The Loneliness of Distant Beings

Chapter Thirty-Six

The impact is what brings me round. A noise louder than any I've ever heard and a bone-shattering crash that thunders through me in echoes for minutes and leaves me so heavy I can't move except to roll my head to Ezra who is coughing and blinking in the seat next to me.

'Dom!' I shriek, struggling with my belt and falling on to the floor, dragging myself to his feet and pulling myself up his legs, into his lap, on to his chest where I can look at his face, speckled in dark ash, leaking dark blood from his nose, blue around his lips. 'Dom!' I hear myself shriek in a voice that isn't my own.

Ezra has pulled Mariana's mask off and has his hands on her neck. 'She's breathing,' he says, and comes to me, forcing me aside, pressing his fingers into Dom's neck, frowning.

'Suarez?' He tilts his face up and leans close; listening, feeling, shaking his head.

'What?' I scream.

Ezra keeps listening, looks at me. 'Help me.' He unclips Dom's belt, takes hold of his arms. 'Help me, Hemple,' he says, snapping me out of it so that I go and take Dom's legs and we get him to the floor between the seats.

'Suarez!' he yells at him, tilting Dom's head back, pinching his nose and pressing his mouth to his, breathing into him twice before starting chest compressions while all I can do is watch, fist pressed against my mouth, blinded with tears. And there are no words for how long and how lonely these minutes are; I can only say that I know they will always be a part of me. I will always hear the way my voice sounded as I said his name, squeezing my eyes shut, hard, against something that couldn't, mustn't, be true.

'Hemple, get ready to take over from me.' When I open my eyes Ezra is watching me, flushed, face covered in Dom's blood, sweating as he pushes and pushes and pushes at his chest so hard that some instinct almost makes me tell him to stop.

I get on my knees, next to Dom's hips. 'I don't . . . I can't . . . ' I swipe at my tears and shake my head.

'You can,' pants Ezra. 'We know this. We did this every year with Dr Pen. I'm going to find the defib, but you have to do this, OK?'

'The defib?'

'Next set of breaths are you, Hemple.' He looks at me hard. 'OK? For Christ's sake, don't give up now.'

But there is just too much, too much of everything, and I can barely see. 'It's my fault,' is all I can say. 'This is all my fault. He can't die. He can't be dead. I can't do this without him.' And then, 'No, no, no, no, no,' stuck on a loop but getting louder.

'Hemple, don't you dare do this now!' he screams, utterly out of breath. 'Take over!'

And he hauls me in next to him, his hands on my hands, showing me. 'Just keep doing this. It has to be this hard. Thirty times. Then do two breaths, right?'

I do it. I push just the way he showed me, and all I can do is think about how many times I have heard Dom's heartbeat before, his precious heart. His face is still deeply beautiful even now that it is so pale, so slack, pretty lips blue. Tears burn down my face and I sob and my heavy breath is nothing but this ugly rattle. Then I take that face in my hands that I have kissed so many times and feel it lifeless beneath my lips and though it is a bottomless horror, I give breath to the man I love, to the person I have loved most, and in between the breaths I say, 'Please come back to me.' And he is so very still and the new gravity is pulling on me so much that it is melting my bones.

All this time Ezra is hauling things out of the storage lockers around me so that the world seems to be collapsing in on itself in a way that doesn't surprise me at all. Then suddenly he is kneeling next to me, clipping the switches on the small yellow defib, which begins a high-pitched whine as it charges.

'I don't even know how this works,' says Ezra, pushing sweat out of his eyes with his forearm.

There's such a chasm of fear in me then that I shut my eyes and almost let it take me right over the edge. There just doesn't seem like there's anywhere else to go but there. My mind fails me, just like it always does. It's only my body that doesn't, that keeps up the compressions, knowing about the strength I have that's kept a secret even from me. It's one of those slow moments; my perception of time is so utterly shifted that I take in all of it, every dreadful detail, and in amongst it I notice the tiny rhombus of sunlight that touches Dom's head, his face, his ear, his hair. And this is when I know that this is not the way the story ends for him. It can't be.

I am just pinching his nose and giving him the next breath when it happens. It's a choking sound at first, a gasp, and I swear I see the way life floods back into him, moving under his skin. He convulses then, jerks up into a cough, our faces crashing together so that I haul him against me as he pulls in a huge noisy breath. He comes back to life, there on the surface of Huxley-3, soaked in my tears and covered in our ashes, retching out blood in strings like something being born, or reborn, before falling back against the floor. And I cover him, crying harder than I ever thought I could, pulling his head up and in against my chest, kissing him all over his hair and his face and his arms and his neck as he stirs, shifts, and finally, with no voice left to speak of, says:

'Estrellita.'

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!