They said when the news broke Mae walked out into the garden and looked to the sky like it was on fire.
Seven years old, first day of summer, her worries limited to mastering cursive, number bonds and what to wear to Abi Manton’s party.
It seemed like a hundred years back, not ten.
Sometimes she would close her eyes and try to remember before, when minutes and hours dripped into an endless pool of future and history. But then she thought maybe life began and ended the night her parents stood side by side in front of the television as BREAKING NEWS edged out the movie they’d been watching.
She felt her father turn and stare at her.
He held her mother’s hand tightly, their fingers interlinked. They didn’t tell her, not till later, but hearing talk of space, she dropped her book to the floor and walked outside.
She stood barefoot on the grass and faced the moon as fireflies sparked from the heathland behind.
Either side the neighbours did the same.
Stan and Mary. Luke and Lydia.
And Abi.
They stood in a line separated by low picket fences and watched the dusk air like Selena wasn’t a billion miles from them. It didn’t feel like the end then, more like a phenomenon, a miracle born from impossible fate, odds so spectacularly long they could only have been preordained.
‘Are we going to die?’ Abi said.
‘No,’ Mae said.
Abi reached through the fence.
Mae took her hand.
Over the coming days the newspapers bulged with expert opinions, doomsday preachers and armchair scientists. The man who first saw it, he worked for NASA and his name was Juan Martin Morales. He was the person who stood in front of the microphones, dabbed sweat from his forehead and rubbed at three-day stubble while a selection of carefully vetted journalists lobbed questions at him.
Morales named it Selena.
Its real name was Asteroid 8050XF11.
They would later learn Selena was the name of his daughter, and that she’d died at the age of three, from a disease so secular Morales ignored all reference to Last Judgement and laid out simple fact.
If this was ever going to happen, we’d always hoped to spot it early enough to do something about it.
We have a decade to save our planet.
That last sentence would echo through Mae’s childhood and beyond. She would see it graffitied on the bus stop each morning as she walked to school. They would play it on the radio, on the television, and print it on the cover of a thousand magazines.
Though they looked at time differently, it went on, unknowing, uncaring. Seasons changed, sun to snow, trees shed leaves as school years ended and began.
Mae watched the trouble from her coastal town, so far from the cities it was like the rioting faces belonged to another species. Each night the news was painted with rage, fear and faith.
On the morning of Mae’s tenth birthday she huddled on the sofa, her hand on her mother’s growing stomach. The dawn chorus sang as they switched on the television and watched a rocket break the sky but nothing more.
Morales became the face of the world, the combined hope of every nation. After each attempt at salvation he would take to the podium and field questions like an ailing politician, while most would read the failure in his tired eyes. He’d scratch his beard, long and peppered with grey now, and he’d say Selena would be easier to tackle the nearer she came.
And come she did.
She blazed a relentless trail, shrugging off solar storms and recoil. Millions of miles away but her impact was felt each day in countless ways. In science Mae would learn about gravity tractors and impactor probes, in maths it was relative velocity and the necessary angle of deflection. She learned they would need to slow Selena by a centimetre per second to send her off course. Each night Mae would hold her thumb and forefinger a little apart.
A centimetre is almost nothing, she would say, as her father stood by the window and watched the stars like they were blinking out before his eyes.
As the world reeled from a new kind of terror, Morales and his team sent up the Saviour 3 spacecraft in another attempt to change its fate.
Mae went into London to watch the launch on the large screen by Tower Bridge. In a crowd of a million her grandmother gripped her arm tightly as fireworks lit the Thames and weary men peddled glowsticks and commemorative T-shirts. Her sister slept through it all, at peace in her pram, too young to breathe the panic in their fleeting air.
The carnival lasted two weeks.
And then Morales took to the world stage and once more shook his head.
Before then Mae had never seen her grandmother cry.
Most nights Mae would lie on the beach with Abi and Felix and watch the night sky in all its perfect, endless glory. She wondered about faith and its limitations, its blindness to everything she knew and everything she hoped for.
Lauda finem, the Sacred Heart school motto.
Praise to the end.
In philosophy Mae stared at the whiteboard and the bold lettering:
If you take away consequence, if you can do anything, right any wrong, however slight, how would you spend your final days?
The topic was ethics. The debate turned so fierce Mr Norton had to hold Liam Carter and Sullivan Reed apart.
It was a question that Mae dwelled on. It was the answer that kept her awake at night. Though it would take until the failure of Saviour 9 before she allowed herself to face up to the overriding, overwhelming facts.
She was seventeen years old.
She would die in one month.