Page 97 of The Mars House

He sat very still for a long time, scrubbing his hand again and again over the visor to erase the words like making them disappear could make the whole memory disappear, staring out at the dust, and not knowing what he was even looking for. He hadn’t seen—whatever it was—even when it was right next to him. There was nothing now either, only the soft illumination of the trails in his lenses, and a sketch in light-lines that showed him where Songshu was. Around him, the trees groaned, an army of dying giants. Even with the heat suit, the cold started to press in on him, and so did the awareness that if you were out in the woods alone, you were supposed to have a rifle. There were bears. The building work would have scared most of them off, where the trees were being cut down, but he could well imagine the news story anyway. January Stirling eaten by inattentive bear on mystery jaunt in the woods.

Find the tree with the bear.

He had to make an effort to make his lungs slow down.

“What the fuck kind of ghost writes on . . .” He didn’t know who he was talking to.

His lenses flared, because the messaging system was voice-activated, and the words appeared in a message alongside a helpful list of his contacts. Gale was Au for Aubrey, which filled his head with useless images of gold jewellery. Send to Au?

No.

Because what could he say? Hello, me again, been attacked by a ghost who wrote a cryptic message on my visor for unclear reasons.

Already, the memory of it was misting in the way strange things and dreams always did. He squeezed his eyes shut. Minds had walls that marked off likely versus unlikely, and the strange things and the dreams were outside, with no protection from the fierce solar wind that seemed to tear through the world beyond those walls. Already, it looked too bizarre to have happened. He had misunderstood somehow, not seen something, or seen something wrongly.

His lenses blinked the message at him again. Send to Au?

No.

No; he was just going to have to find that tree and see if anything was there.

The tree was gone.

He thought he’d made a mistake and lost his bearings until he understood what had happened. The loggers had already felled it. It was here: but it was stretched out lengthwise. The bear carving was just visible above the moss on the ground. He was lucky it hadn’t been through the timber-cutting machine yet.

The roots had torn up from the ground and left a hollow. It was dark, away from the halogens; they looked gritty and dim, and he could only make out shadows. He fumbled through his pockets. He hadn’t been using his phone; everyone was saving every scrap of power they could, but he did have emergency matches. Hunching forward to protect it from the wind, he struck one. Even like that, it ignited the dust particles around it in a soft, gunpowder flare.

And illuminated the body. Perfectly, beautifully preserved in the cold. Whoever it was might have died only a couple of days ago. But they hadn’t. They weren’t wearing enough. Just a jumper with the sleeves turned back.

There was a tattoo on the forearm, still clear. It was the army sigil, with SERVE THE PEOPLE in rigid Mandarin underneath.

That was the insignia of the marines.

Later, he tried hard to think that what he did next came entirely on instinct, that he just panicked, and it was pure helplessness, but the more he tried to convince himself, the more fake it looked. There was nothing instinctive about it. He sat still, looking at that sad figure curled in the hollow of the broken tree, for what must have been a clear minute, his mind ticking through consequences in the way he had learned at the Songshu meeting table.

If he went back inside and said to Gale, So I reckon I’ve found Max—one of two things could happen. One: Gale would turn out to be innocent. They would therefore call the police, all the proper procedures would be followed, and either the investigation would be inconclusive or there would be evidence on the body that Max had been killed by a random bear, irritable mammoth, or passing axe-murderer. Two: Gale was guilty, all footage of January saying anything would be scrubbed, the body would disappear, and if he tried to insist there had been a body, Dr Okonkwo would give him antipsychotics, because obviously he was having some kind of breakdown, and he would live the following five years as a heavily drugged zombie if he was very lucky; if not, like the Consul said, it would be death by garbage truck.

He wouldn’t know unless he did it.

He wasn’t doing that.

In English people said, between a rock and a hard place, which implied you were sort of stuck and mountain rescue might need to give you an embarrassing talk about being careful where you climbed. In Russian, though, they said between the hammer and the anvil. He felt like he was on the anvil now, watching the hammer come down.

He wrenched the Consul’s card out of his pocket and held it in front of his glasses so that the software would read the number, and dial it.

The Consul answered on the second ring, sounding groggy. “January? Are you all right? It’s past . . .” Midnight, it was past midnight, he was being rude.

“No,” he said. “You were right, I need help. I’m really sorry. I think I’ve found Max.” He flicked his eyes to the little icon that would share his camera feed.

There was a silence. “I’m coming.”

43

Gale might have wanted to go in the direction of bed, but they’d been waylaid by Yuan, the little boy with royal ambitions, and Yuan had definitively won; when January came back inside, the two of them were sitting on the floor near a fire and playing with a marble run that someone must have unearthed from an attic. Yuan still had the Senate coronet, and he was explaining some complicated rules with the extreme seriousness known only to tiny children and professors. And Gale, with their ability to concentrate absolutely on anything at all, marble run or zoolinguistics, was listening just as solemnly, bent slightly forward to hear him, the ends of their hair pooling black on the floor.

January felt like his cage had clamped too tight around his ribs. He felt guilty all the time, he was English, he had a hair trigger for guilt—in the nuclear tower, because the lift opened straight out into people’s living rooms, he’d felt guilty about accidentally seeing his own reflection in someone else’s mirror when the lift doors opened on the way down to the ground floor, as though he had stolen their own personal light—but not like this.

He shouldn’t have made the call. The Consul was going to crash through here like a mammoth, it was going to be public and horrible, and he shouldn’t have bloody done it, he should at least have asked Gale what was happening, but—but. You could be gentle and kind and good with children and still a murderer. Everything he knew about Gale was clashing contrasts. A glamorous academic; an honourable CEO; a courteous demagogue.