‘Some of it’s got to matter,’ Harry said, quietly, more to himself.
‘I suppose we can decide,’ Juno said. ‘Hey, when you think about it, we’re sort of like a community or a society, right here, the six of us. We get to choose what’s important to us.’
‘That’s weird.’ Poppy shuddered.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know, like we’re… on our own…’
Astrid looked up. ‘Is it though? Look around.’ And Poppy did for a moment, glancing at the others, who were seated cross-legged in a circle around the half-eaten cake. ‘Can you imagine what it will be like the day we look out the window of the Atlas module and we see Terra-Two the way we used to be able to see Earth? Can you picture us all swooping down into the atmosphere on the lander and standing there, feeling like we’ve come to an end but also a sunlit beginning. Picture it, for a moment,’ Astrid continued, her voice strong. ‘I do, every day. When you think about it, we’re like pioneers. We’re the first, and after us, if we’re lucky, there will be a whole country. Countries.’
‘It’s kind of a big responsibility,’ Jesse said.
Poppy leant forward in the silence and took another fat slice of cake. Dessert was such a luxury in this world where they survived on macronutrient broth.
‘It’s a little childish,’ Astrid said, ‘but I thought of a few games we could play.’
Harry smiled. ‘It’s not a party without a game.’
JUNO
15.07.12
THEY HAD USED THREE rations of sugar and cocoa powder to make the cake, so it was sickly sweet and black as sin. Juno had been so distracted by the hot feeling of it in her stomach that she missed the count and was out of it until everyone was running to find a hiding place.
Harry closed his eyes and Poppy spun around, her heels flashing pink as she shimmied between a gap in the bookcases, a finger pressed against her lips as she disappeared. In half a second Eliot and Jesse were gone, racing down the corridor, thrilled by the competition. Astrid dashed through the hatch, down to the lower deck, flicking off the lights as she went, the sound of her stifled giggle audible in the sudden darkness. Everyone was trying not to trip over things as they ran, their blood thick with sugar, the air chiming with laughter or bated breath.
Juno didn’t want to get in the way of the fun, but she had no real appetite for another game. Over the past few weeks, she had watched both Eliot and Jesse grit their teeth as Harry’s high score on the simulator tripled and their progress stalled. She’d witnessed the competition spill out from the games room into the crew module, where Jesse beat Harry and Eliot in a four-hour chess tournament, to the kitchen – the setting for red-eyed staring contests – and Igor’s lessons, where Harry and Eliot argued over formulae and scribbled convoluted equations on the whiteboard. Card games and arm-wrestling matches almost resulted in blows. The air between the three boys prickled with the static of imminent combustion.
‘Juno, quick,’ came a voice from the shadows. Juno strained her eyes in the gloom, searching for the source, but, as Eliot slammed the door to the boys’ cabin, she remembered that time was running out. If she didn’t find a place to hide, she’d risk the embarrassment of being caught first, standing gormlessly in the middle of the crew module.
‘Ten seconds,’ Harry said. Juno’s heart quickened and she looked around for a place to hide. She could crouch in one of the darkened alcoves, but as soon as Harry flicked the light on he was sure to find her. The girls’ cabin struck her as an obvious choice, but she had no time now to run across the crew module. So she lunged in the opposite direction, to the bathroom, tore open the door and dived in. As it closed behind her, she heard Harry count down, ‘…six, five…’
The room smelt of damp and detergent. Juno’s eyes were not accustomed to the darkness so she groped around for a few seconds to get her bearings. It was a decent place to hide, she supposed, surely the last place Harry might look. Fumbling for the latch, Juno pulled the shower door open and stepped in.
‘What the—’
Her hands flew to her mouth too late to catch a startled whimper.
‘Shh,’ Jesse hissed savagely. He was standing in the shower too, only a shadow in the gloom.
‘Sorry.’
‘Get your own spot,’ he said, but his mouth clamped shut mid-sentence as Harry’s voice rumbled on the other side of the door. ‘I know you’re in there,’ he said. The creak of footsteps.
Juno’s heart skipped and she leapt into the shower.
‘I thought you said this game was stupid,’ Jesse said in a whisper.
‘Of course it’s stupid. But I don’t want to lose first.’
Juno knew that they were all trying to be cheerful in the face of Poppy’s melancholy, which was probably why Astrid suggested the first game that came to mind. It had been a while since they had allowed themselves to do something silly.
Both Juno and Jesse swallowed back a gasp when the bathroom door flew open. Juno held her breath, her chest full, her heart skipping.
Harry’s silhouette was projected across the tiled floor, outlined by the illumination from the crew module. Could he see them? Juno peeled open her eyes and glanced sideways. If Harry switched the light on, he would find them straight away.
When she looked up she realized that Jesse had been staring at her the whole time. His pupils were dilated, his face illuminated oddly in the rose light that filtered through the door. His moist lips were half-open, as if in surprise. Their heads were so close that Juno thought she could feel the static buzz off his hair.
‘Hello!’ Harry boomed, trying to startle whoever might be hiding in the bathroom. Adrenaline flooded Juno’s veins, but she bit her tongue and hoped that he would not find the two of them pressed against each other in this small space. There was a long moment of silence, and she wondered if Jesse could feel her heart hammering against her ribs. She held his gaze. Then, finally, the door slammed shut. Light flashed against Jesse’s retinas and then they were in darkness again. They both exhaled involuntarily. Jesse’s breath was warm on the bridge of Juno’s nose, his molars black with chocolate cake. She was painfully aware of the closeness of this other body. She caught the chemical whiff of the plant fertilizer he handled, the scent of birch leaves and sweat and long grass. For a minute, she forgot about the game. Heat radiated through the thin cotton of his shirt and his forehead glistened.
‘Are we okay?’ he asked, trying to smile.
‘I think so,’ Juno whispered, stepping back. But Jesse’s breath was still quick and irregular, Juno’s hands were shaking and, in the unilluminated air between them, there was a shift.
Chapter 24
JESSE
29.07.12
THERE WAS SOMETHING BETWEEN them. Was there? even two weeks later, Jesse thought he could feel it. A frisson of nerves whenever she was near or caught his eye across the table.
Could she sense it too?
Everything reminded him of her. That afternoon in the greenhouse it was the freshly watered earth, which was the same dark brown as her lips.
Jesse knew it had something to do with proximity. The fact that he saw Juno every day, in the kitchen measuring out rations, or scratching the nape of her neck with the edge of her pencil during Igor’s classes. But that was nothing new. Jesse had trained with Juno for years at Dalton. Back then, she had simply been the ‘other’ twin. The one who never turned up to parties, and whose grades were so high they were the bar that everyone furtively measured themselves against. The one on the Christian Union’s committee and the debating team. Her name was listed on every other page in the school newsletter. There had been something unattractive to him about this overachiever, the girl he would sometimes spot from his window running laps around the frozen hockey pitch before the bell rang for breakfast.