The Loneliness of Distant Beings

Chapter Thirty-Five

I wake up suddenly, who knows how much later.

I suppose I must be dead. Except I'm not.

I didn't even realise I had passed out until now, and obviously Ezra hadn't noticed either, as he is talking at me so fast and so hard it takes me a minute to tune him in.

' . . . in orbit, so all we need to do at this point is slow down, and if we can slow down enough we will just fall, basically fall through the atmosphere. This thing is built for that kind of passive entry in an emergency so, you know, as long as the heat shield holds without any coolant, in theory, it could work.'

'What could . . . ?' I shake my dizzy head. 'What are we talking about?'

He blinks. 'You weren't listening? We're in orbit. If we slow this thing down enough we could get into the atmosphere.'

'Tell me what to do,' I say then, pushing the words out of my mouth like glue, stuck as I am at the bottom of a hole. 'Tell me what to do to help.'

He turns and looks at me, blinks once, eyes rolling back and not returning right away. 'Reverse thrusters,' he says, as if through water. 'We just need to get our speed down enough for the planet's gravity to take over.' And he starts pulling switches and swiping at the screens. Something rumbles under the seats then, a deep rumble that pulses into us in waves and roars in our ears. He shouts but at first I don't hear it, and then suddenly his voice stabs me in the eardrum.

'The sluice!' he yells. 'It's behind you, Hemple.'

'The what?' I twist in my seat.

'We need to dump our weight.'

'Dump our weight? What weight? Our water?'

His eyes find mine, sad, and his voice comes over the com. 'You can still actually think that far ahead? Jeez, Hemple, dump it! Pull the lever round there, the sluice lever – it should be black.'

Straining against my harness I see it, centimetres from a red lever that releases the inner door. I wrench at it, expecting it to be stiff, but actually it ends up being ridiculously easy to slide across, and I watch it then, watch it spray out behind us like our lost innards.

'It's done,' I say, and I lean my head back to where it vibrates with the guttural throb of the thrusters, rattling my teeth, loosening them in their sockets, whipping the blood in my head into foam, scrambling my thoughts.

'Dom,' I say then, flinching with a penetrating fear that he won't answer me. And he doesn't. 'Dom,' I say again, feeling it take hold of me. I try to turn to look at him but can't; the pressure forcing me into my seat is too immense. 'Dom,' I sob. 'Please talk to me. Please.'

'He can't hear you,' says Ezra. 'No mask.'

And when I look at Dom in the mirror I see him – face slack, eyes closed, no mask.

'It's OK,' says Ezra then. 'He's OK.'

'How is he OK?' I scream, but there is nothing I can do to move, to get to him; I am just being beaten back by the kind of forces I have never even imagined, pummelled into the seat until I am almost a part of it, so all I can do is fight the tears and talk to myself and say, No no no no no.

I don't know how long it goes on like this. So long that I think I lose consciousness again, or nearly anyway, rescuing myself just in time before sliding into it, knowing that if I did it would definitely be a one-way trip. I think it's the heat that brings me back, building as it does, as rapid and solid as physical weight. Something I've never felt before, not like this. When I open my eyes I see it, the front window filling with flame, and I find myself trying to speak through my vibrating jaw. 'We're on fire.'

'It's the heat shield burning off,' says Ezra, his voice a blur.

I don't know what happens then; I don't know. All I do know is that Ezra keeps talking, and I hang on to it like a rope in the darkness under my eyelids. I just wish he wouldn't keep making me talk too, because it's so hard, and just gets harder and harder, and I really can't even think of anything to say, and in the end I can only think of a song, and so I sing it, and it's the one that goes twinkle, twinkle and it makes Ezra laugh, but it is so soft, so weak now, that I wonder whether I am losing him too and, if I am, whether there is even the smallest hope of us making it and I guess the answer must be no but then I realise that there never was anyway so we didn't lose anything, not really, we only gained.

And I bury myself then, bury myself in the darkness, the roar, the vomit that issues down my chin with only the slightest sensation of lifting in my stomach, the sudden calm, the quiet, a high whistling sound I can't place but that seems to start in the very centre of my skull and radiate outwards, one of those noises you can hear any number of infinite layers in, including some that sound like music.

And then, there is nothing.

More coming later this week for Seren and Dom! If you enjoyed this chapter, please don't forget to vote – thanks.

The Loneliness of Distant Beings has been published, but to get it in front of as many people as possible I'm posting it to the lovely Wattpad community. The plan is to have it all up before the publication of my second book - The Glow of Fallen Stars - in August.

If you can't wait to read the ending, or just love the feel of real pages, then you can purchase Loneliness from your local bookshop or online retailers!