The New World Read Free Page B

me.
    ‘She’s smiling,’ my father said and his own giant grin filled the binos.
    ‘I am not ,’ I said.
    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. A light against the darkness , he’d said.
    ‘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 crash and snap and grind as we carve out a long ditch through the swamp, awake as the ship rolls over again and again, which can only mean the wings have broken off, and everything in the cabin falls to the ceiling and back down again and then there’s an actual crack in the structure of the cockpit and water rushes in from the swamp but then we’re rolling again-
    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.
    But I’m breathing.
    ‘Mum?’ I say, looking down and around. ‘ Mum? ’
    ‘Viola?’ I hear.
    ‘Mum?’ I twist round to where her seat should be-
    But it’s not there-
    I twist round some more-
    And there she is, resting against the ceiling, her chair ripped from the floor-
    And the way she’s lying there-
    The way she’s lying there broken -
    ‘Viola?’ she says again.
    And the way she says it makes my chest grip tight as a fist.
    No , I think. No .
    And I start the struggle to get out of my chair to get to her.
    ***
    ‘Big day tomorrow, Skipper,’ my dad said, coming into the engine room, where I was replacing tubes of coolant, one of about a million chores they’d come up with in the past five months to keep me busy. ‘We’ll finally be entering orbit.’
    I clicked in the last coolant tube. ‘Terrific.’
    He paused. ‘I know this hasn’t been easy for you, Viola.’
    ‘Why do you care if it wasn’t?’ I said. ‘I didn’t have any say in the matter.’
    He came closer. ‘Okay, what are you really frightened of, Viola?’ he said, and it’s so exactly the question Bradley asked me that I look back at him. ‘Is it what we could find there? Or is it just that it’s change?’
    I sighed heavily. ‘No one ever seems to wonder what happens if it turns out we hate living on a planet? What if the sky’s too big? What if the air stinks? What if we go hungry?’
    ‘And what if the air tastes of honey? What if there’s so much food we all get too fat? What if the sky is so beautiful we don’t get any work done because