Page 53 of The Mars House

“January, how do you feel?” someone else called.

“Glad to be walking away.” He glanced up at Gale. The wind was pulling at their hair, coiling the ends, deep-space black without even a strand of grey. Never had two people belonged less together. “And—amazed that the Senator didn’t once seem to think it was me.”

Gale looked honestly incredulous—it was slight, all their genuine expressions were—but it was there, and very lightly, they closed one hand over the front of his cage and pulled until he bumped them sideways. He had to smile. “Of course I didn’t bloody think it was you,” Gale told him fake-crossly.

January coughed. “Evidence that Britishness is infectious, everybody.”

The journalists all laughed, and so did January.

21 Apollo twins—as in Apollo and Artemis, the archers from the old stories—were common in Great Houses. A House needed an heir and a spare, so they usually adopted two babies at one go, generally born on the same day or very close together, but not actually related. They had identical educations, so that one could take over from the other at any point, although some studies had suggested this was a bad idea, given the unusually high mortality rate among the older twins. “Watch out for Artemis” was idiom now. It meant, be careful of the person right behind you who can do your job just as well as you.

23

At Songshu, the security services were set up on one side of the dining room. What must have been most of the staff were in queues, and ten officers in makeshift booths were doing the tests with the halo devices. The people who had already been tested were sitting in their own cordoned-off section, and there were even more officers keeping registers of who had gone through, and who was yet to come.

All the ways in and out of the house were locked. Someone with a semiautomatic pistol had to let them in at the main doors. They towered, and January found himself shrinking behind Gale. Soldiers here wore a variation of resistance cages but in reverse; they wore them at night to build up their strength as close to Earthstrong as it could physically go—not all the way but near—and then took them off on duty. Without his cage, he would still have been stronger; but he was still a foot smaller, and he wasn’t without his cage. Gale didn’t even look at them, and only opened the door for him. There were more police inside, as well as Sasha’s security staff. Everyone was starting to look frayed.

“Any luck?” Gale said.

“Nothing,” Sasha murmured. “I’m sorry, Senator, we’re working on it.”

“I know. Keep going, you’re doing beautifully.”

“Senator—I know the scan cleared January, but I’d feel better if—”

“Mx Stirling,” Gale said, only just over them, and flaring their eyes with something that was a lot hotter than reproach, “is in the clear, unlike everyone else. Perhaps you might concentrate on the everyone-else problem, unless there’s some new evidence against him?” They sparkled, looking hopeful that there might be some evidence they could smash.

Sasha bowed their head. “None, Senator.”

“Why are you so boring, why couldn’t you have just slightly been involved with terrorists?” Gale said to January. “It’s no fun defending someone who’s innocent. Where’s the smoking gun, Stirling? Where’s the God-and-gender manifesto? You could at least try.”

“Be honest,” said January, wanting to say, Don’t imagine I haven’t noticed you’ve found a way to defend me but give me my dignity as well; don’t imagine it’s passed me by that you didn’t usher me through here with one hand on the small of my back, like I was just all wronged and helpless and rubbish. “Do you want me to find you some better terrorists to play with?”

“Better ones, you say?”

Sasha looked between them, aghast. “Do not find any better—”

“Boring! Everything is boring, nothing is going to be interesting again, at all, ever,” Gale declared, and let January tug them away before Sasha could have an aneurysm.

In the time it took him to make some coffee, someone nabbed Gale, and by the time he came back, the officer was scowling at the screen that showed their halo scan.

“Suffering fuck, how are we supposed to read that?”

“I told you,” Dr Okonkwo said, with not a great deal of patience. They were hovering nearby in a way that managed to be argumentative even when they weren’t talking. January gave them a long look. He hadn’t forgotten about the inhibitor injection they’d been waving around and he planned not to for a good while. “It can tell you what a person thinks but not why those associations are there.”

“This looks like a crazy person’s brain!”

“Indeed,” Dr Okonkwo sighed. “Thirteen things alter in the brain to manifest what we recognise as dissociative psychosis. But if only twelve out of those thirteen are different, you get a creative genius.”

“So this works on fungi but not on clever people? God’s sake . . .”

Gale was quiet and even a little awkward, January thought, as though Dr Okonkwo was talking about a terrible disability they wished people wouldn’t ask about. He pirouetted past to make them laugh, and to make something recognisable come up on the officer’s scanning screen. Gale did smile, and the officer did peer at the screen as though it had almost done something helpful.

“You know what the Left-Wing Crazies are going to be screaming in about an hour, don’t you,” said Solly Francis in passing to January, nodding towards Gale.

“What?” said January, having to fight against the need to point out that actually, he was a left-wing crazy and he couldn’t wait to hear a rich nationalist’s idea about his thought processes.

“Meh, boo, Aubrey did it, Aubrey’s an evil genius, halos don’t work on evil geniuses, they could have done anything, and anyway all Earthstrongers are amazing awesome people who would never do anything bad because having a difficult life puts you in the permanent moral high ground, saying otherwise is racist, boo, hiss, it’s faaaaake . . .”