‘It’s not possible to cheat those tests,’ Astrid said. ‘They control for lying. Don’t you think everyone lies? Or tries to? No one’s going to say they’re frightened of the dark or enclosed spaces. Everyone ticks “strongly agree” when they read “I function well in a team.” But they chose you for a reason. You’re so good at—’ Astrid fumbled for a moment. ‘…communication. And… public relations. The crowds love you. You wouldn’t have made it through if they didn’t know you were right for this mission, Poppy.’
Poppy looked up again at her friend with desperate eyes. ‘You think?’ she almost pleaded.
‘Of course.’
Poppy’s talent with languages had long made her the envy of the other students at Dalton. As part of their training, all astronaut candidates were required to display some proficiency in Russian, as the UKSA had strong links with the Russian Space Agency, Roscocosmos. As her classmates took their first clumsy halting steps into the language, Poppy was reading Анна Каренина and conducting happy conversations with their engineering teacher. Although she scored below average in almost every other subject, Poppy had excelled in computer science and robotics because she picked up programming languages with the ease of a stamp collector.
Nevertheless, everyone suspected, uncharitably, that the real reason Poppy had been selected for the Beta over so many other competent candidates was because of her good looks. Poppy’s role, as Head of Communications, was the most public-facing of the crew. And her face was a delight. Unnaturally symmetrical. Titian hair drawn down her porcelain forehead into a delicate widow’s peak. Cartilage of her nose curved exquisitely upwards. Every week for twenty-three years, her role was to appear on the TV and computer screens of children all over the world, explaining thermodynamics and Kepler’s laws of planetary motion in twenty different languages.
‘And you have doubts too, sometimes?’ Poppy asked.
‘Sure,’ Astrid lied, ‘sometimes.’
A tremolo voice rose up from the rain, and Astrid looked up to see a girl outside the window in the courtyard, dancing by herself, dressed in mufti, a crop top and combat boots, a glittering line of bindis dotting her left brow. It was Ara. Singing a song that Astrid had heard her perform before, at their Leavers’ Ball the previous year. She had been the first on the dance floor, singing alone, wearing, then, a sequinned dress with a skater skirt that flared up around her thighs when she twirled. She had been like a human disco ball with her bold voice, an inspiration to them all – every girl who had scrabbled the previous fortnight for a date – alone and unashamed.
‘She can’t go a day without dancing,’ Poppy said with a weak smile as she stood up. Prising open the door, she followed just like the other girls had that night at the dance. Ara’s siren song, irresistible.
Although Astrid recoiled at the freezing rush of air into the refectory, she watched Poppy skip into the courtyard to join in. Ara took her hand and led her in a dizzy waltz up and down the cobblestones, both blinking fiercely against the rain. Then she let go and sent Poppy reeling, their laughter scattering up the four walls and into every window.
From where she sat, Astrid saw her sister Juno pop a sleepy head from the first-floor window, and was sure she was going to tell them off about the noise, but instead she ducked back inside then appeared in the courtyard a moment later to join them in the dance. Her sister had never been able to dance. She moved awkwardly, with none of the rhythm of her companions. Never able to shuffle off the weight of other people’s eyes, and even in short moments of celebration, too nervous to move the way her body quietly urged. But that morning, she could.
Astrid ventured from the table and stood on the threshold between the kitchen and the garden, watching them all in surprise. ‘Astrid, come and join us,’ Ara urged, spinning around, her arms thrown above her head. ‘The air smells so good out here. Like, cool and clean. The day’s just begun.’
Astrid hesitated – the storm that had been threatening when she woke up had arrived, and it was violent. Thunder roared overhead, raindrops exploded on the cobblestones and sluiced over the gutters. ‘What would you do with this day, Astrid,’ Ara called to her, ‘if you could do anything at all?’ But Astrid remembered that this morning was not a beginning at all. They had been five years in training for this mission and all of a sudden here they were, almost at the end.
It occurred to Astrid, in a disembodied instant, that already this moment was accelerating away from her. In a second, being young and full of laughter and standing with all her friends on Earth would be only a memory. Nothing more than a memory ever again.
When she finally stepped out into the storm everything hurt; the icy needles of the rain, the sharp cold cobbles underfoot, the gnawing hunger in her stomach and a sudden longing to swallow the whole sky, the sound of her sister’s celebration and the light shining off their forearms before it all slipped away.
A flash of lightning lanced across the clouds and Astrid spotted faces illuminated under one of the darkened archways on the opposite side of the courtyard. The boys. Eliot and Harry, their faces pale. Harry had his hands open, palms up, as if the rain was made of platinum coins.
Astrid cleared her throat, all of a sudden ashamed and aware of herself. ‘Did we wake you?’ she called to them.
‘We’ve been up all night,’ Harry admitted. ‘Both of us. What are you doing?’
‘Dancing.’ Ara’s voice still chimed with laughter.
‘Evidently,’ said Eliot. ‘You’ll catch pneumonia or something, in this weather.’
‘You don’t catch pneumonia – or something – from the rain,’ Juno snorted.
They all stood in silence for a minute; the sun was breaking through the clouds and its muted light spread across them.
‘I want to go into town,’ Ara suggested with an excitement that sounded out of place. The exuberance of their last dancing moments had already dissolved on the rain-slicked stones. Harry chuckled, then stopped, spotting no sign of jest.
‘Are you serious?’ he asked, wiping the wet blond hair from his eyes. ‘How would we do that?’
‘We used to sneak out sometimes at Dalton. In the early days, when we were thirteen or fourteen.’
‘Yeah, but it’s pretty much impossible to leave here.’
‘I know what you mean though,’ Poppy sighed heavily. ‘I feel as if we’ve been indoors for years or something. It’s been so much work every day.’
‘We don’t have much scheduled today,’ Eliot said. ‘Just the tree-planting ceremony.’
‘Is it lame that I’m excited?’ Juno said, with a shy smile. They had grown up with pictures of famous and long-dead astronauts planting trees at the British Interplanetary Society, in the Garden of Flight. Pumpkin-orange in their flight suits, sprinkling dirt over the roots as they might over a lover’s grave. It was a ritual the Brits borrowed from the Russians, who planted saplings in Cosmonauts’ Grove near their launch site in Baikonur. Space enthusiasts still made the pilgrimage to see the 100-year-old oak tree planted by the first man in space. Astrid was excited too. She wondered if, in another century, people might touch the dirt at the roots of her own tree, mouth silent prayers for the other distant Earth that the Beta would be the first to stand on.
‘It feels like graduation, almost,’ Poppy said. ‘Like we’re finally real astronauts.’
‘We are,’ Harry said.
‘We will be tomorrow,’ Juno said, ‘technically.’
‘And,’ Eliot said, ‘the garden will be in town. The BIS is near the Houses of Parliament. We’ll see all of London through the window. So you don’t have to feel like you’re missing anything.’