The Loneliest Girl in the Universe

by Lauren James

  “Don’t worry,” J says into my ear. “I’ll look after you.”

  The words echo what J always said in my daydreams, when we first met and fell in love. I fight back another wave of vomit. The fiction I created about us feels like the naive nonsense of a child.

  “Please,” I gasp. “Whatever you’re planning, you can’t— Don’t—”

  “Romy?” The words, uncertain and hoarse, come from my mother. I stop talking abruptly.

  “Mum?” I say. The sound of her voice makes me feel like I’m eleven again.

  “Romy, who is that man?” Her words are calm – nothing like the manic shriek I remember from when I last saw her, smashing up the embryos.

  “Mum!” I choke back a sob.

  I used to crave the days when she was lucid more than anything else in the world. Even now, I want to run to her, to hide under her arm and breathe in her smell, despite the image that never leaves my mind: her pushing Dad away, him falling onto broken glass.

  “Mum, you have to help me!” I say, desperately grasping at a fragile hope. “He’s going to kill me!”

  “I’m going to kill you both, actually.” J jerks his arm against my neck, casually testing his strength. It’s a reminder of how powerless I am.

  “Let go of her,” my mother says, struggling to sit up in bed. “You’re hurting her!”

  “Oh, Talia. I’m going to do much more than hurt your daughter. I’m going to make you sit and watch as I kill her,” J says. “And then I’m going to kill you.”

  Tears stream down my face. “Why are you doing this?” I wail.

  “Haven’t you worked it out yet?” he spits. “This is my revenge. Your parents killed my mom and dad. Dr Silvers here was too busy fawning over her perfect little newborn baby to actually do her fucking job.”

  Suddenly, everything makes sense. “That wasn’t their fault!” His parents’ deaths were just an accident. He’s so lost in grief that he can’t see the truth.

  He laughs. “Not their fault? You have nightmares about the astronauts every single night, Romy. Why are you so frightened of them? What possible reason could you have to be so scared of long-dead crew members?”

  I don’t understand what point he’s making. Anyone would fear the astronauts, wouldn’t they? “They’re… It’s scary! The thought of them, it’s—”

  He shakes his head, talking over me. “You’re guilty. You know that if you hadn’t been born, the astronauts would still be alive.”

  “No, you’re wrong!” I deny it, but my mind is racing. Is that really the reason? Have I really felt like their deaths were my fault, all these years? Hundreds of lives, lost. Because … of me?

  “The torpor technology failed,” I say, weak and uncertain now in the face of his conviction. “There was nothing that could have saved them. Even if I hadn’t been born, they would still have died.”

  He squeezes his hand tight around both of my wrists. I hear the bones creak, and pain shoots up my arms.

  “You know that’s not true. Your parents were supposed to wake up my mom and dad five years into the journey. They were going to take over as caretakers while your parents went into stasis. But then you were born, so they stayed awake to raise little baby Romy. And my parents died. Along with hundreds of other astronauts!”

  But any mother would choose their baby over stasis, however important the mission was. NASA had even told them to stay awake. “But—”

  He doesn’t let me speak. “If Talia hadn’t been so selfish then my parents would be alive right now. They might even have noticed the failure in the stasis pods and woken everyone up before it was too late. Instead, everyone is dead.”

  “It’s not my mother’s fault she got pregnant,” I say, refusing to accept that he’s right. I know that my mother felt guilty about the astronauts, but I never really believed that she was responsible. How could she be? “Accidents happen. You can’t blame all of this on a mistake!”

  “She didn’t just accidentally get pregnant. She must have removed her birth control – all female crew members were fitted with IUD coils. It was intentional. She knew what a risk it would be to the mission, and she did it anyway. She destroyed everything. For you.”

  When I turn to her, I can see from her expression that J is right. I was never a “happy accident”.

  Suddenly, so much of my childhood makes sense. This really is her fault. She knew that. The reason she couldn’t look at me, for years after the astronauts died, was because she felt guilty.

  My brain stops fighting to deny this. J is right. My mother chose to have a baby, and because of that, she held herself responsible for the deaths of hundreds of astronauts.

  But that isn’t enough to explain everything he has done to me.

  “Even if it is her fault, why did you make up all those lies to me?” I say, salty tears dripping into my mouth. “Why the games? Why did you invent the UPR? If all you want is revenge, why not just kill me when you arrived? Why torture me for months like that?”

  “I was telling the truth when I said I was curious about you. That’s how it started. Then I realized that I had the perfect opportunity to make you suffer. To make you feel the pain I felt when my mom and dad died.”

  Even though he said we had a connection, he never actually identified with me at all. He just saw his need for revenge. Nothing I’ve ever said, and nothing I can say now, is going to change his mind. This will end in one of two ways – he kills me, or I kill him.

  I bite down on the inside of my cheek, forcing myself to be calm.

  “Your parents wouldn’t want you to do this,” I say, stalling for time. “Think of Lucy. And … and Jeremy.”

  Without warning, he twists my wrists in his grip until I hear a snap. I cry out, unable to think about anything but the pain in my left arm, searing hot and impossibly brutal.

  “How dare you. You don’t know a single thing about my parents.”

  “But I do,” my mother says, her voice hard. “They were good people. They wouldn’t have wanted this.”

  “I don’t believe a fucking word you say,” J hisses.

  “Lucy was one of my closest friends,” my mother continues. “Jeremy and I were partners for most of our in-class training. Do you think I didn’t mourn them? Do you really think it didn’t destroy me, inside and out, to have to admit that I’d lost them? Whatever you do to me, Jeremy, trust me, it can’t be worse than what I’ve done to myself.”

  “I don’t care how sad you are,” J says. “Your bleeding heart isn’t going to bring them back. I met you, before the ship launched. Do you even remember? A month before take-off, at a dinner party for the family of the crew. They’d just announced that you and your husband would be the first set of caretakers. After dessert was served, you promised me you’d take care of my parents while they were in stasis. You looked me dead in the eye and said that to my face.”

  “I remember, Jeremy,” she says. I can do nothing but look between them, fighting the pain shooting up my arm long enough to focus on what’s happening.

  “I told you that I’d been accepted on an astrophysical engineering course. That I wanted to be an astronaut, to join the colony on Earth II one day,” J continues. He twists his head to the side and wipes away tears on his shoulder. “You said that you’d make sure my mom and dad were waiting for me.”

  “I did,” my mother says, quiet, agonized.

  “It was all a lie!” he shouts.

  “Let her go, Jeremy,” my mother repeats. She’s still struggling to sit up, her arms trembling with the effort. “I admit it. I’m a terrible person. I’ve spent years hating myself for what I did. But please leave Romy out of this. She was only a little girl. This isn’t her fault. She’s a good person – the best. If you’ve been talking to her, you must know that.”

  “Of course I know that,” J yells. He’s breathing in short bursts, hot against my cheek. “But why should she get to live? Why should she get to be happy? If she didn’t exist, my parents would s
till be alive!”

  J’s hands are still squeezing around my broken wrist, so tight the pain makes my vision go black.

  My mother lets out a feeble, furious yowling sound, like a dying cat desperately trying to protect her kitten. She jerks out of the bed on wobbly legs, stumbling towards us with her arm raised.

  Through the spots in my vision I can see something in her hand, something sharp and metallic.

  It’s a hypodermic syringe, filled with some kind of liquid.

  She dives for J, who pushes me away so that I stumble and nearly fall over. I catch myself on the end of the bed, my weight landing on my broken wrist and sending me dizzy.

  By the time I steady myself enough to turn round, J has caught my mother’s arm. They wrestle, but my mother is still weak from the stasis. It’s only the threat of the syringe that keeps him from overpowering her immediately.

  I tear my eyes away from them. This might be my only chance to find another weapon, something better than the scissors I dropped in the corridor. I need to look now, while J is distracted with my mother. Maybe I can save us both.

  I run over to the surgical counter and start pulling open drawers, scattering bandages and pill packets across the floor as I search for something – anything – sharp enough to hurt. Sharp enough to kill.

  A series of thuds sounds from behind me. I spin, just in time to watch J overpower my mother. He pushes her hand down and jabs the needle of the syringe into her thigh.

  She lets out a horrified cry when he presses down on the plunger, but carries on fighting him. The syringe empties into her flesh, crimson blood filling up the chamber.

  Heat flushes through me. It’s too late. He’ll come for me next, and I’ve found nothing I can use to defend myself.

  Running across the room, I yank at the handle of a door, ignoring the sound of fighting behind me.

  As soon as I slam shut the door, I press the keypad on the wall. The lock slides into place with a neat click.

  Breath leaves me in a rush. I’ve bought myself a tiny bit of time. I’m in a supply cupboard – there must be something in here that I can use. Some kind of surgical equipment would work.

  I start rifling through boxes on the shelves, but I keep thinking about my mother’s blood clouding the syringe. I wonder what was injected into her. It must be something dangerous, if she was planning to use it as a weapon.

  I shake myself. I need to keep looking. The only way to help her now is to stop him.

  I sift through more bandages, tweezers, towels. Nothing useful. Nothing dangerous.

  There’s a rattling at the door handle. Spinning round, I watch it move up and down, then fall still. Lights flash on the keypad. He’s trying to get in.

  Diving across the room, I press buttons, trying to counter his orders. The door unlocks, and then locks again.

  This is the same system used for the doors on The Infinity. If I can take the front panel off the keypad, then I think I can cut the wires and break the lock so that J can’t open it at all. It happened once to the bathroom door on The Infinity. The wiring failed and it froze shut. We had to take the door off its hinges.

  I grab a plastic bottle off the shelves and use it to smash the keypad, throwing all my weight into each swing until the plastic panel shatters into pieces. J’s beeping pauses, and then restarts faster.

  I pull at the panel until there’s enough space to reach behind. I run my fingers over the wires, searching for the one I know will break the lock. I tear the wire free, pulling my hand away just as the circuit board sparks with electricity.

  The screen goes dark. It worked.

  The door shudders. He must be hitting it. He’s going to break it down.

  The handle starts jerking, like he’s trying to work it free. A memory flashes across my mind: my mother, replacing a circuit board. Saying to me, “Don’t touch the wires, Romy. They’ll shock you.”

  I pick up the loose wire, still sparking with electricity, and press it to the metal door handle. A white flash blinds me as power jumps between them.

  There’s a hoarse, pained noise. The handle stops moving. I hear a muffled thud as J falls to the floor.

  The fuse must have shorted, because the soft ceiling lighting fades into black. I press my ear to the door, but I can’t hear anything.

  The electricity could have been enough to kill him. I hope.

  My breathing sounds wet and loud in the silence. I still need a weapon, just in case he’s alive. I need to be prepared.

  I start searching through boxes by touch, carefully turning over items until I know what they are, until I’m certain they aren’t useful.

  The lights come back on while I’m looking through the final shelf, illuminating a box labelled “Scalpels”. I open it with stiff, numb fingers, pulling out a sharp knife. This time, I don’t even need to test the blade.

  When the shining metal catches the light, I realize I’m trembling. I brace my muscles, trying to stop it. I need a strong, firm grip.

  There’s still no noise from the next room. I can’t even hear my mother.

  I want to stay in here, safe and alone, but if there’s a chance she’s still alive then I need to help her. I can’t hide again like last time.

  I pull the emergency release lever at the top of the door. It slides open halfway, shudders, then stops in its tracks.

  J is lying on the floor. He’s pale, and his left arm is covered in dark burns from where he must have been holding the door handle when he was electrocuted. His breathing is shallow but even.

  He’s still alive.

  I turn sideways and squeeze through the gap between the door and the doorjamb. The air smells of burnt meat, sharp and acrid.

  J groans and rolls towards me.

  “Romy.” His voice is hoarse.

  I don’t hesitate. I bend down and thrust the scalpel up into the side of his stomach. It’s so tough that for a moment I think I’ve hit his belt, until I feel the tacky warmth of blood in between my fingers. His face, still slack from unconsciousness, twists in pain.

  My eyes fill with tears, but I blink them away and twist the blade, driving the blade as far into his guts as I can reach. The impact vibrates down my arm as it hits something dense.

  J reaches up, hands sliding across my elbows, both of us slippery with blood. I pull free, driving the knife into his chest.

  Air explodes from his lungs in a thick, watery cough, and his hand comes up, fist pushing into the wound, trying to quench the blood. He drops his head back, making a sound that’s half-groan, half-frustrated laugh.

  “I always told you that you were stronger than you realized, didn’t I, Romy Silvers?”

  I stare down at him, my vision buzzing with spots of black. I can’t think of anything worth saying to him. Instead, I turn to my mother. She’s collapsed on the end of the hospital bed, looking down at the needle sticking out of her thigh. As soon as I read the resignation in her expression, I know it’s hopeless.

  I pull out the needle and read the label on the syringe. It’s a lethal injection.

  She sacrificed herself to protect me?

  “I’m sorry, Romy,” she says.

  “It’s not your fault. You … you tried your best. And I got him. He’s dying.”

  She gasps, grimacing in pain. “That’s not what I meant.”

  I know what she means. J is a tiny droplet in the ocean of issues between us.

  “Why did you do it?” I whisper. “How could you just let Dad die like that, without even trying to save him? You just stood there.”

  She opens her mouth to answer, but her eyes are already drifting shut. My mind replays the moment of his death, the look in her eyes when Dad fell into that smashed freezer door. But now I don’t see anger and murderous rage. I see pain, and fear, and helplessness. She was lost, and in agony.

  Sobs rack my body. “You left me alone. You left me all on my own.”

  I thought it was me. I thought she hated me so much that she couldn’t look
at me, that she would rather die in stasis than be alone with me. But she wanted a child so desperately that she removed her birth control. She ignored NASA’s rules.

  I was wanted. I was really, truly wanted.

  She loved me so much, so deeply. That just wasn’t enough to stop the pain when her friends died because of that love.

  “I didn’t want to hurt you,” she whispers. She looks so small and fragile. Nothing like the terrible version of her that exists in my memory.

  She saved me. She left me alone so that she wouldn’t hurt me too.

  I reach out to touch her neck, fingers pressed against her pulse. J lets out a long groan behind me, but I ignore him. He’s too injured to move, let alone find another way to hurt me.

  There is nothing to fear here – just a sad woman who has been in pain for a long time. She would never hurt me intentionally. She never meant to hurt Dad.

  “I forgive you,” I say finally, not sure it’s true yet, but knowing that one day it will be – and I need her to hear it, in her final moments.

  Her mouth forms the word “sorry”, but she’s unconscious before she can make a sound.

  It takes a long time for her heart to still. By the time her eyes have stopped darting back and forth beneath her lids, the tears have dried on my cheeks.

  My mother is gone, at last. I wish things had been different. But part of me is glad that I got to say goodbye, instead of leaving her in stasis for the rest of my life, caught somewhere between life and death. Neither of us able to move on.

  I stand up. My whole body screams in pain.

  At some point while I was holding my mother, J went still and silent. He looks so small now, so underwhelming. When I touch my foot to his shoulder, he doesn’t react. He’s dead.

  J is dead. My mother is dead. I’m alive.

  It was the only way this could have ended.

  HOURS SINCE THE ETERNITY CAUGHT UP:

  41

  I leave my mother and J lying in the sick bay and stagger out of the room, dropping onto my hands and knees in the corridor. My chest feels tight, and every time I breathe I think I’m about to start crying again, but the tears won’t come.