I didn’t answer because for some stupid reason, I could feel my eyes getting wetter.
‘What are you really frightened of?’ Bradley asked, so gently I looked up into his brown eyes, into the kindness of the smile across his brown skin, the small grey curls just starting to show in the hair at his temples. I saw nothing but warmth.
‘Everyone keeps talking about hope,’ I said, swallowing.
Bradley’s voice was too tender to bear. ‘Viola-’
‘I’m not afraid,’ I lied, swallowing again. ‘It’s just I’m going to miss my thirteenth birthday party, and the graduation ceremony to the upper fifth-’
‘But you’ll be seeing things no one else will. Heck, you’ll be an expert by the time everyone else gets there, the one everyone turns to for an opinion.’
I pulled my arms to myself. ‘They’ll just think I’m a show-off.’
‘They think that now,’ he said, but he was smiling.
And I didn’t want to smile back.
But I did. A little.
***
There’s a small banging sound from the bottom of the ship as we hit the first turbulence of the atmosphere.
But my mother and I both look up immediately. It’s the wrong kind of bang.
‘What was that?’ my mother says.
‘I think-’ my father’s voice says-
And there’s a sudden ROARING sound over the comm and a yelp of alarm from my father-
‘Thomas!’ my mum yells.
‘Look!’ I shout, pointing at the display pads, which are lighting up, one after the other.
The engine room is filling with fire and the exits are sealing shut to contain it.
And they’re doing it with my father inside.
‘Dad!’ I scream-
And that fast, everything changes.
My mother frantically presses her displays, trying to open the engine vents to blow the fire out of the ship-
‘They’re not responding!’ she yells. ‘Thomas, can you hear me?!’
‘What’s happening?’ I shout, because the roar of the atmosphere is getting so much louder than in our simulations.
‘It shouldn’t be this thick,’ my mother shouts back, meaning the atmosphere, and I have a sinking feeling in my stomach as I wonder if this is what happened to the original settlers. Maybe they never even made it to the surface.
‘I’m going down to find dad,’ I say, unbuckling from my chair and standing-
But there’s another bang and the ship lists badly to one side. I fall, hanging on to the chair by my fingers. My mother grabs the manual controls with both hands and wrestles us back in position. ‘Viola, I need you to find us a landing spot! Now!’
‘But dad-’
‘I can’t get us back up, so we’re going to have to go down! Now, Viola!’
I sit down and buckle back in, my hands shaking.
‘Find that stretch of ground by the river!’ she says.
‘It’s on the other side of the planet,’ I say, but I know from the shuddering of the ship that we’re tearing through the atmosphere way faster than we should.
‘Just find it!’ my mother shouts. ‘If there are people there-’
And I can see from her face how worried she is about my father, and I know that if she’s battling with the ship instead of going down to find him, then we’re in even worse trouble than I thought-
***
‘I’ll miss you,’ Steff Taylor said at our going away party, her voice twisting up high, making it sound even more insincere than it is.
All the caretaker families had gathered in the conference room of the Delta for the party, happy for any excuse to get drunk and say goodbye. Steff swept me into her arms in a hug angled so that everyone around us would see her face, how sad she was that I was going away for a year. Then she let me go and collapsed into her mother’s arms with a wailing that was louder than anything else in the room.
Bradley came over with an amused look. ‘I’m sure Steff will cope with her grief better than I will,’ he said, handing me a wrapped gift. ‘Don’t open it until you’ve landed.’
‘’Til we’ve landed?’ I said. ‘That’s five months from now.’
He smiled and lowered his voice. ‘Do you know what separates us from the beasts, Viola?’
I frowned, sensing a lesson. ‘The ability to wait to open a present?’
He laughed. ‘Fire,’ he said. ‘The ability to make fire at will. It allowed us light to see in the darkness, warmth against the cold, a tool to cook our food.’ He gestured vaguely in the direction of the Delta’s engines. ‘Fire is what eventually led to travel across the black beyond, the ability to start a new life on a New World.’
I looked down at the present.
‘You’re frightened,’ he said. This time, it wasn’t an asking.
I shrugged. ‘A little.’
He leaned down to whisper to me. ‘I’m frightened, too.’
‘You are?’
He nodded. ‘My grandfather was the last of the original caretakers on the convoy to die, the last one of us who’d actually breathed the air of a planet and not of a ship.’
I waited for him to go on. ‘And?’
‘He didn’t have anything good to say about it,’ he said. ‘Old World was polluted and crowded and dying from its own poisons. That’s why we left, to find a better place, one we could do our very best not to wreck like we had Old World.’
‘I know all this-’
‘But the rest of us are just like you, Viola. We’ve never seen any space bigger than the cargo bay on the Gamma. I don’t know what fresh air smells like either except what they’ve got on the immersive vids, and that’s not the real thing. I mean, can you imagine what a real ocean is like, Viola? How big it must seem? How small we are compared to it?’
‘Is this supposed to make me feel better?’
‘Actually, yes.’ He smiled and tapped the present I was holding. ‘Because you’ll have something to help you against the darkness.’
The present was small in my hand, but heavy, substantial. ‘But I can’t open it ‘til I get there.’
‘How would I know?’ he asked. ‘I’ll just have to trust you.’
I looked back up. ‘I’ll wait,’ I said. ‘I promise.’
‘And I’m going to miss her birthday!’ Steff Taylor wailed loudly, shooting me a look, and I could see that her eyes, at least, weren’t wailing.
‘I’ll see you in twelve months, Viola,’ Bradley said. ‘And when I get there, make sure I’m the first one you tell what the night looks like by firelight.’
***
The scout ship feels like it’s going to fly apart at any second. The atmosphere is bashing us around and it’s all my mother can do to keep us upright.
She calls occasionally for my dad, but there’s still no answer.
‘Viola, where are we?!’ she shouts, wrestling with the controls.
‘We’re coming back around!’ I shout over the roar of it all. ‘We’re going too fast, though. I think we’re going to overshoot it.’
‘I’ll try to get us down as best I can. Can you see anything on the scanners? Anything beyond that bit of the river where we can land?’
I press through my screens but they’re jumping around as much as everything else on the ship. The engines are still firing us forward and so we’re pretty much falling towards the planet, too fast, with no way to slow ourselves down. We’re zooming over a huge ocean right now and I can tell my mother is worried that we’ll have to put down in the middle of it-
But the continent’s coming up on our screens now, looming dark as night and way too fast and suddenly we’re over it, the ground whipping by down below us.
‘Are we near it?!’ my mum yells.
‘Hold on!’ I check the mapping. ‘We’re south of it! About 15ks!’
She wrestles with the manual controls, trying to turn us a bit more north. ‘Dammit!’ The ship lists and I slam my elbow into the control panel, losing my maps for a second.
‘Mum?’ I say, worry and fright in my voice as I try to bring the maps up again.
‘I know, sweetheart,’ she says, grunting with the controls.
‘What about dad?’
She doesn’t say anything but I can see it all on her face. ‘We’ve got to find a place to put down, Viola! And then we’ll do everything we can to save him!’
I turn back to my maps. ‘Looks like a prairie of some kind first,’ I say, ‘but we’ll probably overshoot that.’ I dial through some more scans. ‘A swamp!’ I say. My mother’s got us heading north again, back towards that river we saw, which seems to peter out into swampland.
‘Will we be low enough?’ my mother yells.
I dial through a few more screens and projected landing arcs. ‘It’ll be close.’
The ship gives a huge jolt.
And then there’s an eerie quiet.
‘We’ve lost the engines,’ my mother says. ‘The vents never opened. The fire choked out.’ She turns to me. ‘We’re gliding in. Program me a flightpath and hold on tight.’
I dial quickly through a few more screens, locking in a landing arc into what I’m hoping will be a nice soft swamp.
My mother pulls the manual controls hard with her fists, lining up her screen with the path I’ve laid out. Out the portholes I can see the ground far too clearly now, treetops getting closer and closer below us.
‘Mum?’ I say, watching as we get lower in the sky.
‘Hang on!’ she says.
‘MUM!’
And we hit.
***
‘Happy birthday!’ they shouted on the big day, ambushing me at breakfast with the least surprising surprise party in the history of the universe.
‘Thanks,’ I mumbled.
We’d left the convoy three months earlier, watching it blink out of sight behind us as we sped away fast, fast, fast. We were still eight weeks away from the new planet, eight long weeks in a ship that was beginning to smell a bit, no matter how much the air got filtered.
‘Presents!’ my father said, sweeping his hand over the wrapped boxes on the table.
‘You could at least try to look pleased, Viola,’ my mother said.
‘Thanks,’ I said again, a bit louder. I opened the first present, a new pair of boots, meant for hiking through rough terrain, completely the wrong colour, but I made sort of fake thankful sounds for them anyway.
I opened the second.
‘Binos,’ my father said as I took them out. ‘Your mother had them upgraded by Eddie, the engineer on the Alpha before we left. These do things you wouldn’t even believe. Night vision, in-screen zoom...’
I looked through them and found a giant version of my father’s left eye looking back at me.
‘She’s smiling,’ my father said and his own giant grin filled the binos.
‘I am not,’ I said.
My mother left the room and came back with my favourite breakfast, a stack of pancakes, this time with thirteen motion-activated fibre-optic lights glittering on the top. They sang me the song, and it took four goes moving my hands before I got all the lights to go off.
‘What’d you wish for?’ my father asked.
‘If you tell,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t come true.’
‘Well, we’re not turning the ship around,’ my mother said, ‘so I hope it wasn’t that.’
‘Hope!’ my father said, too loud, covering up my mother’s words with forced enthusiasm. ‘That’s what we should all wish for. Hope!’
I frowned because there was that word again.
‘We brought this out, too,’ my father said, touching Bradley’s still-wrapped present. ‘Just in case you wanted to open it now.’
I looked at my parents’ faces, my father bright and happy, my mother annoyed with all my moaning but trying to make me have a good birthday anyway. And for a brief second, I saw their worry about me, too.
Their worry that I didn’t seem to have any hope at all.
I looked at Bradley’s present. A light against the darkness, he’d said.
‘He said it was for when we got there,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait until then.’
***
The sound when we crash is so loud it’s almost impossible.
The ship smashes through trees, snapping them into bits, and then hits the ground with a jolt so violent I knock my head against the control panel and pain rips through it but I’m still awake, awake enough to hear the ship start to break apart, awake enough to hear every crash and snap and grind as we carve out a long ditch through the swamp, awake as the ship rolls over again and again, which can only mean the wings have broken off, and everything in the cabin falls to the ceiling and back down again and then there’s an actual crack in the structure of the cockpit and water rushes in from the swamp but then we’re rolling again-
And we’re slowing-
The roll is slowing down-
The grinding of metal is deafening and the main lights cut off as we take another roll, replaced immediately by the quivery battery lights-
And the roll keeps slowing-
Slowing until-
It stops.
And I’m still breathing. My head is spinning and aching and I’m hanging almost upside down from my buckle in my seat.
But I’m breathing.
‘Mum?’ I say, looking down and around. ‘Mum?’
‘Viola?’ I hear.
‘Mum?’ I twist round to where her seat should be-
But it’s not there-
I twist round some more-
And there she is, resting against the ceiling, her chair ripped from the floor-
And the way she’s lying there-
The way she’s lying there broken-
‘Viola?’ she says again.
And the way she says it makes my chest grip tight as a fist.
No, I think. No.
And I start the struggle to get out of my chair to get to her.
***
‘Big day tomorrow, Skipper,’ my dad said, coming into the engine room, where I was replacing tubes of coolant, one of about a million chores they’d come up with in the past five months to keep me busy. ‘We’ll finally be entering orbit.’
I clicked in the last coolant tube. ‘Terrific.’
He paused. ‘I know this hasn’t been easy for you, Viola.’
‘Why do you care if it wasn’t?’ I said. ‘I didn’t have any say in the matter.’
He came closer. ‘Okay, what are you really frightened of, Viola?’ he said, and it’s so exactly the question Bradley asked me that I look back at him. ‘Is it what we could find there? Or is it just that it’s change?’
I sighed heavily. ‘No one ever seems to wonder what happens if it turns out we hate living on a planet? What if the sky’s too big? What if the air stinks? What if we go hungry?’
‘And what if the air tastes of honey? What if there’s so much food we all get too fat? What if the sky is so beautiful we don’t get any work done because we’re all looking at it too much?’
