Dad made a broken, gasping noise that sounded like “Romy” and “help”. I realized that he wasn’t moving; that his head was bent at an unnatural angle. Blood dripped down the curve of his neck, fresh and black and thick. I ran to him, pushing past my mother.
“Stop it! Mum, he’s hit his head!”
She just stared at me, like she couldn’t understand who I was.
A shard of glass had pierced Dad’s neck, gouging deep under the skin at the base of his skull. When I met his gaze, his pupils were blown wide; almost completely black.
“He’s stuck, help me!” I yelled at my mother, the doctor, but I couldn’t get her to move.
“They don’t deserve this hell!” She forced the words out through her tears. “We should have ended this nightmare years ago!”
I fluttered my hands over Dad’s head, trying to decide whether to pull him free of the glass. I had no idea how deeply it was lodged inside his head, but the blood flow was speeding up.
All I knew about first aid was that I had to stop the bleeding; I had to bandage him up. I was only eleven.
I carefully pulled his head away from the freezer door, trying to slide the glass out of his skin. It slid free a few centimetres, but then there was an unmistakable snapping sound. Dad turned frighteningly, sickeningly white. His pupils went blank. His chest fell flat.
My mother seemed to come back to herself then. She stopped screaming and stared down at Dad like she couldn’t understand what had happened.
I knew before she did. He was dead.
My mother turned to look at me with empty eyes. I felt certain that she was coming for me next.
I ran.
In the corridor, I climbed the ladder up to the stores, expecting her to grab hold of my legs at any moment. I climbed until I reached a gap between two shelves and dived inside, crawling as deep as I could get, squeezing myself into a space too small for anyone but an eleven year old.
I could hear noises behind me, banging and crashing. I didn’t know if she was chasing me or still smashing up the embryo freezers, but I didn’t turn to check.
Lying in the darkness, I could feel blood ooze from my kneecaps where I’d grazed them on food packets. Every time I breathed, my chest touched boxes on either side of me.
I listened.
I stayed there for two days; listening, waiting, certain that my mother was coming for me.
I hid in the utter blackness of the stores until I was too thirsty to wait any longer, until the memory of Dad’s eyes turning blank as I held him was too much to bear, alone in the dark.
When I climbed back down to ground level, the ship was completely silent. I stood in the corridor, trying to decide what to do. My mouth was parched, but my brain was telling me to find out where my mother was before I went to get a drink.
I couldn’t hear anything. After ten minutes, I slowly walked down the corridor to the habitation area, the sound of my own footsteps making me jump.
It was empty.
I checked in the cupboards, under the bunks. When I was sure I was alone, I went to the sink and drank and drank and drank. Then my fear came back in a rush.
I thought about just going back up to the stores with a bottle of water, but the ship was so silent and empty that my curiosity got the better of me. I needed to know what my mother was doing – and part of me wanted to find Dad. Because I hadn’t entirely convinced myself that he was actually dead.
I checked the entire ship. The only sounds were ones that I made.
The gene bank was empty – and it had been cleaned. There was no trace of the accident, except for the smashed cases. The others were intact, full of hundreds more embryos that hadn’t been destroyed.
If I’d looked harder, I might have found the fragment of my mother’s oxygen tank, engraved with her name, hidden in the doorframe. I was too confused to do anything but carry on wandering the ship.
I didn’t know what to think.
The last place I checked was the sick bay – some tiny, hopeful part of my brain thinking that Dad might be recovering there, with my mother tending to him.
When the door slid open, my eyes immediately found the jar of ashes waiting on the table.
Dad.
I took a tentative step into the room, forcing my eyes away from the jar, searching for my mother. I knew she must be in here. I’d looked everywhere else.
The room was empty.
“Mum?” I called, my voice breaking, barely louder than a whisper.
No reply.
I swallowed. The room was lined with the empty stasis pods: silent upright memorials to the astronauts who had died in them. There were nearly a hundred. Was my mother hiding in one of them – or waiting to creep up on me while I checked them?
I had to look. I had to find her.
I started opening the pods one by one.
Empty.
Empty.
Empty.
The tenth pod I checked wasn’t empty. Even worse, it was running. According to the monitor displaying vital signs, there was someone inside.
I was flooded with adrenalin. I braced myself and opened the door. My mother was inside. She was in stasis, like the astronauts had been before the failure.
I stared at her for long seconds. I couldn’t look away from her eyelids, frozen shut. I expected her to open them at any moment and lunge for me.
When the machine started beeping at me to shut the door before defrosting occurred, I closed it and backed away, dropping to the ground and staring at the pod.
My mother had tidied up the gene bank, cremated Dad and then checked herself into a pod and entered torpor sleep.
She knew the risks, but she had done it anyway.
I still don’t know why. Guilt? Terror? Panic? Or just madness?
I don’t know. I hope I never find out.
I stored Dad’s remains alongside the astronauts’ ashes. Touching the fine grains of his ashes was when I first realized that I was alone. For ever.
I haven’t been back to the sick bay since then. I don’t want to know if she’s still alive. I don’t want to know whether I’m sharing my ship with a murderer or a corpse.
I don’t want to know why she put herself into stasis.
I never want to see her again.
I stare at the neat lines of pods through the open door of the sick bay. I understand now why my mother wanted to destroy the embryos.
She thought that it was better to never live at all than to live in the world as she saw it – where you were forced to watch your friends die, and had to cling to tiny fragments of human communication from a planet an ever-increasing number of light years away.
She thought it was kinder to destroy the cells before they had a chance to suffer through what we had experienced – or worse. Is no life at all better than the constant fear and fight for survival I face every day?
I don’t know.
If a life of fear isn’t worth living, then why should I carry on? It’s not possible to be more afraid than I am right now. The thought of J coming for me hurts to the marrow of my bones in a deep primal dread.
Whatever happens, I can’t see a point in time when I will ever be happy. For the rest of my life, I’ll be struggling. I’m always going to be moments away from sinking completely.
So why should I live at all?