Page 74 of The Mars House

January nodded. “I’m sorry about before. I shouldn’t have said—”

“No, stop, stop, I was—going to apologise to you. I know I can’t expect you to fight me when in most of the ways that matter I’m stronger than you. And I know that when you said I was like Schrödinger’s cat it wasn’t a joke. You’re so good-humoured about being afraid that it didn’t really go through my head that you are afraid.”

January leaned back against the wall. “I didn’t realize that you either win the election or end up in prison. You . . . didn’t say.”

“I didn’t want to complain any more than I already had,” Gale said wryly. “I already sounded like a self-righteous prick.”

He swallowed. “I know I don’t understand what it’s like for you, by the way. I’ve never been afraid a stranger will kill me.”

Gale was watching him with something between relief and worry. “Me neither, honestly. I’m too arrogant to imagine anyone might actually kill me. Even in Gagarin Square.”

January snorted. “You’re fantastic.”

“Is that code for unbearable?”

“No,” he said, and meant it.

“You are afraid though,” Gale said after a moment. “That I’ll kill you.”

“Well, you know, not now this second. It’s different.”

“Is it though?” Gale asked, voice lifting high the way it did whenever January said something they felt was especially Earthy and terrible.

The lift pinged.

When they reached Gale’s room, the lights were already on inside. Sitting by the heater, with their leatherbound journal and their rust-coloured jumper, was that mystery person who always seemed to be there. They stood up soundlessly when Gale stepped inside. Neither of them said anything to each other, and January wondered with an uneasy coil if something else was going on. If they had been fighting, perhaps Gale had left in order to get away, not because of some vague sleeping problem.

“Thank you,” Gale said to him.

“Welcome.” He glanced at the person in the rust-coloured jumper again, worried he was just delivering Gale back to a row. They didn’t look angry, or not that he could see without his glasses—he had forgotten them when he got up, too distracted—but nor were they doing any of the things he would have done if someone he loved had just turned up in the middle of the night chaperoned by a stranger. No relief, no exclamations, no hug, nothing.

But well-to-do people here didn’t do big displays of feeling. It was crass. He had seen children bowing to their parents.

“Are you going to be all right?” he asked anyway.

“I’m fine,” Gale said. He caught the smell of summer from them, spices and warmth that made him think of London in its dying golden light. Home; the one he couldn’t go back to. “Good night, Mx Stirling.”

“Night, Senator.”

They shut the door.

January waited, but no raised voices came through it. He sighed. Good.

A tiny stupid part of him felt sad. He was never going to have someone who was his; not even the someone he was married to.

28 The worst thing anyone had ever said to January about tones in Mandarin was that if you got every single word wrong—like, you said “chi” instead of “shi”—but the tones right, people would understand. But if you got every single word right but the tones wrong, you were just making weird noises. A language teacher at the prison had told him that actually if you said no words at all but just hummed the tones, it was guessable. They then claimed that English was like that too, and when January had argued passionately that it was not thank you very much, they’d played a clip of an ancient children’s show called The Clangers. It was about adorable little pink sock puppet mice who lived on the moon. Instead of talking, they whistled to each other, and sometimes you could guess what they were saying from the rhythm of the whistle: in the clip the teacher showed him, one of the pink mice clearly said, “Oh, sod it, the bloody thing’s stuck again.” Mandarin, the teacher said brightly, was just like Clanger. January hoped they were hit by an asteroid.

32

When he arrived at the meeting room in the tower the next morning—the windows were all fixed now and everything was new again—there were a lot more people than normal, so many he stood at the back rather than trying to wade through for a seat. There were engineers and physicists and specialists whose specialisms he had never heard of. But they all looked bleak and harried, and they were all there to say the same thing.

“Team Science looks like a suicide risk; what’s going on?” Gale asked. They looked remarkably okay. A grasping, needy part of him was disappointed; he realized he had actually been hoping that they weren’t altogether all right, and that at some point today, he could be concerned and helpful, and they could sit together for a little while for a reason that was real, not manufactured by the production crew.

He felt queasy with himself. It was a lot like biting into an apple and finding half a maggot, and trying very, very hard not to think about where the other half was.

There was a strange hum below everyone’s voices; it was the dust whirring over the new windows, thick and brown and strange. The room felt eveningy, because all the lights were on. There was almost no daylight now.

No power in the sun fields.