Temi Oh - Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

‘Call the police…’ one woman said, rummaging in her handbag for a phone.

‘…an ambulance…’

‘…it’ll be too late – there must be someone around here who can…’

When Astrid approached, Eliot shoved his phone at her. ‘Use it…’ he barked, then vaulted over the rusting gate blocking the steps that descended into the black water. A couple of people shouted, but none of them moved to stop him.

There was a body floating in the river.

She only recognized it was Ara a minute later, when Eliot emerged from the water gasping and grabbing at the railing. Astrid stood at the top of the steps and watched – gripped with disbelief – as Eliot scrambled and slipped at the bottom, heaving Ara’s limp body with one arm and clutching at the railing with the other.

‘Help! Help me!’ he cried out. Astrid’s muscles unglued, and she climbed down as fast as her trembling legs would allow. It was difficult; each step was coated in a slippery green-black slime. Every time Astrid moved, her foot threatened to fly out from under her and she pictured herself flailing, crashing down the steps and slipping into the river.

Eliot was having the same trouble. He was half-blinded by river water and tears and his trainers slipped across the stone. He almost buckled under the weight of Ara’s body. Her head was lolling back on her neck, her fingers grazing the ground.

Astrid grabbed onto the railings and reached out her free hand to grab one of Ara’s arms, and together they hauled her up to the pavement.

It was only when Astrid let her friend’s body fall onto the asphalt that she noticed how thin Ara was. Her waterlogged skirt hung halfway down her thighs, exposing her knickers and the harsh angles of her pelvis.

‘Does anyone know first aid?’ one onlooker said, but Eliot was already flicking wet hair out of his eyes as he checked for signs of life, her breathing, her pulse. They had learned how to do that in physiology. The memory took on a grim reality then, as Astrid remembered Ara playing dead in her school uniform as her partner checked her pulse. It tickles , she’d spluttered, her face red with giggles she failed to swallow down.

‘Call an ambulance…’ someone shouted, and three people confirmed that they already had.

‘Don’t touch her,’ another person said, ‘looks like she’s broken something.’ Her body was twisted unnaturally on the ground, one arm bent outwards. Astrid shuddered. It didn’t look as if moving her would make any difference – her jaw was slack, eyes yellow and half-open.

SHE DIED IN THE ambulance. It seemed as if she would make it for just a little while, when she was breathing again and puking up the black water, her lips and teeth stained as if she’d been chewing on charcoal, but her heart had stopped before the paramedics could rush her off to the hospital and before they had time to hold Astrid and Eliot back to keep them from watching her body slump on the gurney.

Looked like poison, one of them said; something in her body before she jumped. Her stomach was filled with it.

Astrid had never seen someone die before – Ara was the first. From then on, when she recalled their final day on Earth, her friend’s twisted body was all she ever saw. And the message they found later on Eliot’s phone. A text that she had sent him, which everyone would go on to consider her suicide note. It was what she had said earlier that day to Astrid, what the reporters quoted: Everything is beautiful. Everything hurts.

T-MINUS 15 HOURS

‘DID YOU SUSPECT THAT Ara Shah was suicidal?’ Dr Maggie Millburrow asked in the car on the way back to the space centre. Astrid sat in the back, squeezing her fists into her eye sockets and trying to scrub away the haunting memory of the previous hours.

‘I don’t know,’ she said through tears.

Whenever she closed her eyes, she played the day back. Had Ara appeared nervous? When they danced together in the storm that morning? Ara’s hands had been hot in Astrid’s palms and later she’d discovered her being sick in the bathroom. When they had escaped from the BIS building, her pulse had been throbbing through her fingertips. Had she been suicidal then? Or had it happened later when they skipped along the bridge by the South Bank – had the windswept river called after her? Perhaps she had never made the conscious decision to jump. Perhaps the notion had struck her, lightning-quick like inspiration, impossible to refuse until the dark water closed over her head and invaded all the hollow places in her chest.

‘I don’t know,’ Astrid said again, opening her eyes to find the city disappearing in the rear window.

‘What were you thinking ?’ Millburrow asked. ‘Running off like that?’ Astrid had to admit that she didn’t know. She could not explain stepping from the safety of the society building and traipsing into London with the thoughtlessness of a sleepwalker. She’d just followed Ara, as she always had.

Astrid was sick with regret. Over what had happened to Ara but also over the very real threat that hung over her and her crewmates – that they would no longer be cleared to fly. That the launch would be delayed. Or suspended.

The UKSA would find someone responsible for what had happened. And, during the drive back, Astrid could not push away the horrified thought that it would be all her fault, that if the mission was suspended and she was kicked off the programme – Earthbound and disgraced – there would be no forgiveness for her. She had already heard whispers about ‘breach of contract’ and ‘criminal proceedings’…

When she returned to the space centre, Astrid had stepped out of the car to find a small crowd was gathered in the half-light of the drive. Dr Golinsky – Dalton’s lead medical officer – in her white coat, their school’s provost, Professor Stenton, and directors of the astronaut’s office. Astrid’s stomach was heavy with dread as a woman in a grey suit ran towards her. ‘You saw it, didn’t you?’ she asked, the car’s headlights illuminating the gooseflesh along the side of her neck. She peered into Astrid’s eyes as if she thought that if she looked close enough she might be able to see the incident herself.

‘I didn’t exactly…’ Astrid turned her gaze down to her feet. ‘I just saw her body. In the water.’

‘After she fell,’ Professor Stenton said, stepping from the shadow of the doorway, ‘it looked like an accident, didn’t it?’

‘Well, the thing is, I didn’t really see—’

‘But if you had to guess,’ interrupted a man in a lab coat, ‘you’d say she fell. She wasn’t suicidal.’

‘No,’ Astrid said. ‘I didn’t think she was. She seemed happy. And we would have known, right? We’re her friends.’ She shook her head. ‘We would have known if she was unhappy.’

‘Exactly.’ A public affairs officer stabbed a painted fingernail at Astrid. ‘ We would have known. We would have detected it. So she must have fallen.’

Astrid nodded. ‘She must have… she fell,’ she said, looking away as if she could see it already. The twist of an ankle, the snap of the railing, Ara’s final look of surprise as her soles left the earth. ‘I think she fell.’ Maybe Ara only realized what happened once her body hit the water.

‘An accident,’ Dr Golinsky said. ‘A tragic accident.’

‘These things happen,’ said a supervisor, his glasses flashing in the headlights. ‘That’s the sad thing.’

These things do happen , they agreed.

They announced this to the shouting reporters gathered at the gates, hurling questions through the bars. It was an accident, they said, even at the press conference a few days later, after it was revealed that Ara’s combat boots had been discovered under a bench on a bridge, pushed neatly together, the laces tied up, neon pink ankle socks scrunched inside like oysters in a shell.