Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

She’d heard the Thames described as a ‘biohazard’; after heavy rain it acted as an overflow for the city’s sewers, and Astrid had come into contact with it. What if Juno was certified to fly and her sister wasn’t? The thought of facing the darkness of space alone filled her with panic.

‘Are you all right?’ A voice over the intercom.

‘Y-yes.’ Juno swallowed deeply and straightened her back. Now was not the time to break down. She was an astronaut. Now was the time to show the supervisors that she could shoulder anything and still do her job. ‘I’m fine, sir.’

‘Here comes the flash.’ A mechanical voice counted… four, three, two… ‘Close your eyes.’

Juno squeezed them shut – one – and even then she could still see the flare. Her eyelids lit up pink for a few seconds and the beating capillaries in her retina flickered red. Her nerves screamed for an instant, but she gritted her teeth against the pain. When she opened her eyes again her vision was bleached green and her skin stung as if she had been sunburned.

‘Well,’ came the voice of the second doctor, ‘you’re all done. It didn’t hurt much, did it?’

Juno let out a breath that she didn’t know she had been holding, stepped out into the exam room and pulled her robe back on. ‘Only a little,’ she agreed as the spots in her vision began to fade.

Outside, the doctors were huddled over a monitor, checking the readouts from the scanner, which were scrolling up the screen.

‘Um…’ Juno lingered in the middle of the room, the cold creeping up her calves. ‘When will I find out if I’m certified to fly?’

‘That depends on the results,’ one of them said.

‘It depends on whether I was exposed to anything today, right?’

‘Amongst other things.’

‘Um… do you think you could tell me—’

‘Look, it’s not really our decision.’ The doctor turned around to face her. Above his mask, his tired grey eyes were all Juno could see. ‘We just run the tests.’

Juno nodded and left the exam room, water dripping down her neck. She took the shortcut back to her dormitory, via the emergency stairwell in the side of the building, but when she pushed the heavy door open she was surprised to find Poppy and Astrid huddled on the shadowed landing. Poppy was wrapped in an identical bathrobe, and her wet hair hung down her back like rats’ tails. Astrid was sobbing hysterically, the kind of desperate wailing that Juno had only heard when they were children.

‘You can’t let them see you like this,’ Poppy hissed. Her eyes kept darting over the banister and down to the exit, as if she was worried that one of the police officers stalking the grounds might throw open the door at any moment.

‘You didn’t see her,’ Astrid wailed, making no effort to wipe away the tears skidding down her cheeks. ‘The way she looked when we got her out of the water. She wasn’t breathing. We were holding her. And I think she broke something, her arm was all bent back at the elbow, like it—’

‘Please stop.’ Juno shuddered. Her voice came out louder than expected, every sound amplified up the long stairwell, and both the girls let out a yelp of surprise.

‘I’m sorry.’ Juno lowered her voice a little and stepped forward. The lights in the hall were motion sensitive and the bulbs on the wall beside her came on with a clink. ‘But it’s bad enough without you telling us—’

‘Bad enough for you?’ Astrid glared up at her sister, her eyes bloodshot and unforgiving. ‘Where were you, Juno? Where the hell were you?’ The last words reverberated off the walls.

‘I was…’ Juno bit her lip. She didn’t want to tell anyone about her experience in the Flight Garden with Noah.

‘Hey, you left us,’ Poppy said. ‘Juno and Noah and me. You and Ara just ran off. I was wandering around the museum on my own looking for all of you before the PA officer told me there’d been an accident and it involved you three. I thought you’d been run over. I was terrified.’

‘Okay.’ Juno took a deep breath. ‘Look, you guys, this isn’t the time. We have to do what we have to do.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Astrid’s eyes were raw and swollen from rubbing them dry.

‘You know,’ Juno said, ‘when we practise emergencies in the simulator and eight different things are going on at once and we’re sweating bullets… the only way to get through it is to think about the next thing. The thing right in front of you. Not what we could have or shouldn’t have done. This is an emergency. And we’ve lost someone. But if we don’t pull it together we’re not going anywhere tomorrow.’

‘That’s what I’m talking about,’ said Poppy. ‘If they see Astrid in this state there’s no way they’ll clear her to fly tomorrow.’

Juno chewed on her lip. ‘Has she had her interview yet?’ she asked.

Poppy nodded. ‘It went on really long, apparently. They really ripped into her.’

‘I’m sorry about that,’ Juno said.

‘That’s not even the worst of it,’ Astrid said. ‘It was like they didn’t even care. They just want to know who’s to blame.’