Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

That was the last night he ever spent with her. The last conversation they had in person. He would realize this later – with a wrench of pain. She had returned from university the previous week and whipped off a patterned scarf to reveal her stunningly bald head. She’d shaved off her thick waist-length locks, and with them the clutching spectres of unhealthy attachments, her own vanity and the hopes of her weary parents.

‘You know what this has to do with you,’ she said, and then her voice softened a little, ‘it hurts to see you in pain like this.’

She had left the week after he discovered that he was not going to Terra-Two, and returned months later to find that he was still hunched over with the ache of disappointment. For Jesse, not a day went by where he didn’t glare at his sleep-swollen face in the mirror and curse his own inadequacy. Not an evening went by without pushing his food away at the dinner table, silently wondering what hateful thing had caused him to fail at the final hurdle. He would never know.

He’d trained with the Beta until January and after he’d been released the six of them had become his new obsession. He bought an issue of every magazine that featured their smiling faces, choked down the breakfast cereals that promised tiny figurines of the shuttle and kept the models themselves in his pockets, which were already heavy with the commemorative coins he collected – the ones with the two earths emblazoned on one side and THE OFF-WORLD COLONIZATION PROGRAMME stamped on the other – and would roll them across his knuckles until his fingers were numb.

‘How do I do that?’ he asked his sister. ‘Since you have all the answers. You talk about worry as if it’s a jacket that I could shrug off. Don’t you think I want to? Don’t you think I want to crawl right out of this anxious body and forget about the space programme and about dying. I can almost imagine how good it would feel. I can almost imagine the vanish of weight. Go on then, Morrigan. Tell me how to do it and I will.’

She was silent for just a moment, her green eyes filled with pity. The radio hissed in the background. ‘Oh Jess—’ his sister reached out to rub his shoulder. ‘Destinies don’t change.’

JESSE WAS TOO NERVOUS to sleep that night. He stood up every half hour to limp over to the mirror and check his body for visible signs of disease, not including the shadows under his eyes or the hollows his new restrictive diet had worn into his cheeks. Whenever he closed his eyes, he dreamt of malignance, of cells multiplying in the soft tissues of his body, of spores floating into his open windows and settling in the membranes of his lungs. Sleep was an abandoned hope.

Instead, he thought about off-world colonization. Of the exquisite design of the spacecraft and the people who would be climbing on to it in a little over twenty-four hours.

Over a million spectators were camped out at the launch site, filling the roads and the surrounding fields with their nocturnal celebrations. It’s like a music festival, one of Jesse’s friends had texted, and he could imagine it now. Most of the people would be the amateur astronomers who had developed a sort of offbeat cool over the past few years. They would be parading their homemade telescopes, the astrolabe apps downloaded onto smartphones. Some of them would be schoolchildren with the Union Jack painted on their eager faces, eyes lifted towards the skies waiting for history to be made.

Jesse didn’t know, even as he began shuffling through another day, that Ara had already taken her final steps towards the bile-black river.

What he did know was that the shuttle that would carry the Beta into orbit – the Congreve – was lit up on its platform behind guards and barricades, and that when it disappeared into the sky the following day, so would the last of his hope.

He was going to die. He was no astronaut. He was no pilgrim, he was no humble dreamer fated for the stars.

Chapter 6 JESSE

^12.05.12

^{T-MINUS 12 HOURS}

HE HEARD IT ON the radio first. The headline, that the body of an astronaut had been recovered from the Thames in what appeared to be an accident. His nerves quivered as if they’d been struck by a tuning fork.

He rushed down the stairs to the kitchen, where his mother was half-watching Strictly Come Dancing on the small television above the fridge. Jesse grabbed the remote from the table and switched to the news. The saucepan hissed as his father set it on the stove. Jesse’s heart was racing as he watched the headlines rolling. Saw the words ‘ARA SHAH’, and ‘ACCIDENT’ and ‘MISSION IN CRISIS’. He didn’t even notice that he’d dropped the remote until he heard the sound of plastic crashing against the kitchen tiles and saw the batteries roll under the table. Then he turned around, and began to run.