Page 119 of The Mars House

“Sasha!” he yelled.

He heard a scramble in the next tent, and then Sasha pulled aside the tent flap. “What?”

“Is the Senator out here?”

“No, I thought they were . . . that’s a lot of blood.”

January swallowed. “I think they might have done something stupid.”

Sasha stared at him but had no time to say anything, because the loudspeakers in the trees that usually sounded the mammoth siren blasted to life.

Everyone in the woods. It’s safe. You can come back inside.

It was Gale’s voice.

“Why would they go to the house?” Sasha said hoarsely. “Christ, why didn’t you stop them? What did they trade, to get us all back in safely?”

Something they couldn’t afford, January was sure.

Sasha caught the front of his shirt. “If we get back and find them hanged over the front door, I will skin you alive.”

“Yeah,” he whispered. “Fair enough.”

Dr Okonkwo gave him more painkillers, and something in a very emergency-looking syringe that might have been adrenaline. It got him upright, and he felt normal again in a frenetic buzzy way, but they said it would only last about half an hour and then he’d crash. When he asked what happened then, they made an unwilling noise and said he’d better be close to a lot of medical supplies by then.

Sasha looked at him like they were happily anticipating watching him die in a ditch on the way, although it was important that he didn’t, because he was the only one with any sense of direction left.

Yuan cried when January tried to hand him to Dr Okonkwo and even when he tried again with Solly, who was the friendliest-looking person in the worlds, and in the end, January had to carry him on his good side. Yuan stayed staunch even when Dr Okonkwo got cross with him.

“Leave him alone, he’s scared,” January said, too tired despite the adrenaline to be diplomatic. “You’re all gigantic, you look scary even to me.”

Dr Okonkwo bristled and Solly looked puzzled, just like the Consul had done. Feeling hopeless, he wanted to ask why everyone had such a mental block about understanding how a tiny child might think someone seven feet tall and brusque was alarming.

“Where’s Senator Gale?” Yuan said miserably.

“Inside, little bear,” January promised, hoping to God he wasn’t lying. Then he hesitated, because it had just struck him how strange it was that Yuan wanted Gale, not his mum. “And your mum too, I hope.”

Yuan shook his head. “She died when I was a baby.”

January’s brain felt like he’d accidentally dropped it in a washing machine. “Who was that lady you were with before?”

“That’s Mrs Li. She looks after me sometimes. And Jenny. And Mr Hafiz.” He put his head on January’s shoulder and didn’t elaborate.

January hugged him closer. “Then I bet Mrs Li and Jenny and Mr Hafiz are really worried about you.”

“No. They don’t love me,” Yuan said, with the devastating clarity that tiny children sometimes have.

50

In the whirling dust, he caught snatches of things as they made the walk back to Songshu. Without internet, there were no highlights in his lenses to show him where the path was among the groaning pines. Once, he tripped into a mammoth footprint, fully five inches deep in what had used to be mud from a stream but was now solid, parched earth. Twice, people rode past their group on horseback, heading in the opposite direction, towards the wrecked railway track. Once there was a wagon. And in a fits-and-starts stream, people walking in heat suits, carrying kids and often carrying cages.

Even though he did know which direction he needed to be going, he lost the path twice. It was ludicrous: on a clear day Songshu would have been right in front of them all, obvious above the trees, but it might as well have been a thousand miles away in the roiling brown of the storm. Sasha had told everyone what to do if you got separated from everyone else—find a tree, find the markings on the trees, they all point towards Songshu, sometimes you have to feel for them—and shook their head when January protested that he could just use the compass on his phone.

“Mars has no north. Compasses point to Athena.”

He could see it now, in the ribbon breaks in the dust way up in the atmosphere. Even from so far away, it was obviously not a natural moon. You could make out the hull and the great machinery that had been used to tow it into place.

He’d seen Athena on the Crossing, but he’d forgotten about it. Mars’s core didn’t spin, so there was no natural magnetosphere—and therefore nothing to keep the air where it was meant to be rather than floating off into space, not to mention no magnetic north and south. Until, that was, they built Athena. It was a gigantic electromagnet, and it sailed a planet-width ahead of Mars on its way around the Sun. Behind it, in an invisible comet-tail, its electromagnetic field hugged the world, and did exactly the same job a magnetosphere did. Without it, everything on Mars would die. Conspiracy theorists always talked about how Earth sabotage meant Athena might fail at any moment, but everyone else agreed it was good for about five thousand years.