Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

She turned around and headed in that direction. Eliot followed without protest. Of all the members of the Beta, Eliot was the boy that Astrid knew the least. He was a year younger than the rest of them, seventeen, although he looked fourteen. His teeth were gappy and small, as if he’d somehow managed to hang on to his milk teeth. He was a robotics genius who had grown up in wales and the only student to be personally head-hunted and invited to join the Dalton training programme after winning an engineering competition run by Imperial College London. Famously, he’d written a computer programme that could predict the probability of a planet bearing ‘life’. He’d been twelve when he’d joined and still scored perfectly in almost every exam. However, many had believed he would not be chosen for the Beta because of how poorly he consistently scored in every psychological evaluation and team exercise. He flinched when anyone but Ara touched him, and had to arrange his chips in order of length before he could eat them.

They had almost reached Westminster station when they both heard a scream. A gathering of people by the side of the road. A car accident maybe? A cyclist crushed under a wheel?

Eliot inhaled sharply and turned. Following his gaze to the edge of the river, Astrid noticed that a small group of people were gathering, looking down a flight of narrow steps that led to the Thames.

‘What is it…?’ Astrid asked, but Eliot was walking quickly, then running, towards the low wall above the water.

‘Call the police…’ one woman said, rummaging in her handbag for a phone.

‘…an ambulance…’

‘…it’ll be too late – there must be someone around here who can…’

When Astrid approached, Eliot shoved his phone at her. ‘Use it…’ he barked, then vaulted over the rusting gate blocking the steps that descended into the black water. A couple of people shouted, but none of them moved to stop him.

There was a body floating in the river.

She only recognized it was Ara a minute later, when Eliot emerged from the water gasping and grabbing at the railing. Astrid stood at the top of the steps and watched – gripped with disbelief – as Eliot scrambled and slipped at the bottom, heaving Ara’s limp body with one arm and clutching at the railing with the other.

‘Help! Help me!’ he cried out. Astrid’s muscles unglued, and she climbed down as fast as her trembling legs would allow. It was difficult; each step was coated in a slippery green-black slime. Every time Astrid moved, her foot threatened to fly out from under her and she pictured herself flailing, crashing down the steps and slipping into the river.

Eliot was having the same trouble. He was half-blinded by river water and tears and his trainers slipped across the stone. He almost buckled under the weight of Ara’s body. Her head was lolling back on her neck, her fingers grazing the ground.

Astrid grabbed onto the railings and reached out her free hand to grab one of Ara’s arms, and together they hauled her up to the pavement.

It was only when Astrid let her friend’s body fall onto the asphalt that she noticed how thin Ara was. Her waterlogged skirt hung halfway down her thighs, exposing her knickers and the harsh angles of her pelvis.

‘Does anyone know first aid?’ one onlooker said, but Eliot was already flicking wet hair out of his eyes as he checked for signs of life, her breathing, her pulse. They had learned how to do that in physiology. The memory took on a grim reality then, as Astrid remembered Ara playing dead in her school uniform as her partner checked her pulse. It tickles, she’d spluttered, her face red with giggles she failed to swallow down.

‘Call an ambulance…’ someone shouted, and three people confirmed that they already had.

‘Don’t touch her,’ another person said, ‘looks like she’s broken something.’ Her body was twisted unnaturally on the ground, one arm bent outwards. Astrid shuddered. It didn’t look as if moving her would make any difference – her jaw was slack, eyes yellow and half-open.

SHE DIED IN THE ambulance. It seemed as if she would make it for just a little while, when she was breathing again and puking up the black water, her lips and teeth stained as if she’d been chewing on charcoal, but her heart had stopped before the paramedics could rush her off to the hospital and before they had time to hold Astrid and Eliot back to keep them from watching her body slump on the gurney.

Looked like poison, one of them said; something in her body before she jumped. Her stomach was filled with it.

Astrid had never seen someone die before – Ara was the first. From then on, when she recalled their final day on Earth, her friend’s twisted body was all she ever saw. And the message they found later on Eliot’s phone. A text that she had sent him, which everyone would go on to consider her suicide note. It was what she had said earlier that day to Astrid, what the reporters quoted: Everything is beautiful. Everything hurts.