by Temi Oh
‘Harry?’ She glanced up and saw him hunched, face buried in one hand. Crying. ‘Harry?’ She put her hand lightly on his shoulder, unsure how to respond. She had never seen him cry before.
The accident in the space shuttle had left him scarred, lacerations along his forehead and temple, a patch of eyebrow where the hair no longer grew.
‘I’ll never be anything like him.’ Harry’s gaze followed hers up to the pictures on the pin-board. There was one of them on launch day – they looked younger to Poppy’s eyes now, but she knew that was unlikely. Jesse had stood a little way away from them, and Solomon had pulled him over.
‘Why does it matter . . . ?’
‘Don’t you realize . . . that’s all that’s ever mattered to me.’
‘Really?’
His eyes drifted away for a moment as if he was looking inside himself. ‘I guess so. Shall I tell you something stupid? Something this whole thing put me in mind of?’
She nodded.
‘Years ago. Years and years ago, when I was – I don’t know, young enough to hold my father’s hand – we were walking from his office in Mayfair to get lunch. I was holding his hand and we were walking under some scaffolding when we heard a sound. Like one of the builders above us dropping something heavy, a hammer, or a pot of paint. The sort of thing that falls and crushes someone’s skull. My dad let go of my hand.’ Harry spread his fingers. ‘Let go of my hand like it was on fire and ran for it, bolted ahead. Left me. And I stopped in the middle of the pavement, just staring at him. Thinking about what a coward he was. Thinking about those stories of people who jump in front of bullets for other people, mothers who lift cars to save their infants. And my dad, ducking for cover. I know it was probably just instinctive, fight-or-flight or whatever. But that was the thing that bothered me most. That it was instinctive. Him leaving me. Even then I thought, I know. He tried to laugh it off all the way to the brasserie but I thought, Now I know.’
‘And Sheppard—’ Poppy knew where this was going. ‘At the moment it came to it, Sheppard saved you.’
Harry nodded. Poppy realized that this was one of the few times that Harry had ever confided in her or treated her like a friend. It hurt when she compared this intimacy to its imitation: late-night trysts in the games room, ten minutes pressed up against the bathroom stall being as quiet as possible. Perhaps, that whole time, this was all she had ever wanted from him.
‘It’ll be okay,’ she told him.
‘Will it?’ Harry asked. ‘They chose us because they think we’re brave. Chose me to be the type of commander who can stare down death, leap in front of it to save my crew. Go down with the ship. Stay calm. But, I think . . . maybe I was so good at it because I still thought that all of this was a game.
‘Do you remember a question they used to ask us in the psych tests back at Dalton? There was this one they asked me once: “What would you die for?” I said something like “Great Britain” or “freedom”. But you know what this whole experience has taught me? If they asked me again, “What would you die for?” Willingly die for? I’d probably say “nothing at all”.’
ELIOT
16.02.13
TEMPERATURE: 2°C
O2: 75.5% SEA LEVEL
WEEKS UNTIL RESCUE: 7
WHEN ELIOT AWOKE IT was the middle of the night, and the sound of his name echoed in the air like the final vibrations of a gong. His body ached with cold and the dark world had taken on a shimmery underwater quality.
He almost fell out of bed; his body was so clumsy and numb that he couldn’t feel his fingers or toes and his lips tingled. They’d been locked in the infirmary for a week by that point. Fae had sealed the door, but there wasn’t a door on this ship that Eliot could not open. He checked through the window to make sure there was no one in the corridor, then fumbled along the edge for the locking mechanism and twisted a paperclip in, a trick he’d performed before to save Astrid and Juno on the bridge. He pulled the latch and it slid right open to the corridor, lit in the deep blue of an artificial midnight.
‘Eliot.’ There it was again, a woman’s voice. He froze and looked around, expecting to find Fae standing behind him, but no one was in the corridor and the cabin doors of all the senior crew were closed.
‘Eliot!’ It was louder that time, with a shrill panicked edge. He looked around in alarm.
‘Who is it?’ he said to the empty corridor. But no reply came.
He climbed through the next hatch and emerged on the lower deck, where most of the lights were off and the hum and whirr of machinery was the loudest. Eliot swallowed, noticing that his forearms were quilled with goosebumps. The games room was empty. After Europa, none of them wanted to spend much time there anymore.
The sound of banging made him start. It was echoing up the long hall just as it had that day when Harry locked Jesse in the airlock. ‘Help!’ someone screamed.
It was coming from the opposite direction to the airlock, behind the door that led to the greenhouse. Eliot ran along the corridor, opened the hatch to the bridge and entered. It was dank as a cave, the sound of his footsteps echoing all around. Broken glass crunched under his feet.
Further ahead, someone was splashing in the reservoir – the deep pond where the ship’s water was stored. As he rushed there, he noticed the chemical smell of the agents they used to clean it. Someone was thrashing inside it, screaming ‘Help me!’, head surging up, then bobbing back under floes of blue ice that clinked against the sides of the pool.
Eliot whipped passed the trees and towards the water. ‘Astrid?’
Who in the Beta could not swim?
He didn’t have time to slow before he approached the reservoir, so he hit the water running. The ice on the surface was sharp against the soles of his feet, but that pain was nothing compared to the shock of the frozen water as it clamped like jaws around him.
It was only waist-deep, but the extreme cold tore through his body and his muscles seized. It was all he could do not to scream at the pain of it. Someone exploded to the surface again with a cry of horror, the water around her churned to foam from her panicked flailing.
Ara.
Her eyes were large and flashing silver with terror. He reached out his hand to grab her, buried his clumsy fingers into the folds of her vest, grabbed her waist and hauled her into his arms.
‘I’ve got you,’ he told her, pulling her close to him, pulling her head out of the water and wiping her long dark hair from her eyes. ‘I’ve got you.’
She couldn’t speak yet because she was coughing water up from her lungs.
‘You came from outside, didn’t you?’ Eliot glanced up at the vault of stars above the greenhouse. ‘I knew there was someone outside.’
What was better than the weight of her in his arms? Her fingers were thin, longer than he remembered. He had forgotten so many details. The jasmine smell of her, the baby hairs that haloed her forehead and dusted the backs of her cheekbones, the eczema on her slender wrists and around her ears. Her legs, the birthmark the shape of Peru high up on her inner thigh. He’d forgotten other things too, like how big and dark her eyes were, like singularities; they seemed to suck all the light out of the room. His panic turned, then, to elation. It was possible to save her. He had saved her.
ELIOT
12.05.12
ELIOT WOULD RELIVE THAT final day so often that it took on a dreamlike quality in his mind. On the day before the launch, Ara had told him that she couldn’t go through with it. They’d been in the back of the car, driving towards the British Interplanetary Society for the tree-planting ceremony.
‘What do you mean you can’t go through with it?’ he’d asked, glancing up to the mirror to check if the driver was listening.
‘Exactly that,’ she told him in a whisper, leaning across the empty seat between them.
‘Cold feet?’
She shook her head as the driver stopped at a traffic light. London’s sunlit skyline flashed past her head, the dome of St Paul’s gle
aming like a Fabergé egg, jostling up against the modern monuments that pierced the clouds.
‘Let’s climb out and run that way,’ she turned and pointed beyond the river, ‘and just keep going. You and me.’
‘What?’ Eliot was unsure whether or not to laugh. ‘Ara, we’re just here for the ceremony. And then we have to get back to the space centre.’
‘I’m not going back,’ she said, and when she turned to him her eyes were shining, the colour of iron. She took a deep breath, holding back tears, and clutched at her seatbelt. The car started up again, heading down towards Vauxhall.
‘What if we get there and there’s nothing?’
‘Then we’d still have made it,’ Eliot said. ‘Do you think the Apollo crew looked up at the moon and asked, “What if we get there and it’s just a rock?’ ”
‘Maybe not. But no one is keen to follow after them. It’s not as if they discovered America.’
‘True,’ Eliot agreed. ‘But why are you saying these things?’
‘Because I know something,’ she said. Glanced up again at the driver’s mirror. He was a quiet uniformed man who Eliot had not met before, keeping his eyes on the traffic.
‘I know that we might not get to Terra-Two,’ Ara said.
Later on, those words would toll like a bell in his nightmares, but that day he’d just shaken his head with confusion. ‘What?’
‘Do you remember anything about the Williamson Inquiry?’ Eliot squinted at her. He vaguely recalled the name. ‘The one commissioned by Save the Children to look into human rights abuses at space academies.’
‘Oh . . .’ He waved a hand dismissively. He’d heard talk of this on the news for a little while, and the directors of the space agency and their teachers had only ever referred to it with contempt or vague amusement. A few months after, it had been suspended.
‘My dad knows a lawyer who worked on it,’ Ara said. ‘And he told me . . .’ she took a deep breath, ‘that they think we have a less than twenty per cent chance of making it to Terra-Two.’
‘What . . . ?’ Eliot’s head was spinning a little. Ara blinked back tears and continued.
‘It’s lots of things. The skeletal support from the ground, the shortcuts taken by the UK Space Agency to win the race, the fact that Igor Bovarin’s gravity-assist drive has never been tested on a manned mission. And he told me that—’
‘No.’ Eliot waved a hand to stop her. A dizzy wave of carsickness was rushing over him. ‘That can’t be true. Your dad’s not a scientist.’
‘No, but there were independent scientists and engineers and professors acting as witnesses for the inquiry. And they all said the same thing. That the mission is destined to fail.’
‘No, you said twenty per cent.’
‘Okay, it’s eighty per cent destined to fail. That’s a one in five chance of success. Not great odds.’
‘Better than rolling a dice,’ Eliot said.
‘A die. Singular. Are you even listening to me?’
‘Yes.’ Eliot looked out at the water. ‘I just don’t believe you. It would be terrible if we failed. A humiliation for the UKSA. Why would they send out a ship with little chance of surviving?’
‘Because, once we leave, it won’t be their problem anymore. We’d reach Terra-Two in twenty-three years. But once we launch the gravity-assist drive and enter interstellar space, we’ll be travelling at close to light speed. In Earth time, we won’t reach Terra-Two for decades, not even including the time it takes for them to receive any messages from us. Do you remember the Shēngmìng? The Chinese generation ship that basically went missing. It was all about the launch for them. Showing the country’s strength in the wake of the recession, and a year later they basically lost all contact with the ship.’
Eliot remembered the story.
‘For them,’ Ara continued, and by ‘them’ Eliot imagined that she was referring to the flag-waving masses, ‘for them, the height of victory is tomorrow, the launch, when the whole world will be watching. They won’t even care about the mission two months from now when the Olympics start. None of them will live to see us land. And, maybe we won’t.’
‘No.’ Eliot turned away from her again, watched as a crowd of commuters waxed and waned at the crossing. They turned, over the bridge, past the busy tube station. ‘It’s not true. They’re planning on sending missions of people after us. For people to join us. I don’t believe you.’
‘Because you don’t want to,’ she said, leaning across the gap between them.
‘What do you want me to do with this information, Ara?’
‘Follow me,’ she said. The car headed down a familiar side road.
‘You think that we can drop out?’ he said, angry now. ‘You think that’s even an option?’
Ara shook her head. They both knew that, at this late stage, it would take more courage to leave the programme than it would take simply to go to space.
The British Interplanetary Society came into view, and within a few seconds they were almost there, heading into the car park.
‘What’s your plan?’ Eliot asked her as the driver slowed. Ara looked at him for a long time, as if holding the knowledge in her fist, daring herself to speak.
JUNO
16.02.13
TEMP: 1°C
O2: 75% SEA LEVEL
WEEKS UNTIL RESCUE: 7
THEIR SEARCH FOR ELIOT led them up to the greenhouse, where most of the lights were still off. Poppy called out his name in the darkness, and Juno followed clumsily behind her. They’d woken that morning to find the infirmary unlocked. Juno cursed herself for the oversight – of course Eliot knew how to unlock the doors. Though she was comforted by the fact that he couldn’t have gone far, the short walk up to the greenhouse exhausted her. Nearly freezing temperatures. Low atmospheric pressure. She was beginning to feel it, the same heaviness in her body, the swollen face and hands that she’d experienced when first boarding the ship. As she and Poppy searched the greenhouse, Juno found herself stopping constantly to catch her breath, her pulse throbbing shallowly in her fingers.
‘He can’t have gone far,’ Poppy said.
‘I know,’ Juno agreed. She felt as if she was breathing through a straw. ‘Go ahead. I’ll catch up.’
‘We just need to make sure he’s okay.’ Poppy began to run.
In the darkness, the greenhouse was sinister and strange, plants covered in ice, the ground hostile and rough to touch. The cold pricked Juno’s face and leached through the wool of her jacket. It felt as if every morning when she awoke the temperature halved, and now it was so low that water vapour had begun to condense into mists that curled around their ankles.
In the end, it was Poppy who spotted him first. The pale creature curled up amongst the leaves. His skin was white as moonlight, and the cold made the silver hairs all over his body stand on end. He looked as if he wasn’t breathing. Juno only registered Poppy’s scream a second later, by which point she was at Eliot’s side, rolling him onto his back, checking for a pulse and pulling off her scarf to tie around his neck.
‘Is he breathing?’ Juno asked finally.
‘I think so,’ Poppy said, holding her arms under his shoulders, helping him to sit up.
‘Leave me,’ he mumbled, swatting her away.
‘Eliot,’ Poppy said, staring at him, ‘you could die up here. Do you realize how cold it is?’
‘That’s what she wants,’ he told her, his speech slurred in his confusion.
‘Who?’ Poppy asked.
‘Ara,’ he said.
Confusion, or hallucinations, Juno thought. Eliot must be in a worse state than she was.
‘Look, Eliot—’ Poppy’s voice softened just a little. ‘I know it’s hard for you, but we’ve all got to try and keep it together right now. At least until the Russian shuttle comes. Doing things like this—’
‘You don’t understand.’
‘Then explain it.’
Eliot squeezed his eyes shut, ‘I c-can’t. You’ll
hate me. And you’re right to.’
‘No one hates you,’ Poppy said.
‘You think I know, don’t you? Why she jumped into the Thames. You think I know and I’m not telling you.’ Poppy and Juno exchanged a frightened look. Nobody had mentioned Ara in months.
‘Eliot,’ Juno stepped a little closer to him, leaning on a branch, ‘what are you talking about.’
‘I’m talking about what she told me. The day she died. About the Williamson Inquiry and the Space Agency and Save the Children, all those things.’
‘Okay.’ Juno glanced at Poppy. ‘He’s clearly confused. We need to get him to Fae. And I don’t know if I can carry him.’
‘I know what I’m talking about,’ Eliot insisted, his teeth chattering. ‘She told me that we only have a twenty per cent chance of making it to Terra-Two.’
‘Well, that’s crazy,’ Juno said. ‘Where would she even get a number like that? What gave her that idea?’
‘She said she knew things. Knew people who knew. I don’t know. I didn’t believe her then, but now . . .’
‘Eliot,’ Poppy’s voice took on a scalding edge, ‘are you telling us that you know why Ara committed suicide?’
Eliot let out a manic bark of a laugh. ‘I know everything. The orbital period of Orlando, its perigee and apogee, I know all the code. I’ve recorded everything I’ve eaten for the past eleven and a half years.’
‘Okay,’ Poppy began, again struggling to get Eliot to stand up. He was in his striped pyjamas, and the pale balls of his toes had taken on the waxy hue that suggested frostbite. ‘Let’s go.’
‘No!’ Eliot pushed Poppy so hard that she almost lost her balance, reeling backwards in surprise.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Poppy. ‘You’re suggesting that Ara jumped because she thought that the mission would fail. But that makes no sense. If that is the reason then why didn’t she just run away? Why did she have to . . . ?’