His nineteenth birthday was fast approaching, and his escape from death had been snatched from him at the final moment. ‘It was amazing that you made it so far in the first place,’ his mother reminded him and – after all – it was not a rejection. Jesse had been assigned to the backup crew. This meant that he had to forgo his final summer to train with the Beta. Only, after graduation the school was like a vacant fairground. Disconcerting, to live out his days in this place that was usually hectic with life. Only fourteen students remained, the crew and the backup crew. Practising with them was a miserable experience. In less than a year, they would all be in space. And Jesse’s job would be over. He felt like a shadow boxer, learning to maintain a shuttle that his feet would never touch. It had all been for nothing, he’d lie awake and consider. Forlorn insomniac nights as the summer vanished. Occasionally, though, Jesse allowed himself to imagine it, leaving Earth and the risk of dying young behind, his name echoing down the halls of history on everyone’s tongue. Neil Armstrong had served as backup commander on the Apollo 8 mission, he remembered. It could still happen. A member of the Beta could be taken ill or fail to comply with the UK Space Agency and he would be called upon. It could still happen, he whispered with clenched fists into the darkness. But then he would catch himself counting the number of days he had left to live, and the old dread would settle like frost.
Chapter 2
POPPY
JULY 2011
T-MINUS 10 MONTHS TO LAUNCH
THE DAY THE NEWS broke she was on her way home from school, and the sun was already setting on her mother’s street. The fences were razor-edged in the last of the light and Poppy savoured it as she walked, letting her fingers clatter along the chain-link. She usually found a reason to stay behind after term ended: something she had forgotten, a second drama rehearsal, Arabic Literature homework, an hour frittered away in her dorm after everyone packed up and left. But this time, there hadn’t been much to do. It was the final half-term before their class graduated, and the high point of the summer when the air was thick and wet as tar.
As always, Poppy had booked the long train home at the last minute, because it was always a miserable affair, leaving behind the sweet-smelling tree-lined avenues near Dalton and returning to her hometown on the outskirts of Liverpool. Part of an urban sprawl that had been condemned by the city’s mayor. She’d taken the coach a thousand times from Lime Street Station, and watched from the window as glass towers slumped down. It took about forty minutes for the bus to wind into ghost-streets of boarded-up shops, Victorian terraces destined to be demolished and post-WWII social housing screaming with spray-paint.
It was downhill from the urine-scented bus shelter to her mother’s flat. Poppy reprimanded herself if she ever turned up her nose at the cracked pavements that spewed dandelions and flattened cigarette butts. This was where she came from. The run-down townhouses carved into flats. Where she grew up.
And these people, the teenagers on children’s bikes who cat-called and whistled when she past, these were her people. For five years, she had believed that when Dalton ended – when she was no longer allowed to lounge in the ivied quad reading books – it was to these streets she would return. To hate this place would be to hate herself, her mother would remind her during every visit home. Her mother vetted Poppy’s speech for a new word or turn of phrase, and teased her mercilessly about it. ‘Ohhh, Mrs Dalton,’ she’d say with a curtsey. ‘Too good for us these days,’ and Poppy would blush and bite her tongue.
On Monday she had discovered that she had been chosen to go to space. In the quiet week after she found out, Poppy walked around in numbed surprise, certain a mistake had been made. It had been a dream to get into Dalton in the first place, to live and study amongst the neat, brilliant students who were unlike her in every way.
At almost fourteen, Poppy had been four months shy of the upper age limit for candidates, but she had filled out an application – an online test, logic problems, personality quizzes, reasoning and lateral thinking – in a secret moment of longing. Half a million other children also applied. She had been shocked when she was invited for the selection interviews, but knew that her mother would not be able to afford the train fare into London. That might have been the end of it, right then, had it not been for a school teacher who handed her an envelope of cash with a note saying, ‘make us proud’. It was the first time she’d ever left her city. An escort had taken her and a coach full of other applicants to Dalton for three more rounds of testing in a purpose-built training facility alongside thousands of other terrified candidates, wearing numbered badges and coded wristbands. They had been the hardest tests that Poppy had ever taken, four hours in a humid silent hall, several writing and coding tasks and one tortuous language exercise that required her to pen a persuasive argument in a language that the examiners had invented, following stringent rules in their devised syntax and morphology. Then came a week of invasive physical exams, blood tests and a comparatively low-tech beep test, which involved running back and forth across a gymnasium at ever-decreasing intervals. Two prospects had vomited on the linoleum.
That had been six years ago. Getting accepted into Dalton had been the greatest achievement of her life, and yet every test she had taken since then was harder than the last. Every week, when their scores were projected up in the school hall, Poppy had been comforted to find that she had achieved high enough to remain on the programme, but never high enough to pose a strong enough threat to the other students, who were bright and driven and strange and already disliked her because of her accent and her age.
When she’d opened the letter to discover that she was one of the six who had been selected for the Beta, she’d been certain that some mistake had been made. And so, for the rest of the week, she carried the news around with her like rubbish she was keen to toss.
The day the names were released publicly, Poppy returned to her street to find a mob. At first, seeing the road blocked by cars and news vans, she’d thought there had been an accident. Reporters thronged the pavement speaking simultaneously into microphones, and the shuttering lights of cameras burst like firecrackers at the edges of her vision. Initially, Poppy was drawn towards the mob with a shiver of intrigue, but it turned into dread in the next moment when she realized that the crowd were lining up outside her flat, trampling the lawn and banging on the door.
‘Hey—’ she approached a young man who had been slouched on the wall. ‘Do you know what’s going on?’
‘Oh, it’s uh—’ He looked up at her and took in her white uniform and her vivid red hair, which was already slipping out of the loose braid she had twisted it into. ‘Oh,’ he said again, and then produced a small notebook from his back pocket. ‘Poppy Lane, how are you feeling about the upcoming mission?’ The sound of her name on this stranger’s tongue was unnerving, and Poppy stepped back. ‘Can you just give me a sentence or two? What are you excited about? What will you miss the most – since you will never return?’