Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

She had a lot of work to do to get the EEC to put much effort into defending Mars as well as Earth from the Vshomu, but at last they understood that leaving Mars as a place for Vshomu to feed on and breed is a really terrible idea. It’s not going to get its own Vuhalimath-laa any time soon, but the EDF do go out there regularly and clean up any Vshomu infestations that they find.

It got scary about six months ago when a big cloud of them turned up and started chewing on the Moon. But at least we’ve got a lot of warning about them, whereas the Morrors hadn’t had a clue until their actual planet started being eaten, and by the time they began to get organised it was too late.

Mum still spends a lot of her time out there, doing what she’s best at: defending Earth in her spaceship. Now she protects the light-shield instead of trying to destroy it. She doesn’t come home every night, but she does come home. And we live together with Dad and Gran in Warwickshire and that’s all I wanted.

Not all Earth’s Morrors live in Uhalarath-Moraa. Some of them live anywhere on Earth that’s cold and will have them.

Th saaa ’s two surviving parents run a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. A year after we returned to Earth, we all got together to go and see them.

Josephine and I rode up on the ski lift with our families. Carl and Noel had got there already. It was summer again, but the mountains were still gleaming with snow. On a crag above the ordinary chalets, between banks of fir trees, there was a large domed building painted in whorls of colour, and outside it Th saaa stood with their parents, waving their tentacles.

‘Hi, Th saaa ,’ I said. ‘Erm, Vel-haraa, Thsaaa, alvaray sath lon te faaa ? How was that? I’ve been practising.’

Th saaa went pitying colours. ‘It’s nice that you tried,’ they said. ‘I think we should stick to English.’

‘Th saaa !’ Th saaa ’s Thuul-lan gave them a light cuff with a tentacle.

‘Don’t mind them,’ said Th saaa ’s Quth- laaa -mi said to us placidly. ‘They’re aaaaaaaalways like that.’

‘Hi, team!’ crowed the Goldfish, bustling up to us over Noel and Carl’s heads. Someone had fixed its eye and given it a new coat of paint, but it was never going to look quite as good as new again. Not that it seemed to care. ‘Hi Alice, hi Josephine! Long time no see! Have you learned anything exciting about the history of Switzerland today?’

‘Can you believe Noel and me got stuck with this as a reward ,’ Carl groaned.

‘I asked ,’ protested Noel. ‘It’s my friend.’

‘That fish is a good fish,’ said Carl’s dad. ‘It’s got your grades up across the board. I won’t hear a word against it.’

Th saaa ’s parents showed us their house, though it was too cold to stay in there for long. But we saw that there were Paralashaths of different sizes and shapes on pedestals. And there were two empty sleeping niches, lined with multi-coloured pebbles, for the two parents that wouldn’t come back.

Th saaa ’s Thuul-lan and Quth- laaa -mi had put a big table outside in the snow. It was warm enough if you kept your coat on. We ate baked fal-thra and tomato ketchup, and Th saaa was right, they do go really well together. And we watched the last few skiers shooting down the slopes as the sun went down.

‘ Do Morrors ski?’ asked Carl, dubiously.

‘No,’ said Th saaa . ‘We toboggan.’

‘Are you going to help your parents run the ski resort when you grow up, Th saaa ?’ asked Noel.

Th saaa turned soft, thoughtful shades of blue and aquamarine. ‘I want to study the history of our people,’ they said. ‘Our art. The Paralashath. So much has been lost.’

We were all quiet for a bit after that.

‘I asked what you were going to do when you grew up the first time I met you,’ said Josephine to me. ‘And you wouldn’t even think about being anything except a soldier.’

‘There was no point, then,’ I said.

‘What about now?’

I hesitated. I had been thinking about it, of course, but I hadn’t talked about it yet. ‘I think I want to be a doctor,’ I said.

I was a little worried Mum might be sad I didn’t want to be a fighter-pilot like her, but she said, ‘You’d be a wonderful doctor.’

‘And are you still going to be an archaeologist and a composer and… all the other things?’ I asked Josephine.

‘Oh yes,’ she said confidently. ‘And I’m doing a lot of biochemistry with Dr Muldoon. But I’ve been thinking lately…’ Josephine looked up at the sky. The stars were beginning to come out. ‘Do they have space archaeologists? Because I think they should.’

I laughed. ‘So: a multi-disciplinary scholar, artist, and explorer, in space.’

‘Yes. Shut up.’

‘What about you, Carl?’ asked Mum.

‘Fly spaceships,’ he said, shrugging.

‘I have this awful, haunting fear you will end up a politician,’ said Josephine.

‘Nah. Just spaceships. Maybe I can be your pilot, Jo; you’ll need someone to get you there.’

‘And we might need a doctor,’ said Josephine.

‘And Noel can be a space zoologist and categorise any animals we find,’ I said.

‘Are there other people like us out there, Th saaa ?’ Josephine asked. ‘I know Morrors searched a long time before they found a place you could live, but did you find anyone else along the way? Places where there are people?’

The stars above the Alps were huge and wild and clear. Th saaa ’s long tentacles rested loosely around our shoulders.

‘There are millions of worlds,’ Th saaa said.

Thank you so much to my wonderful editors at Egmont and Harper Collins, Sarah Hughes and Alyson Day and Toni Markiet, and to Lynne Missen at Penguin Canada for the warm welcome (and all the books!). Thank you to Jo Hardacre too for bringing such imagination and energy to Mars Evacuees . Thank you Andrea Kearney and Andy Potts for the beautiful cover – seriously, have you seen it? So orange. So shiny. It fills me with joy.

Thank you Marisa Pintado for your lucid copyediting and for actually being moved to go to see the Visions of the Universe exhibit at the National Maritime Museum!

Thank you, Catherine Clarke at Felicity Bryan, for your laser-guided agenting, for a life-saving suggestion about the sequel, and for exploding ‘They just don’t get it!’ in the back of a taxi when a different publisher rejected Mars Evacuees on the grounds of featuring too many girls in space.

Thank you Zoe Pagnamenta for flying the Martian flag high on distant shores.

Thank you, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Ivy Alvarez, both of whom generously talked to me about Filipino and Filipino-Australian childhoods. I hope I didn’t mess up too badly. And Rochita, additional thanks for being so enthusiastic about the idea and such a warm reader of my work. Readers, you should check out both these writers: rcloenenruiz.com and ivyalvarez.com

Thank you, John Rickards and others for calculating how far a twelve-year-old could jump on Mars.

Thank you, Samira Ahmed, for letting me chat about Mars on your radio programme, for pushing me towards public stages and people towards the things I write.

Thanks to my family for their unwavering support.

Thank you Mrs Cooke, for reading us Goodnight Mr Tom and for believing I could be a writer in a school where encouragement was in short supply.

And thanks again, Freya, for telling me – at a crucial moment – that you wanted to read this book. Even though you thought Alice was an old-fashioned name and that I’d started too many sentences with ‘And’. I needed to hear it. All of it.