‘Low blood sugar.’
‘Right, right. Can you hold this for a moment?’ Poppy thrust a box in Juno’s direction and rummaged around in it for a while, before pulling out a clattering string of fairy-lights. Then she searched around for a socket before plugging them in and deactivating the main lights. The room was suffused in a warm amber glow. ‘Good thing I thought to bring them.’ Poppy smiled, ‘And my duvet covers. Makes the room look more homey. Don’t you think?’ She flopped back on her floral-print quilt. Only Poppy would have thought of such details. Astrid and Juno had brought comfortable clothes and books in one box, Earth food they would never see again in another: canned peaches, cookie mix, marshmallows, hundreds and thousands.
Poppy had packed frilly throws and crepe-paper lanterns, a black and white print of Audrey Hepburn. Everything they’d packed had been sent up to the shuttle months ago and was covered now in a thin layer of dust. Other items had been launched years ago; a two-decade supply of toothpaste sponsored by Colgate, microfibre duvets from John Lewis. Heinz had donated 100,000 cartons of dehydrated soup and baked beans.
‘Do you think the bed could fit two?’ Poppy flopped back onto it.
‘Planning on inviting anyone?’ Juno asked. Poppy smiled mysteriously and tapped her nose. Juno shuddered at the thought and changed the subject. ‘Have you seen my sister?’
‘She was in here a minute ago,’ Poppy said, making a snow angel in her duvet covers.
‘Was she?’
‘Like… yeah, well maybe half an hour ago?’
‘Did you see where she went?’
‘I dunno, maybe she’s down in the hold.’
But Astrid wasn’t there either; the large gloomy room under the ship that held supplies in sealed, colour-coded boxes. She wasn’t in the greenhouse, the bathroom or the boys’ cabin. Juno was beginning to grow frantic, retracing her steps, calling out her sister’s name as maddened thoughts began to rush through her head. What if they’d left Astrid behind somehow, and Juno was spinning out into space, away from her?
Juno felt the way she did during the nights when she was young, when she woke up in their shared bedroom groping around in the darkness, post-nightmare, for a warm body that she recognized.
‘Astrid,’ she cried out as she looked around this new place. It was nothing like home. It smelt bitter and synthetic, like burning polymers and heated metal. It would take her a while to adjust to the level of noise as well; the mechanical whir and hum of machines rattling under the floorboards, the whoosh of air through the vents and the constant deep-sea moan of the motors whipping around the central truss made Juno wonder if she would ever sleep soundly again. And the walls felt like ice, Juno noticed, the metal was cold like space was cold. This was going to be her home for two decades.
Twenty-three years in this tin box the size of a townhouse. Back on Earth, twenty-three years had merely been a bridge to cross to get to Terra-Two, foreshortened by her own anticipation. In twenty-three years she would be forty-one – as old as her parents were now – and she would have lived in the darkness for more years than she had lived under a sky. This is my new life, she thought with a sinking in her stomach. Suddenly, it didn’t matter how fast they travelled – how many fractions of the speed of light they reached – Terra-Two still seemed terribly distant.
‘Astrid!’ she yelled, her voice threatening tears.
‘Juno?’ came a muffled reply. She heard it, or she thought she heard it, from behind the heavy door of the engine room.
Juno found her twin hugging her knees in the corner, half-hidden behind a bundle of pipes and wires. ‘Astrid?’
‘Yeah…’ Astrid’s voice was thick, drowned by the shriek of an exhaust fan. Juno fumbled for the light switch but her fingers found nothing, so when the door slammed shut behind her, she could only see by the blinking glow of the computer displays in the corner, and the quicksilver flashes of light reflected off the steel blades of a fan.
‘I couldn’t find you.’ Juno groped around in the darkness for Astrid, until her fingers caught between the soft folds of her cardigan. ‘I thought… I thought…’ The thought was too horrible.
‘I just wanted to be alone for a bit,’ Astrid said. ‘I’m just grateful I made it.’ Juno put her head in her sister’s lap. And as she did so, she felt an inward release of pressure. The feeling of being home.
Juno and Astrid had been born three and a half weeks early. Their mother had told them the story only once, described the trauma she had suffered, the blood loss. The isolating terror of that night. And when the sun rose, their mother, delirious with exhaustion, had gazed at them – these keening blue creatures that the doctors had ripped from her – and said to their father, ‘We can’t undo it now.’ Words that had frightened Juno for years. Her mother had been saying that she would never not be a mother. That when she laid eyes on the twins, the permanence of her new status hit her with a sudden and brutal force. She would be their mother until she died and even after.
‘Did we make a mistake?’ Juno asked. Astrid was making quick sharp gasping sounds, her shoulders shuddering. ‘Are you crying?’ Juno strained to discern her sister’s face in the darkness. Her cheeks glistened. She nodded.
‘Do you think we made a mistake?’ Juno ventured again.
Astrid shook her head.
‘Are you homesick?’
Astrid shook her head again.
JESSE
13.05.12
UNLIKE OTHER MEMBERS OF the crew, he had not spent as much time training in a mock-up of the ship. He didn’t already know where everything was and no one had the patience to help him. So Jesse spent most of the afternoon exploring on his own. There were three main decks; the crew’s living quarters and bathroom were in the middle, while the seniors resided on the top deck near the command module. Harry and Solomon Sheppard were already there when Jesse reached it, but he shivered with excitement nonetheless. The control deck was the glittering nucleus of the ship, it was filled with light, dazzling star-maps and spinning astrolabes, the screens of a dozen monitors reeling off endless dizzying scrolls of data. It was a fantasy just standing here. Jesse watched for a moment as Harry took it all in, stroking the leather-backed commander’s chair and the pilot’s seat beside it, as if he, himself, could not believe his luck.
‘It begins today,’ Solomon Sheppard said with a smile.
Jesse had grown up wondering how it felt to be people like Harrison Bellgrave. Surely boys like Harry believed that greatness was their birthright. Strode through life, their hands open for the Oscar, the medals, the knighthood, while people like Jesse crouched in their shadow. The awkward interloper.
‘Ready to feel the burn,’ Harry joked to their commander. Now that they’d arrived on the Damocles, Harry and Commander Sheppard would perform the engine burn that would boost them out of Earth’s orbit. Jesse watched the scene now, with some bitterness.
Like Harry and a large number of students at Dalton, Jesse had fought to be accepted on the pilot stream in his fourth year, when they choose specialisms. The pilot stream students trained in a separate facility, miles from Dalton, where they could practise flying for hours a day. Perhaps because of this separation, and because it was widely understood that the deputy commander would be chosen from this gifted group, the stream took on a glittering mystique, and in reverent tones was referred to as ‘Command School’. Jesse himself had spent all of two weeks in Command School. He’d fought against the teachers at every turn. He had not wanted to cut his hair short, like the rest of the Command School students with their androgynous buzzcuts – the research scientists performed EEGs while the students flew and it was easier to measure their brain’s electrical activity when they didn’t have long locks of hair on their heads. He’d hated the loneliness of it, twelve-hour days locked in damp simulation cubicles, flying through virtual space for so long that during his brief trips outside he became fixated by the sight of the sun as if he’d stolen a glance at the face of God.