Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

‘You know… I feel guilty about it. But sometimes I feel… grateful. Like, this is the way it was meant to be.’ He regretted it as soon as he said it. The words hadn’t come out quite right. What he’d meant to say was that when he looked out at his life, he liked to think that some silent power in the universe or the shining hand of destiny had brought him to the gates of Dalton, on the eve of the launch, at just the right moment. Yes, a girl he’d never really known had died, and, yes, that was tragic. But the fact remained, as inescapable as plain subtraction: if she had made it, then he wouldn’t have. Was it wrong to be glad?

When Juno looked up her eyes were brimming with tears.

‘Meant to be? Meant to be that my friend jumped into a river? Meant to be that she died alone and helpless and our teachers leapt over her grave to find a replacement?’

A knife-twist of guilt. Jesse shuddered, tripping over to take back his words.

‘No, I didn’t mean – I didn’t mean…’

‘Save it…’ Juno slammed her laptop shut and left the room.

LATER ON, WHEN HE was in the greenhouse, Jesse replayed the words in his head and groaned. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ he said out loud, although there was no one to hear. He let the spider crawl up his arm and stayed there for a long while before he heard footsteps clambering up the ladder. For just a second his heart jumped, and he was sure it was Juno, come to rescue him from himself. He had already practised his apology.

Only, when he saw the blond head of hair, his spirits sank further.

‘Hey,’ Harry said. Jesse sat up.

‘Hey.’ From his vantage point, Harry looked frighteningly tall.

‘I hear you want to be one of us. Part of the team.’

‘I was picked. Just like you,’ Jesse said. ‘I am part of the team… now.’

‘Okay.’ Harry smiled. ‘I think it’s time for you to try and prove it.’

Chapter 17 HARRY

IN HARRY’S EARLIEST MEMORY, he is playing chess opposite his father in the dining room. He’s so small that his feet do not yet touch the marble floor. His father is teaching him how the knight captures – in an L shape, two squares vertically and one square horizontally, or vice versa. To demonstrate this principle, his father arranges every pawn on the board in a circle around the knight and asks Harry which pieces he can capture. Each time he reaches his hand to touch the wrong one, his father smacks it back, resulting in a hideous stalemate. Harry is terrified and tired, and even when he picks the correct one, his father, rightly, accuses him of ‘just guessing’.

Harry’s eyes roll with sleepiness. ‘I don’t care anymore,’ he whispers, realizing as he says it that it’s true. ‘Please, can I just go to bed?’ The weight of his exhaustion like a millstone around him. ‘Why is this important?’

Harry can’t remember the exact words but his father told him then, and kept telling him, that chess was everything. That if he understood chess he’d understand life. A notion so gorgeously simple that, even now, Harry hopes it is true.

At thirteen years and eleven months, his father had been the youngest chess grandmaster in the world, a title finally snatched from him in 1999 by Bu Xiangzhi. Harry never reached anything close to his father’s formidable mastery, but those early lessons in logic and strategic thinking had almost certainly contributed to his eventual success at Dalton. Harry had learned from his father about the importance of constant practice, a principle he applied even before he was streamed into Command School as a possible contender for the position of pilot of the Damocles. Competition had been tough, but Harry excelled because he had practised flying every day of his life from age twelve, logging hours in the winter-pale skies above the Bellgrave estate, or, when the weather did not permit, in a dank basement simulation room, VR goggles strapped to his face so long that the skin on the bridge of his nose began to peel. For Harry, it had become something of a cosy ritual, waking up in the morning, a run before breakfast, a practice flight after. One he continued throughout Dalton.

In fact, the only time in his life that Harry had failed to practise had been a Saturday morning eighteen months before the launch, when the sky above his dormitory had filled with smoke. He’d emerged from the shower to find the grounds swarming with paramedics, the police evacuating all the students. Harry heard that his roommate, Jack Redcliffe, had crashed the academy’s Cessna 172. The cause, he later learned, was engine failure that, the coroner’s report claimed coldly, was due to ‘pilot error’.

Pilot error: words that had rattled through the bones in Harry’s head every day since then. It had not been the first time someone had died at Dalton, and it would not be the last. But Command School was closed for half a day, all flights grounded, and a few pupils were assigned a counsellor and sent home for the rest of the week to recover. Including Harry himself, against his will.