Page 28 of The Mars House

“Thank you,” January echoed. Then, “It is. But I don’t need to see virtual things. I walk everywhere and I don’t buy anything except food, so it doesn’t make much difference.” It was already out before he heard how tragic-hero stoic it sounded.

Gale didn’t let their posture go, or their perfect neutrality, but what they said was, “You’re about to tell me that your parents drowned when you were six and you’re dying of an incurable brain tumour.”

January grinned, relieved to be having a normal conversation and to be teased like there wasn’t a chasm between them. Then he stopped, because he had seen his own reflection in the side of a glass and it wasn’t very nice. Along with his hair, the rest of him had lost colour too, except his eyes, which looked much too dark now, and the effect was disturbing. He looked like he had been living in a pond and eating unwary travellers.

“So,” he summarised. “We’re filmed all the time. There are artificial stories, including us. Your press secretary runs through anything more important than breakfast with me to make sure I’m not—accidentally horrifying.”

“Yes.”

He shifted, uncomfortable, but he had to ask. “What happened to Max?”

Gale didn’t flicker. They must have been expecting the question. “They left. I was never very nice to them.” They paused. “What’s the word in English for xiongdi?”

“Brothers,” January said slowly, pretty sure he was falling down the gap between Mandarin and Tharsese, which tended to use the same words for different things. Firstly, it was an odd turn, and secondly, he couldn’t imagine Gale saying anything like that except in the context of swearing.

Gale did the most graceful thing he had ever seen anyone do in ordinary conversation then. Instead of saying, no, you berk, of course I wouldn’t mean that, they nodded carefully. “Ah—I see.” They didn’t even say but. “Is there also a more general word for someone who has the same parents as you?”

January had to just look at them for a second and try to imagine where a person learned that kind of restraint. He hoped he could be like that one day. “Sure,” he remembered to say in the end. “Sibling.”

“I have—never heard that before.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever said it aloud,” January reflected. “Sounds stiff.”

“What is it, is it German?” Gale asked, nearly indignantly, as if it were an affront to find a word that had escaped them until now.

“You must know that I don’t know,” January said, starting to smile, because he had thought Gale’s press secretary had been exaggerating before, but it was becoming clear that you really could distract Gale with random linguistic oddities. It was unexpectedly endearing. He liked clever people who could be derailed by tiny things.

He caught himself thinking so and tried to pull back from it. Gale could be interested in funny German words and interested in taking away everyone’s cages at the same time, however much January wanted endearing things and horrible things to be mutually exclusive.

He thought the minute-taking security officer sitting along from them might have been grinning too.

“Sorry.” Gale looked as if they’d been caught doing something wonky.

“Why do you ask?”

“Who Max left with,” Gale explained. “River.”

“Ouch.”

Gale lifted one hand to say, well, it’s what you get if you prowl around interrogating innocent bystanders about German.

January wondered what the truth was, because it clearly wasn’t that. If it were, the happy couple would probably have given the press a wave by now to say, Hi, actually, we’re not dead. “By any chance are you about to say, oh January, here are the keys to the rooms in the castle, use all of them except this one, it definitely doesn’t open the special dungeon where the corpses of my previous six partners are . . .”

“This all sounds shady as sin, doesn’t it,” Gale said bleakly. “I don’t know what to tell you. You can still back out, if you’d like to.”

It did sound shady, but now that he had been marinating in the idea for a couple of days, January had come to the conclusion that Gale was right: this was better than naturalisation. The decision to go to the facility had come from the part of his mind that wanted not to naturalise, but to be punished. Since Gale had told him straight to his face that he had done nothing wrong, the need to do that had faded from a seething boil to an only-just-noticeable simmer. He still scorched himself on it every so often, but he didn’t feel like he was burning alive any more.

The irony of being told by Aubrey Gale that anything was better than naturalisation was still clanging around his head. He still couldn’t marry it with their campaigns. And he still couldn’t think of a way to ask them without sounding like he wanted a war. It would be too much for now, certainly, after asking about Max. However light Gale’s touch was in person, they were still going to be January’s employer for five years. Pissing them off again would be a stupid way to start. Today was about trying to broker a peace as much as a marriage.

Yet again, Gale glanced into the corner of the ceiling, and all at once January understood why. They were so used to being filmed they were looking for the cameras.

“Better have a magic sparkle-cookie, really,” he said at last, because he believed in simple solutions.

He was too pleased when Gale laughed.

12 There were still quite a lot of news stories about the haptics going a bit wrong, as well. A disgruntled employee at the company which sold the implants had, on their last day, sent out a signal that made everyone with haptics experience the overpowering taste of wasabi whenever they saw or heard the name of the company. January had been at the train station that day, beneath a giant billboard advertising the things, and seen it first hand as dozens of well-dressed people wheezed into the closest cafés with streaming eyes to ask desperately for water. Everyone had found it very funny, except the government, who had fined the company to kingdom come and now legislated the engines very tightly indeed, which January thought was boring of them.

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