Page 3 of When Eden Falls

“And if they’re not alive?”

Rooke took a deep breath. “Then we find out what killed them.”

As simple as that.

C h a p t e rT w o

I woke with a start.

It had been the same dream for the past two months. The same haunting memory was plaguing me and leaving me with a painstaking ache in my chest. There was always a funeral, always a coffin—I remember it so vividly. But it was never my brother laying inside. It was Rooke.

I rubbed my face with my hands, trying to fight the daunting confusion from consuming me. My brother, Jacob, had been gone nine years, nearly ten. It had taken me half that time to accept he’d died, and years to understand his heart was a ticking time bomb ready to strike at any moment. We hadn’t realised he had a heart condition. It was only after he died the coroner discovered his abnormally bulbous heart was diseased.

Rooke had been playing hockey with Jacob when he’d collapsed, dying in his arms just a few minutes later. I still remembered Rooke coming to the house with a police officer. I still remembered how I’d lost all sense of control as I was told the devastating news, and my sobbing became uncontainable. To my surprise, it had been Rooke’s arms comforting me. It was Rooke who sat with me for hours, holding me whilst my mother dealt with the loss in her own way. I’d been fifteen at the time.

Before the events of that agonising night, Rooke had simply been an annoyance to me. Since I was eleven, he had been my older brother’s best friend, and at the time I hated him. For a paranoid girl who was going through the awkward stage ofdevelopment, he used to taunt and poke fun at me, and my brother endlessly encouraged him.

I grew up resenting him, slowly finding the courage to retaliate and bite back at his comments. Our interactions usually turned into a ping pong match of banter-ish bickering, resulting in me sulking and Rooke grinning when he realised he’d finally won. And he always won.

I smiled at those memories, at how trivial they seemed now. But our relationship had changed entirely the day Jacob died. We’d helped each other through the initial grief, then kept in touch, even when life took us in different directions. It had been Rooke who encouraged me to follow in his footsteps and become a pilot for Solarfleet. It hadn’t taken much persuading.

I pondered the thought, the memories it surfaced, and it still amazed me how my brother’s infuriating, teenage friend, who had bullied me with malice, had won my esteem and respect, and was now a friend—my closest friend. But as the years had trickled by, I’d discovered something deeper about myself. Something about how far my esteem for Rooke went. It had struck me a couple of years ago, when he was considering leaving Solarfleet…

I was in love with him. I’d follow him to the ends of the universe without a second thought. Well, my current situation clearly proved that.

But I could never confess the truth. How could I? He was an attractive man, oozing with confidence and charisma. His girlfriends were stunning, the type of women you’d see in old movies or beauty campaigns. He’d never look at me in the same way he did them. To him, I was his best friend’s little sister, a sister he had adopted and taken under his wing. And I would never allow myself to jeopardise the strong foundation of our platonic and working relationships.

What we had worked.

So, I kept my secret locked up inside, trying to disregard it on a daily basis.

But this recurring dream…it was messing with my head. No matter how hard I tried to bat it away, I couldn’t help thinking something bad was going to happen—that Rooke would be taken from me. There was nothing normal about this mission. It screamed danger and uncertainty from the start. And now that there was a chance we were heading to mythical Earth—my paranoia tripled. I was petrified.

With that thought in mind, I discounted how tired I was. I showered and dressed, immediately heading for the bridge.

Rooke sat alone in front of the wide, curving driving screen. He looked up as I approached. “We’re nearly there.” He inclined his head towards the window before looking down at his handheld computer. I peered into the darkness outside, and sure enough, there in the distance, a spherical object was coming into view. Although it was just a tiny glimmer of light, it was larger and far more defined than any other specks on the vast horizon.

I sat down next to him. “Do you still believe we’re approaching Earth?”

“Yep.” He sounded confident. “Cora sent me a mountain of information on Earth and the ancient Sol system. It’s pretty conclusive.”

“And that doesn’t worry you?”

Rooke searched my face and sat up straighter. “This mission has always been a mystery. I don’t know what to expect, nobody does. So, the fact we have information on our destination must be seen as a benefit.”

“Yes, okay, but…”

“But what, Miss Pessimist?” He smirked.

“But,” I huffed away his teasing, “if the Earth part of the ancient myth is true, so could the horror story about why the human race left. Weren’t there demons roaming the land?”

“It’s been three thousand years. And truths and stories get morphed. I wouldn’t be surprised if our ancestors fled because the land no longer held any nutritional value. If my memory serves me correctly, my science teacher always preached in disgust how the ancients’ antics damaged the biodiversity of the natural ecosystems. I won’t be surprised if we find a barren land full of nothing.”

I lounged back in my chair, a deep resounding sigh escaping me. I wasn’t convinced.

“Don’t worry,” Rooke’s voice chirped. “I’m not taking any risks. We’re taking plenty of weapons down for protection.”

“You sound like we have an army. There are only seven of us.”