled into a darkened patch of shrubbery beside the driveway.
The car came to a violent halt in front of the reception, the headlights drained to blackness, the rumble of the engine faded and was replaced by the muted slam of the driver’s door. ‘This way.’ It was their provost’s voice, and Juno crouched down further in the gloom, hoping not to be caught.
A second later, the back door opened and a boy in pyjamas climbed out. Juno glanced at his angular face with a jolt of recognition. She was sure she’d seen him before, in school perhaps, but it was difficult to tell in the darkness. He had waist-length hair and spider-black eyes. She liked the delicate way he moved, sloping back into the car to pull out a duffle bag and slinging it over his shoulder. She knew him. Jesse Solloway? she mouthed in surprise. She had trained with him for a few months after graduation. And, although she knew that a member of the backup crew would be enlisted to take Ara’s place, it felt unreal to see him so soon after Ara was gone. Before she’d even been buried.
‘You’ve got everything you need?’ came Professor Stenton’s voice. Juno tried to keep as still as possible. After the events of the day, she knew she was in disgrace and supposed to be in the space centre, choking down dinner. If her teacher turned and found her crouching in the shrubbery it was likely she would find herself in even more trouble.
‘Sure,’ the boy said. He turned suddenly and his eyes found Juno’s.
Her heart leapt and she bit down on her tongue.
He smiled conspiratorially, catching his bottom lip on the edge of a tooth. Juno pressed a finger to her mouth, as if to say shh. He nodded and turned away.
‘Come right this way,’ Professor Stenton’s voice called out from the entrance. ‘We have so much to do.’ The two figures disappeared inside. The driveway filled once more with darkness. Juno waited for a long while in the gloom before she was certain it was safe to clamber from her hiding place and return inside.
She walked around the edge of the building and re-entered at reception. The television was on low. The news was running, a man speaking into a microphone as headlines rolled across the screen. There was only one guard on duty. His ID badge read Edward. The lanky boy who collected the mail and nodded at them from behind the desk as they came and went.
‘Hi, Teddy.’
When he turned from the television his eyes widened with surprise. ‘Oh. Hello,’ he said. ‘Thought you’d be asleep by now.’
‘Even if they let me I don’t know if I’ll be able to.’ Although, even as she said it, Juno could feel the tiredness in her bones.
‘I bet. If I were you I’d be crapping myself.’
‘Really?’
‘For sure.’ He nodded towards the television, where the camera zoomed in to a live shot of the shuttle at the launch site, dimly illuminated in the darkness. ‘All those people watching you. All those reporters.’
‘Will you be watching it?’ Juno asked.
‘Course,’ Teddy said. ‘Me and my kids. Got the day off. I’m going out to the launch site’ This took her by surprise.
‘You have kids?’ Juno asked, frowning at his patchy stubble and the acne scars faintly visible on his chin.
‘Yep.’ He laughed at her expression. ‘Two. A six-year-old and another who’s eighteen months.’
‘Wow. How old are you?’
‘Twenty-four.’
‘So that means . . . you had your first child when you were eighteen?’ He nodded. ‘I’m never going to have children.’ The words tumbled out of her mouth before she could stop them.
‘Really? Why?’
It wasn’t Juno’s job to have children. Women would come after her – healthy young colony women whose job it was to grow fat and give birth. But theirs was a pioneer mission. They would land on Terra-Two towards the end of their child-bearing years and start a colony, build the base and chart the land. Perhaps children would come after that, but Juno had been informed that this wasn’t her primary purpose. As soon as she was accepted into the Beta she underwent a procedure that slipped a little implant under her arm, and her periods had dried up.
‘The mission is my child,’ she said. And then, her head full of how heroic that sounded, she said a little louder, ‘Terra-Two is my only child.’
Which wasn’t entirely a lie. Going to space saved her from every other fate. From marriage and having to sleep with Noah, from the disappointment of motherhood, from a lustreless life. She was going to make a different world, a better world, on Terra-Two. A noble ambition – in her mind – the noblest.
Teddy shrugged. ‘I guess that’s why you’re here then. Cos that’s what you want.’
‘Yes.’ She blinked, and with a sudden ache in her stomach remembered the predicament she found herself in – still unsure if she actually would launch tomorrow. ‘That’s right.’ Her eyes flicked towards the screen again. A reporter was holding a microphone and standing in front of Embankment station, a poor-quality video taken on somebody’s phone of Eliot dragging Ara’s body out of the water playing over her shoulder. Juno felt the ground shift under her feet, but took a deep breath to steady herself.
‘You okay?’ Teddy examined her for a moment. ‘They’re saying it’s an accident.’ He nodded at the screen. ‘That you were allowed on an outing before the tree-planting ceremony and she fell in.’
‘I don’t know what happened,’ Juno said, which was true.
Teddy eyed her knowingly and said, ‘Thought so. There’s always a difference between what goes on in here and what I hear ’em saying on there. Between you and me, I think someone’s going to get the axe.’ He leant in conspiratorially. ‘And I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t—’
He fell quiet and his eyes darted to the door as the susurration of people coming out of the conference room filled the hall.
Juno looked around in surprise. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to be caught hanging around in reception, so she headed quickly back down the corridor and towards the refectory.
‘Juno.’
When she turned, she saw Dr Millburrow.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be in bed?’
‘Umm . . . I was just having dinner.’ Juno’s eyes darted towards the door of the empty refectory.
It was good to see Maggie’s ruddy face. Of all the senior crew charged with looking after them, she was the most like a friend. Juno had been glad when she turned up in her car earlier that day to take them back home and she was glad to see her now.
‘I was just in a meeting with the board of directors and they’ve come to a decision.’ She glanced behind her at the serious-looking men and women in suits who had spilled out into the hall. ‘I thought you better hear this from me.’
Juno felt her stomach drop with a jangled swoop of alarm. Maggie was about to tell her that she was no longer on the mission. That tonight they would all pay for Ara’s actions with their future.
And then, all of a sudden, a quiet kind of abandon came over her. The kind she had felt in the three horrible hours after Astrid discovered she’d made it into the Beta and before Juno had. In those moments, a colourless life beneath the stars and away from her sister extended before her. Now she felt it again. Juno experienced the dim resignation that sometimes came over her in the split second she realized she was about to drop something; the swollen moment after the shift in weight registers and just before the crash.
‘The mission will be going ahead as planned but someone will have to replace Ara. You do realize that, right?’ Juno stared at Maggie dumbfounded. Could it be? Could it be that God had smiled mercifully upon her?
‘We’re going to launch,’ she said, and her throat tightened.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m going to space?’
‘Yes, that’s what the board has agreed.’
‘Oh . . .’ Juno let out a long breath, leant against the wall to steady herself.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes . . .’ she gasped. ‘Just . . . relieved.’
Maggie put a hand on Juno’s shoulder and her eyes softened. ‘It’s been a long day, JJ.’ Juno nodded. ‘Why don’t you go up there and get some sleep?’ She nodded again.
Maggie leant forward and kissed her on the forehead. For a moment Juno’s nose was filled with the sweet lavender scent of her perfume and she exhaled another shaky breath.
‘If I don’t see you in the morning . . .’
‘You’re supposed to wake us up.’ Maggie nodded as if she had forgotten that fact. Juno had grown used to seeing her silhouette in the doorway in the morning, just after the bell rang. She always smelt sweet as fresh bread and woke them all up by leaning down and stroking their cheeks. Like a mother, almost. Whenever Juno pictured waking up in space she imagined Maggie standing in the doorway and saying, wakie wakie, girls, her own eyes bright and ready to face the day.
‘Sure thing,’ she said with a smile that wilted a little into a grimace. ‘I’m proud of you.’ Maggie added it as an afterthought, when Juno had already taken a couple of steps down the corridor. She stopped and turned back.
‘For what?’
JESSE
11.0 5.12
T-MINUS 36 HOURS
TWO NIGHTS BEFORE THE launch, Jesse was lying on his bedroom floor listening to news reports from mission control. His sister was speaking to him about attachment, but Jesse was only half listening. He was thinking about the rocket. She kept repeating herself: ‘The thing about attachment,’ she was saying, crossing her legs in front of her, ‘it’s not about not caring, it’s about not clinging.’ The word rang in her throat as if it was a little dirty. ‘You know, the way you hold your breath for just a second when you are given something little and beautiful, in the immediate anticipation of losing it. Which – of course – you will.’ She said this with a flippant wave of her hand. ‘You can’t cling on to anything in this life; money, possessions, other people, even the cherry blossoms dry up and drop away. Loving anything is bound to the pain of losing it. Which is why clinging causes suffering.’
‘You should write that on a bumper sticker.’
‘Are you listening?’
‘Mostly,’ Jesse said. ‘I just don’t see what this has to do with me.’ His sister rolled her eyes.
That was the last night he ever spent with her. The last conversation they had in person. He would realize this later – with a wrench of pain. She had returned from university the previous week and whipped off a patterned scarf to reveal her stunningly bald head. She’d shaved off her thick waist-length locks, and with them the clutching spectres of unhealthy attachments, her own vanity and the hopes of her weary parents.
‘You know what this has to do with you,’ she said, and then her voice softened a little, ‘it hurts to see you in pain like this.’
She had left the week after he discovered that he was not going to Terra-Two, and returned months later to find that he was still hunched over with the ache of disappointment. For Jesse, not a day went by where he didn’t glare at his sleep-swollen face in the mirror and curse his own inadequacy. Not an evening went by without pushing his food away at the dinner table, silently wondering what hateful thing had caused him to fail at the final hurdle. He would never know.
He’d trained with the Beta until January and after he’d been released the six of them had become his new obsession. He bought an issue of every magazine that featured their smiling faces, choked down the breakfast cereals that promised tiny figurines of the shuttle and kept the models themselves in his pockets, which were already heavy with the commemorative coins he collected – the ones with the two earths emblazoned on one side and THE OFF-WORLD COLONIZATION PROGRAMME stamped on the other – and would roll them across his knuckles until his fingers were numb.
‘How do I do that?’ he asked his sister. ‘Since you have all the answers. You talk about worry as if it’s a jacket that I could shrug off. Don’t you think I want to? Don’t you think I want to crawl right out of this anxious body and forget about the space programme and about dying. I can almost imagine how good it would feel. I can almost imagine the vanish of weight. Go on then, Morrigan. Tell me how to do it and I will.’
She was silent for just a moment, her green eyes filled with pity. The radio hissed in the background. ‘Oh Jess—’ his sister reached out to rub his shoulder. ‘Destinies don’t change.’
JESSE WAS TOO NERVOUS to sleep that night. He stood up every half hour to limp over to the mirror and check his body for visible signs of disease, not including the shadows under his eyes or the hollows his new restrictive diet had worn into his cheeks. Whenever he closed his eyes, he dreamt of malignance, of cells multiplying in the soft tissues of his body, of spores floating into his open windows and settling in the membranes of his lungs. Sleep was an abandoned hope.
Instead, he thought about off-world colonization. Of the exquisite design of the spacecraft and the people who would be climbing on to it in a little over twenty-four hours.
Over a million spectators were camped out at the launch site, filling the roads and the surrounding fields with their nocturnal celebrations. It’s like a music festival, one of Jesse’s friends had texted, and he could imagine it now. Most of the people would be the amateur astronomers who had developed a sort of offbeat cool over the past few years. They would be parading their homemade telescopes, the astrolabe apps downloaded onto smartphones. Some of them would be schoolchildren with the Union Jack painted on their eager faces, eyes lifted towards the skies waiting for history to be made.
Jesse didn’t know, even as he began shuffling through another day, that Ara had already taken her final steps towards the bile-black river.
What he did know was that the shuttle that would carry the Beta into orbit – the Congreve – was lit up on its platform behind guards and barricades, and that when it disappeared into the sky the following day, so would the last of his hope.
He was going to die. He was no astronaut. He was no pilgrim, he was no humble dreamer fated for the stars.
JESSE
12.05.12
T-MINUS 12 HOURS
HE HEARD IT ON the radio first. The
headline, that the body of an astronaut had been recovered from the Thames in what appeared to be an accident. His nerves quivered as if they’d been struck by a tuning fork.
He rushed down the stairs to the kitchen, where his mother was half-watching Strictly Come Dancing on the small television above the fridge. Jesse grabbed the remote from the table and switched to the news. The saucepan hissed as his father set it on the stove. Jesse’s heart was racing as he watched the headlines rolling. Saw the words ‘ARA SHAH’, and ‘ACCIDENT’ and ‘MISSION IN CRISIS’. He didn’t even notice that he’d dropped the remote until he heard the sound of plastic crashing against the kitchen tiles and saw the batteries roll under the table. Then he turned around, and began to run.
He stopped outside his front door, standing alone in the cloying late spring air, his eyes stinging. In his sleep-addled mind, he was certain that, tonight, his life was about to change, but he didn’t know how. A blood vessel bulging in his brain, about to burst? A car lurching around the kerb, its headlights bright as jack-o-lanterns in the split second before it crushed him into the concrete? Or a call from the space agency at the last minute?
‘Destinies don’t change,’ he told the silent street. At nineteen years he would leave this world, he had been told.
Jesse took a tentative step forwards. The cars were still as sentinels, catching the moonlight, and the air buzzed with flies. Inside the window of every house families crowded before television and laptop screens, like the night before new year. The launch was predicted to be the most watched television broadcast in history. Tomorrow, if it went according to plan, there would be street parties all across the UK. Jesse could already see the sherbet-coloured bunting strung up between the lamp posts in preparation for the festivities.
He started down the street and towards the main road. It wasn’t until he reached the corner, the unlit shop fronts and blinking traffic lights, that he began to run. His feet knew where to take him.