The Loneliest Girl in the Universe(59)

When the shining metal catches the light, I realize I’m trembling. I brace my muscles, trying to stop it. I need a strong, firm grip.

There’s still no noise from the next room. I can’t even hear my mother.

I want to stay in here, safe and alone, but if there’s a chance she’s still alive then I need to help her. I can’t hide again like last time.

I pull the emergency release lever at the top of the door. It slides open halfway, shudders, then stops in its tracks.

J is lying on the floor. He’s pale, and his left arm is covered in dark burns from where he must have been holding the door handle when he was electrocuted. His breathing is shallow but even.

He’s still alive.

I turn sideways and squeeze through the gap between the door and the doorjamb. The air smells of burnt meat, sharp and acrid.

J groans and rolls towards me.

“Romy.” His voice is hoarse.

I don’t hesitate. I bend down and thrust the scalpel up into the side of his stomach. It’s so tough that for a moment I think I’ve hit his belt, until I feel the tacky warmth of blood in between my fingers. His face, still slack from unconsciousness, twists in pain.

My eyes fill with tears, but I blink them away and twist the blade, driving the blade as far into his guts as I can reach. The impact vibrates down my arm as it hits something dense.

J reaches up, hands sliding across my elbows, both of us slippery with blood. I pull free, driving the knife into his chest.

Air explodes from his lungs in a thick, watery cough, and his hand comes up, fist pushing into the wound, trying to quench the blood. He drops his head back, making a sound that’s half-groan, half-frustrated laugh.

“I always told you that you were stronger than you realized, didn’t I, Romy Silvers?”

I stare down at him, my vision buzzing with spots of black. I can’t think of anything worth saying to him. Instead, I turn to my mother. She’s collapsed on the end of the hospital bed, looking down at the needle sticking out of her thigh. As soon as I read the resignation in her expression, I know it’s hopeless.

I pull out the needle and read the label on the syringe. It’s a lethal injection.

She sacrificed herself to protect me?

“I’m sorry, Romy,” she says.

“It’s not your fault. You … you tried your best. And I got him. He’s dying.”

She gasps, grimacing in pain. “That’s not what I meant.”

I know what she means. J is a tiny droplet in the ocean of issues between us.

“Why did you do it?” I whisper. “How could you just let Dad die like that, without even trying to save him? You just stood there.”

She opens her mouth to answer, but her eyes are already drifting shut. My mind replays the moment of his death, the look in her eyes when Dad fell into that smashed freezer door. But now I don’t see anger and murderous rage. I see pain, and fear, and helplessness. She was lost, and in agony.

Sobs rack my body. “You left me alone. You left me all on my own.”

I thought it was me. I thought she hated me so much that she couldn’t look at me, that she would rather die in stasis than be alone with me. But she wanted a child so desperately that she removed her birth control. She ignored NASA’s rules.

I was wanted. I was really, truly wanted.

She loved me so much, so deeply. That just wasn’t enough to stop the pain when her friends died because of that love.

“I didn’t want to hurt you,” she whispers. She looks so small and fragile. Nothing like the terrible version of her that exists in my memory.

She saved me. She left me alone so that she wouldn’t hurt me too.

I reach out to touch her neck, fingers pressed against her pulse. J lets out a long groan behind me, but I ignore him. He’s too injured to move, let alone find another way to hurt me.

There is nothing to fear here – just a sad woman who has been in pain for a long time. She would never hurt me intentionally. She never meant to hurt Dad.

“I forgive you,” I say finally, not sure it’s true yet, but knowing that one day it will be – and I need her to hear it, in her final moments.

Her mouth forms the word “sorry”, but she’s unconscious before she can make a sound.

It takes a long time for her heart to still. By the time her eyes have stopped darting back and forth beneath her lids, the tears have dried on my cheeks.

My mother is gone, at last. I wish things had been different. But part of me is glad that I got to say goodbye, instead of leaving her in stasis for the rest of my life, caught somewhere between life and death. Neither of us able to move on.

I stand up. My whole body screams in pain.

At some point while I was holding my mother, J went still and silent. He looks so small now, so underwhelming. When I touch my foot to his shoulder, he doesn’t react. He’s dead.

J is dead. My mother is dead. I’m alive.

It was the only way this could have ended.





HOURS SINCE THE ETERNITY CAUGHT UP:


41


I leave my mother and J lying in the sick bay and stagger out of the room, dropping onto my hands and knees in the corridor. My chest feels tight, and every time I breathe I think I’m about to start crying again, but the tears won’t come.

I’m in shock. I’m not having a heart attack, or a stroke, or dying. I’m just in shock.