Authors: Patrick Ness
‘Ready here, too,’ I say, opening up screens that I won’t really use until we’re closer to the ground, looking for a clearing big enough to put down. A clearing, if I’m good enough at my job, where we might actually grow our first town.
‘90 seconds,’ my mother says.
‘Engines opening,’ my father says, and there’s another change in pitch. ‘Oxygenating the fuel.’
‘Buckle up,’ my mother says.
‘I
am
buckled,’ I say, then turn my chair so I can buckle into it without her seeing.
‘60 seconds,’ my mum says.
‘One more minute and we’re the first ones there!’ my dad shouts over the comm.
My mother laughs. I don’t.
‘Oh, come on, Viola,’ she says. ‘It really
is
exciting.’ She checks one of her screens, dials on it with her fingertips, then says, ‘30 seconds.’
‘I was happy on the ship,’ I say, quietly but so seriously my mother turns to look. ‘I don’t want to live down there.’
My mother frowns. ‘15 seconds.’
‘Fuel ready!’ my father says. ‘Let’s go atmo-surfing!’
‘Ten,’ my mother says, still looking at me. ‘Nine.’
And that’s when things go really, really wrong.
***
‘But it’s a whole
year
,’ I said to Bradley in one of my training tutorials less than a month before we left. ‘A year away from my friends, a year away from schoolwork-’
‘And if you stayed,’ he said. ‘It would be a year away from your parents.’
I looked back into the empty classroom. It was usually filled with the other caretaker families’ children, learning our lessons, talking to our friends. But today it was just me and Bradley, going over some of the science tech for the trip. Tomorrow, Simone from the
Gamma
– who I think Bradley secretly fancies – would be teaching me emergency survival skills, just in case the worst happened. But it would still just be me and her in this room, separated out from everybody else.
‘Why does it have to be us, though?’ I said.
‘Because you’re the best ones for the job,’ Bradley said. ‘Your mother is probably our best pilot, your father is a highly skilled engineer-’
‘And what about me? Why do I have to pay for what they’re good at?’
He smiled. ‘You’re hardly just some girl. You’re tops in maths. You’re the younger ones’ favourite tutor in music-’
‘And for that, I should be punished by being dragged away from everyone I know for a year?’
He gave me a look, then he dialled so quickly on the training pads in front of us that I could barely see what he was doing. ‘Name this,’ he said, in a teacherly tone that made me answer immediately.
‘Hardpan,’ I said, looking at the simulated landscape he’d chosen. ‘Good drainage, but dry. Irrigation for at least five to eight years before suitable for crops.’
‘And this?’ he said, dialling again.
‘Temperate forest. Limited clearing needed, potentially good for cattle, but strong environmental concerns.’
‘This one?’
‘Near desert. Subsistence farming only. Bradley-’
‘You’ve got skills, Viola. You’re bright and resourceful and even at your age, you’ll be a vital part of the mission.’
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.