The car came to a violent halt in front of the reception, the headlights drained to blackness, the rumble of the engine faded and was replaced by the muted slam of the driver’s door. ‘This way.’ It was their provost’s voice, and Juno crouched down further in the gloom, hoping not to be caught.
A second later, the back door opened and a boy in pyjamas climbed out. Juno glanced at his angular face with a jolt of recognition. She was sure she’d seen him before, in school perhaps, but it was difficult to tell in the darkness. He had waist-length hair and spider-black eyes. She liked the delicate way he moved, sloping back into the car to pull out a duffle bag and slinging it over his shoulder. She knew him. Jesse Solloway? she mouthed in surprise. She had trained with him for a few months after graduation. And, although she knew that a member of the backup crew would be enlisted to take Ara’s place, it felt unreal to see him so soon after Ara was gone. Before she’d even been buried.
‘You’ve got everything you need?’ came Professor Stenton’s voice. Juno tried to keep as still as possible. After the events of the day, she knew she was in disgrace and supposed to be in the space centre, choking down dinner. If her teacher turned and found her crouching in the shrubbery it was likely she would find herself in even more trouble.
‘Sure,’ the boy said. He turned suddenly and his eyes found Juno’s.
Her heart leapt and she bit down on her tongue.
He smiled conspiratorially, catching his bottom lip on the edge of a tooth. Juno pressed a finger to her mouth, as if to say shh. He nodded and turned away.
‘Come right this way,’ Professor Stenton’s voice called out from the entrance. ‘We have so much to do.’ The two figures disappeared inside. The driveway filled once more with darkness. Juno waited for a long while in the gloom before she was certain it was safe to clamber from her hiding place and return inside.
She walked around the edge of the building and re-entered at reception. The television was on low. The news was running, a man speaking into a microphone as headlines rolled across the screen. There was only one guard on duty. His ID badge read Edward. The lanky boy who collected the mail and nodded at them from behind the desk as they came and went.
‘Hi, Teddy.’
When he turned from the television his eyes widened with surprise. ‘Oh. Hello,’ he said. ‘Thought you’d be asleep by now.’
‘Even if they let me I don’t know if I’ll be able to.’ Although, even as she said it, Juno could feel the tiredness in her bones.
‘I bet. If I were you I’d be crapping myself.’
‘Really?’
‘For sure.’ He nodded towards the television, where the camera zoomed in to a live shot of the shuttle at the launch site, dimly illuminated in the darkness. ‘All those people watching you. All those reporters.’
‘Will you be watching it?’ Juno asked.
‘Course,’ Teddy said. ‘Me and my kids. Got the day off. I’m going out to the launch site’ This took her by surprise.
‘You have kids?’ Juno asked, frowning at his patchy stubble and the acne scars faintly visible on his chin.
‘Yep.’ He laughed at her expression. ‘Two. A six-year-old and another who’s eighteen months.’
‘Wow. How old are you?’
‘Twenty-four.’
‘So that means… you had your first child when you were eighteen?’ He nodded. ‘I’m never going to have children.’ The words tumbled out of her mouth before she could stop them.
‘Really? Why?’
It wasn’t Juno’s job to have children. Women would come after her – healthy young colony women whose job it was to grow fat and give birth. But theirs was a pioneer mission. They would land on Terra-Two towards the end of their child-bearing years and start a colony, build the base and chart the land. Perhaps children would come after that, but Juno had been informed that this wasn’t her primary purpose. As soon as she was accepted into the Beta she underwent a procedure that slipped a little implant under her arm, and her periods had dried up.
‘The mission is my child,’ she said. And then, her head full of how heroic that sounded, she said a little louder, ‘Terra-Two is my only child.’
Which wasn’t entirely a lie. Going to space saved her from every other fate. From marriage and having to sleep with Noah, from the disappointment of motherhood, from a lustreless life. She was going to make a different world, a better world, on Terra-Two. A noble ambition – in her mind – the noblest.
Teddy shrugged. ‘I guess that’s why you’re here then. Cos that’s what you want.’
‘Yes.’ She blinked, and with a sudden ache in her stomach remembered the predicament she found herself in – still unsure if she actually would launch tomorrow. ‘That’s right.’ Her eyes flicked towards the screen again. A reporter was holding a microphone and standing in front of Embankment station, a poor-quality video taken on somebody’s phone of Eliot dragging Ara’s body out of the water playing over her shoulder. Juno felt the ground shift under her feet, but took a deep breath to steady herself.
‘You okay?’ Teddy examined her for a moment. ‘They’re saying it’s an accident.’ He nodded at the screen. ‘That you were allowed on an outing before the tree-planting ceremony and she fell in.’
‘I don’t know what happened,’ Juno said, which was true.
Teddy eyed her knowingly and said, ‘Thought so. There’s always a difference between what goes on in here and what I hear ’em saying on there. Between you and me, I think someone’s going to get the axe.’ He leant in conspiratorially. ‘And I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t—’
He fell quiet and his eyes darted to the door as the susurration of people coming out of the conference room filled the hall.
Juno looked around in surprise. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to be caught hanging around in reception, so she headed quickly back down the corridor and towards the refectory.
‘Juno.’
When she turned, she saw Dr Millburrow.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be in bed?’
‘Umm… I was just having dinner.’ Juno’s eyes darted towards the door of the empty refectory.
It was good to see Maggie’s ruddy face. Of all the senior crew charged with looking after them, she was the most like a friend. Juno had been glad when she turned up in her car earlier that day to take them back home and she was glad to see her now.
‘I was just in a meeting with the board of directors and they’ve come to a decision.’ She glanced behind her at the serious-looking men and women in suits who had spilled out into the hall. ‘I thought you better hear this from me.’
Juno felt her stomach drop with a jangled swoop of alarm. Maggie was about to tell her that she was no longer on the mission. That tonight they would all pay for Ara’s actions with their future.
And then, all of a sudden, a quiet kind of abandon came over her. The kind she had felt in the three horrible hours after Astrid discovered she’d made it into the Beta and before Juno had. In those moments, a colourless life beneath the stars and away from her sister extended before her. Now she felt it again. Juno experienced the dim resignation that sometimes came over her in the split second she realized she was about to drop something; the swollen moment after the shift in weight registers and just before the crash.
‘The mission will be going ahead as planned but someone will have to replace Ara. You do realize that, right?’ Juno stared at Maggie dumbfounded. Could it be? Could it be that God had smiled mercifully upon her?
‘We’re going to launch,’ she said, and her throat tightened.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m going to space?’
‘Yes, that’s what the board has agreed.’