The Loneliest Girl in the Universe(44)

There’s an abrupt silence as the sound of my echoing footsteps disappears. I realize I’ve stopped outside the sick bay without meaning to. I’m so tense that it almost makes me jump.

I stare at the half-open door.

There are so many places on the ship that I avoid because I’m afraid of facing the past. But the past is much less scary than the future. I know what’s already happened; I know how bad it was. I don’t know what’s coming, though.

I breathe in the stale air and consider whether to step inside.

I was eleven when I heard a noise in the gene bank. I needed some help from Dad with an astrophysics problem, so I’d gone looking for him. When I went inside to see if it was him, I discovered my mother instead.

She was destroying the embryos, hitting the cases with the oxygen tank from her suit. She smashed the glass, sending the contents pouring out across the floor in an icy mist of liquid nitrogen.

She turned to look at me, blood running down her wrist, fragments of glass sticking out of her fist. Stepping towards me, she ground the shattered remains of test tubes under her bare feet.

There was a blank look in her eyes, the way she always looked during a psychotic episode. “It’s no good. It’s not safe. We can’t do it.”

“Mum? What are you—” I didn’t take my eyes off her, but yelled “DAD!” as loudly as I could.

My mother had been suffering from an increasingly violent psychosis for years, but I’d never seen her like this before.

“They don’t get to choose!” she shouted.

“Who are ‘they’?” I asked. I heard the sound of footsteps. Dad was coming.

“They shouldn’t live on that broken, lonely world,” she said, turning to stroke the door of the freezer, eyes on the samples inside.

“Talia!” Dad yelled as he reached the gene bank. “What are you—” He caught sight of the broken case behind her. “Oh God, no, Talia, what have you done?”

My mother jerked her head up. “It wasn’t their decision to make!”

She raised the oxygen cylinder to the glass of the next freezer, containing hundreds more embryos.

The tank hit the metal side and fractured on impact, oxygen escaping free of the canister in a loud hiss as shards of metal flew across the room.

She just raised her arms and aimed for the glass once more.

“TALIA!” Dad leapt at her, wrapping his arms around her shoulders, grabbing her fists before she could strike.

She let out a furious, mournful wail and threw all her weight forward. “It’s too cruel. We can’t!”

They wrestled, pulling each other in opposite directions, until Dad skidded on the mess on the floor. He crashed down, my mother falling on top of him.

She jerked away, pulling free of his grasp and diving for the nearest case. He grabbed at her arm, both of them slippery with blood. She turned on him, wild with fury, and pushed him away.

Dad’s head jerked back as he fell, cracking against the sharp edge of one of the smashed freezer doors.

My mother hissed at him, “We deserve to die for what we did.”

Dad made a broken, gasping noise that sounded like “Romy” and “help”. I realized that he wasn’t moving; that his head was bent at an unnatural angle. Blood dripped down the curve of his neck, fresh and black and thick. I ran to him, pushing past my mother.

“Stop it! Mum, he’s hit his head!”

She just stared at me, like she couldn’t understand who I was.

A shard of glass had pierced Dad’s neck, gouging deep under the skin at the base of his skull. When I met his gaze, his pupils were blown wide; almost completely black.

“He’s stuck, help me!” I yelled at my mother, the doctor, but I couldn’t get her to move.

“They don’t deserve this hell!” She forced the words out through her tears. “We should have ended this nightmare years ago!”

I fluttered my hands over Dad’s head, trying to decide whether to pull him free of the glass. I had no idea how deeply it was lodged inside his head, but the blood flow was speeding up.

All I knew about first aid was that I had to stop the bleeding; I had to bandage him up. I was only eleven.

I carefully pulled his head away from the freezer door, trying to slide the glass out of his skin. It slid free a few centimetres, but then there was an unmistakable snapping sound. Dad turned frighteningly, sickeningly white. His pupils went blank. His chest fell flat.

My mother seemed to come back to herself then. She stopped screaming and stared down at Dad like she couldn’t understand what had happened.

I knew before she did. He was dead.

My mother turned to look at me with empty eyes. I felt certain that she was coming for me next.

I ran.

In the corridor, I climbed the ladder up to the stores, expecting her to grab hold of my legs at any moment. I climbed until I reached a gap between two shelves and dived inside, crawling as deep as I could get, squeezing myself into a space too small for anyone but an eleven year old.

I could hear noises behind me, banging and crashing. I didn’t know if she was chasing me or still smashing up the embryo freezers, but I didn’t turn to check.

Lying in the darkness, I could feel blood ooze from my kneecaps where I’d grazed them on food packets. Every time I breathed, my chest touched boxes on either side of me.