Three meters. “I’m nearly there. Don’t wait on me.”
DJ paused. “You sure?”
“Positive,” I said. “Kill it.”
Two meters.
One meter. There was the end of the tether right where I’d left it.
“Here goes,” DJ said.
A shudder rolled through Qriosity, and I immediately wondered if I’d made the right call telling DJ to shut down the reactor before I was inside.
“DJ? Maybe—”
The lights around the airlock flashed red. The inner airlock door irised open, releasing the air that was trapped in the antechamber as a fist that tore through the opening and smashed into me at the speed of sound. I felt a moment of resistance as my boots gripped the hull, but the attractive force wasn’t strong enough to save me.
I pinwheeled my arms. I reached for the tether, a handle, anything I could grab onto, but it was already too late.
I could only watch as I flew backward, away from the airlock. Away from the ship and from DJ.
“We did it!” DJ yelled through the comms. “Qriosity’s not going to blow up!”
Warning! Your heart rate is exceeding the maximum recommended beats per minute. Please attempt thirty seconds of relaxed breathing.
“Noa? Are you there? Noa?”
When I was finally able to speak without fear of puking, I said, “We have another minor problem.”
FOUR
SPACE SUCKS.
Space is scary. It’s filled with stars that expand and explode and sometimes collapse into solar system–devouring black holes; there are meteors capable of destroying planets and, potentially, aliens that movies had convinced me were violent and had a taste for human meat. I know that every Earth-bound kid dreams of going into space and sailing among the stars, about boarding a rocketship to a planet no human has ever walked on, but I had never been one of them. Human beings had no business going into space. I was proof of that.
I’d been in space less than an hour and I was already dead. My frozen corpse was going to drift through the void between stars forever, and no one but DJ, who probably wouldn’t outlive me by long, would know what had happened to me.
So I’ll say it again: space sucks.
“How much oxygen have you got left, Noa?” DJ was doing his best to sound like this really was nothing more than a minor problem, but I could hear the alarm in his voice in the wobble of his words.
“Forty-three minutes,” I said. “You know? From out here, Qriosity looks like a bus with wings and a hump on top.” I couldn’t see any detail on the ship, but I could see it outlined by the stars. “It figures that my first spaceship is a flying dump truck.” A sour laugh bubbled out of me.
“Stop talking like that.” DJ’s voice was a whipcrack. “I’m not letting you die out there, so you can just put that out of your mind.”
“Sure. Whatever.” I appreciated DJ’s attempt to reassure me, but my situation was hopeless and I saw no use in pretending otherwise. The only way DJ could save me was if he learned to pilot the ship he just shut down and came to fetch me, which I didn’t see much chance of happening unless DJ was a spaceship savant.
“Keep talking to me, all right?” DJ said. “What’s the last thing you remember before waking up out there?”
The irony of my talking to keep DJ calm was not lost on me, but it’s not like I had anything better to do. “I was in bed, trying to sleep. It’d been a bad day.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Well, there was the car that nearly hit me, and I threw my milkshake, which was stupid, and it was raining. But I guess it really started with Billy.”
“Billy?”
“My ex,” I said. “I wouldn’t have even gone to Dick’s for the milkshake and burgers if I hadn’t run into Billy at Target. I should’ve gone to the one at Northgate, but all I needed was face wash and I didn’t want to have to take the bus. It was my fault, really.”
DJ said something, but I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about seeing Billy standing in front of the notebooks, examining each one like it was the most important decision he would ever make—and for him, it probably felt like it was. How I froze when I saw him, and the moment before he saw me, when I could have taken off but didn’t. The hurt that morphed into anger in Billy’s eyes when he finally looked up and realized it was me standing at the end of the aisle.
“Noa?”
I tried to shake Billy out of my head. “Have you ever been in love, DJ?”
“Once.”
“Sorry.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because love is a lie. It’s not some deep and meaningful connection between two people built over stolen moments and awkward glances and hot chocolates. It’s not a holy expression of the profound understanding you have for another person or a sign from the universe that you’ve found the one human being in the world that you’re fated to spend the rest of your life with.
“Love is chemical warfare. It’s your body responding to their pheromones by juicing you with feel-good hormones and then spraying your own cocktail of pheromones into the air. It’s serotonin and dopamine and oxytocin. You can get the same high from eating a bag of chocolates, did you know that?”
DJ cleared his throat. “Uh, I didn’t.”
“Well, you can,” I said. “And the longer you spend with someone, the more addicted to them you become. Your body craves the chemicals their body churns out.” I laughed bitterly. “Love turns us into junkies.”
I suppose if I didn’t have a one-way ticket to a long, drawn-out death in outer space, I might have been embarrassed by my rant, but I had run out of energy to care what DJ or anyone else thought of me.
“That Billy guy really hurt you, huh?”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” I snapped, even though I was the one who’d dumped my trash out there for DJ to pick through.
“Sorry.” And he sounded like he really, truly meant it, which made everything worse.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I just… let’s talk about something else. What about you? What’s the last thing you remember?”
There was a three-second delay before DJ answered, and I worried in that short time that he’d shut off the comms so he didn’t have to stay with me until I died. I was scared of dying, sure, but I was terrified of dying alone.
“I was in the shower,” he said. “I think.”
“You were kidnapped from the shower?”
“I think.” He definitely sounded distracted. A small part of me wanted to believe that DJ was going to find a way to rescue me, but I couldn’t afford to let hope in. Hope was even more dangerous than space. “I’d gotten home from running, and I was sweaty and covered in gnats.”
“Gross.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You learn pretty quick not to breathe through your mouth.”
I didn’t want to think about all the bugs DJ had swallowed to reach that realization, and quickly changed the subject. “Who’s missing you at home? Parents? Friends? Siblings?”
“I don’t think—”