It is like a nightmare. Like I didn't wake up this morning and I'm still dreaming those awful, sweaty, early morning dreams that haunt your head like angry ghosts. This is how I feel when Ronaldo comes to tell me it's visiting time but my visitors are coming to my room today, and leaves and takes Beth with him to the day room. It is one of the first times I have actually been alone in this room, which is weird, and I have only just got dressed and realised how skinny my legs and hips have become when they arrive, an invading army, trampling around me with haloes of cold air, towering over me, scaring me to the point that I am basically cowering and covering my head by the time I work out who they are.
Captain Kat, Ezra and Grandpa.
They sit down, Grandpa on the bed next to me and the other two on the steel bench bolted to the wall, but for the first little while they are sitting there not one of them even glances at me. Captain Kat looks around at the walls, Grandpa looks at the floor, and Ezra hangs his head and looks at his hands, twisting together between his spread knees.
'How are you, Seren?' asks Captain Kat, still not looking at me, and of course I don't answer, I just sit there pulling a face and trying not to shiver.
My grandfather sighs. 'Seren, we're here to find a solution. To work out something that'll be in the best interests of everyone.'
'No, you're not,' I say, shaking my head. 'I know you're not.'
Captain Kat sighs musically. 'Seren, really! Why do you always have to be so difficult? You and Ezra belong together. There's no need for your illness to get in the way of that.'
I look at my grandfather. 'Don't any of you listen to a word I say? Ever?'
He turns his hat in his hands and sighs. 'We need to work, within the rules of our society, to find a way through this.'
I get up; I can't help it. 'Stop talking like that. I don't want to talk to you if you're going to trot out that crap.'
Captain Kat stands too, looming above me as she does. 'My suggestion is that you sit down and listen to the people who know a lot more than you do about just about any subject you can name.'
'Except the ones that matter,' I tell her, staring at her so hard my eyes burn.
Ezra leans back against the wall and pinches his nose. 'I told you this was pointless.'
'Ezra, you're not blameless in this,' she says. 'All you two had to do was find a way to get along, to realise what your duty was, where your loyalties lay, and act accordingly.'
'I'm not the one who was sleeping with the fish guy.'
She sits back down, laughing a joyless laugh. 'Oh grow up, this has absolutely nothing to do with him and you know it. He's irrelevant. He isn't going to be an issue for any of us soon.'
'What do you mean?' I ask then. 'What does that mean?'
Captain Kat glares. 'You honestly think someone can endanger the mission by disregarding completely the regulations that have been set in place to ensure our survival and continue to be a part of it? We simply don't have the luxury of tolerating people here who are hell-bent on destroying everything we've created, everything that we are.'
'Dom's never tried to destroy anything. What . . . what have you done to him?' I spiral into panic then, unstoppable, painful, like something falling from a height. I start to shake, so hard it rattles my teeth. It's only because Grandpa grabs me, takes hold of my wrists, that I don't go for her, that I don't wrap my hands around her throat. 'Tell me where he is.'
'Don't be such a child,' she says. 'I understand that you're ill but you're embarrassing yourself.'
'TELL me!'
'Oh, what does it matter? He's nobody.'
'Captain Lomax, I must insist . . . ' says Grandpa.
'You must insist on what?' she hisses.
And by this time I have turned to my grandfather and I am pulling on the front of his black uniform, trying and failing to make him look me in the eye.
'Please, Grandpa, please – tell me he's OK. Don't let anything happen to him. Please, please.'
'Technician Suarez is on bail with a restricted access order.'
'A what?'
'He has been fitted with an ankle tether that will alert us if he tries to leave West before his trial, which will take place once we leave Huxley-3's orbit. This BP Infraction, in addition to his past offences, make a custodial sentence in Correctional look very likely.'
'But what . . . he hasn't done anything wrong! It's my fault – all of it. It's my fault.'
'You're unwell. You're unwell and you're sixteen. You can't be held responsible for it.' My grandfather looks at the floor instead of at me.
Captain Kat sighs. 'Can we move on?'
'Yes, let's. Let's stick to practicalities.' Grandpa rubs his cheek as if he is tired in his bones. 'We came here to form a plan. One that works for everyone. Seren, you must stay here as long as it takes for you to recover, and to come to terms with things.'
'But you can't just keep me here when there's nothing wrong with me.'
They all look anywhere but at me then, mirroring almost exactly the way they were when they arrived.
'The fact is, Seren,' my grandfather begins, reaching to pat my hand a couple of times in a way that makes me flinch. 'The fact is, we can't have you released. Not until we're sure things are . . . settled.'
'Settled?'
'You will . . . stay here . . . where you're safe . . . until such time as you are married and you have realised your mistakes and you are ready to take up your position; to fulfil your responsibilities as a member of our community.'
I look at him, feel myself drawing back, feel the snarl that twists on my face as I turn from him to Captain Kat to Ezra. 'I don't have any choices here, do I?' When Ezra won't look back at me I shriek, 'DO I?'
And when he finally does look back he looks pale and hollow-eyed and says, 'And you think I do?'
There isn't a lot to say to that and so we all sit there, breathing in a silence that goes on too long.
'You think it was easy for me, or for any of us?' says Captain Kat, her gaze middle-distance in a way I've never seen it. 'You find out about your Union and you have to make the most of it. I wasn't happy when I was united with Marshall.'
Ezra shifts position then.
'I'm sorry, darling,' she says. 'But it's true.' She shrugs. 'It's true. It was hard, for a long time. But I believe in my people, in my culture, in my place here on Ventura. And by the time I lost Marshall, I . . . ' She looks down for a moment, then up again, tossing her hair. 'Well, in the end, it turned out that, after eleven years together, I missed him. I missed him a lot more than I ever thought I would, and I still do.'
I don't know what she's doing but for this weird moment she is a person, a real person, and it takes me a moment to realise it's all part of her game, all part of her act, the act she has managed to keep up all her life.
'I can't,' I say, and suddenly they're all looking at me. 'I can't be like you. I'm sorry, I just . . . can't.'
She watches me, watches me while I watch her. 'You remind me so much of Gracie.' The way she looks at me then is so intense I nearly turn away, just so I can take a breath, and then she stands so that she is looking at me from her full height, down her nose, and adds, 'But not in a good way.' When she next speaks she is businesslike, as if she is ticking things off a list as she paces the short length of the room. 'There are two options available to you, Seren. Cooperate, and make life better for yourself. Don't, and have every last freedom taken away until you have no choices in any case. You will be the one who decides how it's going to be, but not the one who decides how it will actually turn out. One way or another, in the end, you will be married to Ezra, and you will bear his children. You can do that willingly or otherwise, but that much is already set in stone, and always has been. Come on, darling – we're going.'
Ezra doesn't move at first, just carries on sitting there leaning forward with his fingers in his hair. She glances back at him once before she opens the door and strides out of it, and only then does he look up and when he does it is at me and he is red-eyed and though he doesn't say anything there is such a lot that passes between us and none of it is good, and once he is gone too and I am staring at the empty doorway as the door slides closed behind them, I am feeling something rising inside me irresistibly. Don't ask me how he knows but Grandpa reaches across the room right then for the steel bucket that's used for rubbish and puts it on the floor in front of me just in time for me to fill it with a stream of hot, sour vomit, the last of which I cough up in yellow strings.
I am on my side, shivering, facing the wall with my knees up at my chest when I hear him sigh, when I feel him switch position as he stands to go.
'Seren, this is the way things are. You know they can't be any different. The only person you hurt by kicking against everything is you.'
'Whoever told you that laying on clichés was going to do the trick was wrong,' I splutter, still coughing, eyes streaming, stomach clenching into knots.
'Seren, will you . . . is there any chance you will listen to me and take my advice? As your grandfather who loves you, not as Chief of Security of the Ventura?'
I don't answer but he carries on anyway. 'I know that sometimes life can seem unfair, but things are as they are for a reason. I'm sixty-one years old. I've been around a lot longer than you and for a large part of that time it has been my job to keep us safe, all of us, to guard our way of life and protect the things that we cherish. I'm not always . . . comfortable about the decisions I have to make or the things I have to do, but I do them anyway. Living this way, in planned family units, is the very fabric of this mission. Its importance cannot be overstated. Obviously we are all still –' he sighs before he carries on, '– human. And this is why we have . . . instincts that we find difficult to ignore. You're not the first and, sadly, you probably won't be the last. But believe me when I tell you I have never seen any good come of allowing yourself to follow those instincts. I mean, Seren, just look at the situation you and Technician Suarez find yourselves in now – was it worth it?'
I want to scream at him then. Scream and scream and never stop screaming. I want to tell him that the only reason we're in this mess is because of him and his rules, is because of this place and its complete disregard for anything that's real and true, is because we have no choice, no freedom, and that what he calls duty I call slavery. I want to tell him that of course it was worth it.
But I don't. I don't even turn to look at him. I know he stands there for a while looking down at me before he leaves, so long in fact that I almost meet his eye, but I don't. I make a point of it.
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!