The Life Below

by Alexandra Monir

  Dedication

  For Chris and Leo,

  My world and my stars.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One: Earth

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Part Two: Mars

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Part Three: Europa

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Alexandra Monir

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  Earth

  Prologue

  PONTUS TO EARTH LIVE BLOG

  DAY 43

  ASTRONAUT: ARDALAN, NAOMI

  [MESSAGE STATUS: UPLOAD FAILURE]

  Some disasters begin with a warning, an iceberg you can spot from miles ahead. Others come on all at once, as violent as they are quick, like the earthquakes and hurricanes that wrecked us back home. But up here, it’s easy to miss the trigger altogether. A wire doesn’t make a sound when it snaps. You don’t know what’s happened until after—when the creeping sense of dread moves beyond your body and takes the form of a flawed ship.

  I don’t think I’ve ever felt so helpless as I do now, writing to an entire population that will never see these words. We’re going dark and you won’t know why or what it means, but you’ll assume the worst. And that’s what has me wide-awake and clammy with sweat in the middle of the night, afraid that if I open my mouth I’ll start screaming and never stop.

  I can’t live with them thinking I’m dead. Just imagining my parents and Sam holding each other in grief at a memorial ceremony, staring at my photo while mourners recite Rūmī, hurts worse than any physical pain. And Leo . . . what will he do when he hears the news? When my emails and video messages come to a sudden halt, how will he react? How will I make it through losing the four of them? I used to think communicating through a computer screen would never be enough, but now it seems like the ultimate privilege. One that I’d give anything to have back.

  Maybe that’s why I’m writing now, even as logic tells me it’s hopeless. I have to keep trying, on the off chance that I might press Submit and, this time, hear the whoosh of delivery. The sound of everything returning to normal. Or at least as close to it as “normal” can be up here.

  We’d been traveling through space for just forty-two days, three hours, and twelve minutes when it happened. It was seven in the morning, Coordinated Universal Time, and the first thing I noticed when I woke up was the sound of silence. Normally, NASA Mission Control serves as our alarm clock, waking us up at the same time each morning by piping a song through the cabin speakers. You could count on them to choose something on-brand and space-themed, like yesterday’s vintage Coldplay track, “A Sky Full of Stars.” But today there was no song at all. Someone must have fallen asleep on the job. Still, I woke up on cue.

  We had half an hour to ourselves before we were due in the dining room for breakfast, and over the past few days I’d figured out how to get ready in ten minutes or less. This way, I could start the day in my favorite part of the ship—the one place where I never felt claustrophobic, or desperate to claw my way out.

  I climbed out of my bunk and slipped off my favorite flannel pajamas, which somehow still retained the faintest smell of home. Then I stepped into the tiny shower stall attached to my cabin, which flashed a green light as soon as my feet hit the floor. A timer began, reminding me that the water would shut off in three minutes. Our entire existence here on the Pontus seemed to be dominated by countdown clocks.

  After squeezing a dollop of shampoo onto my head and rinsing as frantically as someone with a lice problem, the shower was over. I toweled off and threw on a pair of gray track pants and a peach hoodie, then slid open the door of my cabin to the common room. Usually at least one or two of us could be found in here before breakfast, reading or watching TV, but it was empty this morning.

  I jogged through the long module that makes up our crew quarters and rode the elevator pod down to the main hatch, leaving the artificial gravity behind. From there I floated, into a place that comforted and intimidated me in equal measure.

  The Observatory is a circular chamber made up of wall-to-wall, indestructible quartz-glass windows, which gives you the illusion of flying untethered through the universe. It’s the high of a spacewalk, minus the danger. The darkness surrounds you on all sides, with a sudden sweep of beauty whenever the ship spirals within view of Earth. This was one of those mornings when I got to see the shock of color—the blue marble of home.

  I pressed my palms against the glass, staring in awe. Somewhere on that planet, in a time zone eight hours behind ours, my parents and brother were just now falling asleep for the night, while six thousand miles from them, Leo was waking up and starting his day. I closed my eyes, trying to picture his surroundings, what that day would look like. And that’s when the pain socked me in the stomach. We don’t exist in the same world anymore.

  I took a few breaths to steady myself, stopping the tears before they had a chance to start. I turned away from the blue, keeping my gaze fixed on the darkness and trying to pinpoint the stars around me, until it was time to join the others. When I crawled back through the hatch, I found someone waiting for me on the other side.

  Jian Soo, crewmate and copilot of our mission, glanced up sharply as I tumbled back into gravity.

  “Morning,” I greeted him. “You okay?”

  He shook his head, his eyes frantic.

  “Communication’s down. Our flight nav software is still working fine, but I can’t get any response from Houston. And then Sydney told me she tried logging on to email and kept getting an error message that said no connection found.” He looked at me intently. “You can fix it, right?”

  My first thought was that it was a joke. He was just pulling a prank—probably Beckett Wolfe’s idea—to see how fast they could get a panic attack out of me. But then I remembered who I was talking to. Jian was the honest, solid, good one among us. And as I thought of the quiet this morning, the forgotten alarm from Mission Control, my stomach plunged.

  “It—it has to be just a hiccup,” I said, forcing myself to stay calm. “Let me go take a look.”

  That was my job, to run all the tech and communications on the ship. It had been easy enough until today, but this was uncharted territory. The Pontus was never supposed to lose its connection, not for a millisecond. It was as vital to the ship as oxygen.

  I sprinted past Jian, toward the Communications Bay and its array of computers, where I found each screen flashing the same message in bold red letters.

  COMMUNICATION SIGNALS DROPPED—NO CONNECTION FOUND.

  “Houston.” My voice came out like a whisper, but it didn’t matter. No one could hear me anymore. “Houston, we’re experiencing a comm failure. I’m rebooting the systems and running diagnostics, and will wait for further instructions from Mission Control.”

  By the time the computers powered back on after the reboot, my anxiety had grown into full-fledged panic.
The dreaded words returned on-screen—NO CONNECTION FOUND—and my fingers shook as I ran a diagnostics scan, praying the answer would flash in front of me with a simple solution. Within minutes, the problem was staring me in the face. But it was the opposite of simple.

  It was our X-band antenna. The single piece of equipment on this ship that enabled all our communication with Earth wasn’t even registering on the equipment scan. It was as if the antenna never existed.

  Something was bubbling in my stomach, a nausea-inducing fear, but I forced myself to stay focused and keep moving. I raced out of the Communications Bay and back to the hatch, where Jian was now joined by Sydney and Dev, the three of them looking almost as rattled as I felt. They turned to me expectantly, but all I could do was shake my head.

  “I’m going to the payload bay. Something’s up with the antenna.”

  “Should we go with you?” Dev offered.

  “One of you, maybe. There’s not room for much more. But we’ve got to hurry.”

  I yanked open the hatch door and climbed inside, with Dev right behind me. We crawled and then floated our way through two different tunnel passageways, known as nodes, until we reached the center of the ship. The payload bay required a password to enter, which always struck me as odd—was a break-in really such a risk when we were the only six humans for hundreds of millions of miles? It took Dev and me ten minutes of racking our brains and scrolling through the notes on our wrist monitors before we finally cracked it.

  The hatch door swung open to reveal the vastest stretch of our ship, towering four stories high and packed from floor to ceiling with rows upon rows of cargo, all sealed in white compartments built into the walls. Attached to one of those walls would be a seven-foot-tall, dish-shaped antenna. It was the focal point of the room, the home base of our comm system.

  Except . . . it was gone.

  The thumping in my chest tripled in speed, loud enough for me to hear the frenetic beating through my headset. I stared at the giant empty space overwhelming the room, half convinced I was hallucinating. It wouldn’t be the first time an astronaut lost their grip on reality.

  “Tell me—how does the biggest, most powerful antenna of its kind just up and disappear?”

  “It doesn’t,” Dev says, all color draining from his face. “Someone made it disappear.”

  I followed his gaze and that’s when I saw the loose bolt, drifting toward us from the back of the module. It was one of the same bolts used to secure the antenna, only this one was floating free—and heavy enough to kill us with a single strike.

  “Move!” I screamed, grabbing Dev’s arm and pulling him away just before the bolt careened into our path. We each seized one of the handrails running up the length of the wall, swinging from one to the next like amateur rock climbers in zero g. My head brushed the ceiling as we reached the top story, a safe distance from the floating weapon below. I looked down at the damaged payload bay in disbelief.

  “Someone did this to us. Someone actually snuck in here, unscrewed the bolts, dismantled the antenna, and . . .”

  My eyes caught on the payload door, fused into the opposite wall. It wasn’t supposed to open for months—not until the Europa landing. But clearly somebody had opened it, and pushed the antenna through to disappear in space. “Someone wanted us cut off and isolated from the entire world,” I whispered, fighting the bile rising in my throat. “Why?”

  “Not just someone,” Dev said, swallowing hard. “One of us.”

  It was like every star in the universe gave out at once, plunging us into an empty, pitch-dark world.

  We were lost to Earth. And we were trapped, hurtling through space at thirty thousand miles an hour, with an enemy far more dangerous than we could have imagined.

  Six Weeks Earlier . . .

  One

  LEO

  WHEN SHE LEFT, IT WAS LIKE THE SUN SLIPPED FROM THE UNIVERSE. I watched the Earth turn dark, cold, and bleak, right in front of me on live TV.

  I thought I knew my way around loneliness—how to swallow the sting, push away memories, ignore the silence. But nothing prepares you for this: watching a spacecraft launch into the sky, with the person you love inside.

  The live feed on-screen holds me captive, showing the Final Six strapped into their launch seats, their bodies now shuddering with the second engine burn. Naomi reaches out a gloved hand, and though Sydney Pearle is the one to grasp it, I know who she was really reaching for.

  Outside the ship’s windows, I can see the colors begin to change. The pale blue sky is receding, taking its final bow. And then, quick as a breath—blue turns to black. The stuffed ladybug hanging from the ceiling, NASA’s lucky talisman, starts to float.

  The Final Six are officially in space.

  The newscasters narrating every step of the journey erupt in applause, losing their “serious” voices as they shriek and cheer. I wish I could share in their joy, but the closest I come is relief, followed by another wave of longing. The same desperate pull that brought me here to Vienna, where I’m now standing beside a silver-haired tech mogul who calmly says, “Glad to see that went off without a hitch,” before returning to her desk. The sound of Dr. Wagner’s voice brings me back to the moment—the reason I’m here. My second chance.

  “How soon can we launch?” I call after her, my eyes still glued to the TV.

  “No later than next week. We need to make sure you depart while Mars is orbiting forty-four degrees ahead of Earth’s rotation, in order for our spacecraft to arrive at the correct time and position to dock with the Pontus. Since we’re already in the midst of this target alignment window now, I’m afraid we don’t have much of a time allowance if you’re going to catch up to the Final Six.”

  I turn to face Dr. Greta Wagner, the scientist, inventor, and billionaire handing me my last hope. We’re in the middle of a conference room in the Wagner Enterprises compound, a modernist palace of slate and steel, with exterior walls rising high to keep out prying eyes. While Greta flips through a massive mission binder spread across the conference table, an assistant hovers over her shoulder, tapping away at a blinking tablet. Meanwhile, the humanoid robot she introduced as her butler, Corion, rolls in and out, delivering messages and replenishing Dr. Wagner’s never-ending cups of black coffee. We’re two days into my stay, and still none of this feels . . . real.

  “I know it’s a tall order, expecting you to be ready this quickly,” Greta continues. “But once you reach orbit, the ship will fly itself on autopilot, right up until you attempt docking with the Pontus at Mars. I’ve designed the WagnerOne, and your mission itself, to be as user-friendly and foolproof as possible. I’ve also called in some reinforcements to help with your training. We may only have a week together, but it will be a week of monumental growth and preparation.” She pauses. “It has to be.”

  “Right.” I nod, trying to block out the creeping thoughts of how utterly alone I’ll be up there. I’ll be skating the line between life and death the entire time. But no matter how daunting, this is what I wanted. It’s what I asked for.

  “Before we begin . . .” She slides a sheaf of papers across the table toward me. “I need you to sign this. Take your time reading it through. I had it printed in both English and Italian.”

  I glance down at the top page, where the words jump out at me in bold black ink.

  I, Leonardo Danieli, being of sound mind, free will, and legal age, hereby declare that I willingly accept the position of Sole Astronaut & Commander on the WagnerOne Mission to Europa, a private venture. I understand that any private space travel unsanctioned by the government is against the laws of the Outer Space Treaty, and as such, I am entitled to no protection or resources from any of the space agencies. I accept that this is a one-way trip, and that the mission could result in my death should it fail. I am aware of all of the above facts, and remain committed as ever to the mission and the privilege of colonizing Europa. I release Dr. Greta Wagner and the entirety of Wagner Enterprises from any future cla
im or liability therein.

  “You know I have no one left, right? No one who would care enough to—to sue you if I die?” I try to joke over my speeding heartbeat.

  Greta doesn’t crack a smile.

  “There are always people on the periphery who come forward when they sense money to be gained. And once the world finds out where you are, the ISTC and NASA will try to spin it as me forcing you to do my bidding. This signed waiver and our witness”—she nods at her assistant—“will protect us both.”

  I’m not sure how any of it protects me, but I don’t bother asking. My attention is drawn back to the screen, where the Final Six are unbuckling from their seats. Their first moments of weightlessness bring gasps and nervous laughter, and then they are floating as a group toward the airlock. But Naomi deviates from the rest, stopping at one of the windows to press her gloves against the glass and look down at Earth. The ache spreads from my chest, the pain of something breaking.

  At the airlock door, Dev Khanna turns the handle and the hatch swings open. The frame freezes, and after a torturous moment of static, the livestream shifts to the crew quarters—the Final Six’s new home, from now to Europa.

  When the six reappear on-screen, they’ve changed out of their spaceflight suits and into matching silver Mission: Europa jackets over polo shirts bearing their country’s space agency logo. Only two share the same logo: Naomi and Beckett Wolfe. I watch Beckett brush against Naomi’s shoulder as they float through the module, and it’s like a punch in my stomach.

  I turn away and grab a pen off the conference table. I don’t need to read another word of this contract; I’m signing. But Greta places a hand on my arm just before I scrawl my name.

  “I need to know that you understand what it is you’re signing up for.”

  Something in her expression gives me pause.

  “What do you mean? Why would I change my mind?”

  “Because a solo mission to space is one of the greatest challenges a human being can endure. You will experience many moments of profound loneliness and fear. Are you ready for that?”