Authors: Patrick Ness
‘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?’
I turned and closed up the coolant tube cases. ‘But what if it isn’t?’
‘But what if it is?’
‘What if it
isn’t?
’
‘What if it
is?
’
‘Yeah, this is getting us somewhere.’
‘Haven’t we raised you to be hopeful?’ he said. ‘Wasn’t that the whole point of your great-grandmother agreeing to be a caretaker on this ship, so that one day
you
could have a better life?
She
was full of hope. Your mum and I are full of hope.’ He was close enough now for a hug, if I wanted it. ‘Why can’t you share some of that?’
And he was looking so caring, so worried, that how could I tell him? How could I tell him how much I hate even the sound of the word?
Hope. That’s all anyone ever talked about on the convoy, especially as we got closer. Hope, hope, hope.
As in, ‘I hope the weather’s good.’ This from people who’d never actually experienced weather except in immersive vids.
Or, ‘I hope there’s interesting wildlife.’ From people who’d only ever met Scampus and Bumpus, the ship’s cats on the Delta. 10,000 frozen sheep and cow embryos didn’t count.
Or, ‘I hope the natives are friendly.’ This always said with a laugh because there aren’t supposed to
be
any natives, at least according to the deep space probes.
Everybody was hoping for something, talking about our new life to come and all that they
hoped
from it. Fresh air, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Real gravity, instead of the fake kind that broke every now and then (even though no one over fifteen would admit that it was actually really fun when it did). All the wide open spaces we’d have, all the new people we’d meet when we woke them up, ignoring completely what happened to the original settlers, super-confident that we were
so
much better equipped that nothing bad could possibly happen to us.
All this hope, and here I was, right at the very edge of it, looking out into the darkness, the first to see it coming, the first to greet it when we found out what it
really
looked like.
But what if?
‘Is it because hope is scary?’ my father asked.
I looked back at him, startled. ‘You think so, too?’
He smiled, full of love. ‘Hope is
terrifying
, Viola,’ he said. ‘No one wants to admit it, but it is.’
I feel my eyes go wet again. ‘Then how can you
stand
it? How can you bear even
thinking
it? It feels so dangerous, like you’ll be punished for even thinking you deserved it.’
He touched my arm, just lightly. ‘Because, Viola, life is so much
more
terrifying without it.’
I swallowed away my tears again. ‘So you’re telling me the only choice I have is which way I’m going to be terrified for the rest of my life?’
He laughed and opened his arms. ‘And at last a smile,’ he said.
And he did hug me.
And I let him.
But in my chest, there was still fear, and I didn’t know which kind it was. Fear with hope, or fear without it.
***
It takes what seems like forever to unbuckle my belt, hard to do when you’re hanging upside down against it. When it finally comes undone, I fall away from the seat, sliding down the wall of the cockpit, which seems to have folded into itself.
‘Mum?’ I say, scooting over to her.
She’s facedown on what used to be the ceiling, her legs twisted in a way I can’t really look at-
‘Viola?’ she says again.
‘I’m here, mum.’ I push away the things that have fallen on her, all the files and screenpads, everything broken as we tumbled, everything that wasn’t fastened down broken to pieces-
I pull up a large metal plate off her back-
And I see it-
The pilot’s chair was torn from the floor, tearing away the back panel of it, turning the backrest into a shard of metal-
A shard that’s gone right into my mother’s spine-
‘Mum?’ I say, my voice tight, trying to lift it further off her-
But when I move it more, she screams, screams like I’m not even there-
I stop.
‘Viola?’ she says one more time, gasping. Her voice is high, broken. ‘Is that you?’
‘I’m here, mum,’ I say, lying down next to her so I can get close to her face. I push away a last bit of glass that’s covering her cheek and see her eye looking wildly around-
‘Sweetheart?’ she says.
‘Mum?’ I say, crying, brushing away more glass. ‘Tell me what to do, mum.’
‘Sweetheart, are you hurt?’ she says, high and fluttery again, like she can’t really take a breath.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Mum, can you move?’
I put a hand under her shoulder to lift her, but she screams again, which makes me scream, too, and I let her go back to how she was lying, on her stomach, on the ceiling, the metal shard in her back, blood coming out of it slowly like it was no big deal, and everything around us broken, broken, broken.
‘Your father,’ she gasps.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘The
fire
-’
‘Your father loved you,’ she says.
I stop and look at her. ‘What?’
I see her moving her hand, trying to worm it out from under herself and I take it gently, holding it with my own. ‘I love you, too, Viola,’ she says.
‘
Mum?
Don’t
say
that-’
‘Listen, sweetheart, listen to me.’
‘Mum!’
‘No,
listen
-’
And she coughs and the pain of it causes her to scream again and I hold her hand tighter and I barely even notice that I’m screaming along with her.
She stops, gasping again, and her eye looks up at me, more focussed this time, like she’s trying really hard, like she’s never tried harder to do anything in her entire life. ‘They’ll come for you, Viola.’
‘Mum, stop,
please
-’
‘You’ve been trained,’ she says. ‘You stay alive. You stay
alive
, Viola Eade, do you hear me?’ Her voice is getting louder, even though I can hear the pain in it.
‘Mum, you’re not
dying
-’
‘Take my hope, Viola,’ she says. ‘Take your father’s, too. I’m giving it to you, okay? I’m giving you my hope.’
‘Mum, I don’t understand-’
‘Say you’ll take it, sweetheart. Say it to me.’
My throat is choking and I think I’m crying but nothing feels attached to anything and I’m here holding my mother’s hand in a wrecked spaceship on the first planet I’ve ever been to, in the middle of a night I can see through a crack in the ship’s hull and she’s dying, she’s
dying
, and I’ve been so horrible to her for months-
‘Say it, Viola,’ my mother whispers. ‘Please.’
‘I’ll take it,’ I say. ‘I’ll take your hope. I’ve got it, okay?
Mum?
’
But I don’t know if she hears me-
Because her hand isn’t gripping back any more.