The Loneliest Girl in the Universe(43)

I can’t trust anything he says, not any more. I don’t even know who I’m talking to. If he’s lied to me about this, then what else?

I have no idea what to do, no way of even beginning to make a plan. How can I stop him coming for me? How can I escape?

I can’t.


At seven, a shrill ringing sound comes from the computer. J’s calling. Right on schedule.

I’m not going to answer it.

There’s no way I can talk to him. I can’t hear his voice and pretend I don’t know what he’s doing to me. I’ll sound like a completely different person to yesterday.

I shudder and squeeze my eyes shut, like that will get me out of this, like if I just try hard enough I can erase time and make it so that The Eternity was never launched at all.

I crawl into my bunk and pull the duvet over my head until I’m safe in my cocoon of bedding, where I can ignore the computer and nothing can hurt me.

It rings and rings and rings.

I curl a pillow around my head to try and block out the shrill wail. It vibrates through me. It seems to last for ever.

Finally, finally, it stops.

I lie back, stare at the ceiling and try to catch my breath. Before I’ve even relaxed, the ringing starts again, loud and piercing and insistent.

I start to cry. He’s not going to stop. Not until I answer. He’s never going to leave me alone.

He rings three more times.

There must be a way to turn it off. When the ringing stops, I go to the helm. I try to block the calls, but as I’m clicking he rings again and—

My click accidentally answers the call – or perhaps I just needed to know, once and for all, whether he’s good or bad or somewhere in-between – and the ringing stops.

“Romy?” a voice says. The sound drags right up against my nerve endings.

My heart stops in my chest. I hold my breath, as if that will make him go away, as if he’ll think it’s an error and the call never connected at all.

“Are you there?” he whispers in a low croon.

I choke on a gasp.

There’s barely a second of silence. The time lag has disappeared almost completely.

“You are there,” he says. “I can hear you.”

I swallow back stomach butterflies and moths and snakes, and before I can decide to end the call without saying a word, he says, “It’s just me. There’s no need to be afraid.”

His voice is deep and terrifyingly gentle, as if he thinks by keeping it mild he can coax me into his arms. The sickening thing is that a day ago, it would have worked.

“I’m not afraid,” I blurt out, without thinking.

There’s another moment of silence. This time it seems victorious.

“I didn’t think you were going to answer,” he says eventually, slightly disapproving and slightly pleased.

It’s only because I’m still not entirely convinced that he’s done what I think he’s done that I reply. “I wasn’t. I answered by accident.”

“You are scared.” His words are absolutely certain. It sends a shiver down my spine so hard that it seizes up my neck.

“I have to go,” I say quickly.

“See you so—” he says, but I end the call before he can finish talking.

I stare at the screen, panting and sweating like I’ve run four laps of the ship. I’m certain now. J isn’t good. I never want to hear that voice again.

He rings again, but only once.


I sit cross-legged on the floor and stare at my model buildings, populated by the tiny Romy and the tiny J and the tiny little children we were going to raise together – in some alternative universe, where he was good and I was normal, and we were in love for real instead of for play.

I pick up the dinner-packet model farmhouses, which tilt on their glue foundations. Tiny paper chickens fly off the sides.

I carry the fragile creation to the airlock and leave it in the outer chamber. When I open the door, the model tears itself apart, twisting and turning until my future disappears into nothing.





DAYS UNTIL THE ETERNITY CATCHES UP:


80


I spend the day pacing the ship, buried waist-deep in hopeless solutions.

Eighty days. I still have eighty days. He’s not here yet. I say it to myself over and over, trying to calm down.

Whichever way I look at it, I can’t escape. How do you get away from someone flying towards you at nearly the speed of light? How do you avoid someone who can outrun you? How do you outmanoeuvre someone who has had over two years to plan?

Today, while I was searching through J’s operating system, I found an audio file hidden in the coding. The room filled with the sound of fingernails scratching across metal when it played – just like the noises I’ve been hearing outside the ship.

The noises weren’t in my head. I haven’t been imagining things. He set up a program that played the sound at night. The monsters were real. The monsters were created by J all along.

He must have spent hours on that one small thing to hurt me. And that’s only the beginning. J’s spent so much time and energy trying to make my life miserable. From the UPR to the power cuts, he’s created the worst living conditions possible.

Is it even worth attempting to stop him? I wonder, still pacing the ship’s corridors. He’s coming, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I could just wait and hope that when he arrives things will be different. But is that possible?