After breakfast, Jesse headed to the infirmary to check on Eliot, and found him playing his guitar, leaning over the instrument, strumming softly and singing.
‘Hey.’
Eliot stopped mid-lyric and looked up, his mouth open, revealing his gappy teeth. ‘You,’ he said.
‘I came to check on you. To see if you’re all right and all.’
‘I’m all right.’ Eliot looked away. His hand was bandaged. Jesse had heard his cries of pain the previous night as Dr Golinsky picked glass from his flesh with tweezers. Jagged flaps of torn skin hung loosely from his knuckles in a way that made Jesse wince.
He came to sit beside Eliot on the gurney. ‘You’re pretty good,’ he said, glancing at the silver strings of his guitar.
‘I’m kind of rusty. Haven’t practised in a while.’ He tapped his fingertips with his thumb. ‘I can feel my fingers have gone all soft. Your callouses go if you don’t play for a while, but never completely.’ He dropped his plectrum on the bed beside him, and Jesse picked it up. A black piece of plastic the size of a coin with the Union Jack stamped on it.
‘It’s not really the same without her. Singing, I mean.’
‘Yeah, you and Ara were in a band together, right?’ Jesse vaguely recalled a school concert at Dalton where Eliot and his skinny friends covered a song by Muse, their greasy hair in their eyes. Ara had fronted the band in stonewashed jeans, her brown thighs shining through the ripped denim. She sang like a siren, her eyes closed the whole time.
‘They’re not going to let me fly this mission. I don’t think,’ Eliot said, looking away.
‘What do you mean?’ Jesse asked. Harry and Commander Sheppard were going to pilot the shuttle to Orlando, then bus the crew back to the Damocles. A journey Jesse knew Harry was looking forward to, because Sheppard was allowing him to lead. In the passenger seat would be Poppy – a UKSA/NASA joint mission was big news, and of course ground control wanted Poppy to cover it. Eliot had also been selected to travel with them as the engineer.
‘I’m not going. Ground control haven’t cleared me.’
‘Really?’ Jesse asked, surprised.
‘I’ve missed a couple of psych sessions.’
‘Why?’ Jesse had actually caught Eliot a few times hiding out in the engine room when he was supposed to meet with Fae.
‘I think there’s something wrong with me,’ Eliot said in a whisper. He ran the soft edge of his thumb along the thinnest string so it made a keening twang.
Jesse remembered what he had mentioned the night before, about seeing things.
‘Do you think…’ Eliot began, ‘do you think that maybe it’s possible there’s someone outside?’
‘Outside?’ Jesse frowned in confusion, then nodded at the black window. ‘You mean, out there?’
‘Yeah,’ said Eliot. ‘And maybe we don’t know about it.’
‘Eliot…’ Jesse wasn’t sure whether or not to laugh, ‘if there was someone out there, then they would be dead.’
‘Maybe they are. Or, like, drowning.’
‘I’m not sure what to say,’ said Jesse. ‘I think that’s impossible.’
They were silent for a moment. Through the gap in the door they could hear the busyness of the ship. Someone was replacing a valve, and Jesse could hear the hollow clang of metal rattle behind the wall. Juno or Astrid dictating numbers from a machine readout. Commander Sheppard’s voice, a comforting rumble in the distance.
‘Maybe this is something you should be talking to Fae about.’
Eliot snorted. ‘Forget I said anything.’
‘Okay, sorry.’ Jesse let his eyes wander for another moment. ‘Do you think this has something to do with—’
‘Ara?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Everyone thinks that everything has to do with her. That’s all everyone wants to talk about. Her and why she did it. That note. That horrible note that she left on my phone. That I’ll see until the day I die. And underneath it all I feel like…’ He looked down at his bandaged hand.
‘Like you can’t remember who you are anymore?’ Jesse asked.
Eliot nodded. ‘My life before I met Ara is a blur, I can’t remember, properly, who I even was or how I ever made myself happy. But then, my life with Ara was all about… Ara. I feel okay telling you this because it’s not as if you really knew her, like the others. They love her. We all do. Did. It hurts like hell, missing her. So much that I haven’t been able to focus much on the work I’m supposed to do with Igor lately. I haven’t even sketched up any ideas for an invention.
‘I thought I’d spend my life with her, on Earth, on Terra-Two. I hoped that we’d die at the same time. I thought there was only one way that my life could turn out. But now…” He lowered his gaze and stopped himself.
‘But now…?’ Jesse asked.
JESSE
29.01.13
THE FIRST MONTH OF the New Year hurtled by and from then on, whenever Jesse slept, he’d dreamt of flight. The control panel illuminated before him, navigating the constellations with the ease of light across water. For five weeks, he made a habit of running the simulator every single day. Once he finished his chores in the greenhouse, he would march down to the games room and play until late into the night. Sometimes, he awoke to the sound of the morning bell, tangerine sunrise-light from the hall bleeding under the door. Flying goggles still strapped to his face, etching tender creases beneath his eyes and across his brow.
As he ascended the levels, the games became more beautiful. Jesse took more time to notice the grandeur of the sky, the exquisite detail of the virtual cockpit. In the intermediate levels, planetary nebulae and the remnants of supernovae unspooled in the foreground in vivid conflagrations of light.
Even with his new, more intuitive, understanding of the games, Jesse would still get stalled for a week on a single level, unable to master the delicate manoeuvres required to steer through a cloud of accelerating space junk, or to rendezvous with another craft. During those times, the task would plague him. His frazzled mind projected planets, darkly visible in the foreground, particles of dust suddenly and momentarily iridescent before a careening asteroid knocked him abruptly back into consciousness.
One fine night, by some miracle of dexterity, Jesse managed to skate through every challenge. Though the hull of his ship was fairly dented, it remained unbreached. He dodged debris and space junk and avoided sudden death by decompression. His heart pounding and palms sweating, Jesse’s mind narrowed into a corridor of exhausted focus. But he stayed true. He met every challenge with triumph, the sticky frustrating levels – eight, eleven, thirteen – he ascended them all.
How had it happened? Was it that keen blinkered attention which arose from weeks of sleep deprivation and determination? Was it that his exhaustion made him reckless and bold? Perhaps he had run the simulation so many times that something of the computer’s underlying logic had seeped into his consciousness.
Experts said it took around 200 hours of flying to become a space pilot, and, at five- or six-hour stretches every night, Jesse had managed at least that since Christmas.
Finally, here he was, on the last level, at the final leg of the challenge. Landing. He reached a half-familiar green and blue planet. Lapis coastlines and snow-white whorls of gorgeous sky. Home? was the message that flickered on his screen. ‘I hope so,’ he said to himself out loud. Hands shaking as his cockpit filled with cobalt light from the little planet. The challenge was to land at just the right angle, at just the right speed, in the thick atmosphere. But Jesse had an intuition for it now; he’d decelerated through atmospheres as thick as Venus’s – ninety times thicker than Earth’s and obscured by sulphuric acid clouds – and survived. This was easy. This was joyful. He slid down into the temperate embrace of the troposphere and brought his lander shuddering to solid ground. He climbed out, his avatar stumbling in the gravity, and stared, for the first time, at an ocean.