‘Eliot?’ Astrid rubbed her eyes, straining to see in the darkness of the infirmary. Eliot’s face was oddly lit by Fae’s desk lamp.
‘There’s someone out there.’
‘Where?’ But then it occurred to her. ‘Eliot, you’re dreaming.’ She climbed out to shake him awake, and he looked at her, startled.
‘What?’
‘You had a bad dream.’
‘Ara was here.’ He scrambled out of bed and checked beneath it, grabbed at the metal bars of the gurney, checked everywhere. ‘She was here in this room.’
‘That sounds like a good dream,’ Astrid said, turning away.
For her, sleep did not come easily. She lay awake most nights, torn up with regret for the choice she’d made. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her teeth chattering, rolling under the duvet, tears in her eyes. Sometimes she was on the edge of sleep, dreaming of drowning just off the shores of Terra-Two, her crew on the beach as she thrashed the waves, watching her die. Commander Sheppard, smiling the way he had a year ago on one of the early mornings when she’d found him singing to his son on the flight deck.
‘I’m sorry,’ she told him. Could he hear her? ‘I made a mistake.’ But the wash of the undertow swept her back into her own cold reality.
Chapter 49
POPPY
IT CAME AS A surprise to Poppy, how hard Harry took Commander Sheppard’s death. He disappeared after the memorial, and she spotted him heading down the corridor and into a room next to the cockpit. It was Solomon’s room, with his name embossed on the door in silver letters beneath a pair of outstretched wings. Poppy often wondered if their commander had slept soundly, or if the burden of being captain of their lonely ship bore down on him, even as he dreamt.
The door was slightly ajar, and a thin stream of yellow light broke into the dim corridor. ‘Hey,’ she said, her breath misting in front of her. Harry was sitting on the bed, his back to Poppy. She lingered for a moment on the threshold. She could hear the melancholy wail of a clarinet through speakers, and over it the catch of a breath. ‘Harry?’
She pushed the door open a little further. The room was only dimly illuminated by the lamp on the desk and the hot glow of Jupiter through a large window. Commander Sheppard’s room was smaller than she had imagined it would be. It smelt of him, which, now, made Poppy feel a little creepy. She took a tentative step inside, her heart in her throat. The rug was soft and thick under her feet and Poppy noted everything as she passed. Solomon’s uniform folded up on the easy chair. On his desk was an armillary sphere. Earth was a golden ball in the centre and the lamplight twinkled off the frame of delicate rings. Poppy ran her finger along the tiny engravings on the surface, lines of latitude, the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. It was the most exquisite thing she had seen in a long time, and it gave her a thrill to try to imagine Commander Sheppard leaning over it late at night, tracing the constellations as they passed.
On the pin-board above the bed were photographs. Pictures of his son, his wife. She, feather-haired and smiling, his arm draped casually around her shoulders. Another, their wedding day, his hair grown out into an afro, his hand on her waist as they pressed a knife into luxurious white marzipan. Him playing the saxophone at sixteen or maybe seventeen, forehead scarred by acne. Him, pushing the British flag into the cracked surface of Mars. Seeing these pictures now was like peeling open a flower to find the vivid, surprising organs inside.
‘Harry?’ She glanced up and saw him hunched, face buried in one hand. Crying. ‘Harry?’ She put her hand lightly on his shoulder, unsure how to respond. She had never seen him cry before.
The accident in the space shuttle had left him scarred, lacerations along his forehead and temple, a patch of eyebrow where the hair no longer grew.
‘I’ll never be anything like him.’ Harry’s gaze followed hers up to the pictures on the pin-board. There was one of them on launch day – they looked younger to Poppy’s eyes now, but she knew that was unlikely. Jesse had stood a little way away from them, and Solomon had pulled him over.
‘Why does it matter…?’
‘Don’t you realize… that’s all that’s ever mattered to me.’
‘Really?’
His eyes drifted away for a moment as if he was looking inside himself. ‘I guess so. Shall I tell you something stupid? Something this whole thing put me in mind of?’
She nodded.
‘Years ago. Years and years ago, when I was – I don’t know, young enough to hold my father’s hand – we were walking from his office in Mayfair to get lunch. I was holding his hand and we were walking under some scaffolding when we heard a sound. Like one of the builders above us dropping something heavy, a hammer, or a pot of paint. The sort of thing that falls and crushes someone’s skull. My dad let go of my hand.’ Harry spread his fingers. ‘Let go of my hand like it was on fire and ran for it, bolted ahead. Left me. And I stopped in the middle of the pavement, just staring at him. Thinking about what a coward he was. Thinking about those stories of people who jump in front of bullets for other people, mothers who lift cars to save their infants. And my dad, ducking for cover. I know it was probably just instinctive, fight-or-flight or whatever. But that was the thing that bothered me most. That it was instinctive. Him leaving me. Even then I thought, I know. He tried to laugh it off all the way to the brasserie but I thought, Now I know.’
‘And Sheppard—’ Poppy knew where this was going. ‘At the moment it came to it, Sheppard saved you.’
Harry nodded. Poppy realized that this was one of the few times that Harry had ever confided in her or treated her like a friend. It hurt when she compared this intimacy to its imitation: late-night trysts in the games room, ten minutes pressed up against the bathroom stall being as quiet as possible. Perhaps, that whole time, this was all she had ever wanted from him.
‘It’ll be okay,’ she told him.
‘Will it?’ Harry asked. ‘They chose us because they think we’re brave. Chose me to be the type of commander who can stare down death, leap in front of it to save my crew. Go down with the ship. Stay calm. But, I think… maybe I was so good at it because I still thought that all of this was a game.
‘Do you remember a question they used to ask us in the psych tests back at Dalton? There was this one they asked me once: “What would you die for?” I said something like “Great Britain” or “freedom”. But you know what this whole experience has taught me? If they asked me again, “What would you die for?” Willingly die for? I’d probably say “nothing at all”.’
Chapter 50
ELIOT
16.02.13
TEMPERATURE: 2°C
O2: 75.5% SEA LEVEL
WEEKS UNTIL RESCUE: 7
WHEN ELIOT AWOKE IT was the middle of the night, and the sound of his name echoed in the air like the final vibrations of a gong. His body ached with cold and the dark world had taken on a shimmery underwater quality.
He almost fell out of bed; his body was so clumsy and numb that he couldn’t feel his fingers or toes and his lips tingled. They’d been locked in the infirmary for a week by that point. Fae had sealed the door, but there wasn’t a door on this ship that Eliot could not open. He checked through the window to make sure there was no one in the corridor, then fumbled along the edge for the locking mechanism and twisted a paperclip in, a trick he’d performed before to save Astrid and Juno on the bridge. He pulled the latch and it slid right open to the corridor, lit in the deep blue of an artificial midnight.