All The Lonely People - David Owen Page 0,32

kind of event Kat had always wished she could attend if the mere idea didn’t crumple up her lungs like an old paper bag. She certainly couldn’t go alone, and Suzy had always liked to shout as loud as possible when she deemed anything unfair. It might have been something they could reconnect over. It’s not like she could invite her sister to the WonderVerse comic convention that was running throughout next week. Suzy would have died laughing at the idea.

Oh well. Both could be added to the tottering pile of events she had missed because going anywhere there were other people was a terrifying ordeal. If only she could have been more like Tinker . . .

The concept of the game Kat was making was simple enough. The player took control of a barren planet devoid of atmosphere. The planet wants to prove it’s as good as popular bitch Earth. To do that, the player must work to attract people and aliens, which is a problem when the planet has nothing to offer potential settlers.

So, using the planet’s weak gravitational pull, you fish for resources – asteroids, space debris, astronaut corpses – and craft them into essential tools to improve gravitational pull, communication, terraforming, avocado growing etc. This gives the planet a better chance of attracting the lowliest living creatures, who further improve the planet, and so on. The end goal is to make the planet more populous than Earth (and not destroy it in some kind of terrible apocalypse).

It didn’t do much of that yet, of course. It was mostly a wireframe rock floating on a field of stars.

Game development had never come naturally to Kat. Growing up she had mostly sucked at video games and always lost to Suzy. It was the conjuring of coding that appealed to her – out of nothing she could create little worlds that danced exclusively to her tune (and often to the cacophony of bugs and glitches before she rooted them out).

The deadline for the Spaced Out game jam competition was two months away, plenty of time to get a prototype working.

If she focused on the game, she wouldn’t think about Safa and everything she had learned about the fade. She wouldn’t think how singing ‘Mr Pretzel’ in the school corridor had made her feel more like herself than she had for months. She wouldn’t think about how important it felt to have her hands held, skin-on-skin, irrefutably real.

She jumped when somebody knocked on her door.

‘You okay in there?’ said Dad.

The door was bolted, as always, but Kat still froze like she might be caught doing something she shouldn’t. She paused the TV, leaving Esme frozen in the moment she accidentally seals her preferred physicist inside her secret lab and has to watch her die of radioactivity poisoning.

Usually Dad would give up if he didn’t get an immediate response, but this time he kept talking. ‘It feels like I haven’t seen you in ages. I had this strange sense that I couldn’t remember . . .’ A strange hesitance laced his words as they trailed off, as if he felt he was breaching the rules of their arrangement. Kat stood, and padded gently to rest her ear against the wood.

On the other side, Dad sighed. ‘It was like this with your sister, you know. She was here, and she made sure everybody knew it. Except when it came to me . . . she wasn’t really there at all.’

They had each been there enough to argue, to wound each other with their words and make the house feel like a warzone. It had seemed so much, so overwhelming, that Kat had never thought it could be the result of something missing.

‘I didn’t want it to be the same with you,’ said Dad. ‘You clearly wanted space, and I thought if I gave it to you, did what I couldn’t for Suzy or your mum, you wouldn’t come to resent me the way they did.’

Kat pressed her fingers to the door, wishing they could push through to reach him. It was only fear of the fade that kept her from calling out to him, screaming that she didn’t resent him at all. They had ended up like this because she had thought it was the best way to preserve what they had.

She had always thought he was going through the motions, but maybe she saw it that way to justify her unwillingness, her incapability to be there for him the way he