Page 101 of The Mars House

The Consul was waiting outside, looking concerned.

“January—are you all right?”

He nodded, numb. He didn’t know what to say, or what not to. Gale could have been lying to scare him or to make him doubt the Consul; he couldn’t honestly claim to imagine they wouldn’t do that. Of everyone he knew, Aubrey Gale was in runaway first place most likely to kill someone. They were exactly practical enough. And yet—now he’d spoken to them—he just . . . didn’t . . . see it. He didn’t see them shooting anyone, he couldn’t imagine them making a mistake like that. If Gale wanted someone dead, they wouldn’t be shrouded in interesting mystery inside Songshu’s grounds, he realized suddenly. They’d be hit by a bus in town. Open; boring; no questions.

And, above all: no body. It was openly stupid to leave evidence, and yet, here it was. Gale wasn’t stupid.

The Consul touched his shoulder. He wished they would stop doing that. Every time they came up close, they loomed. “What did they say to you?”

“They—said—you’d never let it go to trial. They said you’d find a way to start some kind of fight here and at the end of it, they’d be dead on a stairwell.”

The Consul only sighed. “Yeah. Look. I shouldn’t say this about my honourable opposition, but Aubrey Gale is a manipulative prick. You can see that, right?”

January nodded again, but it all felt wrong. His hand hurt and he realized the key to his cage was cutting into his palm, because he’d been gripping it too tight.

“Though obviously I would say that,” the Consul said gently. “Hey. Come on. Let’s go and have a hot drink and calm down a bit. I don’t know about you, but I’m wrung out.”

January looked up. “Consul—”

“For fuck’s sake stop calling me Consul, my name’s Guang.” They bowed a little, like they were being formally introduced, which looked strange on them, because they weren’t normally that polite.

And in the background, he had a familiar coil of anxiety that felt exactly how he did if someone banged on his door in the middle of the night. Not quite attacked, but . . . but.

“Jesus, are you flirting with me?” he asked. “What for? I haven’t got anything you want.”

The Consul laughed, a genuine merry laugh. “Phew, that was an insight into your lonely life right there, wasn’t it? I mean—sorry, sorry. Don’t be angry. I wasn’t doing it to get anything, I’m just—you know, on a high because my arch-nemesis has just been arrested for murder and it’s got away from me a bit. Forgive me?”

January bowed slightly back, keeping his back very straight, to rebuild the formal wall between them. “What did the halo show?” he asked, to move on.

“The analysts are looking at it now,” the Consul promised. “You did well. They talked to you a lot more than they would have talked to an investigator.”

He nodded, feeling disgusting. It was true, Gale hadn’t asked what had happened to River, and he did find that very ominous indeed. But something was wrong, and he could see part of the shape of it but not enough to tell what was going on. He cast one last look back at the door as the Consul led him away towards the dining room, wishing he could be sure, one way or another, whether Gale was lying.

Certainly the praetorians scowling at the halo readout didn’t look like they knew.

As he followed the Consul, Kasha bustled up to him and nosed hopefully at his pocket. Seeing her made him remember Gale’s real partner—who undoubtedly hadn’t the faintest idea what was going on, if they’d gone to bed already. Maybe the two of them pretended not to notice the other existed mostly, but that always silent figure had been kind to him when he needed it; and they were going to need it now. He rubbed Kasha’s ears and started to take a breath to say to the Consul that there was someone he needed to find, and then stopped when he realized he had no idea where the person in the burnt-orange jumper lived, when they weren’t with Gale. They hadn’t been in the room just now. The Consul looked back, because he’d fallen behind.

“Everything all right?”

“I’ve just—this sounds odd, but Gale has a real partner who I don’t . . . actually know, but I need to find out where they are.” He frowned. “We should ask them about Max. I don’t know how long they’ve been here, but maybe they know something.”

“A partner? Really? Aubrey Gale has attracted an actual human? Are you sure they’re not a cunningly disguised AI?”

January told himself to breathe twice before he said anything, but even after that, the glibness of it still needled at him. “Not to sound hopelessly square, but can you maybe not trash-talk the person whose life we’ve just destroyed, maybe for no reason?”

The Consul gave him a strange, sad smile, not at all as if he had told them off; more like he’d recently broken his arm and he’d shown them the cast. “Where do they live?”

“Not sure,” January said, disconcerted and wondering what it was the Consul had seen in him just then. “I need to ask someone.”

The Consul pointed to the production room and gave him a questioning look. Will they know?

“Right,” he said.

On her way past, Kasha growled at the Consul. January patted her head, trying to project “good dog” without saying it aloud.

33 He had tried to explain to Mx Francis and Mx Ren that they’d got the wrong end of the stick, it wasn’t about ritualised housebreaking that was legal as long as you dressed in a big red suit, and no, the random foliage people brought into their houses didn’t really have anything to do with the dodgy supernatural thing that impregnated a teenager without her consent, please could they stop ruining it.

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