Page 21 of The Mars House

When he opened the door, expecting the post, he jolted right back and slammed down onto one knee, because Aubrey Gale was on the other side.

They were dressed in floor-length black, sashed with red, the fabric glittering with solar circuitry. They seemed wrong for the elevator in a creaky nuclear plant repurposed haphazard for cheap housing. They looked like one of those spirits from Tang dynasty novels who sometimes appeared by a holy mountain to offer someone a prophecy, or a sword.

“Hi. May I come in?” Gale said, looking past him into the little apartment. From the lights inside the lift, it must have seemed dark.

January shook his head and then managed to get his voice back. His cage was in the corner where he’d left it. He hadn’t even lit any candles; he was just moving about in the gloom of what little daylight made it through the bubble wrap over the window. “It’s a mess.”

“It is not,” Gale said, and came in anyway, almost too tall for the ceiling. They paused in the middle of the floor as if they had never seen anywhere like it. Probably they hadn’t. “Get up. Please.”

“Is there anything I can get you?” January asked, hoping desperately it wasn’t going to be that long a visit. “I’ve got coffee.”

He’d have to use his charge card to get the electricity to boil the water. It wasn’t much, it was fine. It was fine. He could spend what he had. He was going to the centre.

Gale looked nearly as horrified by the idea as January felt. “Yes, please.”

They both stood paralysed for another infinite second. January had never felt so conscious of his own strength. But the apartment wasn’t big enough to give Gale the usual courteous four-metre radius. January backed against the window to make it clear he would have liked to. “I’ll just . . .” He pointed at the cage, which was on Gale’s other side, to warn them he was going to have to go by.

Gale looked too and January saw them decide they’d rather have him uncaged than pass them a few inches away. “No, no. It’s okay.”

January swallowed, and held out his card. Right out, the whole length of his arm, still slightly out of Gale’s reach, so that Gale could choose to step forward and take it, not have it shoved into their space. “If you could plug that in, then. It’s—the dock is behind you.”

Gale waved the card away and flicked their own into the charge dock. The lights came up, and the heating coughed as the fan unit woke up, and the wall display blinked sleepily as it connected to the internet again. January had to stand on a chair to work the dials on the heating unit, but Gale only had to reach a little. They turned it right up.

“You don’t have to,” he started, excruciated. He had never turned the unit up to full strength. Seeing the display go up to twenty-four degrees made his stomach knot. It was so expensive.

“I’m this close to building a campfire in the middle of the floor,” Gale told him. “It’s freezing outside. I’m sure you’re very hardy and so forth, but I am a spoilt indoors person.”

It was the most spectacularly good-mannered lie January had ever experienced. Gale was not too cold; they had taken their coat off in the lift. Generations-long naturalised people were usually genetically modified for the cold. The heater at full blast would feel like a sauna for Gale. This was for him.

He coughed over the need to say thank you. He couldn’t stand to. There was something about their good manners that felt aggressive. “Sit wherever you like.”

Gale hesitated, and so January retreated to the other wall. Anyone watching the two of them from above could have been forgiven for thinking of magnets with their repelling poles pointed at each other.

Gale sat down in the chair that faced away from the window, where the bubble wrap had three quarters fallen off while January had been away. They sat sideways to see out, looking utterly out of place in the shabby little kitchen, against the industrial backdrop of the warehouses and cranes and the graffiti-covered metro bridge. In the street ten floors below, shadowy figures struggled against the dust, which was still as strong as ever. Gale, though, was immaculate; there was no dust on their clothes, and they weren’t carrying a mask. There must have been a car right outside.

When he risked a glance back, Gale was weighing a teaspoon January had left on the table, moving their hand slowly up and down to feel how heavy it was. A lot heavier—three times heavier—than a normal spoon. It had EARTHSTRONG LIVING stamped onto the back of the handle. Dismayed, January realized that all his cups were from the same company. Everything was weighted to keep him from hurling it across the room while he was out of his cage.

“I, um—are you able to lift this okay?” he asked, and held out a cup, then realized they would almost have to touch him if they were to take it from him. He put it down on the table and edged it nearer to them, and stood away.

Gale took it with both hands. Even so, January saw their arms dip. It must have felt like being asked if they could comfortably drink from a cannonball. “You wouldn’t happen to have a glass?” they said.

Feeling ridiculous, January gave them a glass tumbler, but in front of someone so glamorous as Gale, it didn’t look silly, just chic.

Mercifully, the kettle pinged. He poured the water out over the coffee in the single-person cafetière, and made himself a cup of tea. He didn’t like tea, he only kept it in case of visitors, but he didn’t have another cafetière. He moved the other chair as far from Gale as he could, which, even so, was only about one length of his own arm. Then he took everything across and set it down very, very slowly so that Gale could see he was in no danger of sending anything flying, and eased into the other chair. He had to lock his teeth together when it creaked under his weight.

“I tried to call ahead,” Gale said. They were moving slowly too, and it made him uncomfortable in a sourceless kind of way until he finally chased down the reason: it was how people moved around dogs that were known to bite. “I’m sorry for just showing up.”

“No, it’s okay. I’ve . . . not been good at answering calls. It’s always lawyers or journalists.”

Gale must have seen the thought cross his face, because for a fraction of a second, they looked as awkward and as unhappy as he felt, and studied the coffee instead of him. Not having that razor stare on him was a relief.

“Have you filed a wrongful dismissal suit against the factory yet?” Gale asked.

January tried to tell if it was some kind of dry, rich-person joke. “No. I don’t have money for lawyers and anyway, it wasn’t a wrongful dismissal.”

Gale was looking at the single-cup-sized cafetière as if it had done something awful. January felt anxious, though he was certain it was clean. It wasn’t heavy. He hadn’t been able to get one from the special Earthstrong company, which seemed to think that Earthstrongers only bothered with tea. “No. Rich and powerful people should be frightened regularly. Keeps us normal.”

By way of a reason not to say anything, January lit the little lamp between them. It was illegal, but dodgy biofuel liberated from the reject barrels round the back of Silo 4 was cheaper per minute of light than the electric lamp.