“Romy?” The words, uncertain and hoarse, come from my mother. I stop talking abruptly.
“Mum?” I say. The sound of her voice makes me feel like I’m eleven again.
“Romy, who is that man?” Her words are calm – nothing like the manic shriek I remember from when I last saw her, smashing up the embryos.
“Mum!” I choke back a sob.
I used to crave the days when she was lucid more than anything else in the world. Even now, I want to run to her, to hide under her arm and breathe in her smell, despite the image that never leaves my mind: her pushing Dad away, him falling onto broken glass.
“Mum, you have to help me!” I say, desperately grasping at a fragile hope. “He’s going to kill me!”
“I’m going to kill you both, actually.” J jerks his arm against my neck, casually testing his strength. It’s a reminder of how powerless I am.
“Let go of her,” my mother says, struggling to sit up in bed. “You’re hurting her!”
“Oh, Talia. I’m going to do much more than hurt your daughter. I’m going to make you sit and watch as I kill her,” J says. “And then I’m going to kill you.”
Tears stream down my face. “Why are you doing this?” I wail.
“Haven’t you worked it out yet?” he spits. “This is my revenge. Your parents killed my mom and dad. Dr Silvers here was too busy fawning over her perfect little newborn baby to actually do her fucking job.”
Suddenly, everything makes sense. “That wasn’t their fault!” His parents’ deaths were just an accident. He’s so lost in grief that he can’t see the truth.
He laughs. “Not their fault? You have nightmares about the astronauts every single night, Romy. Why are you so frightened of them? What possible reason could you have to be so scared of long-dead crew members?”
I don’t understand what point he’s making. Anyone would fear the astronauts, wouldn’t they? “They’re… It’s scary! The thought of them, it’s—”
He shakes his head, talking over me. “You’re guilty. You know that if you hadn’t been born, the astronauts would still be alive.”
“No, you’re wrong!” I deny it, but my mind is racing. Is that really the reason? Have I really felt like their deaths were my fault, all these years? Hundreds of lives, lost. Because … of me?
“The torpor technology failed,” I say, weak and uncertain now in the face of his conviction. “There was nothing that could have saved them. Even if I hadn’t been born, they would still have died.”
He squeezes his hand tight around both of my wrists. I hear the bones creak, and pain shoots up my arms.
“You know that’s not true. Your parents were supposed to wake up my mom and dad five years into the journey. They were going to take over as caretakers while your parents went into stasis. But then you were born, so they stayed awake to raise little baby Romy. And my parents died. Along with hundreds of other astronauts!”
But any mother would choose their baby over stasis, however important the mission was. NASA had even told them to stay awake. “But—”
He doesn’t let me speak. “If Talia hadn’t been so selfish then my parents would be alive right now. They might even have noticed the failure in the stasis pods and woken everyone up before it was too late. Instead, everyone is dead.”
“It’s not my mother’s fault she got pregnant,” I say, refusing to accept that he’s right. I know that my mother felt guilty about the astronauts, but I never really believed that she was responsible. How could she be? “Accidents happen. You can’t blame all of this on a mistake!”
“She didn’t just accidentally get pregnant. She must have removed her birth control – all female crew members were fitted with IUD coils. It was intentional. She knew what a risk it would be to the mission, and she did it anyway. She destroyed everything. For you.”
When I turn to her, I can see from her expression that J is right. I was never a “happy accident”.
Suddenly, so much of my childhood makes sense. This really is her fault. She knew that. The reason she couldn’t look at me, for years after the astronauts died, was because she felt guilty.
My brain stops fighting to deny this. J is right. My mother chose to have a baby, and because of that, she held herself responsible for the deaths of hundreds of astronauts.
But that isn’t enough to explain everything he has done to me.
“Even if it is her fault, why did you make up all those lies to me?” I say, salty tears dripping into my mouth. “Why the games? Why did you invent the UPR? If all you want is revenge, why not just kill me when you arrived? Why torture me for months like that?”
“I was telling the truth when I said I was curious about you. That’s how it started. Then I realized that I had the perfect opportunity to make you suffer. To make you feel the pain I felt when my mom and dad died.”
Even though he said we had a connection, he never actually identified with me at all. He just saw his need for revenge. Nothing I’ve ever said, and nothing I can say now, is going to change his mind. This will end in one of two ways – he kills me, or I kill him.
I bite down on the inside of my cheek, forcing myself to be calm.
“Your parents wouldn’t want you to do this,” I say, stalling for time. “Think of Lucy. And … and Jeremy.”
Without warning, he twists my wrists in his grip until I hear a snap. I cry out, unable to think about anything but the pain in my left arm, searing hot and impossibly brutal.
“How dare you. You don’t know a single thing about my parents.”
“But I do,” my mother says, her voice hard. “They were good people. They wouldn’t have wanted this.”
“I don’t believe a fucking word you say,” J hisses.
“Lucy was one of my closest friends,” my mother continues. “Jeremy and I were partners for most of our in-class training. Do you think I didn’t mourn them? Do you really think it didn’t destroy me, inside and out, to have to admit that I’d lost them? Whatever you do to me, Jeremy, trust me, it can’t be worse than what I’ve done to myself.”
“I don’t care how sad you are,” J says. “Your bleeding heart isn’t going to bring them back. I met you, before the ship launched. Do you even remember? A month before take-off, at a dinner party for the family of the crew. They’d just announced that you and your husband would be the first set of caretakers. After dessert was served, you promised me you’d take care of my parents while they were in stasis. You looked me dead in the eye and said that to my face.”
“I remember, Jeremy,” she says. I can do nothing but look between them, fighting the pain shooting up my arm long enough to focus on what’s happening.
“I told you that I’d been accepted on an astrophysical engineering course. That I wanted to be an astronaut, to join the colony on Earth II one day,” J continues. He twists his head to the side and wipes away tears on his shoulder. “You said that you’d make sure my mom and dad were waiting for me.”
“I did,” my mother says, quiet, agonized.