Temi Oh - Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

She had sacrificed her whole childhood on the altar of diligence and obedience and hard work. So couldn’t she steal back this day? This one hour, and keep it for herself?

Astrid chose her friend. She darted in front of a red bus as the lights changed and raced after her.

They grabbed each other’s hands, hysterical with delight, marooned on a traffic island amongst the cars. This was the most they had seen of the world in over a week, and the sounds were an assault on her, the roar of tyres on tarmac like waves smashing rocks, her pulse a snare drum.

The green man lit up. Ara dashed across the road and into a throng of people.

‘We have an hour,’ Astrid reminded Ara as they ran.

The rain had stopped and the wet pavements sparkled in the sunlight. Astrid and Ara ran by the Thames, deliriously free. Months of sprinting across the grounds at Dalton meant that they were at their peak of physical fitness, barely out of breath as the white stuccoed houses flashed past, as Tate Britain appeared and then disappeared behind them. They headed into throngs of tourists in plastic-bag ponchos, photographing Big Ben, the Palace of Westminster, protesters gathered on Parliament Square.

They could see everything when they reached the bridge. The low buildings to their right, clustered around the British Interplanetary Society, then on their left was the London eye, the South Bank, the Shard like a broken tooth in the distance.

Amongst the crowd, a woman in harem pants was blowing giant bubbles with two sticks. Astrid watched as rainbows slid across them, and little children bounced with delight at the sight of their own warped reflections. The bubbles were so big that, when they burst, they made a splash on the ground.

‘Why do you think the bubbles are so interesting?’ Astrid asked.

‘Because they only last for a few seconds,’ Ara said, as a small girl let out a thrilled yelp, jumping up to touch the shining edge of the thing and missing every time. ‘Imagine if, instead of bubbles, that woman was blowing balls of see-through plastic that didn’t cost much and lasted forever.’

By the time they reached the South Bank, Astrid was eager to head back. If they ran they could do it in twenty minutes. But Ara was distracted by the busyness. She kept slipping in and out of the crowd, pausing often to look at the street performers. One dressed as Charlie Chaplin doing tricks for pennies, a skinny teenager covering Jimi Hendrix songs. Ara emptied her pockets, chucking coins and a few crumpled notes at him with a laugh. ‘It’s not like I need them anymore,’ she said.

Astrid was distracted by the food trucks, the ones selling footlong hotdogs, Neapolitan ice cream, nuts that smelt like burnt sugar, boiling in vats of caramel. Only she couldn’t eat anything. With each minute that passed, her stomach knotted with dread.

‘Ara.’ She grabbed her friend’s wrist before she could turn on her heel again. ‘We have to go.’ Her voice growing stern. ‘I’ve had enough.’

The pulse in Ara’s wrist throbbed wildly. She shook herself free, and smiled.

‘This isn’t a game,’ Astrid told her. Ara pressed her palms against Astrid’s cheeks and brought their faces together, for a second, in a kiss. Her mouth tasted bitter as aspirin and there was a film of sweat on her upper lip. Astrid closed her eyes and, when she opened them again and drew in a surprised breath, Ara was running away.

‘Where are you going?’ she shouted after her friend.

‘I’m not going back!’

All Astrid could see was her red skirt as she raced down the bank, her black hair like a comet’s tail behind her.

She headed across the bridge and Astrid had to sprint to keep up, ducking and weaving past people on the walkway and calling apologies after her. She took a sharp turn down a crowded road, past the subway, which was belching steam in the May heat, into one end of Embankment station and out the other, to the crossing facing the Thames. Ara had vanished. When Astrid stopped running, her head was spinning and she pushed a hand against the strain in her chest, dizzy and panting in the humid air.

She groaned in frustration. This was getting away from her. She considered making her own way back to the BIS building, but could she go without Ara?

She headed in that direction anyway, back along the river. They had thirty minutes.

The warmth of the afternoon surprised her. It was late spring and the wind was hot as flesh. Astrid followed Victoria Embankment, where the river was the colour of rust. Then she stood for a long while, trying to memorize the city’s skyline, before she heard a voice behind her.

‘Juno…?’ She felt the cool of a shadow across her shoulders and turned around to find Eliot. ‘I mean… Astrid. Sorry, it’s hard to tell you apart… from behind.’

Astrid exhaled with relief. ‘What are you doing out here?’ she asked. Eliot looked as if he’d been struck by lightning, his eyes wide.

‘I was looking for you, and Ara. We need to get back.’

‘You ran after us? All this way?’

‘Yes. I lost you in the museum, then I saw you running up the road. Tried to catch up. Lost you on the South Bank.’ He swore, leaning against the railings to catch his breath. ‘This isn’t funny.’

‘I know,’ Astrid said, and suddenly it wasn’t at all.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asked. ‘You could get in trouble. You could get sanctioned. Or not cleared to fly. Astrid, don’t you want to go to space?’ The question cut her. Of course she wanted to go. Wanted nothing more. And yet, what was she doing here? Why had she done this foolish and reckless thing? Her own motivations frightened her.

‘Let’s find Ara and head back.’ Eliot glanced around wildly, as if he might find her behind him, or across the road. ‘Ara?’

‘I lost her. Should we go back without her?’ The silence between them, then, was horrible. Going back without Ara didn’t feel like an option. ‘Maybe she’s there already,’ Astrid ventured finally. ‘This is probably all a huge joke to her.’ And she imagined her in the society’s library just as they spoke, bent double with laughter. ‘If we keep going in that direction—’ she nodded ahead of her, back the way they had come, ‘…we’ll probably bump into her.’

She turned around and headed in that direction. Eliot followed without protest. Of all the members of the Beta, Eliot was the boy that Astrid knew the least. He was a year younger than the rest of them, seventeen, although he looked fourteen. His teeth were gappy and small, as if he’d somehow managed to hang on to his milk teeth. He was a robotics genius who had grown up in wales and the only student to be personally head-hunted and invited to join the Dalton training programme after winning an engineering competition run by Imperial College London. Famously, he’d written a computer programme that could predict the probability of a planet bearing ‘life’. He’d been twelve when he’d joined and still scored perfectly in almost every exam. However, many had believed he would not be chosen for the Beta because of how poorly he consistently scored in every psychological evaluation and team exercise. He flinched when anyone but Ara touched him, and had to arrange his chips in order of length before he could eat them.

They had almost reached Westminster station when they both heard a scream. A gathering of people by the side of the road. A car accident maybe? A cyclist crushed under a wheel?

Eliot inhaled sharply and turned. Following his gaze to the edge of the river, Astrid noticed that a small group of people were gathering, looking down a flight of narrow steps that led to the Thames.

‘What is it…?’ Astrid asked, but Eliot was walking quickly, then running, towards the low wall above the water.