Free The New World by Patrick Ness Page B

rolls away from under us.
    ‘Ready,’ my father calls over the comm system.
    ‘Then let’s call that ten minutes mark,’ my mother says, pressing a countdown button.
    ‘Everyone up there excited?’ my father’s voice says.
    ‘Some of us are,’ my mother says, frowning at me.
    ***
    ‘I’m so glad we’re not going,’ Steff Taylor said the first time I saw her in class after it was announced it was my parents who were the landing party and not hers. It was actually my favourite class, arts with Bradley on the Beta . Bradley also taught us maths and agriculture, and was pretty much my favourite person on the whole convoy, even though he made me sit next to Steff Taylor since we were the only girls our age in all of the caretaker families.
    Lucky us.
    ‘It’ll be so boring,’ Steff said, twisting her hair in her fingers. ‘Five months on that little ship with just your mum and dad for company.’
    ‘I can vid back to friends and classes,’ I said. ‘And I like my mum and dad.’
    She sneered at me. ‘Not after five months you won’t.’
    ‘Steff, you used to brag about how your father-’
    ‘And then when you land , you’ve got to live there with who knows what kinds of scary animals and hoping your food rations last and there’s going to be weather there, Viola. Actual weather .’
    ‘We’ll be the first people to see it.’
    ‘Oh, whoopee,’ she said. ‘First people to see a deserted mudhole.’ She twisted her hair a little harder. ‘First people to die there more like.’
    ‘Steff Taylor!’ Bradley said from the front of the class. All the other kids huddled over their interactive art vids were suddenly looking up.
    ‘I’m working,’ Steff said, running her hands over her artpad.
    ‘Is that so?’ Bradley said. ‘Then perhaps you can come up here and show the rest of us what you’re working on.’
    Steff frowned, hard, a frown I knew covered the latest grudge she was adding to her long, long list. As slowly as she could get away with, she got to her feet.
    ‘Thirteenth birthday,’ she whispered to me. ‘All alone.’
    And I could tell by the satisfied look on her face that I reacted just exactly how she wanted.
    ***
    ‘120 seconds to orbital,’ my mother says.
    ‘Ready here,’ my father says over the comm, and I hear the engines change their pitch as we prepare to stop falling out of the black beyond and power our way through the atmosphere of the planet.
    ‘Ready here, too,’ I say, opening up screens that I won’t really use until we’re closer to the ground, looking for a clearing big enough to put down. A clearing, if I’m good enough at my job, where we might actually grow our first town.
    ‘90 seconds,’ my mother says.
    ‘Engines opening,’ my father says, and there’s another change in pitch. ‘Oxygenating the fuel.’
    ‘Buckle up,’ my mother says.
    ‘I am buckled,’ I say, then turn my chair so I can buckle into it without her seeing.
    ‘60 seconds,’ my mum says.
    ‘One more minute and we’re the first ones there!’ my dad shouts over the comm.
    My mother laughs. I don’t.
    ‘Oh, come on, Viola,’ she says. ‘It really is exciting.’ She checks one of her screens, dials on it with her fingertips, then says, ‘30 seconds.’
    ‘I was happy on the ship,’ I say, quietly but so seriously my mother turns to look. ‘I don’t want to live down there.’
    My mother frowns. ‘15 seconds.’
    ‘Fuel ready!’ my father says. ‘Let’s go atmo-surfing!’
    ‘Ten,’ my mother says, still looking at me. ‘Nine.’
    And that’s when things go really, really wrong.
    ***
    ‘But it’s a whole year ,’ I said to Bradley in one of my training tutorials less than a month before we left. ‘A year away from my friends, a year away from schoolwork-’
    ‘And if you stayed,’ he said. ‘It would be a year away from your parents.’
    I looked back into the empty classroom. It was usually filled with the other caretaker families’ children, learning