Page 4 of The Mars House

He could hear other people breathing or coughing through the paper walls. Everyone else was standing at the windows too.

As the dust came closer, he could make out the storm front better. Tendrils of rust brown raced out ahead of the main dust cloud, billowing and reaching, and then other shapes rode after them, all illusions of the roaring particles, but all vast. As the dust smashed into the towers, it made an eerie roar. Then the view vanished, and the dust started to blast in through the cracks under the window frame. January pushed the tape back down quickly, already gritty, and touched the film of dust on the sill. It was fine as icing sugar. But there was so much of it that it thrummed against the building and hissed at the windows. He had to shine his phone around just to find the light switch. He hadn’t seen much dust come in, only a puff, but it was already hanging in the air, winking.

He polished it off the front of his phone in case it clogged up the electrics. He didn’t know if there was anyone in Tharsis who would be able to fix it. The phone was an antique—his great-grandmother’s—from the days when they were still hand-held, a beautiful thing that looked like a glass card when it was off. The battery was good forever, but even in London there’d been only one specialist shop that had ever been able to service it.5

Worried by the mention of less water, he looked in the tiny cupboard where the water meter and the electric gauge were. The water meter showed a traffic light that said how much water you could use in the day. Green was twenty litres; amber was ten; red was five. January had never seen it green and suspected they only made the gauges with the green light to give you false hope. A shower used ten litres per minute, so he tended to save up the water and then dive into the cubicle once every three days, which was fine, given that he had one of those jobs where being too clean made you morally suspect. He wasn’t sure he’d cope very well if that went down to once every seven days, though.

It was still amber. Good.

The factory was going to be chaos. Better get in early.

He called the lift. The tower was designed in a truly strange way, with the lifts opening straight out into the flats. The housing company said it meant they could fit more apartments in that way, because they weren’t wasting space on corridors. January thought it seemed like a nightmare waiting to happen if ever there were a fire, but he wasn’t too bothered. In this gravity, he could just jump out of the window if he had to.

As the lights on the readout counted down from the fifty-seventh floor, he was filled with a nagging sense he’d forgotten something.

There are moments when you come so close to another future you can taste the air in the courtroom, and feel the roughness of the orange jumpsuit seams over your knees, and hear the grinding of the mechanisms as the barred doors close.

Usually, for January, they were the moments that came when he wasn’t quite feeling right anyway, and his mind stopped working properly, its usual calculations skewing until it seemed like a sensible idea to swerve a tiny boat in front of a cruise liner into a gap that was exactly wide enough, making no allowance whatever for travelling at forty knots at the time; or hearing the electrics fizz as the flood waters rose, filing it away as useful information, walking away from the lights to avoid any explosions, and not telling the other thirty people in the canteen. Those things were just badly timed ordinary mind malfunctions of the kind everybody had all the time, the ones that saw people go upstairs for reasons they immediately lost, or forget to lock the door at night—but it was the ordinariness of it that scared him.

When the lift doors opened, the three people already inside drew back all at once, and yelled in different languages.

“You’re not wearing your—”

“Get back!”

“Where’s your—”

“Get your resistance cage!”

He was so shocked he couldn’t even say anything at first. Cold swept through him like the heater had just broken, aching through the bones in his face and right down his arms.

“I’m sorry—I’m sorry,” he managed, mortified, and turned back to get it.

What felt like every second week, he saw something in the news about some idiot who had killed someone because they’d wandered off accidentally—he really baulked at thinking it was on purpose—without their cage. If you were born on Earth, your bones grew to support your weight in Earth’s gravity. If you were born on Mars, or if you naturalised, your bones could only lift one third of that. Those bones were fragile. If he so much as bumped into someone from here, the kind of knock he wouldn’t even have noticed in London, there was every chance he would break their skull.

And he never felt sympathetic when those clumsy Earthstrongers got the twenty-five-year mandatory prison sentence, because when you had a resistance cage, it was a hard thing to miss.

Resistance cages were full-body steel harnesses. The steel was something clever, and it would fit to you exactly whether you put it on over clothes or under them. Open, they looked like skeleton suits of armour. January had walked straight by his on his way to the door.

When he stepped backwards into the frame, it shushed as its silver tendons closed over him, very cold even through his clothes, and immediately, moving was far harder. He lifted his arms a little to make sure. Yes. Much heavier.

The cage did not actually make you heavier. It did exactly what it said on the side—resistance. It made moving as difficult as it would be under Earth’s gravity.

He looked back at the lift and realized, hating everything, that they had actually held the door for him. They were all waiting.

“You don’t have to wait for me,” he croaked.

“Don’t be silly,” the nurse from the top floor said warmly. “You’re ready now, get in.”

He crept in, clawing for some grateful things to say, but so shaken up that all his Mandarin flew out of his head.

He squeezed into the corner, which was marked off in bright yellow tape on the floor with a big E in the middle, for Earthstrong, beside the Mandarin sign for “Earth.” Everyone else squeezed over the other side. He tried to think tiny, harmless thoughts. Right above his head was the government poster that plastered this whole building. It showed a silhouette of what looked like a troll, with silvery lines sketching a cage around it.

REMEMBER, it exclaimed in a happy font that had probably been designed for a kids’ show about making rockets from old gardening pots, IF YOU’RE EARTHSTRONG, YOU MUST WEAR A RESISTANCE CAGE IN ALL PUBLIC SPACES! LET’S STOP ACCIDENTS TOGETHER!

He pressed his hands together, trying to stop shaking, and hoping that everyone else thought he was just cold. He had never done anything so spectacularly stupid before. And what for; because the dust was distracting? He was hanging over the edge of crying.

“You should be more careful,” someone said, so old and desiccated that they were mostly just a big coat and a hat. “You could have killed someone. You know normal people are three times weaker than you lot?”