‘Yeah, because people who run away from spiders live,’ Juno said. ‘Spiders are predatory. They eat their sexual partners. They strangle their prey with silk, vomit digestive fluids into them so that they liquify before they’re eaten.’
‘Spiders are just misunderstood. They’re survivors,’ Jesse said. ‘Found on every continent except Antarctica. They can establish a habitat basically anywhere. I mean – look at this.’ He gestured to the glass, and the spider at the bottom of it.
‘What are you going to do, name it?’ Poppy was edging towards the doorway.
‘Maybe,’ Jesse said. ‘Now I have a pet.’
‘Charming.’ Juno grimaced. ‘So long as you keep it away from me.’
Poppy backed out the door. In the silence that followed, Jesse returned to his work, wiping up the hot water he’d spilled on the counter. He was almost finished when Juno looked up. ‘Oh Jesse,’ she said. When he turned her face was full of concern. ‘You burned yourself.’
‘Yeah…’ Jesse looked down at the reddening patch on the back of his hand. It was only now beginning to sting.
‘You have to put it under hot water,’ Juno said, standing up. ‘I mean, cold water.’ She took his wrist and held his hand under the tap, examining it, the cool stream catching on the little hairs behind his fingers. The cold was a relief. So was her touch. Jesse noticed that her nails were chopped short, dotted with flecks of turquoise nail varnish. Her fingers were lightly calloused, and she ran her fingertips along the sensitive skin on the back of his hand. The constant ache of his loneliness felt like a fever that had only just broken. How wonderful, the nearness of Juno. She was like the other girls, busy and mysterious, but how many of them would have come to his aid like this?
He closed his eyes, hoping to hold onto this moment. But Juno let go suddenly. Jesse opened them again and noticed that she was peering at him quizzically. She stepped back. ‘It um… doesn’t look too bad.’
‘Thank you,’ Jesse said. Juno sat back down, brushing stray coils of her springy hair behind her small ears.
‘It’s my job,’ she said. ‘You know, Fae’s training me to be the ship’s medical officer.’
‘Oh, right, yeah.’ A flash of disappointment.
Juno looked back down at her notes, wielding a highlighter. ‘We’ve just covered first aid and minor injuries again.’
‘Right.’ Jesse held his hand under the tap for a few moments longer until the numbness began to prickle up his fingers. Juno was already far away, absorbed in her notes again, her pen locked between her lips.
By then, his coffee was the sort of lukewarm he liked, and he finished it in slow drags, leaning against the counter.
‘Hey.’ Juno looked up at him again. ‘Jess…’
‘Yeah?’
‘I forgot to tell you… thank you.’
‘For what?’
‘For saving my life that time. During the solar storm.’
Already that night felt like a year ago. While it had been terrifying at the time, Jesse could no longer remember it without a twinge of embarrassment. ‘Well,’ he told her, ‘you weren’t really going to die. None of us were.’
‘You didn’t know that,’ Juno said, ‘and you barely knew me at the time. You could have stayed in the radiation shelter, but you didn’t.’
‘Yeah…’ In retrospect, he probably should have. Flouting orders on his first day had by no means endeared him to their commander.
Jesse thought about the day ahead of him, another day of bracing himself against the coolness of the rest of the crew, against homesickness.
‘You know,’ he took his cup to the sink to rinse it, turning his back to her, ‘this is the most anyone’s spoken to me since I got here.’
‘Really?’
From the corner of his eye, he saw Juno flinch at his words.
‘I mean, I know what it is. It’s not like I don’t understand it. If I had a really good friend who I thought I’d spend my life with, and then some other guy comes in at the last minute and takes her place, I guess I wouldn’t be too fond of him either. But I… I thought it would have stopped by now. It’s been almost two months since the launch and I feel as if it’s getting worse.’
‘I don’t know.’ Juno leant back in her chair. ‘It’s not just you. None of them talk about Ara, either. Or what happened, or why it happened. Not since the launch. And I know we all think about it. You’re kind of a reminder.’
Jesse hung his mug on the rack and thought for a moment. The silence was growing heavy again.
‘You know… I feel guilty about it. But sometimes I feel… grateful. Like, this is the way it was meant to be.’ He regretted it as soon as he said it. The words hadn’t come out quite right. What he’d meant to say was that when he looked out at his life, he liked to think that some silent power in the universe or the shining hand of destiny had brought him to the gates of Dalton, on the eve of the launch, at just the right moment. Yes, a girl he’d never really known had died, and, yes, that was tragic. But the fact remained, as inescapable as plain subtraction: if she had made it, then he wouldn’t have. Was it wrong to be glad?
When Juno looked up her eyes were brimming with tears.
‘Meant to be? Meant to be that my friend jumped into a river? Meant to be that she died alone and helpless and our teachers leapt over her grave to find a replacement?’
A knife-twist of guilt. Jesse shuddered, tripping over to take back his words.
‘No, I didn’t mean – I didn’t mean…’
‘Save it…’ Juno slammed her laptop shut and left the room.
LATER ON, WHEN HE was in the greenhouse, Jesse replayed the words in his head and groaned. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ he said out loud, although there was no one to hear. He let the spider crawl up his arm and stayed there for a long while before he heard footsteps clambering up the ladder. For just a second his heart jumped, and he was sure it was Juno, come to rescue him from himself. He had already practised his apology.
Only, when he saw the blond head of hair, his spirits sank further.
‘Hey,’ Harry said. Jesse sat up.
‘Hey.’ From his vantage point, Harry looked frighteningly tall.
‘I hear you want to be one of us. Part of the team.’
‘I was picked. Just like you,’ Jesse said. ‘I am part of the team… now.’
‘Okay.’ Harry smiled. ‘I think it’s time for you to try and prove it.’
Chapter 17
HARRY
IN HARRY’S EARLIEST MEMORY, he is playing chess opposite his father in the dining room. He’s so small that his feet do not yet touch the marble floor. His father is teaching him how the knight captures – in an L shape, two squares vertically and one square horizontally, or vice versa. To demonstrate this principle, his father arranges every pawn on the board in a circle around the knight and asks Harry which pieces he can capture. Each time he reaches his hand to touch the wrong one, his father smacks it back, resulting in a hideous stalemate. Harry is terrified and tired, and even when he picks the correct one, his father, rightly, accuses him of ‘just guessing’.
Harry’s eyes roll with sleepiness. ‘I don’t care anymore,’ he whispers, realizing as he says it that it’s true. ‘Please, can I just go to bed?’ The weight of his exhaustion like a millstone around him. ‘Why is this important?’
Harry can’t remember the exact words but his father told him then, and kept telling him, that chess was everything. That if he understood chess he’d understand life. A notion so gorgeously simple that, even now, Harry hopes it is true.