‘Where are you going?’ Astrid shouted, taking care not to slip on the linoleum.
‘Somewhere great!’ Ara shouted over her shoulder. Astrid followed past the museum’s gift shop, up spiralling flights of stairs, their laughter crashing off the marble walls.
‘Come back,’ Eliot said, just before he disappeared behind another tour group.
Astrid chased Ara through a deserted fire exit and out into the blinding daylight. She didn’t realize that they’d escaped until they had.
‘This?’ she asked.
Ara stopped running and leant on her knees to catch her breath. As Astrid’s vision cleared, she gazed around. Ara had led her to the children’s playground at the back of the building. The wooden benches were still wet from the morning’s rain, the ice cream stall shuttered, play-horses sunk into the AstroTurf, heads reared as if drowning.
‘This,’ said Ara, and pointed past the low wall of the playground and beyond the road to the wind-whipped river. She said it as if she was giving it to Astrid. ‘We have an hour. Let’s go for a walk. Let’s take what we can.’
‘But…’ Astrid hesitated. ‘What about Eliot?’
‘He’ll find us.’
‘We should probably stay indoors.’ Astrid glanced back through the fire door at the darkened stairwell.
‘Astrid, don’t you want to do everything you never did before? Or at least one thing?’
Astrid’s arms were prickling with goosebumps.
She wanted to go.
She knew what she should do. She should go back into the building and wait for the other astronauts to arrive. She should rejoin her sister and Poppy and Eliot and plant her sapling…
‘Astrid?’
…and yet, she had only one life. And she was tormented by how lovely the sky was, with the sun spearing through the clouds, and the pavements glittering.
How would she explain it to the Astronaut Office when she returned? Or to herself an hour later? Or in the years that would follow? How would she explain the mistake she was about to make?
Ara vaulted the fence on the other side of the playground and strode into the road, forcing two drivers to swerve, both cursing out of their windows. Astrid had a second, as another car passed, to choose between staying or following. She glanced back at the Interplanetary Society. The unlit corridor was like a dark maw, leading to a life away from everyone she loved. And, for one wild minute, she didn’t want it at all.
She had sacrificed her whole childhood on the altar of diligence and obedience and hard work. So couldn’t she steal back this day? This one hour, and keep it for herself?
Astrid chose her friend. She darted in front of a red bus as the lights changed and raced after her.
They grabbed each other’s hands, hysterical with delight, marooned on a traffic island amongst the cars. This was the most they had seen of the world in over a week, and the sounds were an assault on her, the roar of tyres on tarmac like waves smashing rocks, her pulse a snare drum.
The green man lit up. Ara dashed across the road and into a throng of people.
‘We have an hour,’ Astrid reminded Ara as they ran.
The rain had stopped and the wet pavements sparkled in the sunlight. Astrid and Ara ran by the Thames, deliriously free. Months of sprinting across the grounds at Dalton meant that they were at their peak of physical fitness, barely out of breath as the white stuccoed houses flashed past, as Tate Britain appeared and then disappeared behind them. They headed into throngs of tourists in plastic-bag ponchos, photographing Big Ben, the Palace of Westminster, protesters gathered on Parliament Square.
They could see everything when they reached the bridge. The low buildings to their right, clustered around the British Interplanetary Society, then on their left was the London eye, the South Bank, the Shard like a broken tooth in the distance.
Amongst the crowd, a woman in harem pants was blowing giant bubbles with two sticks. Astrid watched as rainbows slid across them, and little children bounced with delight at the sight of their own warped reflections. The bubbles were so big that, when they burst, they made a splash on the ground.
‘Why do you think the bubbles are so interesting?’ Astrid asked.
‘Because they only last for a few seconds,’ Ara said, as a small girl let out a thrilled yelp, jumping up to touch the shining edge of the thing and missing every time. ‘Imagine if, instead of bubbles, that woman was blowing balls of see-through plastic that didn’t cost much and lasted forever.’
By the time they reached the South Bank, Astrid was eager to head back. If they ran they could do it in twenty minutes. But Ara was distracted by the busyness. She kept slipping in and out of the crowd, pausing often to look at the street performers. One dressed as Charlie Chaplin doing tricks for pennies, a skinny teenager covering Jimi Hendrix songs. Ara emptied her pockets, chucking coins and a few crumpled notes at him with a laugh. ‘It’s not like I need them anymore,’ she said.
Astrid was distracted by the food trucks, the ones selling footlong hotdogs, Neapolitan ice cream, nuts that smelt like burnt sugar, boiling in vats of caramel. Only she couldn’t eat anything. With each minute that passed, her stomach knotted with dread.
‘Ara.’ She grabbed her friend’s wrist before she could turn on her heel again. ‘We have to go.’ Her voice growing stern. ‘I’ve had enough.’
The pulse in Ara’s wrist throbbed wildly. She shook herself free, and smiled.
‘This isn’t a game,’ Astrid told her. Ara pressed her palms against Astrid’s cheeks and brought their faces together, for a second, in a kiss. Her mouth tasted bitter as aspirin and there was a film of sweat on her upper lip. Astrid closed her eyes and, when she opened them again and drew in a surprised breath, Ara was running away.
‘Where are you going?’ she shouted after her friend.
‘I’m not going back!’
All Astrid could see was her red skirt as she raced down the bank, her black hair like a comet’s tail behind her.
She headed across the bridge and Astrid had to sprint to keep up, ducking and weaving past people on the walkway and calling apologies after her. She took a sharp turn down a crowded road, past the subway, which was belching steam in the May heat, into one end of Embankment station and out the other, to the crossing facing the Thames. Ara had vanished. When Astrid stopped running, her head was spinning and she pushed a hand against the strain in her chest, dizzy and panting in the humid air.
She groaned in frustration. This was getting away from her. She considered making her own way back to the BIS building, but could she go without Ara?
She headed in that direction anyway, back along the river. They had thirty minutes.
The warmth of the afternoon surprised her. It was late spring and the wind was hot as flesh. Astrid followed Victoria Embankment, where the river was the colour of rust. Then she stood for a long while, trying to memorize the city’s skyline, before she heard a voice behind her.
‘Juno…?’ She felt the cool of a shadow across her shoulders and turned around to find Eliot. ‘I mean… Astrid. Sorry, it’s hard to tell you apart… from behind.’
Astrid exhaled with relief. ‘What are you doing out here?’ she asked. Eliot looked as if he’d been struck by lightning, his eyes wide.
‘I was looking for you, and Ara. We need to get back.’
‘You ran after us? All this way?’
‘Yes. I lost you in the museum, then I saw you running up the road. Tried to catch up. Lost you on the South Bank.’ He swore, leaning against the railings to catch his breath. ‘This isn’t funny.’