Page 131 of The Mars House

Still. River was right about the consulship. They were a maddening pedant. They weren’t going to win any elections. One lecture about the etymology of “election” later and anyone in their right mind would rather eat their own eyes than vote in the obnoxious professor. And that was even if, after months of rehabilitation and struggling with the injury and a prosthetic, River even wanted to keep up the consulship bid.

It would be fine.

It would.

The spring and half the summer later, Aubrey let themselves into River’s room after Kasha and folded into the spare chair, their own old chair, and put the screen on. River had done the rounds. Influencers, broadcasters, even newspapers, the serious-journalism ones. In a wheelchair, looking thin and battered and heroic and unbroken; and of course, what they were talking about was the naturalisation drive.

Cover of Vogue.

Aubrey veered between thinking River really believed in cage bans and closed borders, and being convinced they had just latched onto the big divisive issue that could propel them up to Jade Hill. Watching them, it was hard to tell. But whichever it was, losing a leg had done exactly zero to the campaign except skyrocket the poll ratings. It was official as of yesterday. Aubrey Gale was level with Consul Song.

Aubrey was fast losing faith in the voting public of Mars.

The door opened and River came in, looking exhausted. Solly Francis and that horrifying Ren creature were with them. Aubrey got up fast so that nobody would sit on them thinking they were an empty chair. Kasha bounded up and jumped into River’s lap.

Traitor dog.

They were all talking about campaign things; ratings, how different issues polled in different boroughs of the city, a surprising uptick of newly naturalised voters in Americatown who thought the new House Gale policies were a brilliant idea. It was Last on the Bus syndrome. You jumped on just in time, and felt the most immense smugness at seeing the door slam in the face of the person right behind you.

Aubrey stood in the corner, making notes about what they said so they could review it later, and waited for Solly and Ren to leave. Then they waited some more, sitting on the floor, for River to take the evening dose of painkillers that would more or less get them through the night. And waited for them to go to bed.

Aubrey stood at the side of the bed, looking down at them. Awake, River was sharp, so sharp you tended to cut yourself trying to have a conversation. But asleep, Aubrey could see how they’d looked when they were little; when they’d been five or six and scared of Kali’s evil cat.

Aubrey had never missed anyone more than they missed that child-River.

But there were two important facts here. One: the consular campaign wasn’t going away by itself. Two: Aubrey could not be Consul.

You couldn’t fight an election if you never slept and your staff thought you were going insane. So that was what Aubrey was going to make them think.

Hating it, hating how nothing stopped them and no thunderbolt blasted them through a wall and no angel appeared, Aubrey knelt on the edge of the bed and pressed both hands round River’s neck. Very lightly, just enough to interrupt their breathing but not to hurt.

Of course they flew awake, and of course they could see nothing. River gripped at Aubrey’s wrists, trying to tear them off, but they had only been out of hospital for two months, and they were weak from it. It was much harder to keep doing it than Aubrey had thought. They’d thought they were angry enough, after everything, but it was impossible to keep all the reasons front and centre. All they could see was River as a toddler, bubbly and happy.

Aubrey let them go after a minute or so—after that both of them were streaming tears—and then curled up in the corner as Sasha burst in, then Dr Okonkwo. Both of them listened to River’s amazingly put-together account of what had happened, and exchanged exactly the concerned kind of look Aubrey had been hoping for.

The weeks dragged. Aubrey shadowed River everywhere, writing down every conversation and every meeting, all marked clearly by date, and cross-referenced with sticky notes. Because River would remember. River remembered the names of people they’d met once on a building site. So Aubrey filled notebook after notebook. It was better than taking recordings. To write, you had to rethink things, and re-remember.

It was exhausting and it was incredibly boring. Aubrey spent a lot of time staring hard at clocks, willing ten in the evening to creep round, because that was when River stopped working and went back to mammoth transcripts alone in the room, and that was when Aubrey could escape and go out for a proper walk outside with Kasha. People noticed that Kasha seemed to be going out by herself a lot, but she was an independent dog and she never misbehaved, so nothing ever came of it. Aubrey just had to be careful about throwing things for her.

The drones were a real pain. It was, however, a serious case of hoisted by your own petard.

After the fourth or fifth instance of faked sleep paralysis hallucinations, River had invited in the reality show cameras. Mx Francis was overjoyed, Mx Ren swore a lot, and Sasha seemed tentatively pleased, because more cameras meant better security. River never said it, not even to Dr Okonkwo, but it wasn’t for the election. It was nothing to do with fame. It was that they were so pissing confident in the integrity of their own mind that despite everyone telling them otherwise, they weren’t convinced they were hallucinating at all. The cameras were to see if anyone, anywhere, would see something strange.

And so Aubrey had to be more careful than ever.

Sometimes they had to open or close doors. Sometimes there was no one to follow, not even Kasha. It became well known that there was a ghost at Songshu. Some people murmured that maybe it was Max, maybe Max was dead; those rumours were everywhere, but in the face of no useable evidence from River’s halo, all River had to do was shrug it off.

Sometimes it wasn’t so straightforward. Getting food became a lot harder. It was one thing to sneak meals out of the kitchens in such a way that the cooks wouldn’t notice there was any missing; in a place like Songshu it would have been impossible to keep track of exactly what five hundred people were eating. But there were permanent camera rigs in there now. You couldn’t just open a fridge and take out some salad. Doors opening and closing was a spooky thing people could write off, but floating salad wasn’t. Aubrey had to start putting duct tape over the cameras whenever they had to fetch anything. It was a shabby way of doing it, and of course the producers and the security office kept taking the cameras apart to try and work out why they kept blacking out for five or ten minutes, and then puzzling over the sticky residue, but Aubrey had no idea how to hack into a camera feed or loop footage or anything like that.

And then finally, finally, after River had been on the new prosthesis for most of the autumn, the ceaseless medical appointments faded away.

It was time.

There was a problem.

Aubrey hadn’t talked to anyone for months. They didn’t realize how debilitating that was until one Saturday, when River stayed in bed with a cold and Aubrey decided to have a day off and go down to Tharsis and not be invisible for a while. It was shocking how badly it went.

They didn’t even get down the Valley. They were on the train when someone asked them, very politely and ordinarily, whether it was easy to get to Benin Gate from the station. The map haptics were always glitchy right by the Valley wall, something to do with satellite signals.