Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

JUNO WANDERED THE SHIP dazed as a sleepwalker. Everything looked different in the dim illumination of the emergency LEDs. She reached out an arm to get her bearings as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. But the walls of the middle deck were so cold already that tendrils of pain shot up to her knuckles and she recoiled.

They were running out of air.

Her mind reversed back over the same anxious tracks. It had been easy – it had been essential – to forget that the Damocles was delicate as a bubble, that she had ventured into the arid vacuum of space with nothing but a few metres of mylar and aluminium to protect her. She’d never forget again.

Both the Beta’s cabins were empty. Poppy’s radio crackled under her bed, spitting out a few bars of music, the limpid rise of a melody audible for just a moment before being consumed by static. She was not in her bed and neither was Astrid.

Juno headed to the greenhouse, and when she opened the hatch the sound of her footsteps echoed in the gloom. It was like a darkened cathedral. Through the vaulted glass ceiling she could see the spinning rings of the other decks and, beyond them, the stars cast a cold constant light.

They were running out of air.

Bright splinters of pain had begun to burst behind her temples. When mountain climbers ventured too high into the upper atmosphere, and altitude sickness set in, it felt like a hangover, then like carbon-monoxide poisoning. If they continued to climb, the partial pressure of oxygen in their lungs would decrease. They experienced fatigue, dizziness, headaches, a gradual loss of consciousness, and then…

‘Jesse?’ Juno’s voice reverberated off the shattered spires. The temperature had already dropped so low that her breath misted on the air. Frozen branches of trees were like twisted fingers, catching at loose strands of her hair. Every now and then a halogen lamp would flicker on and light would spear through the icy foliage, making the leaves knife-edged and the creeping undergrowth a steely silver.

When she found Jesse, he was crying. He was lying on his back on a grassy platform near the radiation shelter, on the little mound of pillows and bedsheets he’d gathered there a few weeks ago in order to sleep in the garden. It was quite beautiful, Juno realized now, a bamboo skeleton of a roof above, hung with fairy-lights and wind chimes. They tinkled as she approached.

‘Jesse?’ Juno flicked on a little pen-light she’d found in a first aid kit. It gave her his face in tiny snatches, flashed off his retinas and his lips, which were blue as bruises. His skin was frozen. Juno bit back a scream. She had been surprised to tumble over the still weight of his body and for a horrible instant she thought that he was dead.

But the sound roused him and he opened his dark eyes.

‘Juno,’ he said, his breath like smoke.

‘You’re crying,’ she said, and he nodded. The side of his face was covered in dirt, and glass glittered in his hair.

Juno wasn’t sure if he was crying because of the shock, because of all that he had endured, or out of fear and grief or because – in the greenhouse – he could see that his months of work had come to almost nothing. His seedlings torn from the ground in a quick blast, their oxygen system crippled.

‘T-the air is here,’ he stammered, the words thick on his frozen lips.

Juno took off her jumper and wrapped it around him. She had learned about hypothermia before, so she already knew about the confusion that set in after core body temperature began to drop.

‘Come on. Let’s go back to the crew module. You need to warm up.’ He wouldn’t move, so Juno tried to roll him, but her own limbs were so heavy with exhaustion that she sighed and stopped. ‘Please. I’m not strong enough to carry you. You’ve got to help me. What are you doing?’

‘P-practising,’ he said.

‘Practising what?’

Jesse opened his hand. In the dim light it was difficult to see what he was holding. At first it looked as if he was bleeding, as if he’d squeezed a broken piece of glass, but then she realized that the shredded skin clumping in the lines of his palm was the slick flesh of crushed berries. The pulp ran down his wrists like blood. Near his head was the thin seedling. Half the stems had snapped off and around the roots, the water had frozen into silver veins of ice.

‘Dying,’ he said. ‘When it happens it won’t be so bad. It’ll be quick. Once the oxygen’s low enough.’ Juno pictured it, the trauma of suffocation, the tide of black horror that came with it, and suddenly the walls felt as if they were closing in on her. She had to lean back to steady herself. ‘There’s no alarm response,’ he continued. ‘You just fall asleep. It’s okay, apparently, it’s… euphoric.’

‘Jesse—’ she was shaking. ‘Please stop.’

His eyes rolled up to find hers.

‘Anyway,’ she knelt down beside him, ‘it’s all going to be okay. Tomorrow Igor and Eliot and maybe Astrid – since Sheppard is still sick – will do a spacewalk and fix the broken service module. Then we’ll be okay.’