Page 13 of The Mars House

No: no. Gale was not a thirteen-year-old girl. Gale was a shimmering politician with billions. Gale was the one who was strong here.

“Can I ask why you came to Mars if you don’t want to naturalise?” Gale asked. “For nearly everyone in the world, naturalisation has been a rite of passage either for them or someone in their immediate ancestry. It’s part of living here, an acceptance of the conditions of the planet. Or do you feel differently?”

January’s throat was going dry. When you read what Gale had to say in the news, it was easy to scoff. In person, there was a terrible pressure to be as courteous to them as they were to you. “I don’t think the government should be allowed to tell people they have to knock twenty years off their lives.”

“Really? They do it all the time.”

“What?” January said stupidly, knocked off kilter.

“The draft,” Gale said. “Every adult is told to serve in wartime, nearly everyone agrees that’s reasonable and necessary, though it can take your life altogether. These are wartime conditions, and they will be until we find a way to stop fighting this gravity.”

What was he even trying to do? Win an argument with a weapons-grade genius who had spent years putting their mind to all this, with—what? He hadn’t even been to university. He had been trained to leap six feet into the air and make it look like he was floating.

It was one thing to know that what Gale said was wrong, but what was happening now wasn’t about knowing something. It was about articulating it in front of news cameras.

Gale was going to crucify him.

But he couldn’t just bow his head either.

“No, but—forcing people to change because of how they’re born, and maybe die in the process, because it’s more convenient for someone else? It’s genocide, isn’t it? I know that naturalisation is a rite of passage here, but it’s a horrible rite and if someone doesn’t want to do it, they shouldn’t have to. Cages work if you use them right.” But he hadn’t this morning, he had been that close this morning, he could have killed someone but shut up, shut up, shut up. “Humans weren’t made to live here, and just because they can doesn’t mean that everyone who comes here should have to do it in the same way. I’m not allowed in shops or trains with Natural or naturalised people, it’s illegal for me to leave my flat without a cage, and the only tower blocks I’m allowed to live in are in Americatown, which is a long way from where your voters are in New Kowloon. I think things are safe enough as they are.”

Only it wasn’t safe, was it. One in two hundred and sixty-seven times, it wasn’t. Why had he said that?

The longer he ran on, the brighter Gale looked. He might have been pouring them a glass of champagne. “Even though it creates a two-tier society with you firmly at the bottom?”

“It’s the only safe way.” Suffering Christ, how had Gale managed to make him say that a horrible class system was a good idea because he didn’t think people should have to naturalise? He could see there must be a flaw in there somewhere, and if he’d had plenty of time to think, he would have found it—but there was no time to think.

“Is it? Across your lifetime you’ve got a one in four chance of accidentally killing a Natural person,” said Gale, and January had a ridiculous certainty that somehow they knew all about what had happened this morning.

“I can’t hurt anyone any more than you can in a cage,” January said, horribly aware that he wasn’t wearing it now.

“You can take it off,” they said, and now they had the unmistakeable spark of a person who found joy in war.

January shrank inside, and for the first time he understood exactly who Gale was. Not a politician like January knew politicians. Gale was the modern version of those Spartan soldiers who scythed through life looking for someone well matched enough to give them a good fight, who celebrated being hugely outnumbered in unwinnable wars because somewhere in those armies there might just be someone legendary enough to bother getting up for.

He had always hated those people, because when they couldn’t find an equal fight, they’d start an unequal one for practise. And this was a very unequal fight. He wasn’t even a featherweight trying to fight a heavyweight. He was a comedy sock puppet.

Then, finally, he understood what was happening. He had been invited into this interview because Gale’s press secretary knew what his politics were likely to be—God, he’d even said he’d rather dissolve in Silo 4 than speak to Gale—and the whole point was for everyone to see Gale destroy someone who thought naturalisation was bad. They were here to make him look like a stupid, aggressive thug who was happy to yell at someone who had been life-changingly injured by someone just like him, and to broadcast it to millions of people.

In the car on the way here, Gale had probably said, find me a fire-breathing Earthstrong Rights moron, it’ll be fun; because the hilarious thing is, even if he’s got a point, it’s going to sound foul if he tries to say it to me.

“Right now, you are at about the strength of a local polar bear,” Gale said, still with that playful sparkle, the one cats got when they found an asthmatic mouse, “and we tend not to let those in shops and on trains with Natural people either.”

Smug

self-satisfied

overprivileged

dickhead.

“Oh, you’ve got me, I’ll definitely murder you if you let me in the shop,” January said flatly.

What followed was one of those hanging moments where you saw the glass falling, but there was no way left to stop it smashing.

A stillness went through everyone who had heard, but January only saw it at the edge of things, because beside him, Gale flinched. It was tiny; just an involuntary flicker of their shoulders, almost perfectly hidden. But fear went through their eyes too, honest, hunted fear, and suddenly they weren’t an immensely wealthy, powerful politician and January wasn’t some powerless labourer; Gale was a glassen elfin thing, and January was a monster who was getting angry.

And then, a fraction too late, Gale laughed. “No, of course not.” It was a lion-tamer’s calm. They looked over at the journalists. “Right, surely that’s enough?”