TO MARS

Chapter 1 · The voice in the dark

Luna's notebook. Monday, late.

I'm sitting on my bed with my knees pulled up to my chin and the window open. It's October, and the air coming in is cold enough to bite. I don't close it. Cold is better than the quiet in here.

My room is small. A bed, a desk with one wobbly leg, a wardrobe that doesn't shut properly unless you lean on it. A string of fairy lights over the window that I never switch on any more. On the wall above the desk there are maps. Not real ones. Mine. Drawn in blue pen on the back pages of old exercise books and taped up crooked, corner to corner, until the wallpaper underneath stopped mattering.

The notebook is on my knees. My phone is face down on the blanket, so I don't have to watch it not light up. It hasn't really lit up in weeks. Only the weather app, and the school, and once a message from the bank about an account I don't have.

Above the roofs there are three stars I can name and a lot I can't. The orange one, low down over the chimney across the street, isn't a star. Tomas told me that, the first summer I was here. It's Mars. It doesn't twinkle like the others. It just sits there, steady, like it's waiting for something.

Some nights I just look up. Tonight I'm writing it down. My head is too full to keep it.

· · ·

There's a knock on the door. Two soft taps.

"Luna? Lights out soon, okay? School tomorrow."

It's Anna. Her voice is careful, the way it always is with me, like I'm a glass on the edge of a table.

"Okay," I say.

She waits a second longer than she needs to. I can hear her deciding whether to open the door. She doesn't. "Night, sweetheart."

"Night, Anna."

Her footsteps go away down the hall. Anna is kind. She makes pancakes on Sundays, and she bought me this notebook when she saw me writing on the backs of receipts. I don't call her Mum. She has never asked me to. I think we're both waiting to see if I'll stay.

There used to be two goodnights in this house. Anna's soft one at the door, and then Tomas's from the landing, always too loud, always the same: "Night, Starling." He's the one who taught me my first chords on his old guitar. He's the one who stood with me in the garden and showed me which dot was Mars. He died in May. Since then there's only one goodnight, and I can't make myself walk towards it. That's a story for another night.

· · ·

So. How did I get here. To this bed, this window, this notebook that is the only thing I talk to.

I used to sing all the time. In the kitchen, on the stairs, on the bus with my headphones in, not caring who heard. Nobody knows who taught me. Nobody knows much about where I come from at all. But the singing was always there, like breathing. It was the one thing that was only mine.

There were four of us. Ilse, Mara, Dani and me. We met on the first day of secondary school, when Dani dropped her lunch tray and I was the only one who knelt down and laughed with her instead of at her. After that we were a thing. A group chat with a stupid name and about a million photos. Sleepovers. Film nights where nobody watched the film. They used to say my voice was the best part of every party. Dani used to say, When you're famous, don't forget us.

My skin is blue. Not bruise blue, not cold blue. Blue like the sky the hour after the sun goes down, when everything goes still. I was born like this. Doctors have written long words about it in files I'm not supposed to read. Strangers stare for one second, then look away fast and pretend they didn't. With the three of them, nobody stared. Or if someone did, Ilse stared back until they stopped. I thought that was what friends were. People who stare back for you.

Then Dani's birthday, in the summer. A rooftop. Fairy lights strung between the chimneys, music from a speaker, everyone a bit loud and a bit too happy. Somebody's older cousin had brought something in a bottle. And someone said, Luna, sing the new one.

I'd written it myself. My first real song. Not a cover, not something from the radio with my own voice on top. Mine. Words and melody, written in this notebook over three weeks of nights like this one. I'd only ever sung it to my ceiling.

So I stood up.

I remember the warm roof under my bare feet. The city lights. The way my hands were shaking, so I held them behind my back. I sang the first verse, and it was good. I know it was good. My voice did the thing it does when it's right, where it stops being my voice and becomes just the song.

Halfway through the chorus I saw Mara's phone held sideways, filming. Then I saw Ilse's face. That thing where you try not to laugh and you can't, so your mouth goes tight and your shoulders shake.

I finished anyway. Stopping would have been worse.

Nobody clapped. There was a gap where clapping should have been. Then someone said, Okay, wow. Very emotional. And somebody else snorted, and the music came back on, louder than before.

The next morning the clip was in another chat, one I wasn't in. Somebody I barely knew forwarded it to me, "just so you know." Under it were rows of laughing faces, and a comment about the blue girl singing to the moon. Thirty-eight people had seen it. Then two hundred.

I didn't cry. I want that written down. I didn't cry. I just went very quiet inside, like a room after someone switches off the music.

Our group chat didn't end. That's the part nobody tells you about. It just carried on without me. Photos from the lake. Photos from somebody's garden. A cinema trip I heard about on Monday. I stopped writing first, to see if anyone would notice. I waited eleven days.

Nobody did.

That was the day I stopped singing out loud. I still sing. Under my breath, into my pillow, inside my head, on the walk home where the trains are loud enough to cover it. But not where anyone can hear. My voice lives in this notebook now. It's the only place it's safe.