Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

Jesse was already behind, even that first week. Many of the students, like Harry, had already logged years of private flying lessons on their families’ estates, or at their town’s aerodrome. But Jesse struggled with every test and knew that if his average kept dropping he would be thrown out of Dalton by November half-term. So he placed a request to switch to the least competitive stream: hydroponics. Six months spent baking under the dome of the greenhouse, or bent over trays of static solution cultures, and his score went up. It turned out that Jesse had a knack for working with living things. But he could not stifle the sting of regret, or the shame of failure.

In the end, his defection from Command School had still only earned him a place on the backup crew.

‘Jesse Solloway.’ Jesse was startled by the German accent of their doctor. For a second, he wondered if he was in trouble, if he had no right to be on the control deck. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘you are just the person I’ve been looking for. Can you do something for me?’

She wanted him to take a box of the dead girl’s things down to the cargo bay, and Jesse realized, from her hushed tones, that she wanted him to keep it a secret.

She was everywhere, the dead girl. Not more than twenty-four hours after it had happened and her dark presence already permeated the ship, stood between Jesse and the rest of the crew, lingered at the end of every unfinished sentence. Her name, ARA SHAH, was embossed on the door to the girls’ cabin, above Astrid’s. Her spacesuit was boxed up next to theirs in the equipment bay, a hard shell custom-made for her dimensions.

Jesse could think of no good reason to object, and soon he found himself hauling the crate down the hatch to the lower deck, where the whirring of machines was louder and the fluorescent lights hissed like wasps. He held the barcode on the box against the scanner and the monitor flashed green. ‘EARTH CARGO’, it read, ‘miscellaneous/personal effects/SHAH, ARA.’ Jesse knew that this box, like many of the crew’s belongings, had been sent up to the Damocles four months ago with the final supply shuttle. She would have been alive back then. Her name on the screen sent a little thrill of curiosity through him, and as he pushed inside the dully lit room, Jesse gave in to it and pried the box open.

Although most of her clothes were vacuum-packed, the box was filled with the powdery, fresh smell that Jesse associated with the female dormitory at Dalton. The faint aroma of orange blossom and jasmine. It was like a time-capsule of a teenage girl. A box of souvenir plectrums printed with the Union Jack, a string of Mardi Gras beads, an ornate hairbrush with strands of thick black hair twisted in its teeth, crushed Chinese lanterns and Polaroids. One of Eliot Liston asleep and splayed atop a mountain range of rumpled duvets. Another one of her own young self, fingers pressed against a fretboard, sitting on the refectory table. Jesse thought he remembered the incident. One lunchtime Ara and her friends had surprised onlookers with an impromptu performance of ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’, which earned them a standing ovation. At the time, Jesse had been quietly annoyed, but now he realized that he’d only been jealous. Jealous of the self-assured way that Ara grabbed at the world, with a foolhardy optimism. Her class believed that if she was not chosen for the Beta she would rise to fame in some other way, as a musician or a striking and strange runway model. She had talent and intelligence, and the unwavering love of Eliot Liston in one of those freak school romances that survived more than a summer. To Jesse, she’d seemed to have everything.

For the first time, he wondered about the person whose destiny he’d stolen. He could not fathom the darkness of a girl who could leap to her death.

What was left of her? This feeble assortment of items, vacuum-packed clothes, a spiral-bound journal with an illustration of a half blown-out dandelion clock on the cover, little seedlings carried on an imaginary wind, off the page. Jesse opened the book and flicked through it. Scrawled dates and doodles looping through margins. Moons. Falling leaves. The rings of Saturn. Thickly-lashed asymmetrical eyes. He turned right to the last page and found a blurred satellite picture of Terra-Two. In my dreams, she had written, I’m already up there.

Chapter 10 HARRY

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