Page 72 of The Mars House

“Hi,” they said, sounding level, but not looking it.

January bumped down onto his knees. “Jesus Christ. Are you hurt?”

“No—no.”

But they were. Normally Gale spoke to him in English, but they were using Mandarin now. Nobody could do a foreign language when they were properly upset. If he was even flustered, January went from functional to incoherent instantly.

“It’s okay,” he said again, even though he had no idea if it was. “I—why are you here, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know.” Gale’s voice cracked over it. “I don’t—I didn’t mean to come here.”

January looked along the corridor, at a complete loss. “You . . . sleepwalk?”

“Must do.” Gale was rubbing one arm, but too lightly; it hurt.

He took a breath and realized he had no idea what to say with it. The only thing he could do was try to work out if their arm was broken. “Can I . . . ?”

Very gently, he straightened out their arm and bent it again. Not broken. Good. But Gale was shaking.

It must have been a spectacular nightmare. He supposed they could have got this far, asleep, if some part of their dreaming mind had insisted it was urgent enough. If you’d been torn in half by someone who looked just like a person who’d just moved into your house, then blown up by yet another one, it only followed that you’d get horrendous nightmares and sleepwalk, or whatever this was, immediately after being snarled at.

Strange to come to his door, though. The opposite direction would have made more sense.

“Can you get up if I give you a hand?”

It came out wrong, and he saw them try to catch his meaning, and miss. “What?” Their voice was breaking.

“Sorry,” said January, whose Mandarin was not at its best at two in the morning. “I always screw up my tones when I’m tired, don’t I—agh.” He turned his head aside and stuck out his tongue, mostly to see if he could get Gale to smile. “Yuck yuck yuck.”

Gale did smile. “In a stone den, a poet called Shi, who was a lion addict, resolved to eat ten lions . . .”

All those words were shi, and they only made sense if you got the right tones.28

It was a famous tongue twister and January could never do it. “Shut up shut up. She sells sea shells on the seashore. I said, can you get up, if I help you?”

“I can do it without you—you go back to bed. I’m sorry. I don’t know how I ended up here.”

January had to laugh, although it didn’t sound very laugh-like. “Come on. I’ll feel bad if I leave you on the floor.”

“No. I’m a foot taller than you and you’re in a cage—”

“I could lift you with one arm,” January said softly. That wasn’t what Gale was saying, he could see that, Gale was embarrassed, but he wasn’t having it anyway. “Look; look at this.” He pulled his phone out and scanned back two years through his photographs—he’d not taken many here because he had no one to show them to—until he found one of Hulking Terry, stumping off with yet another round of cake. “Look at that. One arm. And I never killed him, either, which I think speaks very well to my character.”

Gale choked on a laugh.

“It wasn’t even dancing, it was bullfighting. His mum used to turn up with survival packages full of bloody biscuits because everyone knows how horrendously thin ballet dancers are.” January didn’t often do impressions of people because there wasn’t much in the world that was ruder, but he had a strong feeling that Gale needed to hear him say something bitchy and unreasonable about someone else, so that it was all the clearer he wasn’t secretly feeling bitchy and unreasonable with them. “I still don’t know if I was dealing with a chunker of a human or a really beautiful hippo.”

Like he’d hoped, Gale laughed properly this time.

“Okay?” he asked.

Gale nodded slightly. It was fragile trust, though, and they stiffened so completely when he took their hands it was like lifting glass. But not a great deal of glass. Even on Earth, Gale would have weighed much less than Terry. Once they were standing, one hand to the wall, he tipped sideways to catch their eye.

“Think you can walk?”

“Yes, I . . . I’m fine. I can go by myself.”

“Nope. Come on. You’ll have to live with me for entire minutes.”