Page 106 of The Mars House

They were at the top of the last staircase. The windows of the tower room were just high enough to catch the glimmer of the lights on the rig, from the welding torches. The night shift were still working.

What if people refused to do it?

He could try being very straightforward and calm. That worked.

Or, a fevered voice in his head clarified, it worked if you were Aubrey Gale; if you looked like the emperor of somewhere and it was basically unthinkable to disobey.

If you were just a January, it seemed a lot less likely.

Grandmother strength, that was what this required. He didn’t have it.

He jumped when a message flared in his glasses. It was from Gale.

Livestream your feed. The news services need to see what people are being forced to do.

Right; right.

Way down the tower, perhaps even from the ground floor, someone was yelling in Mandarin to get the internet shut off. Someone else—who sounded a lot like Dr Molotov—was yelling back that it wasn’t that simple, there were laws to prevent that if there was sufficient power to maintain the servers, and you had to get consent from Lao Zi, the AI who oversaw those servers, and Zi was emphatically not going to turn them off just for a politician’s convenience. Their voices carried all the way up, pin-sharp.

“Then shut down Lao Zi!”

“You realize they can hear you!” Molotov shouted. “You’ll be lucky if they don’t lock you in a freezer! They have coding that allows for self-defence, you lunatic!”

January flicked his eyes into the corner of his right lens, opened a random Songshu social media account, he didn’t even know which one, and started to film.

“Okay; break the windows,” he said briskly, doing his best impression of Val. Val didn’t look like the emperor of anywhere, but everyone always did what she said. “We’re going to jump. We can survive a fall at terminal velocity here. It’ll be a bang when we hit the ground, but not enough to break bones. The praetorians can’t follow us. When you get to the ground, run for the warehouse; there’ll be heavy-weather gear waiting for us. It’s going to be really cold, but it won’t be for long.”

“Are you sure about this?” the young man with the elderly father said, gone shrill.

He kicked out the nearest window. He felt as though he’d barely touched it before the glass shattered and rained outward incredibly, delicately slowly. “It’s this or get shot. I’m sorry, but we have to go.”

Glass broke everywhere as people smashed through the windows. The wind and the dust and the cold poured in.

“Anyone in a cage, get out of it now,” January said, having to call louder over the whistling. “You don’t want to hit the ground still wearing one.”

The last few closed cages shushed open, and people ringed the edge, hair spinning in the wind and clothes snapping. Instantly it was freezing, in the way that didn’t just feel uncomfortable, but dangerous.

January looked back at the door. He could hear the praetorians on the stairs now. They would have heard the glass breaking.

Someone tugged his sleeve. He looked round, found no one, then looked down. It was Yuan. There was no sign of his mother.

From so high, he could see the mammoth roads in the forest. They went single file and threaded slim ways through the pines. Beyond them, the colossal skeleton of the rig stretched way into the sky.

Right across from him, the titan trees sighed.

He scooped Yuan up and let himself fall.

The tower was perhaps five hundred feet high. On Earth, it would have taken about six seconds, and he would have fallen at close to a hundred and forty miles per hour. But here, it felt like flying, and it felt like years in the air. There was time to be scared and then time left over to see that there was no need to be, and time still after that to feel like there was nothing else in the world but the air and the dust and the trees.

Even falling so slowly, the ground rushed up and smacked him hard. He rolled a few yards, trying to cushion Yuan, though he wasn’t sure he was a very good cushion, and he was glad it was grass and not concrete. He skinned his knuckles and knocked chips out of his elbows and knees all the same. Around him, the ground juddered as the others hit it too. He saw one person break their ankle, but others stood up nearly straightaway. He hoped adrenaline wasn’t masking a chest full of broken ribs and punctured lungs. No; no. He could breathe.

He looked up in time to see the last few people falling. They were points of light; because, he realized, they were filming the fall.

“Are you okay?” he asked Yuan, who was so tiny and so fragile it seemed impossible, but he uncurled and sat up in January’s arms.

“Can we do it again?” Yuan asked joyfully.

January laughed a horrible not-laugh. “Maybe later, tiny bear.”