The last thing I remembered was the flashlight rolling crazily, the smell of the ocean, and the fierce pain in the back of my head.
I woke up cold and stiff, with a pounding headache, thinking I was still on the Bifrost. But the rough wooden floor and the bitterly cold wind helped me remember that I had left Jupiter eighteen months ago. I was on Tern Island. I tried to get up but my legs didn’t work. It was like when I first made planetfall. I gave up the attempt and lay there, trying to make sense of what was happening.
I blinked and opened my eyes hazily, seeing double. I was looking up at the night sky. The rain had stopped and the clouds had cleared. The stars flickered through the atmosphere, the spiral arm of the Milky Way a faint smudge against the void. I could see the massive armature of the station that orbited the Earth, its lights flashing rhythmically. I looked for Jupiter and saw her, a steady, reassuring point of light.
I turned my head, oh so carefully, almost overwhelmed by the pounding headache and the nausea. There was enough starlight for me to see the broken stone walls of the tower. Someone – no child, of course – had carried me to the top of the lighthouse. An enemy, I imagined. I struggled to come to terms with that. I had no enemies. Things like this simply didn’t happen in space. People were – people were chosen for space, carefully vetted and analyzed and tested. They didn’t hit pilots over the head with heavy objects and carry them to the top of dangerous towers. I would have felt more outrage if I hadn’t been so sick and feeble.
I managed to push into a sitting position.
“Where are you?” I tried to shout, but my voice came out as a whisper. I was shivering from the cold and shock. I needed to get back to the house, despite the presence of my enemy. I wouldn’t last the night up here.
A light caught my eye, the flickering of candlelight, a tiny reminder of danger. A candle doesn’t light itself. I got to my hands and knees and then to my feet, swaying dangerously. The light waited, the little flame blowing sideways. I was drawn to it – I imagined I could even feel the tiny bit of heat it emitted. I tottered toward it, one step, then two.
A mighty gust of wind roared up out of the sky and battered me backwards. I couldn’t even hear my own scream in the whirlwind that sent me to my rear on the wet, rough floor. My head pounded as if it were about to explode.
The wind abated as quickly as it had come up, taking the candlelight with it. I got my breath back and decided staying off my feet was best. I scooted over to the center of the tower, thinking I could find the stairs and the ladder down. The stars gave me enough light that my plan was rewarded. My boots found the trapdoor, and slow step by slow step I made it down the ladder.
This part of the tower was familiar to me. My grandfather had used it for storage of all kinds of junk. I didn’t know who was playing with fire, but I knew where they had gotten the candles. I made my way to the cabinet with the emergency supplies and fumbled for a stub of my own. There were matches too, and after a few hasty tries I managed to light my candle. It flared and sputtered and the heat was uncomfortable, but it gave me light. I found a small lantern and fixed the candle inside it, holding it by the handle high above my head.
As I expected, no one was in sight. My headache had faded somewhat. I grabbed a wool blanket from the stack and wrapped it around myself. It smelled of urine and rat droppings but at least I stopped shivering. I could even, if I wanted, stay here for the night.
The lighthouse has the answers? I wasn’t sure I wanted answers anymore. Someone had tried – was trying – to kill me. I wanted off Tern Island as much now as I had when I had been a teenager, when my grandfather had succumbed to his madness, calling me “Angelique”, my mother’s name, and cursing me for my bad blood, my defective genes, and for killing his son, my father. He had beaten me so badly that I still bore the scars on one side of my face. I had fled in the night, piloting a small fishing boat across the sound, setting a rough course by keeping the flickering light from the lighthouse at my back. I imagined I could still hear my grandfather screaming my name across the water. The Cardenas had sheltered me from his retribution, and then I had fled as far as I could.
I had gone all the way to the moons of Jupiter to escape his insanity, and here I was, back again, with no way to escape this time. Moving stiffly, I barricaded the door to the tower, constructing a deadfall of junk to warn me if anyone tried to get in. I cleared a lumpy old sofa and laid my aching body down, wrapped in the stinky blanket, and blew out the candle.
From where I lay, I could see a patch of starlight through the trapdoor in the ceiling. Jupiter burned bright, and I was comforted by her presence. I closed my eyes and slept.
I woke, plagued with a cold and stuffy nose, to birdsong and the wind in the pine trees. I sat up stiffly, waited for my headache to subside, and began the process of clearing out the deadfall at the door.
The sun was up but emitted no warmth. My breath misted as I made my way across the overgrown frost-rimed lawn to the house. I would call Mrs Cardenas and she would send Ethan, and once away from this place I would instruct my lawyers to sell the house and the island. I would begin the process of getting back into space. I never should have come.
The ocean was gray with whitecaps, the long stone jetty submerged by the tide. Despite my determination to leave and never come back, I paused to take in the island’s harsh beauty. It was a stark place, unhealthy for a child to grow up in, but it was the only home I knew. And there was the cemetery, with its impossible image of a child who never existed. I knew I should walk away, and I knew I couldn’t.
It was an essential part of me, as much my DNA as the bad blood my grandfather had accused me of.
The rusty gate squealed as I pushed it open and entered the little graveyard. I looked around at the graves of my ancestors. There was my grandfather’s – the massive, polished oblong thrusting into the sky.
But it was not his grave I meant to see. Nestled in between the roots of the largest pine tree was a small, unassuming gravestone, its engraved name barely readable after eighty years of weather and time.
Bianca Fermes
29 April 2150 – 8 September 2161
I didn’t believe in bad blood or bad genes, but I was beginning to believe in ghosts. Before me, at Tern Island, there had been another child, one whose grave was tucked furthermost under the pine trees in the cemetery. I was a lonely child, and before Ethan had come along, I had pretended she could play with me.
I had only stopped when things became too real and the stories I made up about her became frightening, as if I hadn’t been playing make-believe so much as narrating history.
“What happened to the little girl in the cemetery, the one who fell from the tower?” I remembered asking Mrs Dawes. And her only response had been to stutter and scold, telling me I was a bad girl for making up stories.
I stopped playing with Bianca and I never went back to the cemetery, but she was never far from my mind, especially at night when my grandfather hammered on my locked bedroom door and screamed at me.
I knelt awkwardly at the grave and put my hand on the rough stone. “I’m sorry I abandoned you,” I said.
“You must have been very lonely.”
The pine trees stilled, and the cemetery grew silent.
“I went away to Jupiter,” I went on, past the lump in my throat. “I tried to forget you and everything else that happened. But that wasn’t fair, was it? It wasn’t your fault.”