‘Please?’
‘Okay, fine. I’ll stand outside.’ His shadow disappeared but she could still hear his voice. ‘Hey, are you spacesick?’
‘Yeah,’ she muttered, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Sick of space.’ He chuckled. ‘I don’t think so,’ she admitted.
‘Then maybe it’s something you ate?’
Juno’s face burned. ‘Maybe,’ she managed to say.
‘Should I go and get Fae?’
‘No, I don’t want you to wake her. I’ll be fine in a few minutes.’
They were silent for a while. Juno’s head clouded over with sleep, pinpricks of imaginary light stippling the darkness. The room was illuminated only by the glow from the crew module through the open door. She tried to imagine Jesse on the other side of the wall, in nothing but a T-shirt and boxers. Imagined the straight line his thigh made all the way down to his ankle, and his feet that were stained green with fertilizer from walking barefoot in the greenhouse.
Her eyes dropped closed as she began to drift into sleep, but she bit awake abruptly when her head flopped down on her neck. In panic and semi-conscious confusion she called out, ‘Jessseee … ,’ her voice a plaintive whimper. He was by her side in the next moment.
There were tears in her eyes. ‘It’s okay,’ he said softly, pushing them away with a thumb. ‘You’ll feel better soon. You’re okay.’
‘’mnotokay,’ she slurred as tears fell freely from her eyes. ‘I’m alone.’
‘No, you’re not,’ he said and pulled her close to him, though her face was sticky. ‘You’re okay.’ He stroked her hair. She realized that this was the closest she’d been to a human body since Noah had held her in the Garden of Flight back on Earth. Such a long time ago. Nestled against Jesse’s large chest, she felt slight and safe. She would drift into sleep a couple of times, only to jerk awake in a body filled with pain and retch over the toilet bowl. Each time Jesse would wake too and tug the hair out of her face, and wipe her forehead and smile lazily and promise her that she would soon be fine.
She supposed he carried her out of the bathroom a while later, and onto the sofa where she woke to find herself in his arms. By then, the worst of the sickness had passed. She felt light and tired and wonderfully clean, as if she’d been baptized in flames. She opened her eyes to discover a body without stomach cramps or tremors. Jesse was still asleep beside her, his lips slightly parted, head rolled back on the sofa, breathing softly.
Chapter 31
JUNO
11.12.12
BY THE TIME DECEMBER came, everything was different. Jesse and Juno slid into an intimacy born of constant proximity. Cosy habits emerged: watching recordings of University Challenge and shouting out the answers or marathons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Juno discovered that they shared the same cynical sense of humour. Every new thing she learned about him was a delight. They stayed up late talking most nights, sometimes until the hallway sky simulation turned lemon-yellow with ‘dawn’.
Everyone had closed ranks by the end of that year: Harry and Eliot stayed up late playing insomniac chess marathons on the control deck; Poppy and Astrid paired rations of sugar and evaporated milk to make wild saccharine confections and curled up together in Poppy’s bed, discussing star signs.
A couple of weeks after they began their approach to Jupiter, an email from Noah arrived. The subject line was ‘Juno?’, nothing in the body of the message but a photograph of her house, and a video attachment. The photograph had clearly been taken a couple of months ago, because the leaves on the apple tree in the front garden were the colour of fire and rust. Juno touched the screen. He had given her the end of the summer. The shortening days, Cox apples growing fat. For a moment, she was there too. Beyond the reinforced walls of their vessel. Home.
Juno clicked on the video attachment, which loaded slowly, and as it did, she shuddered with excitement and dread. Finally, Noah’s face appeared on her screen. His curly blond hair had grown out so that he looked like a young Robert Plant, his chin shadowed with patches of stubble. Noah fiddled with the camera, setting it on the desk in front of him, before staring straight into the lens. ‘Hey, Juno.’ He waved. ‘So I was thinking about a gift to give you and your mum suggested I make a video so you get to feel like you’re here with me. It’s September right now but I probably won’t get up the courage to send this to you until after Christmas so… happy Christmas?’ He was in a bedroom she didn’t recognize, sparsely decorated with a fire-safety notice stuck to the back of the door. ‘I could see you for a while, you know. In the sky and on the news. I wish you could have been here. I don’t know if they told you how crazy it got down here for a while. The Beta was on the news every day… but I don’t watch it so much anymore.’ He paused, and swallowed. ‘So anyway, here is my room in uni!’ He twisted the camera around to show a rather bare room. Juno recognized some of the posters from his old bedroom. The periodic table, an old Coldplay poster, a little postcard that said ‘if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the precipitate’, which never really stopped being funny even after GCSE chemistry.
‘My bookshelf…’ He pointed the camera towards three fitted shelves, with a couple of fat textbooks. ‘We had to buy all of these books. Most of mine are second-hand. We started lectures a week ago and it’s not so hard… Mostly A-level stuff. I’ve probably covered half of the content at Dalton already but I kinda can’t wait for it to start getting harder. Oh also, this is the view from my window –’ he pointed the camera towards a courtyard that reminded Juno a little of the space centre, only there was a group of people slouching under a smoking shelter – ‘and all my photos…’ Stuck to the pin-board, mainly photos of the two of them, a school trip to Devon, their Leavers’ Ball, Juno giving a dorky thumbs-up in the first spacesuit she ever wore.
The camera wobbled again and Noah held it close to his face, so that his eyes filled her screen. Juno had forgotten the details so quickly – forgotten how striking his eyes were. The frosty lines in his iris sparkled like cut glass. ‘I still love you Juno. I know you’re not coming back, but sometimes I wish you were here with me. Also… I’m sorry about what I said. You know… Please forgive me?’ The screen went blank too soon.
Juno re-watched it, and each time the video seemed shorter. Only two minutes. Juno felt as if it was only the window of her computer screen separating them. She could be in university too, reading fat expensive textbooks and wondering what to do with the abundant free time she was trusted to organize herself. University would be filled with new, exciting people, and Juno took a moment to imagine what they would be like. What she would be like. As she did, she saw, all too clearly, a different avenue her life could have taken. Why did it hurt? She had chosen this path and yet she was distracted by the distant ache of injustice. The notion that she’d been robbed of something too soon.
She flopped back on the bed, clutching her stomach. When the others asked what was wrong she’d tell them she was spacesick.
Chapter 32
POPPY
25.12.12
SOMEHOW, BY DECEMBER, HER mind had changed. Poppy would never know if it was the antidepressants Fae had given her or finally getting used to the new rhythm of her life on the Damocles or Juno’s determination to pursue order, but by Christmas Poppy found it easier to keep from being mired in hopelessness. On Christmas morning, she awoke with a hard knot of excitement unspooling in her stomach. She looked around in the darkness at the sleeping heaps of Astrid and Juno in their bunks and smiled. For years, at Christmas, Poppy had woken alone in her bedroom and longed for sisters.