Chapter One
September 14, three years earlier
Bristol, UK
"Damn it, damn it, damn it, I'm late again." Alice half-sprinted down the pavement, not overly eager to draw attention even in this most stressful of states, avoiding a rack of electric scooters and even ignoring a cat sat on a shuttered florist's front step. That was how serious things were right now.
Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, she was sure, Alice's phone's alarm app hadn't sounded. She checked and checked and was sure it wasn't set to vibrate, yet she'd missed it. Was it possible that she kept waking up, turning it off, and going back to sleep, all of this so quickly that she didn't even remember it on the second time she woke? Impossible to say – until she got a security camera installed in her bedroom like she probably needed to. It'd help keep track of who she was bringing home at night, too, and that'd be useful. She wasn't above extortion…
Now, thanks to the phone and certainly not because of Alice's own inattention, she was late for class. Again.
"Man, Doctor Hicks is gonna tear me apart," she thought, glumly. "He already thinks I don't respect him, and he's right, but not because his teaching's bad. Just because he keeps trying to sit with eighteen year old girls in the student bar." Alice's chest was starting to burn – she wasn't even out of Redland yet, Cotham Park to one side with its early-rising dog walkers and joggers, Georgian stone houses on the other. Gradually, then all at once, she slowed down, hands on her thighs, struggling to catch her breath, a slick of sweat down her back and sticking to her dress. It was too hot for September.
"I don't even smoke that much," she grumbled to herself, her heart beginning to chill out. A bus rumbled by in the other direction and she glanced at it – a troop of aqua-uniformed schoolkids flicked V's at her and she watched, almost proud, as they passed. Standing straight again, Alice checked her phone – 8.54. She was so dead.
"Oh well," she said quietly. "What can you do?" She started walking, almost leisurely, holding her backpack in one hand so it didn't strain her spine. She'd been good, for once, as well – not drinking on a Thursday evening was tricky as it got, given some of the offers you could find. Still tired, though. A newsagents came into view, sandwich board outside advertising the National Lottery rollover ("I could do with forty-six million right about now") and, realising that a few more lost minutes wouldn't make a difference at this point, if she even bothered to turn up to the lecture at all now, she darted inside. A pair of schoolboys, much taller than her, so much taller that it made her want to kill herself, were ruminating on what flavour Monster to buy. Alice squeezed between them and plucked up an iced coffee carton without a word. It was a whole litre, so big she had to hold it in both hands, but it was the only option so to Hell with it all.
Not until she got to the till did Alice realise they had a £2 limit on card payments – and the coffee was £1. Sighing, she grabbed the nearest things she could see; a copy of The Guardian, and a Lion bar. From £1 to £3.75. Alice didn't even need, or really want, the Lion bar – no wonder she was so screwed on rent.
"Walk of shame, love?" asked the woman behind the counter, and Alice stared at her. Sure, her hair was messy, as she hadn't showered, and her maroon dress was a bit frivolous, but it was just the nearest thing to her. It still smelled of Popworld but that was from last week, not last night, so it was fine.
"This is just how I dress," Alice replied smartingly, and the woman just nodded, smirking. Paying with a tap of her debit card, she hurried back out into the warm autumn morning, drinking from the carton and, she knew but didn't care, looking ridiculous. After a few gulps, she crouched at the sandwich board to load everything into her bag. No point letting a perfectly good newspaper go to waste. She intermittently read The Guardian online, when she wasn't getting her news from Twitter or that one Instagram page that summarised major stories in one sentence and then you acted like you were informed, but mostly film reviews she could enjoy furiously disagreeing with. She put the carton in first, making sure the lid was secure – she'd been burned that way before – then the Lion bar, then folded up the newspaper. But, as she did, she saw something which caught her eye.
"Carney: no-deal Brexit could be as disastrous as financial crash," read the headline, but that wasn't what interested Alice. Nor the banners about The Cranberries' farewell tour or "a cure for insomnia?" No; on the side, apparently covered on Page 14, was a strange little nugget – "scientists scratching heads over Jupiter anomaly." Alice, getting her fingers between the uncooperative pages, turned to Page 14, always keen for a bit of astronomical mystery. You got so little these days.
The article began: "Administration heads at NASA have admitted they still have no certain theories as to the source of the strange phenomenon witnessed near Jupiter on Tuesday." This was the first Alice was hearing of it – besides the text, a sequence of grainy photos of the planet. Even to Alice's untrained eyes, it was pretty clear that the big sheen of light just next to it, growing then fading as the sequence progressed, wasn't meant to be there. The article said that the prevailing theory was that two meteors had collided, perhaps drawn together by the complex gravities of Jupiter and his many moons. That the 'explosion' had happened so close to Io, a moon known for the geological chaos inflicted by Jupiter's gravity, seemed to back this up. It was an interesting little read, with few answers but a nice bit of mystery, and Alice always enjoyed that. True crime was so much fun when it involved space. Once we started getting enough people colonising planets and asteroids that you started getting murders, she thought, that'd be when civilisation truly peaks.
Forgetting the story almost as quickly as she had read it, Alice folded up the newspaper, put it in her backpack, and carried on towards the city and university, renewed nerves about Doctor Hicks taking over any leftover thoughts about Jupiter and Io and the blackness of the void.
"I'm so glad I didn't drink last night," she sighed to herself, a Sky TV van driving by, a dog's head dangling from the window with tongue lolling. She always felt that way the morning after not drinking – you'd think that'd convince her to just, you know, not drink. But she already knew how tonight would go. Because tonight was Friday night.
Overhead, the sky blue but for the incisions cut across it by jetliner contrails, Alice tried to guess where Jupiter might be in relation to her, then concluded, as she fished headphones out of the bag while trying to cross the road where she probably shouldn't she could probably get an app that'd tell her. She wasn't Galileo – she was just some girl trying to study English Literature, being late to every lecture, and, as of right now, nearly getting clipped by an e-scooter. She hadn't the slightest idea that, as of Tuesday, a swift fate was hanging over her, everyone she knew, and the whole planet around her. All she could think of was getting back to Popworld tonight, maybe getting Subway for lunch even though she couldn't afford it, and whether Norwich could hold off Manchester City tonight. She hoped so.
End of Chapter One
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