‘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.’