Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

‘’mnotokay,’ she slurred as tears fell freely from her eyes. ‘I’m alone.’

‘No, you’re not,’ he said and pulled her close to him, though her face was sticky. ‘You’re okay.’ He stroked her hair. She realized that this was the closest she’d been to a human body since Noah had held her in the Garden of Flight back on Earth. Such a long time ago. Nestled against Jesse’s large chest, she felt slight and safe. She would drift into sleep a couple of times, only to jerk awake in a body filled with pain and retch over the toilet bowl. Each time Jesse would wake too and tug the hair out of her face, and wipe her forehead and smile lazily and promise her that she would soon be fine.

She supposed he carried her out of the bathroom a while later, and onto the sofa where she woke to find herself in his arms. By then, the worst of the sickness had passed. She felt light and tired and wonderfully clean, as if she’d been baptized in flames. She opened her eyes to discover a body without stomach cramps or tremors. Jesse was still asleep beside her, his lips slightly parted, head rolled back on the sofa, breathing softly.

Chapter 31 JUNO

^11.12.12

BY THE TIME DECEMBER came, everything was different. Jesse and Juno slid into an intimacy born of constant proximity. Cosy habits emerged: watching recordings of University Challenge and shouting out the answers or marathons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Juno discovered that they shared the same cynical sense of humour. Every new thing she learned about him was a delight. They stayed up late talking most nights, sometimes until the hallway sky simulation turned lemon-yellow with ‘dawn’.

Everyone had closed ranks by the end of that year: Harry and Eliot stayed up late playing insomniac chess marathons on the control deck; Poppy and Astrid paired rations of sugar and evaporated milk to make wild saccharine confections and curled up together in Poppy’s bed, discussing star signs.

A couple of weeks after they began their approach to Jupiter, an email from Noah arrived. The subject line was ‘Juno?’, nothing in the body of the message but a photograph of her house, and a video attachment. The photograph had clearly been taken a couple of months ago, because the leaves on the apple tree in the front garden were the colour of fire and rust. Juno touched the screen. He had given her the end of the summer. The shortening days, Cox apples growing fat. For a moment, she was there too. Beyond the reinforced walls of their vessel. Home.

Juno clicked on the video attachment, which loaded slowly, and as it did, she shuddered with excitement and dread. Finally, Noah’s face appeared on her screen. His curly blond hair had grown out so that he looked like a young Robert Plant, his chin shadowed with patches of stubble. Noah fiddled with the camera, setting it on the desk in front of him, before staring straight into the lens. ‘Hey, Juno.’ He waved. ‘So I was thinking about a gift to give you and your mum suggested I make a video so you get to feel like you’re here with me. It’s September right now but I probably won’t get up the courage to send this to you until after Christmas so… happy Christmas?’ He was in a bedroom she didn’t recognize, sparsely decorated with a fire-safety notice stuck to the back of the door. ‘I could see you for a while, you know. In the sky and on the news. I wish you could have been here. I don’t know if they told you how crazy it got down here for a while. The Beta was on the news every day… but I don’t watch it so much anymore.’ He paused, and swallowed. ‘So anyway, here is my room in uni!’ He twisted the camera around to show a rather bare room. Juno recognized some of the posters from his old bedroom. The periodic table, an old Coldplay poster, a little postcard that said ‘if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the precipitate’, which never really stopped being funny even after GCSE chemistry.