Page 100 of The Mars House

“No,” Gale whispered. They looked wrong for a murder suspect. Their hair was tied up in a knot with a white band, and they had on the same green jumper they slept in. It had holes in the sleeves where the weave was frayed, and around the hem where Kasha sometimes tried to get at their pockets for whatever interesting things might be in them. They straightened painfully, like they’d just been told they had to take the Senate floor. “They told me it was out in the woods.” They tipped their eyelashes towards the door to explain who they meant. “The body. What happened, how was it found?”

Right. That was simple, at least. The razor-thoughts parted just enough to let him through. “One of the trees the timber people cut down tore up the ground and exposed it.”

The sharpness came back to Gale’s eyes and there was nothing soft about them any more. “They’re felling half a mile from here, in the dark.”

January couldn’t quite believe that they could still be like this, even when they were staring down the barrel of life in prison.

“It was found, does it matter how?” It came out more snappish than he meant.

Gale let their shoulders drop a little and they lifted one hand an inch from the table before they noticed and pulled it into their lap again. People from Great Houses didn’t talk with their hands. In one way it was infuriating to see them insist on that whalebone propriety even now, but in another, it was horrible. Things January was that compulsive about weren’t choices, they’d been beaten into him by dancing masters with bamboo switches. “It matters that it happened now. Immediately after we got the gravity trains up, immediately after it became clear all this wasn’t doomed, it’s too . . .”

“Sorry, it’s narratively inconvenient for us to find your murdered consort just now?” January demanded, so incredulous he’d gone all the way around the wheel and almost come right back to laughing.

Gale looked away, and January frowned, because he had never seen them struggle this much to say something. “I mean . . . did—did someone take you there?”

“Me?” he said, trying to tell himself not to panic. “Who said I found it?”

Gale smiled a fraction at their own hands in their lap. “You went outside, you were gone for half an hour, you came back looking haunted. I’m Schrödinger’s cat; maybe it would have been all right, maybe it wouldn’t, if you had come to me. You’re not an idiot, so you called the Consul instead.”

He pressed his teeth together until they hurt. “You don’t think I’ve got other reasons to look a bit haunted? You know—worrying you’re going to lock everyone in naturalisation centres, worrying what happens if you lose the election, and what happens if you win, and . . . ?”

“But did they?” Gale asked, black eyes coming back up to find his again, not angry, but not an invitation to try to evade the question again either. “Did someone show you where to find . . . ?”

He wanted to tell them. What had happened out in the woods was sitting in all his thoughts like a great lodestone, warping everything else that came near enough to feel the magnetism, and the closer he tried to get to it, the less sure he was of what had happened. Someone had grabbed him, someone had written on his visor, but he still didn’t understand. He didn’t know if he believed in ghosts. People said Songshu was haunted, and maybe it was, maybe there was a ghost who desperately wanted not to be stuck under a pine tree forever. It was crazy but he didn’t know what else to think any more, and maybe . . .

He had a vision of Dr Okonkwo taking out the special inhibitor injection. God knew that would come straight out if he started talking about ghosts.

“No,” he said.

Gale nodded slightly.

January was quiet for a second, but Gale didn’t try to fill the silence. They weren’t fighting. It was more disconcerting than a barrage of facts and reasons. “Senator, what happened to Max?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

January had no idea what he was doing any more, or what was going to happen, to Gale or to him. Gale knew he’d done this to them and there was no real way that he could see to prove what they might have done; maybe he was heading for a hole under a tree as well, not too long from now, or maybe the Consul would find something else to charge Gale with, or maybe . . . he just didn’t know. The only solid thing in his mind was that he wanted to get as near to the truth as he could. He’d never met Max, but he was Max. He was another version of that figure curled up in the roots of the tree. “Look, halo scans aren’t good on you and I bet you can warp them however you like, so probably you’re not going to prison because there’ll be no proof, but I’m going to tell you why I don’t believe you and then you can tell me if it’s unreasonable.”

Gale waited. Dressed plainly, they looked a lot younger, and a lot less official. The white band in their hair made them look like a postulant at a monastery.

“You haven’t asked me if I found River. So I think—you already know what happened to River.”

Gale shook their head a fraction and he thought they would argue. “That’s very reasonable.”

“Are you going to explain?” January asked, frustrated. It was only then that he understood how badly he wanted them to have an explanation that wasn’t the one he thought. “I mean—did River do it and you’re covering for them and they’re hiding at a lunar colony or . . . ?”

Gale was studying the edge of the table again like the answer might be written there; and then studied him in the same way. They were so good at letting questions bounce off them, January thought with a kind of hopeless admiration. They were a mirror person; the brighter the light you tried to shine on them see what was going inside their head, the more you got blinded. “I know you have no reason to listen me. But you need to leave. Now, tonight. I think something’s going to happen. The Consul is going to find a way to start a fight, a bad one, and afterwards . . . they’re going to find my body on a stairwell somewhere.”

January felt like he had in his flat in the nuclear tower two months ago—Christ, it was only two months ago—when Gale had asked him to marry them. What they had just said was so divorced from anything he had expected that his brain didn’t even recognise it as sentences with grammar at first.

“What?”

“This isn’t about Max, this is about stopping me finishing the tower and moving the sun fields into the atmosphere, which is . . . why I asked if someone took you out there. This only happened once the mammoths helped us; before that, it looked hopeless, so there was no need. Now; we could actually win, we could get functioning solar power before the fleet arrives. The Consul needs me out of the way.”

“No, what? They—can’t, how could they even . . . ?”

Gale looked across at him for a hanging second, then pushed something into his hand, something small and cold and silvery. “Go.”

It was the key to his cage.