“She said I was supposed to die,” I said after a while. “That’s what she told me, DJ. That I should be dead.”
“But you’re not.”
“I was.” I couldn’t see Kayla’s body. Even if the fold drive hadn’t already engaged and skipped us to some new section of the galaxy, it would have been too small. But I imagined I could still see it tumbling through the stars. “That could’ve been my body you spaced.”
“But it wasn’t,” he said. “You’re alive, Noa.”
“Then why does it feel like I’m not? Why does it feel like I’m still dead?”
“Noa—”
I turned to face DJ. “I died, and that was it. There was nothing waiting for me. Just like there’s nothing waiting for her. And I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that. If there’s nothing after this, then nothing matters. And if nothing matters, then what the hell is the point of anything?”
Tears welled in DJ’s eyes. “Everything matters, Noa.”
“Not if there’s nothing waiting for us when we die.”
“You’re wrong,” he said. “That makes our lives matter more.” DJ struggled to find the words, but he finally said, “I don’t know whether there’s anything after we die. I guess I won’t know until it happens to me, so I have to focus on what’s important. On what’s right in front of me.”
“She said I should have died—”
“She was wrong!”
I turned to the viewport again. No matter how many times we skipped through space, I couldn’t tell one patch of stars from another. They were all the same to me. “How can something be filled with so much light and yet be so empty and dark?”
“You’ll get through this, Noa. We’ll get through this together.” The anguish in DJ’s voice hurt, and I hated that I was the cause.
“All that darkness, all that emptiness, all that space. It’s not just out there, DJ.” I took his hand and pressed his palm to my chest. “It’s in here, too.”
“Then let me help you,” DJ whispered.
I let go of DJ’s hand, the warmth of him quickly forgotten. There was some part of me that wondered what would happen if I accepted DJ’s offer. If I tried to fill that infinite, spacelike void in my chest with his laughter and Jenny’s intensity, and made an honest attempt to build a life on Qriosity. But that would’ve required forgetting the entirety of my life before I woke up on the ship. It would’ve required giving up on going home. And, to me, that felt like a kind of death too.
“You can’t,” I said. “I don’t think anyone can.” I could feel DJ readying his argument, and I didn’t have the strength to fight him. “I’d like to be alone for a little while, okay?”
DJ paused, probably considering whether he should leave me alone, and then nodded. “Yeah, okay.” He stood and headed for the door. But before he left, he said, “For what it’s worth, I don’t think death is the end. Not for Kayla, and not for us.”
I chuckled, thinking back to the first time I saw DJ’s face. “When you found me and Jenny outside the head that first day, I thought you seemed familiar.”
“You did?” His eyebrows rose and he seemed surprised by the admission.
“My mom went through a phase where she believed in reincarnation, and she said that recognizing a stranger is a sign you knew each other in a past life.” I shrugged, mostly because my mom had dipped her toe into a lot of different religions but had never committed fully to any.
“Do you think it could be true?” I asked. “Do you think we might have been friends in another life?”
DJ was looking at his feet. “I guess I think anything’s possible.”
“I hope it’s true.” I liked the idea that maybe DJ and me ending up on Qriosity together wasn’t random. That there was an invisible hand guiding us.
“But, Noa?” DJ said. “Whether we knew each other in the past or not doesn’t change how important your life is in the present. Jenny needs you… and so do I.”
THE END OF A VERY LONG DAY
ONE
THE TIMER I’D SET BEGAN to blare as I opened the oven door. The moment the air hit it, the soufflé collapsed in the middle. It caved in more when I pulled it out of the oven. The whole disaster resembled a delicious chocolate sinkhole.
“Damn it!”
“Problems in the kitchen?” Jenny was sitting at the table, playing with a device the size of an apple that was composed of interlocking triangles. The metallic faces lit up different colors—red and blue and orange and green—as she twisted them into various positions.
“I can’t get this soufflé right. I think something must be wrong with the ovens.” I dipped my finger into the creamy, spongy, molten-hot mixture. “Son of a—” I ran my burned finger under cold water. It hurt, but I didn’t think it would blister.
“Or maybe you’re not good at making them.”
“Maybe.” I took off my apron, tossed it on the counter, and sat at the table across from Jenny. “Mrs. Blum tried to teach me, but I couldn’t get it right then either. She said I was impatient.”
Jenny snorted. “You are.”
I stuck my tongue out at her. It’d been a few weeks since Kayla had stumbled out of her hidden room, died, briefly come back to life, and then died again, and I’d fallen into a routine. I spent my mornings running simulations with DJ and Jenny. The tutorials were intended to teach us how to operate Qriosity without destroying the ship. When we weren’t busy with those, I spent my free time working out with DJ in the gym, using Mind’s Eye to visit the virtual recreation of Bell’s Cove, the fictional town where most of Murder Your Darlings takes place, or hanging out in the galley, baking. My life was uneventful except for the part where I was living on a spaceship that randomly skipped around the universe every nineteen hours.
“What is that thing?” I motioned at the object Jenny was playing with.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I found it in one of the science labs. I think it’s a game. That I’m meant to twist the pieces around until the faces light up the same color.”
I watched Jenny play with the device. The way the faces shifted made my head feel tight, like I’d spent too much time in the sun and was dehydrated. “Do you think you should be messing with it?”
Jenny shrugged. “It hasn’t killed me.”
“Yet,” I muttered.
Jenny ignored me. “What’s with all the baking, Noa?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been spending more time in the kitchen than usual,” she said. “Not that I’m complaining.”
“Of course not,” I said. “I noticed the chocolate croissants I made yesterday are already gone.”
“I only had one!”
“They didn’t eat themselves.”
“Maybe they did,” Jenny said.
It wasn’t worth arguing about because I honestly didn’t care who’d eaten them. Besides, Jenny wasn’t wrong about how much time I’d been spending in the kitchen, and my devotion to baking had little to do with her voracious appetite.