“What did you say?” Adri asked. “Do you mind if I ask?”
Lily smiled though tears were running over the corners of her lips. “I said, ‘Be brave. The other tortoises aren’t that bad.’” She paused to breathe, and gazed out the window, not meeting Adri’s eyes. “I told her, ‘You’ll realize how to be free if you just give it a little while. It can hurt a little bit, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t right. I’ll be praying for you. I love you.’” Lily sniffed. “‘You’re my best friend.’”
Adri didn’t trust herself to say anything for a while. “That’s good,” she said after a few moments. “You said the right things.”
At first they could see the tortoise—the shape of her, her lopsidedly round outline in the sand, her neck craned in curiosity. Not looking in their direction but away, out toward the rest of the island. And then she was a dot, and then—as the island retreated into the shape of green curves on the water—they couldn’t make her out at all, and Adri could only picture her and what she wanted for her—that she would make her goofy, lopsided way down the dune toward the others. That she would remember she was home after all. That it would all come back to her.
On their drive back from Wichita, Lily insisted on listening to the entire collection of Phil Collins’s greatest hits.
“This is my soundtrack for when I feel melancholy,” she said.
“Well it’s awful,” Adri said.
“That’s only because you have no soul,” Lily said.
Adri shrugged. “Maybe you’re right.”
“I need to know you’re going to be all right,” Lily said abruptly.
Adri shook her head. “I need to know that about you.”
Lily looked over at her. “Oh, Adri, I’ll be fine.” She glanced up at the sky. “My angels are looking after me.”
“You don’t know that.”
Lily shrugged. “You don’t know they’re not.”
There was nothing more to say about it. Nobody knew anything for sure.
“It’s your last night,” Lily offered. “What do you want to do?”
“Watch TV, I guess,” Adri said.
Lily cooked her a pitiful dinner—spaghetti and jarred sauce. They watched Bot Wars, where people repurposed old androids and fought them in glow-in-the-dark arenas. “This is trash,” Lily said, popping popcorn in her mouth. And at eleven, they went to bed.
It was like any other night, but it was the last night.
The darkness had fallen fast, and Adri kept looking up at the moon through the window. She thought about how almost everyone who came and went on Earth from the cavemen on had touched their eyes on the moon, but only a few people had ever been lucky enough to make their way past it. And she was going to be one of them. And that felt like breaking away from something in good and bad ways.
One last time, she read Lenore and Catherine’s letters. And then she went to sleep that night using her old positive visualization trick, but this time she visualized something she knew for sure could never happen. She saw Lily walking to the edge of the farm and finding a cave. In it was a Cup that made you live forever. In her vision, her cousin drank from it, and did.
CHAPTER 12
It was an hour’s drive to the launch site. Adri watched the farm disappear behind her, then Jericho Road, then, as they entered the highway, Canaan. She and Lily didn’t speak the whole way. She’d brushed her hair for once, and now she ran her hands through it.
She clutched a letter in her one less-than-twenty-pounds bag and everything it contained.
They exited at Garden Plain and, after parking, got out of the car without exchanging a word.
A scattering of journalists waited for them, calling Adri’s name as they got out of the car. A few cameras flashed; a reporter called out, “Good luck!” Lily gave a friendly wave and followed Adri up the gangway into the building. Families had come into town for good-byes, and the vestibule was crowded.
They were separated while Adri suited up and while the last tests were being performed. The others all gathered around their locker pods, but everyone was quiet, in their own heads, and only vaguely acknowledged one another. Adri could hear the roar of the shuttle outside the building, hear people announcing the results of different diagnostic tests over loudspeakers.
She felt suddenly, terrifyingly breakable. What if their ship exploded before it even got there? Why had she never thought to worry about that? What if it caught fire the moment they took off? She thought of all the things she’d forgotten to be scared of.
She looked over to see Saba’s hands trembling a little on her locker as she closed it.
“We’ll be fine,” Adri said. “If you want to vomit on someone, you can vomit on me.”
Outside, in a room that gave way to the hallway that led to the ship, Lily stood among the other families, tiny compared to everyone else, her white hair and pale face standing out in the crowd. She looked like a little kid on the first day of school—excited, proud, scared, lost.
“Are you ready?” Lily asked, as they lingered at the edge of the crowd. People around them were saying their good-byes, hugging, crying. Adri’s heart began to pound out of her chest.
“I guess,” Adri said. “I guess this is what feeling ready feels like.” She swallowed. “Any advice?”
Lily’s face crumpled up and tears ran down her cheeks. She took Adri’s hands in hers and squeezed them hard, hers were small and thin. “Enjoy yourself,” she said.
They stared at each other. So many thoughts were running through Adri’s head, but there would never be enough time to say them all. And because she couldn’t say all of them, she didn’t say any of them. She reached down into her bag and pulled out an envelope, handing it to Lily.
“Read it after I take off,” she said.
Lily nodded.
Now people were starting to trail down the hallway, and a technician took Adri’s bag and told her it was time to board. Adri couldn’t bring herself to let go of Lily’s hands. She held her hand to Lily’s cheek before letting it drop.
She backed toward the hallway. And softly, the moment faded away. She let go.
The simulations couldn’t have prepared her for what it was like looking out a window of a ship that was already far from Earth. The contrast of Adri’s small warm bunk, her blankets around her that night . . . and what lay beyond the glass: the immensity of space, the hazy blue planet she was leaving, suddenly small and far away. It was like looking out at a rainstorm from a warm, dry house, and thinking of everyone else outside, exposed to the sky.
That night, the ship was quiet, everyone deep in their own thoughts. Adri watched the Earth spin behind them in its restlessness and thought about the future. Mars would have a history one day too, and she would be a part of it. It might be just the beginning—using Mars as a launch point, they might find life everywhere, scattered throughout the universe, pulsing and humming and wanting, inevitable, instead of just a fluke like so many believed.
If that was true, she hoped she lived long enough to find out.
CHAPTER 13