A Complicated Love Story Set in Space, Page 2

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” DJ said. “But we’ve got about fifteen minutes before Qriosity blows up, so if you want to keep living, I’m going to need you to do a heck of a lot more than try.”

  The touch panel asking if I wanted to cycle the airlock was still taunting me. All I had to do was press it. I even considered doing it and saying it was an accident. Except, then I would’ve been responsible for destroying the ship and killing DJ, and I really hated having to apologize.

  “Right,” I said. “I can definitely maybe do this.”

  “That’s the spirit!”

  “And if I can’t, then we both die in a fiery explosion and it won’t matter anyway.”

  THREE

  I DIDN’T WANT TO DIE, even though I might have said I did.

  Look, I was dealing with some stuff, okay? I was walking home in the rain with a milkshake in one hand and a bag of Dick’s burgers in the other, and some oblivious ass in an SUV, who was too busy texting to be bothered with paying attention to the road, rolled through the crosswalk and nearly hit me. Yes, I lost my temper. Yes, I threw my milkshake at him as he shrugged and drove off. Yes, I yelled, “Why don’t you just kill me next time?!” at the sky and started to cry, while strangers on the other side of 45th pretended not to stare. It’s not like I actually meant it.

  After that, I gave the burgers to the homeless guy who was always hanging around the bus stop, went home, and crawled into bed. But, honestly, I hadn’t been serious about wanting to die, and I hoped that whoever was out there making those decisions understood that I’d just been having a really bad day.

  Not that this day was turning out much better. Though, I supposed if I managed to make it back into the ship without suffocating, I’d count it as a win.

  I trudged along Qriosity’s hull, following the path on my hud, taking careful, measured steps like I was crossing a tightrope over a pit of vipers. It was eerie not hearing anything outside of my own breathing inside the suit. I could feel the impact of my boots attaching to the metal hull, and my brain expected to hear the sound of each step and didn’t know what to do when it didn’t. It left me feeling unsettled and anxious.

  Adding to my disquietude was that I couldn’t see much of the ship beyond the globe of light radiating from my suit. The path on my hud disappeared into the darkness, and it could have led me right over the edge and I wouldn’t have known until it was too late.

  “How’s it going with the reactor?” I asked when the silence began to get to me. It had probably only been thirty seconds since I’d last heard DJ’s voice, but it felt like forever.

  “I’m not real sure yet.”

  “That’s not reassuring.”

  DJ’s sigh carried through the speakers inside the helmet, bringing his weariness along with it. “I don’t know this computer, so I’m going through everything hoping I find something that says ‘shut down reactor.’ ”

  “Sounds fun. Trade you?”

  “Does it make me weird if I would?” he asked.

  “A little,” I said. “I don’t know why you would want to be out here, though. Every step might be the one that sends me hurtling off the hull into space, where I’d slowly suffocate and die in the icy embrace of the frigid void.”

  DJ hesitated a moment before saying, “I’d still do it. I always wanted to be an astronaut when I got older.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen,” he said.

  I stumbled. I threw my arms out to steady myself, but that was pointless in a zero-G environment. Thankfully, my mag boots held their grip. It still took me a second to regain my balance.

  “Noa?”

  “You’re sixteen?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “So am I.” I should have been moving, following the path to the coolant conduit, but finding out DJ was my age had shaken me. “Don’t you think that’s messed up? Who the hell kidnaps a couple of sixteen-year-olds and sticks them on a spaceship?” My voice rose an octave and cracked.

  “Everything about this is unusual,” DJ said. “I don’t think us being sixteen is more or less weird than the rest of it.”

  Maybe DJ was right, but that didn’t stop my brain from spinning. “Why us?” I asked. “And why here? What do they want from us, and how come I can’t remember how I got into this damned suit?”

  DJ’s voice was like a soothing hand between my shoulders. “Whoa there, Noa. Slow down.” His words cut through the anger and fear. “I want answers too, but we’ll never get any if we blow up.”

  It was terrifying logic, but it made sense. I needed to move. I focused on putting one foot in front of the other, marching toward my destination. “Hey, DJ?” I asked. “Where are you from?”

  “Small town in Florida called Calypso. You’ve probably never heard of it.”

  I hadn’t. “Is everything people say about Floridians true? Do you ride alligators to rob banks and whatever?”

  “Heck yeah,” DJ said, though he sounded a little distracted. “You’re not a true Floridian until you’ve committed at least one stupid crime from the back of a gator.”

  Anyone who could crack jokes while the specter of death hung over them was okay by me. “So what do you really do?” The path on my hud finally reached an endpoint a couple of meters ahead. “Wait, don’t tell me. You’re a surfer. You’ve got a perfect tan, a sunburned nose, and blond hair because you spend as much time as possible catching waves in the ocean.”

  Up close, this section of the hull looked similar to everything else I’d passed. I saw nothing to distinguish it from the rest. But my hud had me kneel in front of an access panel and then offered up a helpful set of instructions. Step one: Open the panel.

  “You got the blond hair right,” DJ said, “but I’m about as white as Wonder Bread, and I definitely don’t surf.”

  “How do you live in Florida but you don’t surf? Isn’t that against the law?”

  “Don’t know how to swim.” DJ sounded a bit sheepish. I kept trying to picture what he looked like, but he remained a pale, blond blob in my mind.

  I opened the panel and immediately spotted the problem. “Damn.”

  “What?” DJ asked.

  “You should see this pipe,” I said. “The thing’s as big around as my thigh, and thick, too, but it’s got a raggedy hole in one side. Looks like it was burned with acid or something.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  My hud had outlined a pouch attached to my belt, and the instructions told me that the next step was to smooth the surface of the conduit before applying the sealant patch. In the pouch, I found a sponge-shaped object with a side that was rough like sandpaper. “Yeah,” I said. “I think I can.”

  “You sound like you believe it.”

  “I guess I do.” I started grinding down the rough edges around the hole in the conduit. I didn’t know anything about DJ, other than that he didn’t know how to swim, but I was grateful that he was on the other end of the line to talk to. I tried to picture Becca in the reactor room, and no. She would’ve demanded to speak to the manager and then probably set the place on fire. And Billy?

  Nope. Billy was the last person I wanted to think about.

  “What about you?” DJ asked. “Where’re you from?”

  “Seattle.”

  “Guess that means we weren’t abducted from the same city.”

  “We weren’t even on the same side of the country,” I muttered. “Wait. When you say ‘abducted,’ do you mean by aliens?”

  I heard the pause in DJ’s breathing, and I wasn’t sure whether he was considering his answer or was busy with whatever he was doing to keep us from exploding. After a couple of seconds, he said, “Why not aliens?”

  I hadn’t thought about it much until he asked, but the more I did, the more the idea seemed unlikely. “Does this feel like an alien ship to you?” I asked. “Granted, I’ve only seen the inside of this suit and the airlock, but all the text on my hud is in English.”

  “You�
�re probably right,” he said. “Besides, there are lots of other things that could’ve abducted us.”

  “Such as?”

  “Sentient computer programs run amok?”

  I snorted. “You watch way too much TV.”

  “My dad says the same thing all the time,” he said. “Doesn’t mean it can’t be true.”

  DJ had me there, and I didn’t know what else to say. There was an ease talking to him that I rarely found with others. I was frequently awkward and shy around strangers, but DJ drew words from me, seemingly, without even trying. I suspected it was because we weren’t actually in the same room together. He was little more than a voice in my helmet.

  Once I’d finished smoothing the conduit, the instructions told me to use one of the mesh patches in my pouch to seal the hole. The patch was made of thin, flexible metal strands woven together as tightly as silk. I peeled the backing off to expose the adhesive and pressed it carefully against the surface of the pipe.

  “Question for you,” DJ asked. “I’ve located the controls for shutting down the reactor, but doing so requires turning off a bunch of other systems, and I’m not real certain what any of them do.”

  “Okay?” I was finishing the last step, which involved smearing a thick, pasty goo around the edges of the patch.

  “I think I can work out what ‘oxygen reclamation’ does and that I shouldn’t mess with it, but I’ve got no idea what ‘stasis regulation’ or ‘photonic interface’ might be for. Any guesses?”

  I shook my head, forgetting DJ couldn’t see me. “I can bake a cake no problem, but I can barely update my phone without breaking it. I don’t think this is the kind of situation where you want me taking guesses.”

  “You bake cakes?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I bake lots of things, but I don’t think that’s what’s important at the moment.”

  “I know. It’s just that I love eating cakes.”

  It was weird to be laughing when my life was in danger, but it also felt good to bleed off some of the pressure that had been building inside my skull. And hearing DJ’s lighthearted laugh on the other end of the comms made me feel, just for a moment, like I was safe and nothing could harm me.

  “If we survive, and there’s a kitchen on this ship, I’ll bake you as many cakes as you want.”

  “Deal,” DJ said. His laughter faded into silence and then the silence turned uncomfortable. “So what do you think? Should I turn off these systems even though I don’t know what they do?” I began to repeat what I’d said before, but DJ cut me off. “We’re in the same boat, Noa.”

  “Technically, it’s a ship,” I said. “And I’m not actually in it.”

  “You know what I mean.” DJ sounded tense. He wasn’t joking anymore. “I don’t know what these systems do either, and I’ll make the decision if I have to, but I don’t want to be responsible for killing us if I can help it.”

  I understood where DJ was coming from. It was a lot of pressure. I still didn’t think I was the best person to advise him, but I was the best DJ had, and I couldn’t let him down. “Is there any other way to kill the reactor?”

  “Not as far as I can tell.”

  “We’ll definitely die if you don’t shut those systems off, and we’ll only possibly die if you do. The choice seems pretty clear to me.”

  DJ let out a relieved sigh. “Okay. Good. That’s what I was thinking too.”

  “You got this, DJ,” I said. “And I’ll try not to be too pissed off if you accidentally kill us both.”

  DJ’s rich, deep laugh filled the emptiness. It was bigger than the ship and brighter than the stars. “Thanks for that. I guess.”

  “You’re welcome.” I closed the panel and stood. “Now hurry up. I’ve finished patching the conduit and I’m coming in. I can’t wait to get out of this stupid suit.”

  “All right,” DJ said. “Say goodbye to water filtration.”

  “Bye, water filtration!” I reached around my back to grab the tether, but it wasn’t there. I froze, seized by panic. The tether wasn’t there because I’d taken it off at the airlock and hadn’t reattached it. The tether wasn’t there because I was a moron. My heart fluttered. It stopped. “Damn it.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. This was fine. I was going to be fine. I had my mag boots, and there was no point worrying DJ about something he couldn’t fix. I’d walked from the airlock to the conduit without the tether; I could make the return trip, no problem.

  “You’ve gotta stop doing that,” DJ said. “Unless you’re trying to give me a heart attack.”

  “Sorry.” One slow, careful step at a time, I made my way back to the airlock. The halo of lights surrounding the entrance grew brighter as I neared it, and this time I wasn’t going to let anything prevent me from cycling through and shedding my suit.

  Even thinking about the suit made me anxious. I needed to talk to keep from panicking. “What do you do for fun, DJ?” I asked. “Obviously nothing water related.”

  DJ didn’t answer. I hoped he was only preoccupied with shutting down the reactor, and I didn’t want to bug him and cause him to make a mistake, but I was also kind of on the verge of freaking out.

  “DJ?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t do much, I guess. Just normal teenage stuff.”

  “Normal teenage stuff? That sounds like the kind of answer a fifty-year-old dude who’s never been a normal teenager would give.”

  I had only been playing, but DJ sounded annoyed. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  “Just making conversation. Do you play any sports?”

  “I like running,” he said.

  “Because of all the cake you like to eat?”

  The silence before DJ answered was loud. “No. I just like to run.” More quiet. Thankfully, I was nearly at the airlock. Just a few more meters. Ten, max.

  “I’m a jerk,” I said. “I make jokes when I’m nervous. I also talk a lot and I can’t stand silence. My mom says it’s because I was born premature and spent the first month of my life in an incubator.” Five meters. “I had heart problems too. My mom teases me that I was born with a broken heart.”

  The heavy exhale of DJ’s sigh rushed through the speakers in my helmet, and even that sound was a relief. “Sorry. I’m concentrating on not messing this up.”

  “What’s the verdict? Are we going to live?” Four meters.

  “I can shut down the reactor as soon as you’re in the airlock.”

  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 t
hat 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.”