The ship gives a huge jolt.
And then there’s an eerie quiet.
‘We’ve lost the engines,’ my mother says. ‘The vents never opened. The fire choked out.’ She turns to me. ‘We’re gliding in. Program me a flightpath and hold on tight.’
I dial quickly through a few more screens, locking in a landing arc into what I’m hoping will be a nice soft swamp.
My mother pulls the manual controls hard with her fists, lining up her screen with the path I’ve laid out. Out the portholes I can see the ground far too clearly now, treetops getting closer and closer below us.
‘Mum?’ I say, watching as we get lower in the sky.
‘Hang on!’ she says.
‘MUM!’
And we hit.
***
‘Happy birthday!’ they shouted on the big day, ambushing me at breakfast with the least surprising surprise party in the history of the universe.
‘Thanks,’ I mumbled.
We’d left the convoy three months earlier, watching it blink out of sight behind us as we sped away fast, fast, fast. We were still eight weeks away from the new planet, eight long weeks in a ship that was beginning to smell a bit, no matter how much the air got filtered.
‘Presents!’ my father said, sweeping his hand over the wrapped boxes on the table.
‘You could at least
‘Thanks,’ I said again, a bit louder. I opened the first present, a new pair of boots, meant for hiking through rough terrain, completely the wrong colour, but I made sort of fake thankful sounds for them anyway.
I opened the second.
‘Binos,’ my father said as I took them out. ‘Your mother had them upgraded by Eddie, the engineer on the
I looked through them and found a giant version of my father’s left eye looking back at me.
‘She’s smiling,’ my father said and his own giant grin filled the binos.
‘I am
My mother left the room and came back with my favourite breakfast, a stack of pancakes, this time with thirteen motion-activated fibre-optic lights glittering on the top. They sang me the song, and it took four goes moving my hands before I got all the lights to go off.
‘What’d you wish for?’ my father asked.
‘If you tell,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t come true.’
‘Well, we’re not turning the ship around,’ my mother said, ‘so I hope it wasn’t that.’
‘Hope!’ my father said, too loud, covering up my mother’s words with forced enthusiasm. ‘That’s what we should all wish for. Hope!’
I frowned because there was that word again.
‘We brought this out, too,’ my father said, touching Bradley’s still-wrapped present. ‘Just in case you wanted to open it now.’
I looked at my parents’ faces, my father bright and happy, my mother annoyed with all my moaning but trying to make me have a good birthday anyway. And for a brief second, I saw their worry about me, too.
Their worry that I didn’t seem to have any hope at all.
I looked at Bradley’s present.
‘He said it was for when we got there,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait until then.’
***
The sound when we crash is so loud it’s almost impossible.
The ship smashes through trees, snapping them into bits, and then hits the ground with a jolt so violent I knock my head against the control panel and pain rips through it but I’m still awake, awake enough to hear the ship start to break apart, awake enough to hear every
And we’re slowing-
The roll is slowing down-
The grinding of metal is deafening and the main lights cut off as we take another roll, replaced immediately by the quivery battery lights-
And the roll keeps slowing-
Slowing until-
It stops.
And I’m still breathing. My head is spinning and aching and I’m hanging almost upside down from my buckle in my seat.
