When she returned to the space centre, Astrid had stepped out of the car to find a small crowd was gathered in the half-light of the drive. Dr Golinsky – Dalton’s lead medical officer – in her white coat, their school’s provost, Professor Stenton, and directors of the astronaut’s office. Astrid’s stomach was heavy with dread as a woman in a grey suit ran towards her. ‘You saw it, didn’t you?’ she asked, the car’s headlights illuminating the gooseflesh along the side of her neck. She peered into Astrid’s eyes as if she thought that if she looked close enough she might be able to see the incident herself.
‘I didn’t exactly…’ Astrid turned her gaze down to her feet. ‘I just saw her body. In the water.’
‘After she fell,’ Professor Stenton said, stepping from the shadow of the doorway, ‘it looked like an accident, didn’t it?’
‘Well, the thing is, I didn’t really see—’
‘But if you had to guess,’ interrupted a man in a lab coat, ‘you’d say she fell. She wasn’t suicidal.’
‘No,’ Astrid said. ‘I didn’t think she was. She seemed happy. And we would have known, right? We’re her friends.’ She shook her head. ‘We would have known if she was unhappy.’
‘Exactly.’ A public affairs officer stabbed a painted fingernail at Astrid. ‘We would have known. We would have detected it. So she must have fallen.’
Astrid nodded. ‘She must have… she fell,’ she said, looking away as if she could see it already. The twist of an ankle, the snap of the railing, Ara’s final look of surprise as her soles left the earth. ‘I think she fell.’ Maybe Ara only realized what happened once her body hit the water.
‘An accident,’ Dr Golinsky said. ‘A tragic accident.’
‘These things happen,’ said a supervisor, his glasses flashing in the headlights. ‘That’s the sad thing.’
These things do happen, they agreed.
They announced this to the shouting reporters gathered at the gates, hurling questions through the bars. It was an accident, they said, even at the press conference a few days later, after it was revealed that Ara’s combat boots had been discovered under a bench on a bridge, pushed neatly together, the laces tied up, neon pink ankle socks scrunched inside like oysters in a shell.
JUNO
T-MINUS 12 HOURS
AFTER JUNO HAD BEEN driven back to the space centre, she and the rest of the crew returned to a different kind of fray. Reporters were gathered at the gates, their cars parked all the way up the street. The driver had to take them around to a side road and up through a shadowed back entrance where directors, police and public relations officers were gathered.
They were ushered immediately into separate rooms. Required first to give a statement to the police, and then the Astronaut Office, the school’s directors and finally to undergo a psychological assessment and mental health screening.
By the time the gruelling round of tests was over, Juno emerged from the windowless room to find that the sun had set long ago, that night was marching on, and yet the launch felt more distant than it had three weeks ago.
Before Juno was sent for an inspection in the medical exam room, a technician led her towards a cubicle with a bathtub and shower and said, ‘Twenty minutes, and make sure to scrub under your nails’ before he closed the door,
Juno was glad to climb out of her clothes. The day had been so humid that when she peeled off her T-shirt the air was ripe with the smell of her body. She sat on the porcelain edge of the tub and watched the water gush out of the tap. Her hands were shaking.
She ran the water so hot that it scalded her feet at first. But she gritted her teeth and surrendered herself to it, letting herself slip down until it lapped over her head.
There would be no bath on the Damocles. Just as there had been no baths in the dormitories at Dalton. Only spartan shower cubicles and lukewarm water. If she launched tomorrow this would be her last bath before she and her sister could swim into the hot springs in the mountains of Terra-Two.
Although Juno wasn’t sure they were going anywhere anymore.
She held her breath under the water until her body screamed for oxygen and then she held on longer still, until the pain of deprivation squeezed her lungs in a vice. Finally, she lost control of her legs, her knees unbuckled and her feet smacked the side of the bath. She jolted upright and came up gasping like a newborn, splashing in blind panic and scrubbing suds from her eyes.
Was there a worse way to die?
She had seen a picture of a drowned boy on the front page of a newspaper the previous June. His head had been half-submerged in water and in the midsummer temperatures putrefaction had already begun. Algae had attached to portions of his little body, multiplied and formed a living layer of slime around the side of his mouth and the hollows of his half-open eyes…
An hour earlier, when the police had asked her what happened, Juno had to remind herself that she hadn’t actually seen anything. By the time Juno, Poppy and the public affairs officer reached the Embankment, it was the chattering throng that had told her what happened.
Someone’s just died. Some girl.
The girl. That girl’s an astronaut.
Just jumped in.
No, she fell in. My kid saw her.
The girl from the magazines. The girl from the news. One of them, anyway.
Looked like an accident to me.
If suicide looks like an accident…
When Juno climbed out of the bath she felt the ground shift under her feet and she had to reach out for the handrail to stop herself from slipping. The mirror was fogged up, and it was a relief not to catch a glimpse of her own reflection. She had been awake now for almost twenty-four hours and the day was far from done.
‘Are you ready?’ A little tap came on the other side of the door.
‘Yes.’ Juno pulled on a white cotton bathrobe and stepped out into the medical exam room. It was filled with the familiar acid smell of antiseptic and the citrus tang of floor cleaner. Two suited flight surgeons stood near a trolley. Juno had been in the same room earlier in the week for a pulmonary function test and a bone density exam. A nurse had clipped her nails down so far that they bled and just before her bath that evening she had been swabbed again for contaminants.
‘Can you step into the scanner please?’ said the first man, indicating the door. Juno walked slowly towards it, taking care not to let her wet feet slip on the ground.
She climbed out of her robe and crept through the door. The cold of the room was a shock to her bare skin, and the hairs along her forearms stood on end. ‘Please hold your arms out and place your feet on the markers below,’ buzzed the voice of one of the doctors over the intercom. Juno could not see them examining her naked body on the other side of the wall. She looked at the indicators on the ground and placed her feet upon them, stretching out her arms like a gymnast. Any contaminants that remained on her body would fluoresce under the light.
She had heard the stories about astronauts who were decertified the morning of the launch after failing an eleventh-hour medical examination. In the closed air system of a spacecraft, viruses spread rapidly and threatened the success of a mission, especially during long-term missions such as theirs, where medical supplies were limited and protracted exposure to radiation would eventually weaken their immune systems.