Page 112 of The Mars House

The taxes rose and rose, and more and more people from the emperors’ country poured in, and the emperors put them in charge. The people who had lived there before either had to leave and go into the desert, or try to scrape by under new, unfair ways, getting poorer and poorer, and dying, until there were none left at all.

And that’s how one foolish prince brought down a city.

“Halos don’t work on me,” River said.

Or was it, a little voice always asked, really because that joke Kali always made about you was true: you were born in the year of the dragon, but you spend your whole life trying to be a rabbit? Was it because after staying always hunched down and pretending to be little and fluffy, sweet harmless dorky River who’ll never leave the university and never bothers anyone, you had to straighten up one day, and incinerate everything in front of you, not because it was right but because you wanted to see if you could?

“That doesn’t do me any good!”

“No one knows what we look like. We both wear filters. All we have to do is swap.”

Aubrey stared at them, and then half laughed. “You’re right. Just until the police go away?”

“Right. And—Aubrey—will you promise to check into a treatment programme? You can’t just kill someone and go back to your life—”

“No, no, I know. Of course I will. Of course.”

That was a lie.

“What are we going to say has happened to you, meanwhile?” Aubrey said. They were looking earnest and deferential, which was also a lie.

River had to look at the ground. They couldn’t look at Aubrey. If they looked at Aubrey, they’d believe it all. “Why don’t we say that Max and I ran off together? Then no one’s looking for me.”

“That’s good! How do we bring me back afterward?”

“I . . . don’t know, we’ll come up with something.”

River tried to feel around inside their own soul, to see if there was enough iron in it to do—not the right thing, because they couldn’t tell what right was, but maybe the just thing. They could see what was going to happen if not. Aubrey would refuse to go anywhere or change anything, and River would let them because they remembered being toddlers together, and then there would be another consort, and more rows, and more blaming everyone else, and perhaps one day there would be another body. And then that wouldn’t be Aubrey’s fault; that would be River’s, because that was the law too. If you saw a murder happening and you did nothing, you were also guilty.

River could already see it, years away.

Not for the first time, they wondered bleakly if there was any true way to be clever and innocent at the same time.

“Should I show you where the—”

“No!” River half shouted. “I’m sorry. No. Halos—don’t work on me completely, but something that . . . that serious would show up. I can’t hide it if I’ve seen a body.” They swallowed. “Just . . . just make sure it isn’t where anyone can fall over it.” Ideally, said part of their mind that was somehow fine with covering up a murder, have it incinerated, don’t leave it out here as evidence, but there was no way they could set fire to anything without the security drones seeing it. The only reason any of this was viable at all was the fog.

Max deserved a lot better than an unmarked grave out in the Songshu woods. Most military people River had ever come across were dismissive of anyone who couldn’t strip a rifle blindfolded, but Max had an inexhaustible courtesy, even when faced with an irritating university tweed-person. They had actually asked how the mammoth dictionary was going.

“I love you,” Aubrey said suddenly, and hugged River hard.

They only ever said it these last few years when River did something useful. In a sensible world, River would have pointed that out and refused to have anything more to do with them, and maybe it would have been enough of a jolt to change the way Aubrey lived, maybe Max would be all right in that world, but River wasn’t sensible in that way. Every so often, there was a flash of Aubrey-before-the-Senate, the old Aubrey who baked cakes at weekends and joked and who would sprawl on the floor with the dogs, and who squeaked unexpectedly and leapt onto haystacks. They were still in there somewhere, and River had never stopped hoping they’d come out again. Sometimes even now there were flashes—aurora flares, never for long, but bright and wonderful and worth the snarling and the temper.

Or, they’d always told themselves so.

“I love you too,” River said into Aubrey’s collar.

They agreed to give it a month, and Aubrey left for that month. They said they were going to a rehab centre, but River knew, because one of the security people followed, that they went to the Tiangong, enjoying their new filterless anonymity, and drank a lot.

It was painfully straightforward, pretending to be Aubrey. Aubrey handed over access to all their accounts, so River wore their filters, and they did look a little different over different bones, but politicians looked a little different all the time as trends shifted. River reported Max missing. Because it’s always the consort, Sasha and then the police did indeed arrive with the halo test, and after puzzling over the bizarre readout for a little while, determined that no, however much River’s mind writhed, they couldn’t have killed anyone.

There were three mandatory Senate sittings in that month. River went to all of them, and sat silent in the first one, listening, heart thumping and waiting for someone who knew Aubrey well enough to say, Hey, hang on a second, you’re not the right person, I’m calling security, but nobody did. Slowly, River realized that Aubrey knew other senators to nod to, but not really to have a conversation with. They weren’t interested enough.

So before the second session, swearing inwardly that this was the test, and if this went wrong then it was over, River spent a few days canvassing law-and-order candidates, and having tea with people at beautiful clubs and saying simple things like, We only need to shift a few million and lift the tax on air storage in shipping, and this prison hulk stupidness is done.

Every time they met someone, it was with knots in their insides. Because Aubrey wasn’t an idiot at all, Aubrey had been scholar before all this, and been lovely at it—and surely, surely it had to be more difficult to get things done than just charming some influential people. But one by one, the other senators sat back and said, okay.

“You know I really thought you just tabled this year on year so that the Regulatory Committee couldn’t complain you weren’t engaging properly,” the Speaker said, creaking forward interestedly in the leather armchair. “But you actually want to get this done, don’t you?”