Page 114 of The Mars House

Sasha stepped in front of River, fast. Of course they didn’t recognise Aubrey. “Step back please.”

“Get out of the way, Sasha, what—River, if this is some kind of involved, insane joke—”

It was one of those moments where the world spun on a penny. Or rather, it spun on Sasha. They looked between Aubrey and River, and River saw them realize what had happened.

And then saw them decide to pretend not to.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” Sasha said to Aubrey, and guided them towards the door.

“Sasha, it’s me, don’t—that isn’t Aubrey Gale! When people find out about this you’ll be in prison for—I’m going to the papers!”

“No, you’re not,” River said quietly. “Or there will be two of us with things to say, and two of us under the halo.”

Aubrey stared, and River’s heart smashed under the jackhammer of that stare, because it wasn’t angry any more. It was hurt and betrayed, and all the other horrible things they had hoped so badly not to see. Aubrey wasn’t the foul-tempered senator now. They were Real Aubrey, the one who’d come to the university to look after River during flu season, the one who had propelled River into clubs and music festivals with all their popular friends and smacked down anyone who tried to say River was boring, who still insisted, even now, on cooking all the New Year food for the whole of Songshu together, just the two of them and the music on loud.

“You’re free,” River said, voice shaking too badly to control. They felt like they were falling. They’d been watching the cliff edge get closer and closer all this month, they had put on the gear to survive the fall, updated records, changed banking details, made sure that the DNA samples in the infirmary were switched, but now that it was here, the gravity was shockingly strong, and just for a few instants, they had a mad sense that they could just grasp a tiny corner of an understanding of what it must have felt like for those doomed people forced into the orbit of Earth or Jupiter on the hulks. “You can live however you like. You can be who you like.”

“Fine,” Aubrey said, very soft. Real Aubrey vanished again then. “I will. But one day, I’m not just going to kill you. I’m going to drive you out of your obnoxious righteous mind, and make you watch the world come down around you, I will burn this place down, and then I might kill you, if you ask me politely enough.”

“Time to go,” Sasha said, impossible to bypass.

River sank down into a chair and had to stare into space. Kasha snuffled up and put her paw on their wrist, full of sympathy. River hugged her. She was Aubrey’s dog, and suddenly stealing even the dog was worse than anything. They had to sit and stare at her, and slowly get used to the fact that rather than having just planned and thought about doing a terrible thing, they had done it now. They were always going to have done it; they were always going to be the person who had it in them to do something so bad it sounded like it was from some medieval legend.

They hadn’t left Aubrey with nothing. There was a bank account. They’d never want for anything.

Kasha tried to get into River’s lap. River made a fuss of her, hoping that she wouldn’t be too sad not to see Aubrey any more. Testing the halo for the mammoths, they’d had some good conversations with Kasha. She was very interested in how fish could breathe, and she was of the opinion that humans didn’t really do life right, given how little time they spent chasing llamas.

Sasha came back and sat down, and handed River a cup of coffee. “Now,” they said kindly, as if nothing remarkable had happened at all, “let’s have a little coffee break and I’ll bore you to death with navy stories.”

34 River had overheard one of them explaining it to her friends. Human writing, she said, was footprint marks that made talking sounds. Humans could discuss things with their special footprint marks, and that meant they could talk to each other over big gaps in time, as well as big distances. It was like saying something today, and somebody hearing it next week. That was why several of the mammoths were convinced humans were time-travellers. River had tried to explain that they definitely couldn’t time-travel, but the mammoths had said, Well, but you can talk to someone a hundred years in the future, right, and River had said, Yes I suppose, and the mammoths had gone off satisfied with a point properly proven, and River had had to stand there having an existential crisis.

48

After Gale stopped talking, there was a staticky silence in which everyone watched January like they were waiting for a mine to go off.

“Well—that’s a relief,” he said finally.

“It is?” said Gale.

“I’m not married to a murderer, I’m married to someone who gave up everything to do the least bad thing out of a lot of bad things. That’s winning, sort of.”

Gale nodded slightly and pulsed a certainty that they expected a horrible row about it later, once the others had gone.

January looked between them all and wondered if they would ever believe what he was going to say. Even knowing what they all knew, it was still insane, and of course, not a single one of them had seen what he’d seen.

“Kasha’s had an imaginary friend for ages, hasn’t she,” he said, starting slowly, and not sure he had chosen the right place to begin, but it was too late now. “She plays with someone who isn’t there, you all talk about it. But that isn’t what I saw, before I had these.” He touched his glasses. “She was playing with someone. They follow the Senator everywhere. They write everything down. They were at the Tiangong with us, they sat at the next table along.”

Gale was frowning. “What?”

“You—I’m sorry, Senator, but can I ask why you set up the reality show inside the house? Cameras everywhere, thousands of people watching you all the time?” He begged Gale with his eyes to be honest. “You hate it, we all hate it, and I don’t buy that it’s just for the consular campaign. You could win without all this reality show rubbish. You didn’t do it for that. Did you?”

Everyone looked at Gale.

“What’s he talking about?” Solly Francis asked.

Gale nodded slowly. “No. I didn’t. I did it so that—so that people would notice if I started to really lose it. And I hoped someone might see something,” they said, nearly too quiet. “To show I wasn’t going mad.”

“I am so far behind the two of you I’m in a different time zone,” Mx Ren said flatly.