Page 104 of The Mars House

Later, he was almost sure it was one of the teenagers, just trying to express how unimpressed they were to have seen a soldier shoot someone who was flat on the ground. Certainly it could never actually have been dangerous. But someone threw a shoe. He saw, very clearly from where he was lying on the floor, that it was a shoe, not a brick, or a grenade; it had neon green laces. The praetorians, though, must have been trained to always expect the absolute worst, and what they did, of course, was fire up through the glass ceiling.

45

The bullets had fractured the glass, so it was hard to see up now through the webs of cracks. January shuffled backwards to get against the wall. The praetorian captain was snapping at the others to get up there and round everyone up—it sounded so casual but they were going with their guns out and Jesus Christ, if Sasha was anything to go by then they could barely tell the difference between fourteen-year-old boys and forty-year-old men. Very carefully, he pushed back against the wall and eased onto his feet, still struggling to breathe.

“Where do you think you’re going?” the captain demanded.

“Out the way of the glass,” he managed, edging towards the door.

The praetorian glanced up. “It’s fine.”

He didn’t think so. Up on the fifth floor balcony, there were people whose kids had just been shot at, and maybe even hurt; and they knew, because they watched the news, that praetorians would be coming up to them now, and that those praetorians would shoot anyone who even twitched at the wrong moment. He didn’t know what it was like to have children, but if he had been up there holding Yuan, who he had only met yesterday, he knew exactly what he would be considering very, very seriously just now. He would be looking at the distance between the balcony and the glass ceiling, and thinking it wasn’t far to fall if you weren’t wearing a cage.

They’re going to find a way to start a fight, Gale had said, and afterward, I’ll be found dead on a stairwell.

It was only a few steps back along the corridor to Gale’s room.

“I said stop moving,” the praetorian told him. He stopped. Reasonably they had no reason to shoot him again, but since Gagarin Square, he seriously doubted anyone had been training the praetorians to give passing Earthstrongers a reasonable hearing. The unspoken rule was shoot first, justify it to the lacklustre tribunal later.

“For God’s sake, he needs a doctor,” the producer tried.

“He—”

January twisted against the wall to get his arms over his face as the ceiling exploded inwards. It was safety glass, so there were no shards; instead, it shattered into little irregular cubes that smashed across the floor like a truckload of spilled beads.

Six or seven Earthstrong people had landed easily in the middle of the room, uncaged, the fall nothing to them, and all the praetorians swung that way. He heard the shots and heard someone scream but he didn’t see what happened, because he was already on his way out the door.

He juddered the key into the cage lock, knocked the release, and stumbled out of the steel frame while it was still opening. Even after being out of it for a little while with the mammoths, he still smacked into a wall and had to slow right down.

The need to find a cupboard and hide it in was crushing. It shocked him as much as the gunshot. He was strong enough to hurl any one of those security officers aside, and naïvely, he had spent a lot of his life wondering why more people didn’t just jump on terrorists when they pulled out a gun in a shopping centre. The answer was paralysingly straightforward. It was the visceral kind of fear he had never had before, never, not in the flood in London, not looking down the barrel of naturalisation, not once, because he had never once been about to die right now and that was as different from the dull constricting I-might-die-in-two-weeks fear as a dragon was from a snake.

As well as he could, feeling peculiar and swimmy now even though the gunshot wound still didn’t hurt, he ran back along the corridor, towards Gale’s door, wondering what in God’s name he could say to the praetorians guarding it to convince them to let him through, all blood-soaked and cageless.

When he stumbled round the corner, only one of them was there. Just tilting open Gale’s door, gun drawn, even though the door had been locked and no one was in there—no one could be in there—but Gale.

He had no idea what to do. Distract them? But then maybe he would get shot, again; but if he didn’t, could he really move fast enough to knock out a praetorian in body armour? Probably it wasn’t a fifty-fifty choice, probably there was a right answer, but there was no time and all he could think was that he was only thirty seconds out of the cage and uncoordinated. He had as much chance of ricocheting off a wall as doing anything useful. At least if he said something, and loud enough, Gale would hear.

“Hi!” His voice came out high and mad-sounding. “Are you moving the Senator to a safe room? Thank God. It’s insane, someone opened fire, and now—can I come with you?”

It made the officer jump, and then there was an eerie lag in which they noticed he wasn’t wearing his cage, and that he was already covered in blood.

The gun swung up towards him, but he had been watching for it, and he was quicker.

It was just a smack. That was all. He didn’t close his fist, he was sure of it, even later when he went over it thousands of times.

But he was straight out of the cage, and you never knew what your strength was in that five minutes, and instead of banging into the wall like he’d wanted them to, the security officer smashed into it sideways. He swung away too slowly to avoid a spray of blood across his face. It froze him. He couldn’t look. He would only have had to turn his head another inch to the left, but the bones in his neck wouldn’t move, and a childish voice in the back of his mind said that if he didn’t look it wasn’t real yet, it couldn’t be, you couldn’t do a thing like that by accident, you couldn’t.

On the floor, by his shoes, there were three teeth.

The door was half open. Gale came through it slowly, and didn’t flinch. Instead, they picked up the security officer’s gun, mimed to January to cover his ears, and then fired straight down into the body. He swung away so he wouldn’t see, but he knew what had happened. Evidence obliterated. It would look like a terrible gunshot wound now, instead of—instead of.

Gale turned the gun around in their own hands and pressed down hard on the barrel. He didn’t understand, and then did: they were making it look like they’d taken the gun off the officer while the officer was aiming it at them. Fingerprints all in the right place. That was how you did it, wasn’t it, you snatched the barrel and twisted it sideways and hoped to God you didn’t get a bullet in the stomach on the way? He had no idea.

“Is that your blood?”

He still couldn’t look.

“January,” Gale said, very soft. They brushed his cheek. It was a powerful enough thing to snap him back into himself, more or less. Very lightly, they tilted him away from the body, and that just kissed his ribs against theirs. He turned to stone, terrified he was going to hurt them if he breathed, even while his heart swelled painfully with knowing that they didn’t think he would.