Page 110 of The Mars House

“Aubrey! Are you hurt, where’s the bear—”

“What bear?” Aubrey asked, voice wisping.

“I heard a shot, I—are you drunk?” River demanded, because they looked wrong, starry.

“No; no.” Aubrey was staring at them. “No bear. I’ve . . .”

River frowned, because never once had they seen Aubrey incoherent. Aubrey was glamorous, confident, erudite, addicted to things River hadn’t even heard of, but never lost for words. “Aubrey. Are you okay?”

Aubrey shook their head slightly. “I think someone’s taken Max.”

“What? Have you called security? We need to—”

“No, but I’m not sure, there’s mist, can you—there was a gunshot, and then I couldn’t find them, but there’s blood, River, we—”

“Sasha needs to know even if you’re not sure, it’s a lot better to be wrong and embarrassed than right and letting someone get further and further away,” River said, smacking the circuitry tattoo on the inside of their wrist. It was an emergency tracker, and a distress beacon, and plenty of other things. The insides of their lenses lit up with red, and immediately Sasha’s voice came through the aural implants, too quiet for anyone else to hear.

River—what’s happening?

“We think Max is missing, we need people to come out here and start looking. Aubrey heard a shot but there’s fog.”

We’re coming.

It was just a flicker, but River thought there was something annoyed in Aubrey’s expression; like River wasn’t doing what they were supposed to do, even though they were, even though everyone in Great Houses did endless drills and training for this kind of thing, and even though it wouldn’t have been the first time someone got into the grounds and tried to kidnap one of them. A furious ex-employee (there were plenty; Kali wasn’t known for generous pensions and reasonable severance deals) had got in last year and snatched River at knifepoint not that far from here.

Not right, River’s Aubrey-is-lying-to-me radar said, not right.

But what Aubrey said was, “Come on, help me look.”

They took River’s hand and led the way up a steep bank of roots, to a patch of open ground where ten or twelve confused llamas were standing around, looking at a lot of blood on the ground. It was already freezing to the grass. River swallowed hard. You couldn’t lose that much blood and still be alive. It was everywhere.

It was on Aubrey too.

“Were you—close by?” River asked, trying to look at them more closely, but Aubrey was wearing black and it was impossible to tell. It was under their fingernails, and on the side of their neck.

“I fell over here,” Aubrey said, and wrung their hands together. There was something actorly about it. They never usually moved their hands when they spoke. But then, it wasn’t as though they usually had to talk over pints and pints of blood on the ground. “Come on, maybe we can find something in the mirrors . . .”

They were right at the edge of one of the sun fields. River had gotten turned around; they hadn’t realized they were so far from the house. The air was warmer here, as it always was in the fields, even on a drab day. It was why the mist was so much denser. Vanishing into the grey in either direction were ranks and ranks of solar mirrors, and way up in the air was a blinking amber light that marked the top of the salt tower for aircraft. It was an eerie, uncanny place, and River had a powerful instinct not to go in among the mirrors.

It would be very easy for someone to hide in there and shoot.

There was no blood trail. Whoever had done it was strong enough to lift a body and walk with it.

“Where were you, what did you see?” River asked.

“Nothing! Come on—”

“Hang on, hang on,” River said, annoyed with themselves. Aubrey was scared: they wouldn’t remember if they’d seen anything important. “Sorry. I’ve got a halo here. You might not know if you saw something, but it’ll be on the scan if we can hook you up right away, while your memory’s still clear. If you put it on—”

“I don’t want to mess around with a halo, we just need to—”

“No, Aubrey, this is what Sasha will do in a second, come on, it’s right here!”

Aubrey went quiet. Something in their face closed down, and went from urgent to . . . calculating.

River wanted to be horrified, but they just weren’t.

Very slowly, with a feeling like egg fresh out of a fridge trickling down the back of their skull, came the understanding that there was nobody hiding in the mirrors.