Harry twisted the lock and the door slid open, revealing a room only slightly larger than the infirmary, with high shelves stacked with medical supplies and tinned food. Jesse couldn’t help but think of civilians in the Second World War ducking inside Anderson shelters to wait out an attack. He sank down, exhaling in relief.
Radiation from a solar flare was the silent killer in space. Every now and then flaming whips of plasma exploded from the sun’s magnetic field and sent deadly showers of high-energy particles through the blackness of space. Earth was protected from most of the impact but, outside its atmosphere, Jesse and his fellow crew members were as vulnerable as a raft in a storm.
They were safe inside the reinforced shelter, but outside the alarm was still bawling. If it hadn’t been for the alarm, Jesse would have slept while showers of high-energy particles ghosted through his body. Most of them would have slipped right through but a couple would shred his DNA. Best-case scenario: he would not feel the damage until years later when cancer bloomed in his bones. The worst-case scenario involved vomiting, diarrhoea and hair loss, then death within a few days or weeks. During the early years of Disaster Training, they had been taught to fear solar storms. Unlike an explosion or a collision, this was a disaster they could not see. So, their instructor had said, see this instead. He’d shown them pictures of nuclear accidents, Chernobyl victims, children blistered and bald, black and white photos of flash burns and ulcerated skin. If you see nothing when you hear the alarm, he had said, remember this.
‘Lock the door,’ said Igor. ‘We’re looking at an X-3 solar flare.’
‘Right now?’ Astrid was wrapped in a towel, her hair still dripping soapy water onto her shoulders from a late-night shower.
‘The ground gave us a bit of warning,’ Igor said. He clapped his hands to hurry them up, but they were already in a line by their bunks, and shouting their numbers.
‘One,’ said Harry.
‘Two,’ said Astrid.
‘Three,’ said Eliot, who, like Harry, had had no time to change out of the running shorts he’d fallen asleep in. They both stood near the door, their forearms covered in gooseflesh.
‘Four,’ Poppy said.
Jesse watched them in confusion, unsure where in the line he was supposed to stand, and all the while watching the Geiger counter on the wall tick up and up. There was a moment of silence and everyone looked around in alarm.
‘Five?’ Jesse said, guessing that perhaps this was his turn to speak.
‘Where’s Juno?’ Poppy asked, ignoring him.
‘She wasn’t in our room,’ Astrid said.
‘I didn’t see her,’ Jesse said, recalling that he had not spotted the second twin racing through the corridors behind the others.
‘Oh no,’ Astrid gasped in horror, ‘she must be outside.’
‘You can’t go out there.’ Jesse motioned towards the door as if to block it.
‘She’s my sister.’ Astrid lunged at him.
‘Well, she has five minutes,’ Igor said, looking at his watch. Once the shelter sealed she would be trapped outside.
‘Five minutes?’ Jesse echoed, looking around at the pale faces of the crew. He pictured Juno as she had looked only a few hours ago, unconscious in the infirmary, quiet and helpless. He imagined her panic, being trapped outside the shelter, alone, and his heart jolted.
‘I’ll get her,’ Harry said, pushing Jesse aside.
‘It’s against protocol,’ Commander Sheppard said. ‘It’s too dangerous.’
‘You won’t have time to get back,’ Eliot said, looking at his watch.
‘We can’t just leave her!’ Astrid was frantic, her face streaked with tears. ‘Go! Please!’
After her panicked imploration, Jesse heard himself say, ‘I’ll go.’ If there was one thing he had always been good at, it was running. So he dashed out the door, glancing at the figures on his watch.
‘Get back.’ Harry was gaining speed behind him. ‘We don’t need you getting in the way right now.’
‘You take the upper deck,’ Jesse yelled without slowing, as he dashed barefoot across the greenhouse, ‘I’ll go down.’
Jesse lunged through the hatch and onto the lower deck, landing so hard that the bones in his shins rattled, before running past the rooms in which she was unlikely to be hiding; the cargo bay and the equipment locker. The sound of the alarm squealing bored into his temples like a drill, and Jesse gritted his teeth in irritation. He wondered how it was possible for Juno to ignore such a racket. And then it occurred to him that wherever Juno was, she probably couldn’t hear the alarm. ‘Where?’ he said out loud over the noise.
He knew that Juno had found Astrid, earlier that day, crouched like a mouse in the warmth of the engine room. It seemed likely that the siren was less audible there, but Jesse could not picture Juno herself seeking out solitude amongst the dim light of Igor’s devices.
His watch said he had two and a half minutes left, and so he went back on himself around the lower deck. Back up to the middle deck, where the warning lights reflected manically off the walls in a way that made his head spin. As he ran he heard the pounding of Harry’s bare feet behind his.
Back into the greenhouse. At the opposite end, on the far side from the radiation shelter, was a tiny module called the Atlas. Jesse headed towards it in one last search for the missing crew member. When the hatch slid open, and he stepped in, Jesse found her. Juno was curled up on one of the chairs, and Earth was large in the window. It hung above them in a way that gave Jesse the unsettling sensation of falling. But for a moment his fear vanished, and he was transfixed. He could see the Antarctic, South Africa and the Southern Lights, iridescent curtains of red and green light rising like steam off the hot bubble of the atmosphere. He had never seen them before.
As the doors closed behind him, the sound of the alarm disappeared like water sucked out of a drain. Jesse leant over to wake Juno, but paused. Her frizzy hair wafted with static electricity, her sleeping face eerily lit by the Aurora Australis. Jesse remembered that he had seen her the night before the launch. Emerging like a shadow from a briar, wearing a thin bathrobe, which, in the dim light, made her look like a visitation. The soft edge of a breast delightfully visible. The cord of her robe cinched tightly around her waist. It was an image that lingered with him.
Jesse Solloway, she’d mouthed. It had been hard to miss the distant look of disappointment on her face. The same disappointment he’d seen in all the Betas’ eyes when Professor Stenton had introduced him, as if they’d hoped for someone else.
Me. I made it after all, he’d thought.
‘Juno!’ Harry yelled, throwing the hatch open behind them. Juno started awake, her eyes wide and vacant as a recent dreamer. The sound of the alarm crashed like a wave into the small capsule and Jesse realized, to his horror, that they had only thirty seconds. Harry grabbed Juno’s arm and half-dragged her out of her seat. ‘You’re hurting me,’ she cried. They stumbled over each other in their rush to get out. Twenty seconds. The other end of the greenhouse had never seemed so far away.
Jesse saw Astrid’s terrified face peer from behind the closing door. ‘Hurry!’ she screamed, the fear in her voice sharp as a blade. Jesse bounded towards her, but even as he did the door was sliding closed, the red ‘Lock’ light flashing. Astrid pushed her fingers through the gap in an attempt to keep it open. Jesse’s lungs were on fire. He thought he could make it, but he was a metre away when the door slammed closed and he heard the hiss of mechanics as the hatch locked. It bit Astrid’s finger as it shut and she let out a howl of pain, which, in a moment, was silenced.