“She’s resourceful,” I said. “That monster should be scared of her.”
DJ eased himself back to the floor and leaned his head against the bulkhead, closed his eyes. “I’m not going to sleep,” he said as I was opening my mouth to remind him he shouldn’t.
I resumed pacing. Back and forth across the room. I couldn’t see the radiation that was poisoning me, but I swore I could feel it invading my cells, killing them slowly. Killing me. And what if MediQwik couldn’t save me this time? What if there was a limit to how many deaths MediQwik could reverse, and I had exceeded mine? Death was how the universe reminded us we were unimportant, but DJ was important to me—he had become important slowly, sneaking into my life one smile and kind word at a time—and I didn’t want to die without letting him know.
“I’m sorry,” I said. The words burst out of me like an accusation rather than an apology.
“For what?”
“Being me. For not being him. For pushing you away every time you try to—”
DJ frowned. “Noa, I don’t want you to be anyone but you. Not ever.” His face softened, and my knees nearly buckled. “As for pushing me away, I’m the one who’s sorry. I made you uncomfortable, and I should’ve been more considerate.”
I sat across from him, pulling my legs under me. “It’s not you, DJ. It’s him. It’s my past. It’s the memories that I can’t escape.”
“Hey,” DJ said softly. Gently. “You told me you didn’t want that to be the only story folks told about you, right? Well, memories are just stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the past, so don’t let that one memory become the only story you tell about yourself. Who we were isn’t who we are; it doesn’t limit who we can be.”
I tried to imagine what Becca would’ve said if she were there. Or what advice my mom or Mrs. Blum would’ve given me. Mrs. Blum’s advice was usually something like, Go to the gym. You can’t knead dough with noodles like those. But even she probably would have agreed with DJ. The problem was that it was easier to know what to do than to actually do it.
“You don’t under—”
“He died, Noa. He’s gone.” DJ’s expression was solemn, his voice flat. “I watched him die. I watch him die every night when I sleep.”
“Oh, DJ—”
DJ held up his hand to stop me. “Watching him die broke me in ways I didn’t know a person could be broken. And now you’re here, and I’ve got these feelings for you because you’re this moody, complicated, selfish, smart, beautiful, weird person that I can’t wait to keep getting to know.” He sat up on his knees, scooted closer to me. “This ship is death, Noa. It feels like every day it comes up with a new way to try to kill us, and I’m terrified it’s going to succeed and that it’ll take you first. That I’ll have to watch someone I care about die again.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I whispered.
“Because it’s not gonna stop me from having feelings for you. I’m not going to sacrifice one second of the present to my fear of repeating the past.” DJ bit his lip. “We’re the storytellers, Noa.” He pointed from me to him. “And this is the story I want to tell.”
I trusted DJ, but I had trusted Billy, too. When he had told me he was willing to take it slow, to wait for me, he had been as sincere as DJ was being now. I didn’t know what to do.
“I can’t just forget what happened.”
“You don’t have to,” he said.
I got on my knees and inched closer to DJ. “Do you promise to never hurt me?”
DJ shook his head. “I promise to never hurt you like he did, and I promise I’ll try to never hurt you, but I’m going to make mistakes.”
A small laugh bubbled out of me. “I’m sure I will too.”
“I’ll do my best, though,” DJ said.
I leaned my forehead against his. He rested his arms on my shoulders. One of the last messages Billy had sent to me, one of the last I’d seen anyway, had said, No one will ever love you. You’re going to die alone. It hadn’t been a wish. He hadn’t said he hoped I would die alone. It had been a prediction, and I’d believed it. I had believed I would never be loved. I had believed I didn’t deserve it.
Maybe he was right. DJ could have been telling me the things he thought I wanted to hear. He could have been lying to me. Preying on my fears. Using me.
But what if he was wrong? What if I did find love? What if I deserved to find it? What if the opportunity was kneeling right in front of me?
There was only one way to find out.
“You can kiss me if you want.”
DJ said, “What?”
“I won’t flinch this time.”
“Noa, I—”
I didn’t wait for DJ to kiss me. I kissed him. I reached my arm around his neck and pulled him to me and kissed him like the room was filled with radiation and we were going to die. I kissed him in the present and I kissed him in the future, and I left the past behind me.
We might die. Radiation might kill us, a monster might eat us, the ship might explode and scatter our atoms across the void, but this moment belonged to us. I was lost in DJ, except I wasn’t really lost at all. I had finally been found.
Just because I had been born with a broken heart didn’t mean I had to die with one.
DJ and I were so caught up in each other that neither of us heard the door open. Nor did we notice Jenny standing over us, dripping with ichor and blood. Not until she cleared her throat and said, “No, it’s fine. I’ll just do everything myself.”
SEVEN
I SAT ON AN EXAM table in medical, a MediQwik cuff around my arm, receiving treatment for acute radiation poisoning. DJ sat on the other table, also receiving treatment. I wished I didn’t have to be so far from him, but another hour and all Jenny would have found when she opened the door to Reactor Control was our corpses.
“So while you boys were making out, I was killing an alien monster that was trying to eat my face.” Jenny sat on a bench in the corner. She’d wound a bandage around her leg to stop the bleeding until she could get time in a MediQwik cuff, and she was covered in an algae-colored mucus. The odor wafting off her was like rotting meat mixed with spoiled milk. It was, quite possibly, the most vile smell that had ever assaulted my nose.
“How did you manage to kill the alien?” I asked. I kept stealing glances at DJ, and I wanted to hold his hand, but the tubes and wires connected to the cuffs wouldn’t reach.
“That was the easy part,” Jenny said. “I was hiding in the shuttle, and the monster was trying to get inside, so I opened the bay door and launched the shuttle.” She wrinkled her nose. “It’s not exactly like the planes my mom was teaching me to fly, but it was close enough. I only dinged the outside a little. I’m sure the damage is fixable.”
“So you blew the alien out the airlock?” DJ asked.
Jenny shook her head. “It clung to the shuttle and tried to use its nasty acid to burn through the hatch. So I flew a safe distance away and performed some extremely unsafe maneuvers. Eventually, it let go.” She was grinning, looking so proud of herself. And she had every right to be. I wouldn’t have had the nerve to do what she’d done. If Jenny had been trapped in Reactor Control with DJ, and I’d been the one running from the monster, I would have wound up alien food.