‘You think?’ Eliot lifted his head to look at her. Poppy nodded. ‘Say goodbye?’ he asked and she nodded again. ‘But… then I’d really be alone.’ Tears seeped slowly from his eyes.
‘No.’ Poppy knelt down and grabbed his hand. ‘We need you.’
‘But…’ He looked past her, at the shadows beyond the cracked spires, ‘you know she’s here with me.’
‘Right now?’ Juno’s heart sank. It was worse than she had thought. Eliot was clearly suffering from some kind of delusion.
But Poppy simply continued stroking his hand calmly. ‘She needs to leave.’ She said it like an order, with a strength that Juno had never seen. Said it as if she could command him back from the world between the living and the dead.
Of course, Juno thought, of course this is a conversation Poppy is comfortable engaging in. Poppy, who had fought to find strength in the face of her own depression.
‘Tell her. We need you here.’
Tears squeezed from Eliot’s eyes. ‘I don’t think I can,’ he said.
‘I know,’ Poppy soothed. ‘It takes courage to be alone. But you have to tell her that she can’t stay. Tell her that you forgive her but you have decided, today, to live.’
Chapter 53
ELIOT
18.02.13
TEMPERATURE: -3°C
O2: 68% SEA LEVEL
WEEKS UNTIL RESCUE: 6
FOR THE REST OF his life, Eliot’s mind would always roam back to the edge of the Thames, and he would never properly understand what made her jump.
He’d left the Earth less than twenty-four hours after Ara had died. Had not seen her body again, after it had been carted away from Embankment. He had not attended her funeral, and the guilt of the abandonment crushed him.
When Juno and Poppy took him down to the infirmary, Eliot had been delirious with hypothermia. He’d thought that he could see Ara everywhere he looked.
His nerves had been on fire. Electric shocks arrowed up his toes and along the arch of his foot as Fae had tried to warm them. In his confusion, he’d thought he’d heard Juno and the doctor mention frostbite. ‘I think he might lose them,’ one of them had said.
Eliot cried so much that finally Fae injected something into his IV to put him to sleep, and in his dream he was walking through the ship, Ara’s hand in his. Through the window, he could see that they were close enough to Terra-Two for him to discern mountain ranges.
‘You can’t come with me,’ he told her. Her hand, in his, was heavy as a millstone.
‘Of course I can.’ She smiled the way she used to when they shared an inside joke.
‘We used to go everywhere together,’ he told her. He and Ara had grown up like two trees with their roots twisted together. Both of them liked to believe that, together, they were twice as strong. Although, silently, they knew that without the other they were crippled.
He saw them both, watching the long surf rise and fall near his uncle’s house in Southerndown. Getting drunk in Brockwell Park, their blood sizzling with champagne, lying on their backs in the floodlit grass, talking about God and Terra-Two and the Damocles, which was shining above them even then.
In his dream, he wheeled through memories as they flashed like a life before his eyes. Her life. A surprise party in Ara’s garden, their grinning mouths black with braces. Ara in her white school uniform, her shirt see-through and dripping from a water fight in the garden. The summer she bleached her hair candy-floss pink. By sixteen, Eliot and Ara were roughly the same height and their darkly lashed eyes and long hair made them look like long-lost siblings, their fingers entwined. Both of them thin and dour as refugees.
Ara’s theory was that lovers had been conjoined twins in a past life, sentenced to look for each other in the next, bereft until they found the one person with a hollow in their chest shaped like the bump on their own.
‘I can’t go with you,’ he said. And his own life flickered before him. His jaw growing square at twenty-three, etched with stubble. At thirty, sketching a new design for an updated VASIMR engine, improving on Igor’s design. At forty, setting foot on Terra-Two, staring down at his hand as he touched rain. ‘I remember this,’ he’d say to himself. He saw it all, the abundance of the life before him, another seventy years perhaps. And he wanted it.
‘I can’t have both,’ he told her as they approached the airlock. In the low oxygen, it took all the strength he had to haul open the hatch.
‘Both of what?’ she asked as she stepped inside the airlock, and waited for him to follow after her. For a moment, Eliot almost did. He stared at her bare feet on the ground, the way her hair floated around her head. His love for her cut like a knife, now. Caused him nothing but pain and so it was a relief, almost, to shut the hatch between them.
He reached over to the gearbox and found the emergency eject button. As he did, there was a banging against the porthole window, frantic pounding. Eliot saw that Ara was shouting his name in a panic. He froze, his mouth dry, considered again what this meant, a life without her. It was the only one he could have.
He remembered what Poppy had told him, that grieving for Ara would be like an uphill climb, a terrifying journey back to himself. This story, too, was a love story. It had only just begun.
WHEN HE AWOKE A day later, two of his toes were gone. But Eliot’s chest was light with freedom. ‘We had to,’ Juno said, leaning down to examine the wound dressing. In the cold, her hands were shaking violently. ‘They were too damaged.’ Eliot struggled to sit up, his arms trembling under him.
‘Does it hurt?’ she asked.
Eliot turned to the window and pressed his hand against it. Looked for her in the blackness. ‘She’s gone,’ he told Juno. And he actually laughed. The sound foreign but wonderful in his mouth.
‘Who?’ Juno asked. Behind the glass there was only the vacuum, and his own face. His own smiling face. ‘Eliot, are you okay?’
‘I’m…?’ He said it like a question, as if he was experimenting with the sound of it. ‘I’m… okay? I am okay.’
Chapter 54
ASTRID
20.02.13
TEMPERATURE: -9°C
O2: 65% SEA LEVEL
WEEKS UNTIL RESCUE: 6
THEY RELEASED ASTRID FROM confinement after Eliot’s accident. With Commander Sheppard gone, and Eliot sick, the crew needed all the hands that they could get. Astrid saw that they were all unravelling now, in different ways. The Russian expedition would not arrive for another six weeks. The temperature on the ship had dropped to below freezing, which meant that ice formed silver veins along the windows. If Astrid ever reached out to touch the walls of the ship, the cold was like a razor to her nerves. All but essential chores fell by the wayside. They spent long hours sleeping in their cabins, although the cold often woke them. Fae told them to check their bodies regularly for frostbite. After witnessing what happened to Eliot, Astrid was terrified of losing her own toes. During her time in the infirmary, she had scoured Fae’s books on human physiology. Found the chapters on high altitude and hypothermia. Pages of medical photographs of frostbite, thumbs and earlobes black as coal, nails falling off toes, skin that looked like it had been burned by the cold. The pictures made her sick. And yet she could not stop herself from reading. She discovered that the slow reduction of oxygen would be accompanied by “inexorable deterioration of the body”, a phrase that echoed in her nightmares. She discovered that some people acclimatised a little but that by the time the air pressure dropped below 40 per cent, they were all likely to be dead.