by Patrick Ness
***
‘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.
‘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-
