‘Anyone gets caught, we don’t tell on the other person, okay?’ Yada says.
I don’t speak.
‘Okay?’
‘Yeah.’ Then I wait, out of breath, my clothes soggy and filthy from the garden. I’m shivering. My bed is getting soaked. I replay in my mind the last fifteen seconds of my life. If Yada wasn’t with me, there’s no way Zarif would have opened that door. I know it.
I listen for the tiniest sound. The door to the courtyard closes and there are footsteps. I slow my breathing down and pray.
Our door opens and light from the hall falls on me.
‘Get up,’ Palatnik says in a low voice.
I stop breathing.
‘Get up now.’
I’m a rock.
‘Yada Luang. You have three seconds to be standing in front of me. One—’
Yada?
‘Two—’
She slides out of her capsule.
‘Three,’ he says as her shoes hit ground. I open my eyes the tiniest slit and I can see three sets of feet – Palatnik and Bonnie facing me; Yada facing away. ‘You always sleep in your clothes?’ he asks her. ‘And your shoes?’
‘No.’
‘Security found this.’ There’s a rustling sound. ‘Your exam paper. Can you explain to me why it was rolled up and placed in a door jamb at the end of this hallway?’
I groan on the inside. Yada grabbed a piece of folded-up paper out of her drawer on our way outside. Why did she have to use her exam paper?
‘No.’
‘Can you explain to me why there was an explosion in the central courtyard a few minutes ago.’
‘No,’ Yada says.
‘Was anybody with you?’
‘No.’
‘You sure about that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Come. Now.’ The three of them leave the room and the door is pulled closed.
I count to ten, then I sit up, banging my head.
‘What were you guys doing out there?’ It’s Zarif.
‘Nothing,’ I whisper into the darkness.
‘It didn’t sound like nothing. It sounded like something blew up,’ he says.
I want to spill everything to him and ask him what to do. He’s older than me. He might know. I want him to be my friend or my big brother and to give me advice, but something tells me not to. With any of the others I would, but Zarif has kept too quiet. He’s never shared anything about himself. I don’t think I can trust him. And that look in his eye when he was deciding whether to let me in or not—
‘Thanks for letting us in,’ I say. There’s silence for a few seconds. I hear Zarif’s bed sheets rustle as he settles down.
I wonder if I should go and tell them that I was with her? Yada and I made a deal that we wouldn’t dob on the other person, but it’s not fair if only she goes down. I want to get out of my capsule and own up, but something inside stops me. I mean it was her idea, right? And she wanted to do it right outside Palatnik’s window. I just went along with it. I mean, I built the rocket, but I didn’t even light the fuse. She did that.
I lie back down.
She did it.
And if she hadn’t put her stupid exam paper in the door she wouldn’t have got caught.
I’ll wait.
I’ll wait till she gets back. Maybe they won’t send her home. We’re so close to launch. Two days. They won’t send her home now, and if I go out there I might make it a bigger thing than it is. I mean, so what? It was a little prank. It was just like setting off a fire cracker. What was the harm?
I’ll stay here, take a nap, talk to her when she gets back.
I close my eyes.
They snap back open.
I’m never going to sleep again. Especially if she goes home.
I’m freezing. I want to get up and change my clothes, but I don’t want to risk getting out of bed. I lie there, stone cold, numb, my bed sheets covered in dirt from the garden. I remember that we’re skydiving in the morning, but I try to forget. One disaster at a time.
I wait.
It must be more than an hour before I feel the light from the doorway fall on my face again. My eyes flick open. There are two sets of legs in the room. One set like tree stumps; the other like twigs. My heart, my lungs and all my other organs are in my throat as I wait for someone to say, ‘Dash Campbell. Get up.’
But nobody does.
‘You get changed and catch some sleep,’ Bonnie says, then shuts the door. It’s just Yada. She stands there for a few seconds as the footsteps fade up the hall. She crouches and looks into my capsule.
‘What happened?’ I say.
‘I have to go home.’
‘What? Really? Why?’
‘Um, I set off a rocket in the courtyard outside our mission commander’s window. Weren’t you there?’ she asks. ‘They took me to James Johnston’s office. He says it, too. They say that I have acted irresponsibly. I have to go.’
‘But what about me?’ I say, crawling up to the feet end of my capsule where the opening is. ‘Did you tell them about me?’
‘No.’
I’m half relieved and half angry at her.
‘Why not? I’ll have to tell them.’ It hurts to say this.
‘Why?’
‘What do you mean, “why”?’
‘Sssshhhhh,’ someone says. ‘Stop talking.’ It’s Z.
‘Sorry,’ Yada whispers. She lowers her voice even more. ‘What is the point of you going home too?’
‘Because we did the thing together. That’s the point.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I go home in the morning. You stay. This is your dream.’
‘It’s your dream, as well. We’ll protest. We’re not going to let you go. Not for a stupid plastic rocket. I’m gonna tell them I was there.’
‘No, I won’t let you.’
‘But what about you?’
‘Fall down seven times, stand up eight. That’s what my father says. Dust yourself off.’
I don’t even understand that. I want to. I’d like to think that I’d be cool about it, but there’s no way I would. I’d be so angry if I was told I had to go home. I’d be crushed by it. I can’t believe she can be so cool.
She looks me in the eye and squeezes my hand. I don’t know what to do.
‘When are they saying you have to go?’ I say.
‘The morning. At least I can sleep in.’ Her eyes look kind of shiny, when she says this. I don’t know if it’s happy or sad shiny.
I lean forward, give her a big hug and she gives it back. It feels kind of awkward, more like I’m trying to wrestle her than hug her, but I don’t want to switch holds in case she pulls the plug on it altogether. When we finally break she says, ‘Better get to sleep. Very good rocket you made. Thank you for teaching me. I’ll show my little brother in Bangkok.’
I force myself to smile.
‘Remember, fall down seven times, stand up eight,’ she says, then she stands up and I hear her poking around in her drawer for her pyjamas. She disappears up the hall and into the bathroom. I’m alone again. I get up and change my clothes, shivering as I do.
I feel terrible, but I know that I’m not going to dob myself in. My heart wants to, but my head won’t let it. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Head then heart. I don’t know. I slide back into bed and the two halves of me wrestle each other.
As Yada climbs into her capsule she checks to see if I’m still awake. She knows what I’m thinking.
‘Don’t say anything. Don’t tell anyone. Send me a message from space.’
Palatnik switches the lights on at 4.55 next morning. I pull on my jacket and look into Yada’s pod. She’s out cold. I want to wake her and say goodbye again. I rem
ember that hug. Zarif looks at me, making me feel guilty. If he wanted to, he could tell Palatnik right now and I’d be going home. He could do it in a second. This is my chance to own up, too.
But I don’t.
‘Let’s go!’ Palatnik says.
I look at Yada one last time, then I grab Marv from in among my twisted sheets, pocket him, and follow Chuck down the hall with the others. He leads us out across the central lawn and through the hangar to the tarmac, where a small plane is crouched, waiting.
19. Slaying the Dragon
‘I swear to God I’m not supposed to be here,’ I scream over my shoulder. My heart is doing a thousand beats a minute.
‘You told me that already,’ Palatnik screams back over the sound of the plane and the blast of wind rushing in through the open door. It’s so loud it sounds like I’m standing between carriages on a fast train. But I’m not. I wish I was. Instead, I’m four thousand metres above the ground. I can see the whole world below, spread out like a satellite map.
‘I swear. Please don’t make me do this. I should be sent home. I was with Yada last night. Seriously. I should be going home, too.’
I don’t know why I’m saying this, but suddenly, faced with falling from a plane, I’m flipping out. I will do anything for this not to happen. I know how much I sound like Scott on the Vomit Comet, but I can’t help it.
‘That’s nice, but I don’t think you were,’ says Palatnik. ‘Stop blubbering and get ready to jump.’
I’m not just a bit scared. I seriously cannot fall from this plane and at this moment I don’t care that I’m throwing everything away. I dig my heels into the door frame and I push back against Palatnik, who is trying to slide forward. I’m strapped to his front. I have just watched Zarif tumble out of the plane. Rafaella is behind me, strapped to her instructor, ready to go after I do. She is struggling, crying. It feels like a car crash unfolding before my eyes.
My body shivers, but my face is burning up. I feel Marv’s warm body against my chest and I wish I hadn’t brought him.
Palatnik shuffles forward. I look down, staring into my greatest fear. Thousands of metres of empty space, broken only by scattered wispy clouds, then hard, hard ground.
‘I’m telling you—’ The words stick in my throat. ‘I’m not supposed to be here. Please don’t make me go. I’ll be sick. I’ll vomit on you in the air. I’m sorry for everything. Please, Chuck. I’ll—’
He gives me a shove. My legs buckle and slip off the door frame.
Then we’re gone. He has jumped. We have jumped.
For the first few seconds I fight to get back on board, but the shrinking speck of glinting metal laughs at me. Everything I’ve ever done or seen in my life roars through me as I fall. I forget everything I’ve been taught. I curl into a ball and we start to tumble and spin badly.
‘Hands out! Hands out! Arch your body! Don’t curl up! Do it like you were told, you imbecile!’ Palatnik shouts right in my ear.
I don’t. We keep tumbling. I know they said to arch my back like my body is the front of a spacecraft on re-entry, but that’s way too scary.
He grabs my arm and a leg, tries to straighten me. I fight against it.
‘You’re gonna die if you don’t listen to me.’
This helps me to loosen up a bit. Palatnik uncurls my arms and legs and stretches them out like a star, but we still tumble. Up is down, down is up. I open my eyes for a second. I can imagine Marv’s little heart hammering away inside my flight suit. I wonder for a second if he is the world’s first skydiving rat. Then I remember that I’m about to die and my mind is ripped back into freefall.
The tumbling slows down. I’m falling face and chest to the ground now, but strangely it feels like we are no longer falling. Just floating.
We punch through a cool, moist cloud. I can see the spaceport way, way below. The sun is rising behind it. There are miniature planes on the tarmac. I can even see protestors at the gate. Directly below us is a train, like a silver snake, slithering across the desert. We plunge towards it.
‘This is 120 miles an hour!’ Palatnik screams. ‘That’s 200 k’s! Arooooooooo!’
Terrified, I try to fill my mind with something else. The most boring thing I can muster. I think of our tiny apartment, Karl, the deadness of my suburb, that feeling of going nowhere.
‘Time to pull the cord!’ Palatnik yells. I panic and wonder which cord. Then I remember the chute. I look to my altimeter and it says 4,000 feet. It’s time.
I reach around to my back. My frozen fingers search for the cord, but there isn’t one. ‘I can’t find it!’
‘You will.’
I keep scrabbling and my hand flicks something that might be it, but I still don’t grab anything. ‘I can’t! I can’t!’
‘You will,’ Palatnik says.
My hand clutches something. I know it isn’t going to work, but I pull it anyway. Chuck helps me pull it out in the right direction.
BANG.
We slam into an invisible brick wall. My shoulders are being torn off as I’m ripped back into the sky, towards the jump-plane. Within three seconds we go from almost 200 kilometres an hour to just 20. I flick a look up and catch a glimpse of a purple and yellow chute way above us. I quickly count the nine pockets that make up the canopy. Palatnik’s told us that if there are less than nine, the ropes must be twisted and we need to sort it out. I count them again. Nine. The crazy wind-rush noise in my ears is now replaced by a calming whoosh.
We cruise, quietly, slowly. That’s what I notice most – how quiet it is now. And the fact that I’m alive. The world looks incredible from here.
I feel Marv crawling up to the neck of my skydiving suit, maybe trying to get a better view. He’s at the neck hole and I start to worry that he might actually squeeze right out.
‘Don’t!’ I say.
‘What?’ says Palatnik.
‘Nothing,’ I say, poking two fingers into my neckline to shove Marv down. ‘Stay.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ But Marv keeps pushing. He bites me on the finger, then I feel a gnawing at my skydiving suit. I give him a hard squeeze and he twists and squirms out of my grip, and pokes his head out for air. I go to poke his head back down, but he bites me again. This is one determined, hardcore, skydiving rat. Now that his head is out, I realise that he isn’t going any further. He just wants to see what’s going on. I grin. I hold on to his tail through the dive suit, just for safety.
‘Good boy,’ I say.
‘Who?’ says Palatnik.
We’re close to the ground now. A couple of hundred metres to go. Chuck pulls cords and we spin around and around in circles as we drift down. I can imagine the wind in Marv’s face, his whiskers plastered back to his snout, front teeth hanging out with joy, and I realise that my front teeth are hanging out, too. I’m actually happy. All that time I spent worrying about jumping out of a plane and now I’ve done it. James Johnston said when we were selected, ‘There’s nothing to fear but fear itself.’ This is what he meant.
After a long time drifting our final approach happens quickly. We stop spinning and suddenly we’re screaming towards the ground in a straight line. There’s a black four-wheel-drive down there and we’re going to land about 40 metres away from it. We’re falling really quickly and I hope Chuck knows what he’s doing. He seems to be dropping us too fast. The desert floor is streaming past us and I’m having simulator flashbacks – except that this ground is real. It feels like we’re going to hit hard. I lift my legs up and get ready for impact. Marv scurries back down into my suit for safety. I imagine him covering his eyes with his paws. Palatnik pulls cords and we slow right up. His feet hit ground. Then mine. We run. Fast. He’s on my back and our feet are moving quickly. Our legs tangle and I go to fall on my face, but he pulls the cords, we slow up and, finally, we lan
d on our butts.
We stop.
Solid ground.
I’m alive.
Palatnik unclips me at shoulder and hip and stands up. He leaves me there without a word and walks away. I flop back on the grass and look at the sky. I’ve never been happier to feel the earth beneath me. Maybe I’ve never been happier. I’ve hugged the monster, slayed the dragon. I’m giddy with adrenaline. I feel invincible. I’m a superhero. I turn over and kiss the ground. I wipe the dirt off my mouth.
‘Can we do it again?’ I say. My ears are so blocked I can hardly hear myself speak.
Zarif comes into view, looking down at me. He says something, but I can’t hear him. I pop my ears and they squeak loudly. ‘I’ll do it again,’ he says.
I sit up. ‘Where’s Rafaella?’ I look around. She’s nowhere.
‘I don’t know,’ he says.
I hold out a hand and he helps me up. We walk over to where Zarif’s instructor and Palatnik are loading the chutes into a black four-wheel-drive Range Rover. It has a black luggage trailer on the back.
‘Hey,’ I call out. Palatnik looks up. ‘Where’s Raf?’
Zarif’s instructor is listening to someone on a walkie talkie. He speaks to Palatnik.
‘Still in the plane. She wouldn’t jump,’ Palatnik says.
‘I wouldn’t jump either,’ I say. ‘But you made me.’
‘That’s right. And you almost killed me by rolling into a ball rather than arching your back as you were told. That’ll go on report.’
‘So what happens to Raf?’ says Zarif.
‘Home.’ Palatnik shrugs.
‘What?’ My ears are still funny and I figure I can’t have heard this right.
‘She didn’t complete the challenge. She goes home.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that.’
We stop right next to the four-wheel-drive and stand there, glaring at him.
‘What was that you said about being with Yada Luang last night?’ he says.
‘Oh – nothing.’
Galactic Adventures Page 9