Page 103 of The Mars House

In the interest of not being rugby tackled, he held his hands up to promise he wasn’t going to do anything sudden. To have something to do with himself, and to give him a second to think, he pulled his glasses off to polish them on the hem of his shirt.

The person in the orange jumper was right there.

They were playing with Kasha.

January pointed.

“The dog’s always been a bit funny,” the producer said.

“Not the dog, the—sorry, excuse me,” he said to the person in the orange jumper. “I’ve been trying to find you. I know this isn’t a very good time for an introduction, but—”

“Who are you talking to?” the producer said nervously.

The praetorians had just put their hands on their guns.

“No, there’s—they’re here,” January said, stepping back from the praetorians, his whole brain freezing up. It was amazing how incoherent even the threat of a gun could make you and now it was happening, he could see exactly why people panicked and ran away, or did the wrong thing and ended up shot in the head for no reason. “Are you joking?”

The person in the orange jumper straightened up and bowed to him a little. They had their book tucked under one arm, and the pen stuck in their hair. As always, they looked carelessly elegant, in a tired sort of way.

“There is no one there,” the producer said, in the very careful way of someone dealing with a mental patient. “Um. I think you might be having an altitude hallucination—”

“I’m definitely not! Look, I—” Without thinking about it, he put his glasses back on, and then stopped still, because the person in the orange jumper vanished. “It’s a filter,” he said, not loudly enough. “You can’t see them through . . .”

“Mx Gale, we’re going to have to ask you to step away from the Consul,” one of the praetorians told him.

He only half heard. He took the glasses off again.

The person in the orange jumper had come right up to him in the few seconds he’d been seeing through the glasses. Now, they gave him an apologetic look, and shoved him hard, straight back into the Consul.

Even though the Consul was huge, January was too heavy, and the two of them went over backwards with a bang that smacked the air out of him, and ground the cage’s ribs so hard into his real ones that he felt like they must have left a permanent dent. Yelling erupted everywhere, someone was dragging him to one side and then there was a gun in his face and a praetorian helping the Consul up, and someone else kneeling behind him to pin his wrists to the floor. Above it all, a drone hovered. Someone was shouting at the producers to stop filming. Somebody else was bundling the Consul out of the room. Way up above the glass ceiling, he could see people on the Earthstrong level’s balcony still looking down, but no one was smiling any more.

“Stay still!” one of the praetorians told him.

“I am! I didn’t do that, someone pushed me, you must have seen . . .”

He trailed off, though, because the person in the orange jumper had come up next to him. They bent slightly so he could see them properly, and then held up a sign they’d just written in their book, ink still gleaming. It said,

You seem great and this absolutely isn’t personal; sorry!

It was the semicolon that made it insane, he thought manically.

And then, because manic thoughts have long tails, he thought: What the fuck kind of sixth-generation Natural Tharsese person can handwrite totally natural English? Nobody. Gale and minus six people in a university.

“What?” he managed, and at the most tremendous lag, he realized that this was what had happened to him in the woods—this person, whoever they were, had bodily dragged him and written on his dust mask visor to make him find Max—

He didn’t get any further with the thought, because the person in the orange jumper gave him an apologetic wince and then kicked him in the stomach.

It doubled him up, which made him wrench his hands out of the praetorian’s, and then there was more yelling and he heard a click that something right in the base of mind his informed him was the safety catch being turned off on a gun, and he tried to remember the Mandarin for “don’t shoot” but it came out in English and then there was a noise like the bomb coming in through the window, and he slammed back into the floor so hard he thought someone had shoved him.

They hadn’t shoved him.

They’d shot him.

He didn’t understand until he saw the blood on the shoulder of his shirt. It didn’t feel like he’d expected. It felt like being punched very hard, but it was more just impact than pain, or at least, right now this second it was. Something peculiar happened to his brain then. It sort of detached itself from the rest of him, and his thinking became perfectly calm, and clear. He might have been standing next to himself, not in his own body, just an onlooker, or at a cinema.

“I really don’t think that was necessary, do you?” he said to the praetorian with the smoking gun, and even as he said it, he heard how ludicrous it sounded.

Everything was silent. Except, up above them, there was a noise that he’d thought was just ringing inside his own head; it was the people who had been watching from the balcony. There were a lot of them now. Some weren’t wearing cages; it was still too early in the morning.