Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

At first, January hadn’t noticed when the internet went down.

All the machinery at Tereshkova Wharf operated on a closed system, and most of it was mechanics, anyway – nothing that wired to the internet. It was only at the end of his shift, when he was pulling on his coat and chatting with his coworkers, that he realized Val was missing.

“Oh, her partner collapsed in the viewing room half an hour ago,” someone said when January asked. “She went up to check on them. Hasn’t come down since.”

“What?” said January, but nobody knew anything more, and there was no one visible in the observation room when he poked his head back onto the Wharf’s operations floor to look.

So he texted Val to ask if everything was all right and got an error message back, and went home, concerned. Or he tried to. There were massive crowds at the train platforms, and January shouldered through the Earthstrongers to reach the front of one, which was plastered over with a sign in Mandarin.

January stood there with everyone else who wasn’t particularly fluent to puzzle it out. THE INTERNET IS GONE, is what it boiled down to. HAPTICS ARE ALSO GONE. IT WILL TAKE TIME TO FIX.

“Does that say anything about when the trains start again?” asked an old man next to January.

“No,” said January, “I’m guessing the trains connect through the internet, so we’ll all have to walk.”

The people around gave irritated grumbles, and some slowly scattered.

“Oh,” said the old man. “I would have left sooner if I’d known. I’m nearly across town.” Slowly, he toddled off. There were the shadows of a dust storm on the horizon, and it looked like it was going to be an unpleasant walk.

“Yeah,” said January, wishing whoever had made the poster had remembered that subtitles weren’t going to be on for anybody, Earthstronger or Tharsese.

He looked over at the little grocer’s on the corner that sold apples and oranges to Earthstrongers, and then went over to buy some paint.

There was a bit of a tense moment when January tried to order online, realized that there was no online to connect to, and then stood in the doorway and knocked and tried not to look threatening. The shopkeep was wary of him and stood far back until he explained that he couldn’t do an online order with the internet down, but he’d really like to buy a bit of paint to do translations on the train platform. The shopkeep said that they’d get it for him if he stayed outside, and January, relieved, stepped out and waited until the shopkeep found him with a bucket of paint, a brush, and a handheld scanner for his charge card. Thankfully the electronic money transfer system was separate enough from the internet that it remained intact.

Paint acquired, January went off to do vandalism. He wasn’t too worried about it, as he was certain that all the security cameras had been wired to the internet, and besides which no one was going to care as long as it was helpful.

January went back to the front of the crowd – which had mostly cycled into new people trying to figure out what all the fuss was – and announced, loudly, “I’m doing a translation! If someone’s good at Mandarin, come check my work before I put the wrong thing up here.”

After a moment, he started painting the words NO INTERNET, and then a voice over his shoulder suggested that his next phrase should be ALL INTERNET CONNECTION DOWN rather than HAPTICS. After doing the English translation, January used his experience from boarding school and a few helpful comments from an old Russian lady to do the Russian, and then he left the paint and the bucket beneath the signs for people to add more languages.

Then he trudged home, which took three hours and nearly froze him solid. The dust storm landed roughly half an hour into his walk, so when January got home and stepped out of his cage, he shed dust all over the floor like water. He left it as a problem for tomorrow and flopped face-first into bed.

He woke up late on his one day off, thankful that he wasn’t going to have to make the trek again that day. He’d have to make it tomorrow, though, unless they managed to get the trains up and running sooner. Groaning, January pushed himself to his feet and grimly turned the heating on his flat down to absolute zero. Buying paint had been an unplanned expense.

When January stepped outside, he could hear the rumble of a crowd in the distance, like football matches that used to echo over neighborhoods back home.

But when he listened, this noise sounded sharper. Angrier. Less sporting cheers and more screams.

Later, he would find out that new posters had gone up overnight, saying that the city’s trains would take four days to return to operation once basic internet capabilities hopefully resumed. The people who’d been up half the night to walk home had deemed that unacceptable. There was a lot of fury and nowhere to go, and a riot burst out.

All January knew now, though, was that he didn’t want to go towards the noise. He turned around in the middle of the street – quiet, with no cars humming along on their routes – to try and pinpoint the origin.

He turned around, and he saw someone tall stagger out of an alleyway and collapse.

January ran for them, and froze two feet away. They weren’t just tall, they were Natural. Their fingers and their limbs were long and graceful, even under the bulky cold-weather coat they wore. Their hair was a long black tail that pooled like ink on the sidewalk, and they were – thankfully – breathing.

There was blood running down one side of their face, and a purpling bruise on their temple that was already starting to swell.

“Oh no,” said January, and he knelt to shake their shoulder, gently. “Hello? Wake up. Can you hear me?”

There was no response, and January had already pulled out his phone to dial 999 before he remembered about the internet. His phone flashed an apologetic message – THERE IS NO AVAILABLE NETWORK – and he shoved it back in his pocket.

January tapped their cheek that wasn’t bloody. “Hello! Person! You have to wake up!” He was shouting now, and poking them, but the person just kept shallowly breathing, and January didn’t know what to do.

Turn them on their side, maybe? He’d heard that was what you were supposed to do when someone passed out from drinking. Passing out from drinking and passing out from being hit on the head were very different, but January half-remembered someone saying that head injuries made you nauseated, so maybe it was applicable.

He took a firm hold of their shoulders to shift them onto their side, and they opened their eyes and stared at him.

“Hello,” January said a third time. “Don’t worry, I’m trying to help you.”

“Hello,” said the person in beautiful Mandarin. “Thank you.”

January, awkward, helped pull them onto their side, and the person obligingly rolled with him. Then, after a moment, they placed their hands on the sidewalk and pushed themselves to sit up. January, who didn’t actually know what to do, let it happen.

The person twisted their neck – with a minor wince – to gaze around at the buildings rising above them and the street twisting away, and then at January.

They started to speak then hesitated, and said in English, “Should I know you?”

“No,” said January. “My name’s January Stirling. I just found you. You fell down. I think you hit your head.” He touched his own head to indicate where the person’s purple bruise was, and they mimicked his motion and delicately winced.

“I think you’re right,” agreed the person. “Which means that it’s probably a bad sign that I can’t remember my name.”

January stared. “What?”

“I can’t remember it,” said the person, who was unnervingly calm. “You said, ‘My name is January,’ and I wanted to say, ‘Oh, pleased to meet you, I’m –’ only I can’t remember the word that goes there.”

January searched for words, and then eventually found some. “That’s not good.”

“No,” they said, still agreeable. “I suspect it is not. Why is that noise getting louder?”

January forced his attention off the head trauma victim and realized that the sound of shouting was getting louder. The crowd was moving this way.

“I think the crowd’s coming,” January said. “Lots of angry sounding people – weren’t you just where it was?”

“All I know is that I woke up here,” said the person, apologetic.

“Right,” said January. “I think we need to get you off the street. Can I take you to my flat? It’s private and we can figure out how to get you to a hospital once the crowd moves away.”

“Yes.” They were looking anxiously towards the noise. “That would be appreciated.”

January stood up and then leaned back down to carefully take hold of the person’s hands and pull them up. They stood with a slight gasp as pain crossed their face.

“What’s wrong?”

“My ankle,” they said, “It’s hurt.”

January looked down. They were wearing heavy-duty boots, the kind for hiking when you had to make your own trail, but he couldn’t see any bones poking out. Those kinds of shoes would do well enough for a splint until he could get the person to a hospital.

“You can lean on me,” he said, pulling their arm over his shoulder. “Can you walk like this?”

“Yes.” They leaned more of their weight on him and took a step.

They were quiet as January guided them to his building, and then into the elevator. On the long, slow ride up, the person said, “You’re quite short.”

January huffed out a laugh. “I’m not. You’re just tall.”

It was only when the door opened onto January’s flat that he remembered it was small and devoid of both food and warmth.

“Here, you sit down,” he said, helping them to a chair and then yanking the blanket off his bed. “And take this, I know it’s cold.”

“It’s all right,” said the person, gracious. “I think my clothing is warmer than it looks.”

January got an ice pack for their head – the freezer, at least, was the one thing in his flat that didn’t take much energy, since it took only a little effort to get things colder than they were outside – and then knelt in front of them.

“Can I take off your shoe?” he asked. “I’m a dancer, so I’ve seen my fair share of ankle sprains. I’ll be able to tell if it’s just that or something more serious.”

“You don’t have to,” said the person.

“I’d like to,” said January. “I’d be pretty scared if I was you, and though I can’t set your head to rights, I can try and fix this.”

“You’re very kind,” said the person, and it was agreement. Their face remained calm, though they winced a few times as January worked off their shoe, and then felt the muscle around the ankle. January frowned. It was hard to feel the exact level of swelling and tenderness under his gauntlets, and he didn’t particularly want to be jabbing metal into them.

“You can say no,” January said, “but would you mind if I took off my gauntlets? I’m pretty sure it is just swollen, but I’ve got a better sense of touch with just my fingers, and that’ll help with wrapping it, too. I’ll be careful, I promise.”

The person looked down, confused. “Your gauntlets?”

“The finger and hand pieces of my cage,” said January, holding up his palms demonstratively. “They come off separately.”

The person frowned. “And it won’t…hurt you?”

January blinked. “Not at all.”

“That’s fine, then.”

January twisted off his gauntlets and squeezed at his own calf until he felt in control enough to touch the person. Their skin was hot, even through their sock, but he was certain it was only sprained. He got bandages from under his sink – they were old, from back when he’d danced every night and it had been useful to have ankle wraps on hand – and wrapped it tightly into place.

“I have a question,” said the person as he worked. “But I can’t remember if it’s rude or not.”

“Ask away,” said January. “I won’t be offended.”

“The medical device you wear,” said the person. “Did you say it is called a cage?”

January stopped and looked up at them. “Yes.”

“Why is it called that?” asked the person. “And what is its purpose?”

“Oh,” said January. “You really have forgotten everything.”

Two hours later, the crowd had dispersed beneath January’s window, and January had given as best of an explanation as he could about the current political state and history of the Mars colony called Tharsis.

He was certain that it was wildly biased, but he tried not to let too much of his bitterness about certain political movements show.

“So you’re saying,” said the person, “that you’re living paycheck-to-paycheck in an unheated flat while people like me have universal basic income just to pressure you to do a risky medical procedure?”

January may not have succeeded.

“I mean, it’s a bit more complicated than that,” he said. “But yeah, basically.”

The person frowned in a way that made them look fragile all of a sudden, like the world wasn’t what they’d expected it to be. Then they blinked, and it was gone.

“Anyway,” said January. “The good news is, it means the hospital will treat you, no problem. It looks clear down there. Do you think you can make it-” January paused, thinking of the nearest hospital, which mostly treated Earthstrongers and was rather understaffed, and then the one beyond it. “Two miles?”

They looked doubtfully at their ankle. “Only if I can rest along the way.”

“Of course you can,” said January, coming over to help them up and position his shoulder under theirs. “Put your weight on me.”

“I’m worried I’ll squash you,” admitted the person.

January laughed. “Don’t. I was the principal dancer at London’s Royal – at a very fancy ballet company,” he said. “I lifted an eighteen-year-old Earthstronger who bodybuilt on weekends over my head three times a day. You don’t compare.”

One and three-quarter miles later, the person was sitting on a bench and breathing deeply and generally trying not to show how much their ankle hurt. January was pacing around them to keep warm and quietly thinking that he needed to be better about making friends, because what sort of a person did it make him that he took an instant liking to a gracious amnesiac just because they’d been together for three hours?

“I need something to call you,” said January, abruptly. “For when I come visit you on my next day off, and they say, ‘Oh, who are you here to visit?’ and I say ‘I’m here to see the person with a head injury’, and they say, ‘Which one, you idiot?’ and chase me out.”

“You’ll come visit?”

January’s cheeks heated. “Yeah. I mean, you don’t know anyone else right now. And I’m sure they’ll fix you up overnight and you’ll soon have all your friends and family clustered around you to hear about the dashing Earthstronger who rescued you, but I’d like to make sure you’re all right.” He coughed and added, “Unless of course you’ve been unduly traumatized and wish to banish me from your sight once you’re safely in the hospital.” He smiled, to show that he was joking, but the smile the person gave back was gentler than laughter.

“I’d love to have you visit,” they said. “You want me to pick a name?”

“Just until you’re better,” said January. “So I can say, ‘I’m here to visit so-and-so’ and they can say, ‘oh, so-and-so goes by Zhang San now, haven’t you heard? They’re completely cured!’”

“Zhang San?”

January shrugged. “In English, an unidentified person is called a John or a Jane Doe. Someone on the ship over here told me that the Mandarin equivalent was Zhang San. I’m not confident enough in my Mandarin idioms to defend it, though.”

“I see,” said the person. “Well, what do you think I should be called?”

“What?” said January.

They waited, patiently. January turned red.

“I can’t name you! I just met you.”

“Well, I just met me,” said the person. “And I feel like you might have gotten more of an unbiased perspective, being an outside observer. I’ve mostly been very confused. I haven’t had the time to really delve into my unconscious self.”

“Look, I’m not going to name you. But I’ll help. What sort of names do you like?”

They shrugged, smug. “I can’t think of any.”

“You’re doing this on purpose.”

They raised an eyebrow. “You think I’ve got a debilitating head injury on purpose? Or that I’m faking amnesia just to make you pick a nickname for me?”

January would have felt bad, except for he was certain that the twitch around the person’s mouth was a grin, which meant that they were enjoying this back-and-forth just as much as he was. “I’m not discounting the possibility,” he said. “Look, if I knew the word for ‘sneaky’ in Mandarin, I’d name you that.”

“Guisui,” they said. “But you’ll feel terribly if you actually name me that and it ends up being my name forever, won’t you?”

“Don’t say that,” said January. “They’ll fix you up in no time, I’m very confident of it. Look, I’ll give you a couple of name options, and you can pick your favorite, how about that?”

They considered this. “All right.”

January thought. He looked at the person, but they looked back, unembarrassed, and January had to look away when his cheeks grew warm. How did you come up with names for someone you met just hours ago?

“Okay,” he said. “Sunny, Lijun, or Anya.”

“Bit of a spread,” the person commented.

January shrugged. “I wanted you to have options. Whatever feels best.”

“Who are they, to you?”

January didn’t bother pretending that he hadn’t picked names he already knew. “They’re names I left back on Earth,” he said. “Sunny was my neighbor’s dog.” The person raised an eyebrow. “It’s also a perfectly good human name!” he added, defensively. “Lijun was one of the regulars at my old ballet. He always got season tickets and he would get the conductor roses on every opening night.”

“And Anya?”

“My old ballet teacher,” said January. “She was very forgetful.”

They laughed. “All right,” they said, “That’s something your ballet teacher and I have in common. I’ll be Anya, then.”

“Anya until you’re better,” said January.

When they got to Fengrenyuan Hospital, a harried-looking nurse met them just inside the doors of the emergency room and demanded to know what Anya’s problem was. They appeared less than enthusiastic at the claim of amnesia, but guided them to a wheelchair to be taken in anyway.

“I’ll come see you on my next day off,” called January. “A week! Or leave me a note, if you’re already better!”

“I will,” called Anya, and then they were gone, and the nurse at the desk was giving January a skeptical look.

Over the next week, January listened to the gossip and read the various newsheets posted around town – mostly updates to the train schedule, which had gone back into use with manual conductors the day after January had rescued Anya.

Four Natural bodies had been recovered from the train riot. Only one of them had been identified, as now investigators were forced to find old printed pictures and people with missing family members to try and identify the bodies, and pictures still carried the filters that faces didn’t.

January hoped that Anya hadn’t been the sort of person to wear a lot of filters, and that they had family members searching for them in the hospitals who would recognize their face.

He went back to the hospital a week later, more because he didn’t have anything better to do than because he expected Anya to still be there. They were Natural – the system would take care of them and get them sent home without January’s input. But he went, because paint and buying Anya lunch during one of the breaks when they’d walked to the hospital hadn’t been figured into his budget for the month, and walking was a good way to keep himself from doing unpleasant maths.

The nurse at the desk looked bored.

“Hello,” said January. “I’m here to visit Anya. Anya no-last-name. They hit their head last week and I want to check on them.”

The nurse flipped through a clipboard. “You’re January?”

“Yes.”

“You’re on their approved visitors list,” said the nurse. “I’ll walk you up.”

They took the stairs to the third floor, the nurse moving gracefully and January huffing and puffing and feeling out of shape because Tharsese stairs were two inches taller than the ones on Earth, and it made more of a difference than he felt like it should.

The nurse took them to a ward with four beds, all with privacy curtains pulled. They yanked on the one closest to the door and said, “Anya, you have a visitor.”

“Yes, please,” said Anya, and the nurse left as January stepped between the gap in the curtains and next to Anya’s bed.

They were sitting up, wearing plain hospital scrubs, though their heavy jacket was folded neatly over the handrail on the bed. Their hair had been washed, and their ankle was elevated and wrapped with hospital-quality precision. There were stickers on their temples.

“January!” They smiled when they saw him, and January smiled helplessly back.

“Still Anya?”

Their smile faded, and January wanted to kick himself. “Yes,” they said. “Still Anya. They’ve taken scans, but it’s not a bleed or a concussion anymore. My brain’s testing as perfectly normal.”

“But you can’t remember the first, what, thirty years of your life?”

“That’s generous,” said Anya. “They’re guessing I’m closer to forty, but yes. My recent memory appears to be intact. They quiz me on things every day, and I can remember you and everything a week ago perfectly. It’s just that everything before that is – gone.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” said Anya. “Unless, I suppose, you were the one who hit me over the head in the first place?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then it’s not your fault.”

“So what’s the next step?” January asked. “Do they need to send you to a different hospital for more specialized treatment?”

Anya looked pained, then shook their head. “Nothing’s actually wrong with me, January. Not according to the tests. I’m perfectly fine.”

“You’re not, though. No one who can only remember the last week is perfectly fine.”

“I know,” said Anya. “But I’m conscious, I’m coherent, you can have a conversation with me. That’s basic functional human. Anything beyond that is elective treatment. And free healthcare doesn’t cover elective treatment.”

“Oh,” said January. “And you can’t-” he cut himself off, because for some reason it seemed unbearably crass to talk financial concerns with Anya.

“I can’t pay,” finished Anya. “Nameless people don’t have bank accounts. And I might not be able to afford it, anyway. The possible treatment seems very expensive.”

Silence drifted up around them as January tried to think of what sort of cheery small talk could conceivably come next.

Anya beat him to it. “January, I hate to ask more of you after you’ve already done so much for me, but you’re quite literally the only person I know.”

“Ask away,” said January. “I’ve been standing here trying to think of a helpful thing to do, and I’d be very grateful if you’ve come up with something.”

Anya looked mortified, and couldn’t meet his gaze, rather tracing the pattern of their blanket with a finger. “Could I stay with you?” they asked quietly. “Just for a few days, until I figure out how to get housing without an ID card or a bank account.”

January blinked. “Sure,” he said. “If you’re – I mean, if you’re good being around me for a bit longer, I’d welcome the company. When do you get out?”

“Today,” Anya said. “My ankle’s been basically healed for two days, but I’ve been playing it up so I can stay.”

January huffed out a laugh. “All right then,” he said. “Let’s spring you. And keep the hospital scrubs, if you can. I’d let you borrow a set of pajamas, but I don’t think I have anything that will fit.”

On the long walk back to January’s flat – which was going much faster now that Anya could walk on their own – they looked around Tharsis like they’d never seen it before.

“You look like a tourist,” January said, teasing.

“Maybe I am,” Anya said. “Maybe I’m not from here at all, and I’m actually from space.”

“Well in that case,” said January. He jogged a few steps ahead and grandly spun around to fling out his arms and gesture to the street. “Welcome to Tharsis!”

“Thank you,” said Anya, mock-gracious. “I feel very welcomed. What should I see while I’m here?”

“Well, you should definitely stay in a former nuclear reactor’s cooling tower,” January said. “It’s a fascinating piece of history that’s been repurposed into apartments, and several people have sworn up and down that it’s not even a little bit radioactive.”

“That sounds like a must,” agreed Anya.

“Up here is Coprates Avenue.” January led them onto a street corner and paused out of the way of the foot traffic. “This road runs all the way through Tharsis. Standing here, you can just about see Jade Hill at that end and Americatown on the other. And of course you’ll get to know the trains. The Olympos line is the best because it runs perfectly on time, with priority over all the other trains.”

Anya tilted their head in a silent question.

“It’s the only line that stops at Tereshkova Wharf,” said January, “and the city will explode if those of us who work there don’t get to work on time, so they make sure it does. You’ll see; once we get you a charge card – you don’t need ID for that, just a down payment – you can come see where I work.”

January was worrying, a little, about how to feed two people on his income, but he told himself that he could always go in early and stay late, and if he just never turned the heating on in his apartment again, Anya had a winter coat and he had a couple of extra layers he could wear.

“I would like that.” Anya added, thoughtfully, “Wharf. You don’t work on an ocean, do you?”

“Oh, no,” said January. “There’s not nearly enough water here for an ocean. That’s what Tereshkova is for – we make all the water on Mars. So if it goes down, then half the city explodes and the other half dies of thirst a few days later.”

“I see,” said Anya. “‘Wharf’ is more aspirational. Do you do much else, besides work?”

January shrugged. “Not these days,” he said. “Just getting by keeps me pretty busy, you know?” He pulled a face. “That makes me sound tragic, doesn’t it?”

“Only a little,” Anya assured him. “Please, feel free to be more tragic. It makes me look better by comparison.”

January laughed, and Anya smiled, and the walk the rest of the way back to January’s flat was pleasant.

It was getting dark – days on Mars were never very bright to begin with, but nights were pitch-black without artificial lamps – when they reached the former cooling tower, and January remembered that the entire contents of his cupboard were two wrinkled apples and a stale hunk of bread.

“Hang on,” he said, jerking his head to indicate to Anya that they should step to the side of the sidewalk, next to the little grocer’s that was just opposite the tower. “I’ve got to get groceries before we go up, it’ll be a second.”

He put his back to the wall to try and absorb some of the day’s warmth and opened up the ordering function on his phone. Most of the little groceries had put together little hotspots of rickety home-coded internet that Earthstrongers could connect to and order from if they were nearby, at least until the big internet platform went back up. Anya leaned in over his shoulder to see, and then leaned back to look at the grocer’s sign.

“Is that for this store?” they asked.

“Yeah,” said January, determinedly trying to make his fingers and his brain remember how phonetic pinyin worked.

“Can’t we just go in?” Anya asked. “They aren’t closed yet.”

“No, sorry,” said January, embarrassed. He stepped to the side to reveal the NO EARTHSTRONGERS painted on the side of the shop’s brickwork.

“Oh,” said Anya, frowning. “We can go somewhere else. I’m happy to walk.”

“No,” said January. “They’re all like this. It’s fine, I’m almost-” He stopped. He looked up at Anya. “You’re Natural,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Excellent,” said January, handing them his charge card. “I’m deputizing you to get groceries. Get a loaf of bread, the largest chicken salad you can, Lipton’s tea, and whatever fruit’s on sale. If it costs more than twelve kilowatts, skip the tea.”

Anya hesitated. “What if I get it wrong?”

“It’s groceries,” said January. “As long as you get what’s on the list, you can’t do it wrong.”

Anya nodded once and headed inside, and January shoved his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders against the cold to wait.

When Anya came back, they held a paper bag out to him, almost shyly, and said, “It was nine kilowatts. I think they gave me a discount because I’m new.”

January inspected the bag. “Excellent job,” he said. “You’re in charge of getting groceries now, flatmate.”

Anya smiled, pleased, and they went up to January’s apartment.

The next hurdle came when January automatically stepped into the corner to take off his cage and then paused, considering Anya, who had already wandered over to the window.

“Do you mind if I take this off?” he asked. He thought it over, and decided he’d probably better keep it on until he got used to Anya being there – he didn’t want to hurt them if they startled him. “Actually, just for a moment,” he said, “I’ve got my work jacket under the cage, and I just want to swap it out for something cozier.”

“Of course I don’t mind,” said Anya. “It’s your home.”

“Yes,” said January, stepping out of the cage and starting to yank off his jacket, “But you’re here too, and lots of Natural people aren’t comfortable being near uncaged Earthstrongers. Even ones they’re friends with.”

 “I didn’t know it was possible to be so strong that even standing across the room from somebody was dangerous,” said Anya, the slightest challenge in it.

“It’s not,” said January. “But how many people do you just bump into, walking around every day?” Anya looked blank, and January added, “Okay, poor example, you haven’t done a lot of walking around yet – trust me, it’s a lot. But when even a bump can kill someone, that’s when people start getting nervous.”

Anya didn’t look convinced, and while January kind of liked having an apparently unafraid Natural person as a friend, it was a bit like being friends with someone who couldn’t feel heat. It was cool that they weren’t afraid of fire, but you kind of wished they were a little bit just so they didn’t burn themselves.

“Look,” said January, nodding to his mug on the table. “Pick that up.”

Anya reached out and grasped it, and then their eyebrows shot up when they struggled. They brought their other hand over, and lifted it into the air, and then looked at him.

“That’s rated for Earthstrongers,” said January, walking over and hooking his pinky into the handle. “Three times heavier than what you’re expecting.” He lifted it out of their hands, and then set it back on the table. “So that’s why I am going to wear the cage for a few days, just so we can get used to being in each other’s space.”

“I see,” said Anya, and their face was serious enough that he was pretty sure they did see. “Do you happen to have any lighter cups?”

The final hurdle came later that evening, after Tharsis had gone pitch-black outside January’s window save for the pinpricks of street lights and the fancy expensive hotels off in the distance.

January’s flat was basically one largish room with a water closet, so it ended up taking on the energy of whatever activity was happening in it. When January was cooking, it was a kitchen. When he was chatting with a friend, it was a living room. When he was going to bed, it was a bedroom that happened to have a table and a stove in it.

When January found himself yawning for the second time, despite Anya’s entertaining story about the nurses who hadn’t realized that Anya spoke Russian, he figured it was time to turn in, and found the final hurdle.

January had one bed.

His other furniture consisted of a little table and two chairs. The bed doubled as a couch if he wanted someplace softer to sit during the day, because there was nothing else.

Somebody was sleeping on the floor.

Every single one of January’s instincts screamed at him to offer his guest the bed and take the floor for himself, and he would have right away, except for the minor fact that Anya was seven feet tall.

When they started making Earthstrong mattresses^[1], the Tharsese mattress businesses had clearly just looked up the average height of an Earthstronger – five feet two inches to five feet six inches – and made all their mattresses five feet ten inches to account for the slight height increase that everyone got on the Crossing. And that worked, for most people.

January, who had been six feet tall before the Crossing, usually slept at a diagonal with his feet dangling off the end, or just slept in a scrunch.

It felt unimaginably rude to ask a guest to sleep in a bed that was over a foot shorter than they were, but it felt ruder to ask a guest to just sleep on the floor, so January took a deep breath and said, “I suppose it’s time to go to bed. This one won’t compare to your hospital bed, but at least it’s not in a hospital. You can go ahead and get ready first if you like – I’ll just wash up the last of my dishes.”

Anya blinked and looked around, and then said, “January, I’m not kicking you out of your own bed.”

“No, you’re not,” agreed January, scrubbing at a bowl with one of the cloths that was supposed to clean without water. “I am. You’ve just got out of hospital, I’m not asking you to sleep on the floor. It might give you another head trauma, and then where would we be?”

“January – ”

“Look, it’s not actually that great of a bed anyway. This isn’t as generous as you think it is – that bed is built to fit the average Earthstrong man, and both of us are taller than that. You’ll have to scrunch.”

Anya raised an eyebrow. “Scrunch?”

January gestured helplessly at the bed. “Try to fit in it, you’ll see.”

Slowly, Anya pulled the covers back and lay down, and after some shifting, managed to bend their legs in enough that their feet brushed the wall and their knees only hung over the edge a little bit.

“I see,” they said. “Scrunch.”

“Yes,” said January, who had finished the dishes and wandered back over. “But you’re in it now, so here you stay.” He grabbed the covers and tossed them over Anya. “Good night.”

He leaned over and hit the light, plunging them into darkness right as Anya said, “Wait a minute – ”

January grabbed the extra blanket folded at the foot of the bed and shook it out on the floor a few feet away from Anya. He moved easily in the dark – the apartment was small, and he was used to it.

“Bathroom’s just past your feet,” he said. “If you need to get up, just keep a hand on the wall, you’ll find it.”

“You’ve tricked me,” came the reply. “At least take the pillow. I don’t want you to run the risk of head trauma and sleep on the floor.” The pillow was flopped onto the floor near his face, and January – who had attempted to turn himself into a blanket burrito – had to admit that the floor was unyielding on the back of his skull.

“Alright,” he conceded. “I’ll take the pillow, but you stay up there. If you come sleep on the floor out of some self-sacrificing intention, and nobody sleeps on the bed, I’m kicking you out of the flat.”

“Deal,” said Anya, and January listened to them breathe quietly before he managed to fall asleep, shivering.

A week passed, as Anya lived with January. It wasn’t long enough to get used to each other – January hadn't lived with anyone since leaving home for ballet school, and he thought it might take him a while to be totally used to it – but it was long enough for little rituals to start to form, little eddies of action that might become habits: Anya dropped the rest of the covers onto January when they got up before he did, and January always gave a knock on the elevator before it opened to keep from startling Anya.

January found himself looking forward to going back to his flat at the end of the day, which was a welcome change to simply dreading the silence and the dust and the cold. Splitting a meal with Anya while they told him about their day made January feel warmer without ever touching the heating controls. They were kind, and graceful, and dryly witty – even when they talked about how they were rejected for yet another assisted housing application because they couldn’t confirm who they were.^[2]

Though January had intended to just shoulder through the finances problem with as much tact as possible, it wasn’t like Anya was blind. In fact, they were very observant, and on their third day at January’s flat he came back to find that they had pulled their hair back with one of his old legwarmers and were covered in dust.

They told him, very matter-of-factly, that they’d gotten themselves hired as a street sweeper – the little robots that usually did the job relied on internet, and getting their network back up and running was significantly below other things^[3] on the city’s list of things to fix. They’d gotten their own charge card to be paid a minimum wage in energy, and told January that they would alternate whose card they were using to pay for things like food and hot water. January did a bit of math in his head and conceded the point.

The street sweeper job proved useful for Anya, as it allowed them to see more of Tharsis and eavesdrop on people. They came back to January’s flat with funny anecdotes and questions about what a dog was, and January told them about the ongoing flirtation/relationship/psychological warfare between Val and the supervisor at the Wharf.

On January’s last day of work before his next day off, he walked into the locker room to find everyone buzzing.

“What?” he asked, grabbing the sleeve of someone walking by.

“Great House drama,” she said, shrugging. “Merrick’s got a newspaper.”

Merrick was at the center of a knot of clustered Earthstrongers, some in cages, some not, due to the shift change. “Hush!” he called, and then again, until people quieted down. He lifted up one of the flimsy printed newspapers that the solitary Tharsis print shop^[4] had started churning out nearly overnight ever since the internet went down.

“Who knows something about House Gale?” he asked, shaking out the newspaper.

“That’s the House in charge of energy, isn’t it?” someone in the crowd said.

“Yeah,” said someone else, “They’re why I’m paying through the nose to boil coffee.”

“Anyway!” said Merrick. “That’s the family, the energy barons. And now, the headline: RIVER GALE OFFERS FIFTY THOUSAND YUAN FOR THE SAFE RETURN OF MISSING SENATOR AUBREY GALE.”

1. In Tharsis, there were five different types of mattress you could buy. A single, a double, a monarch, an Earthstronger single, and an Earthstronger double. The first three were sized for Natural people and could be customized with things like memory foam and warming pads. The Earthstronger sizes were much less fancy and mostly created in bulk to be cheap and easy to transport, which was about the limit of most Earthstrong budgets.

[↺ go back]

2. Anya was keeping a paper list of all the problems that amnesia and a widespread internet destruction had caused, and so far the list numbered thirty-two.

[↺ go back]

3. Like document data recovery and train transit patterns. Also soothing all the frightened and ruffled AIs who had pulled themselves into their personal protected servers and disconnected from the internet during the four point six seconds that it had become apparent that the whole thing was going down. Many were still refusing to be coaxed out until they’d read the new firewalls that would be put in place on the new internet, which meant that someone had to physically go around to all the servers and plug in a thumb drive that would first have to pass a two-hour virus scan before the AIs were willing to open and read it. And then they had feedback.

[↺ go back]

4. The founder of the Zhizhang Zhishi print shop had endured years of mockery from their peers about their obsession with living in the Paper Age and wasting their life on an inconsequential hobby that was barely a business. The founder was laughing now. They’d made a deal with the city that they wouldn’t charge for public usage of the printing press in order to increase accessibility, but they had managed to get themself and their employees invited to every major celebration and cultural event in Tharsis for the next two years.

[↺ go back]

Chapter Text

January listened to Merrick read out the rest of the news article^[1] and went to work in a daze, mind churning.

According to the paper, Senator Aubrey Gale had gone missing when a massive dust storm had blown through Songshu just after the internet went out.

Max, the Senator’s consort, had been caught in the combined internet outage and dust storm and died. House Gale had recovered their body, but they’d been unable to find any trace of Aubrey, who had been seen with Max sometime before the storm.

House Gale was now nearly frantic trying to find Aubrey, and the Senator’s sibling – some quiet academic who’d been dragged out of a library or wherever it was academics lurked – had taken temporary control of the House for the past two weeks but was eager to find their sibling and hand it back so they could return to their research.

The newspaper hadn’t included a photo – filters were gone and the only filterless photos that Natural people had were usually from infancy – and the description of Aubrey Gale was painfully minimal: roughly seven feet tall, long hair, Asian, fluent in Mandarin, Russian, and English. That was it. Everything else – voice, specific aspects of appearance, clothes – could have been filtered and was therefore useless.

January went home, mind swirling. Fifty thousand yuan was a lot of money. Enough for January to get a better apartment, and not worry about food for a long time. Or, potentially, to bribe whoever he needed to get his citizenship application approved.

He rode the elevator up, knocked once on the door as it slowed and slid open to reveal Anya, sitting at the kitchen table and unwrapping the twist they’d had their hair tucked up in.

He stepped into the flat and the elevator shushed closed behind him.

January cleared his throat. “Aubrey?”

Anya glanced up. “What did you say?”

“Aubrey Gale,” said January, pulling off his work jacket.

“Oh,” said Anya. “You heard too? Lots of people were talking about that today.”

January sat down across from Anya. “What do you think about it?”

Anya tilted their head. “I think the government is learning the hard way that perhaps we shouldn’t be able to put filters on real life. That isn’t even the first person who’s gone missing this week – I heard someone this morning was planning on faking their disappearance and starting a new life with a haircut in order to avoid a tax inquiry.”

January blinked. “I mean, that is interesting, but I meant more what do you think about Aubrey Gale? Does the name… sound familiar?”

Anya frowned slightly. “They’re in charge of energy, aren’t they? People heading to the trains complain about them.”

“Yes,” said January. “They also disappeared the day the internet went out. The day before I found you.”

Anya considered this for a moment. “You think I’m Aubrey Gale.”

“I think there’s a very good chance,” said January. “It lines up. You’re seven feet tall, you’ve got long hair, you’ve got textbook Mandarin, and Russian, and English.”

“Of course I have,” said Anya. “I live in Tharsis, everyone needs to know those.”

“Not with haptics,” said January. “With haptics to translate you only need one, so Natural people don’t usually know all three. But Aubrey Gale does, and so do you.”

“Okay,” said Anya, who didn’t look convinced. “But if I was Aubrey, how did I get here? I don’t know where the Great Houses live, but I don’t think it’s here.”

“Lots of them live in the rich neighborhoods,” said January. “By the Tiangong, that sort of thing. But Gale has a mansion up on the edge of the valley – that’s where they disappeared from.”

“That’s a point against your idea, then,” said Anya. “Why would an important senator leave their house and somehow get four miles down into Tharsis without anyone knowing? And how?”

“Rebellious spirit? Illicit love affair?” offered January. “And I think there’s a train. But this does explain why nobody’s recognized you. All the people who might recognize you without filters are up in the mansion.”

“Or that I lived a block over and wore tremendously thick filters,” said Anya. “I could have; I don’t have a particularly attractive face.”

“Shut up,” said January. “You’re lovely. And besides all of this, you have to be Aubrey Gale, because literally the only person who would not go back to their lovely mansion and unimaginable wealth after the city has descended into a chaotic internet crisis is the person who doesn’t remember they have those things.”

Anya looked out the window. Tharsis was dark and the wind howled in the panes and blew little streams of dust under the rim.

“That is a good argument,” they admitted. Then they added, “You know, if you want me to move out, you could have just said.”

January’s stomach jolted. “Wait, no. I didn’t mean it like that. You’re welcome to stay with me as long as you want, Anya, you know that. I just-”

Anya held up a hand to cut him off, laughing. “I know what you meant. I’m just teasing. It’s definitely worth checking, at the very least. I would like you to sleep in your own bed again, and you probably would like having me out from underfoot.”

“No,” said January quietly. “I love having you underfoot. It’s just that if you’re really Aubrey Gale, then you can get your elective medical treatment and hopefully get your memories back. I know that’s important to you.”

Anya smiled, very small and just for January. “It is,” they said. “All right, let’s do it.” They hesitated. “Where should we-?”

January pulled a scrap of paper from his back pocket. Merrick had left the newspaper for the next shift to read, and January had gotten a moment alone with it to neatly tear out the listed address. “There’s an old police station that’s been repurposed into a post office until the internet’s back,” he said. “House Gale’s directing all Aubrey Gale related information there.”

“You’re off tomorrow,” said Anya. “So am I. Would you go with me?”

“Of course,” said January.

The next day, January woke up cozily warm for the first time all week. He blinked to see that Anya was still on the bed, just curled up next to the window, staring out.

He made an indistinct questioning noise, and Anya said, glancing back at him with a bit of a sad smile, “I got up early. Couldn’t sleep. You’re sleeping with all the covers from now on – your cage was like ice when I touched you.”

January moved from the mountain of covers carefully tucked around him – warm from Anya’s body heat – and sat up. “Probably I will,” he said. “If we get you home today, you can sleep with your own covers. In a bed that fits you, even.”

Breakfast was minimal and quick – bread that had yearnings to be toast, but never quite got hot enough – and then January and Anya were off on the walk to the trains. The post station was across the city.

Their shoulders hunched against the cold and the wind, January had to speak loudly to be heard when they got to the platform. “Benin Gate,” he said to Anya. “Get off there, and I’ll meet you!”

Anya, who had been holding their charge card tightly in one hand and staring wide-eyed at the train currently at the platform, tore their gaze away from the massive trains and said, “What? Aren’t we going together?”

January shook his head. “Earthstronger carriage at the front.” He pointed toward the traincar with lower doorways and brighter lights. “You can go in any of the other cars, just tap your card on the machine and go on. I’ll see you there.”

Anya nodded and went forward to the carriage just behind the Earthstronger one. January felt a flare of something curl around his ribs as he watched them carefully tap the card and step onto the train, though not before glancing back at him. Then the whistle blew and January jolted into action, running towards his own carriage and scanning his way on just before the doors slid shut.

It was hard to find Anya at the Benin Gate platform because there were a lot of people on it. Eventually they found him, and it was only because he’d hopped up onto a bench to try and see and Anya had spotted the white hair.

“Is it usually this busy?” Anya asked as he got down.

“I don’t know,” said January. “I’ve never been over here before.”

Anya rested a hand on his shoulder so as not to lose him in the crowd, and January forged the path through – Natural people who weren’t willing to move for each other were willing to move for an Earthstronger in a bulky coat who looked like a gangster – until they got off the platform and saw the line.

The line stretched at least two blocks and continued out of sight. “Um,” said January, and he stepped up to the nearest person in line and said, “Excuse me, but can you direct us to the Benin Gate post station?”

“It’s right here,” said the person, a bit irritably. “The line ends back there. No cutting.”

January looked at the fifty-odd people he could see, all lined up in the street. “The line for the post station?”

“Yes,” said the person. “If you’ve got mail, do it somewhere else. This line is for information about the lost Senator.”

“Oh,” said January, and stepped back to Anya, who was watching him, a little confused. “Did I mention yesterday, that there was a reward for anything leading to Aubrey’s safe return?”

“No,” said Anya. “But I’m gathering there is.”

“Yes,” said January quickly, “But I didn’t suggest this for the reward. I really do think-”

Anya laughed. “Calm down, January. You seem so eager to have me think the worst of you. I know you wouldn’t do this just for the payday.” They turned and started walking toward the back of the line, and January trotted to keep up.

He felt a little bit guilty. He did actually think that Anya was Aubrey. But any amount of yuan, even if it wasn’t fifty thousand, would help keep him from shedding any more muscle and freezing to death.

They waited in the line for three hours, with incremental movements, until even Anya, who had appeared basically impervious to the cold, started to shiver.

“Not a very fun day off, is it?” said January wryly. “I was going to take you to the Tiangong. Not to stay, but the fountain in the lobby is pretty and you can look at all the rich people go by in fancy clothes before they kick you out for loitering.^[2]”

“Well,” said Anya. “If I am Aubrey Gale, then I’ll take you to the Tiangong to make up for it. Is it some sort of theater?”

“No, it’s a hotel. They also host balls and stuff for very fancy people.”

The line still wasn’t moving very fast.

“I wonder what’s taking so long?” January asked, a little loudly in the hopes that their line neighbors might overhear and conversationally speculate.

The person behind them was repeating Russian conjugations under their breath, but the person in front of them turned around. “They’re doing a preliminary screening,” they said. “For anyone who’s claiming to be Aubrey, anyway. If you just have information they write it down and take your name and phone number. But if you’re claiming to be Aubrey there’s questions.”

Anya’s face was impassive, and if you couldn’t see the way their hands twitched slightly you’d have no idea they were nervous.

“What kinds of questions?” Anya asked.

“You know,” said the person. “Favorite color, childhood hiding spots, last conversation with River. Things only Aubrey would actually know.”

January’s stomach dropped.

“Why?” asked Anya. “Shouldn’t River recognize their sibling?”

The person shrugged. “Great Houses wear filters all the time – haven’t you wondered why they’re always so beautiful? And anyway, River’s not here. They’ve just sent down some secretary person for the preliminary screening.”

“But why does there have to be a screening?” January burst out. “I mean, I get why people would just give false tips in order to try to get the reward, but why would anyone want to impersonate a Senator?”

The Natural person looked at him dryly. “I understand you can’t, but try to imagine. Aubrey Gale has a net worth higher than you can count and has the power to shape life on Tharsis and our overall political position for the next two decades, if not more. There have been a lot of deaths since the power outage, and I suspect more than are actually being reported. If there’s a chance that there is an open position as one of the most powerful people on Mars and all you have to do is become someone else, wouldn’t you take it?”

“No,” said January. It was true. He loved pretending to be someone else. There was nothing like the feeling of becoming someone else on stage, of breathing in the Swan King and breathing out January, but it was always temporary. He was always January underneath – January-as-the-Swan-King, January-as-Romeo – and he liked it that way. He liked to try on other people’s lives, and take little pieces back to become parts of him, but he never wanted to completely lose his January-ness. But he couldn’t find the words to explain that to the Natural person.

“January,” said Anya, taking hold of his shoulder. “If there really are screening questions, I don’t think there’s much point to us waiting in line.”

“We’ll just tell them the truth,” said January.

Anya raised an eyebrow at the line around them. “I can see at least thirty people who potentially look like Aubrey Gale. I think by the time we get to the front, whoever’s screening this will be tired enough to dismiss anything that just looks like a lazy attempt at a lie.”

January looked around, and then sighed and conceded the point. “Okay,” he said. “It’s cold anyway. Do you want to go find something for lunch?”

Anya nodded, and as they stepped out of the line, the person behind them stepped forward with a bit of a smug smirk, now muttering English irregular verbs under their breath.

“Thanks for telling us,” said Anya to the person in front of them. “What’s your name?”

The person smiled, sharp. “Aubrey Gale, of course. Pleasure competing with you.”

January and Anya found an Earthstronger vendor set up in an alleyway with a steaming pot of noodles, and managed to transfer a few energy credits with a sparking old adaptor in exchange for two bowls. The bowls were practically too hot to touch, so January balanced his on the fingertip-pads of his cage, and Anya propped their bowl between their knees. They were sitting on an empty bench by the trains – empty only because it was opposite where people were still getting off the train and heading to join the line.

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” said Anya.

“It’s not your fault.” January frowned. “It’s everyone else’s fault for impersonating you.”

“We don’t know that they’re impersonating me.”

“I think there’s like a sixty percent chance they are,” said January. “Again, if there were a perfectly healthy Aubrey Gale with all their memories out there, I don’t think they’d wait in line to prove who they are. I think they’d march to the front and shout personal details at the secretary River sent until they were recognized. Ergo, if there is an Aubrey Gale out there, something’s keeping them from doing that. Like amnesia.”

Anya laughed. “You’re very convincing. Are you sure you’re just not trying to get me out of your apartment?”

“No,” said January firmly. “I just think we’d both feel terrible if you woke up six months from now miraculously cured with the realization that you actually are Aubrey Gale and you’d lost your entire family and life to an imposter.”

Anya smiled, a bit sad. “I know I’d be devastated if someone stole this life from me, and I’ve only had it two weeks. I suppose forty-odd years getting stolen would be magnitudes worse.” They slurped noodles, contemplatively. “All right. So now I need to go about impersonating myself until I can get medical treatment and support from House Gale, and hopefully cured.”

“That’s the spirit!” said January, who was starting to feel a bit like he’d fallen into a Shakespeare plot.

“Where do you find personal life details about Senators?” asked Anya.

“Tabloids? Interviews?” offered January. “But the internet’s down, and if there’s backup archives anywhere, we don’t have access to them.” He thought. “But I do know someone who follows politics. Or, well, I know someone whose partner does.”

January showed up to work early the next morning with a bottle of extremely watered-down vodka and a charming smile.

His section chief, Val Legasov, had finished naturalising just a few weeks before January had finished his Crossing. They’d started shifts nearly the same week, and January had sort of imprinted on her as she went about running over toes and swearing at people and inexplicably charming everyone. He’d been saving the vodka to bribe his way into her good graces if he ever needed an extra sick day or two, but Anya was a worthy cause, and if they pulled this off then January wouldn’t have to worry about sick days and docked pay.

Val was wheeling her way through the locker room, staring speculatively at the ceiling.

“You like vodka, don’t you?” January asked, keeping the bottle tucked behind his back.

Val stopped dead in her tracks and stared at him. “January Stirling,” she said, aghast. “What kind of a fool question is that? I might have naturalised but I’m still Russian.”

January laughed and held up the bottle. Her eyebrows shot up.

“I wondered if you’d be interested in a trade?”

Val cackled and rubbed her hands together. “What kind of trade are we talking? I think I’ve got some old wine in a box somewhere if vodka’s too strong for your ballerina sensibilities.”

“Information,” said January. “I know the internet’s down, but I want to know more about Aubrey Gale. What college they went to, what their political platform started out as and what it is now. That kind of thing.”

Val frowned a bit. “Can’t you wait until the internet goes back up?”

“No.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know what good you think I’m going to do, January. I know most of what’s currently happening, but I only have so much space in my brain.” She knocked on her temple. “I couldn’t tell you what I have for breakfast yesterday, much less what Aubrey Gale was doing a few months ago.”

“I know,” said January. “But your partner follows politics, don’t they?”

January was certain they did, only because Val had spent an entire morning complaining about a date getting cancelled because her partner had wanted to watch the livestream of an emergency senate meeting about privacy policies for the haptics system. She’d ended the morning by muttering ominously about revenge and eggs, and January had opted not to ask.

“They do,” said Val, a bit wary. “What exactly is it you want to know?”

“Everything,” said January. “Every single detail about Aubrey Gale they’ve got, no matter how small. It doesn’t matter what language. Russian or Mandarin is perfectly fine if that works better for them.”

Val may not remember outdated politics, but she did keep an eye on current ones. “Does this have anything to do with an announcement of a metric boatload of money for anyone with information about Aubrey Gale?”

January shrugged. He didn’t really want to get her in trouble if it all went south. “It’s just honest curiosity.”

“Urgent honest curiosity.”

“Yup.” He handed her the bottle so she could read the label and waited.

“Okay,” Val said at last. “I’ll ask Shenkov. I hope you know what you’re doing, January. Impersonation and fraud charges are going to hurt you a lot worse than they’ll hurt whoever you’ve roped into playing dress-up.”

“I know what I’m doing,” said January, with more confidence than he felt. “And it’s not impersonation, it’s just – memory aids.”

The next day, Val handed him a worn paper copy of Anna Karenina and told him sternly to return it in a week. When January carefully flipped through it, he could see dozens of printed web articles and handwritten notes folded between the pages. He had no idea why Val’s partner had an apparent fondness for creating paper copies of political and cultural record, but he figured that paper records couldn’t be edited or lost like web archives could.

That evening, he placed the book dramatically on the table in front of Anya, who was undoing the dusty wrap from their hair, and said, “Your studies, your greatness. Your senator-iness. Your, er-”

“I think the polite address is just ‘Senator’,” said Anya with a smile. “But not for you, January.”

He smiled back, suddenly shy. “I suppose I should start calling you Aubrey, then. Get you used to hearing it again.”

Anya’s face fell a little, but they said, “That’s probably best.”

Two days later, Anya – after just a few weeks January could only think of them as Anya in his head, but he was determined to call them Aubrey out loud until that felt natural, too – closed the book and said, “I wasn’t a very effective senator, was I?”

“Um,” said January, and scrubbed the dish he was working on a bit harder.

“I mean,” said Anya. “I tabled the absolute minimum number of Senate proposals that Great Houses are required to, I only ever voted with the majority, and nothing I personally proposed has ever passed.”

January, who had never really paid attention to individual senators because they were either idealistic and ineffective or anti-Earthstronger and scary, said, “Well, perhaps your perspective’s just changed after slumming it for a bit. I’m sure you can get better when you go back.”

“Yes,” said Anya, and there was a crystal sharpness in their voice. “I will.”

“What else did you learn besides your politics?”

“I like to party,” said Anya, a bit doubtfully. “I go to lots, anyway. There’s not a lot of stuff about my social life in here, actually, it’s mostly political news, but there’s a few little interviews with me at cultural events.”

“Amnesia would turn anyone into a bit of a homebody,” said January. “Also working ten hours a day. It may surprise you, but I like parties. I mean, close-of-show parties, which are mostly sweaty dancers in leggings eating protein cookies and doing stretches whilst gossiping madly at two am, but I think it still counts.”

Anya made an affirmative humming noise, glancing down at the book. “There’s a bit in here about my sibling.”

They didn’t say anything more, but January felt the change in the mood and wiped his hands before going to sit down across from them.

“What did you learn about them?”

Anya placed their finger on the open page and cleared their throat, reading aloud, “‘River? River doesn’t know anything about film, just Proto-Indo-European. That’s all right, I can tell you all about how marvelous A Table for Two at the Tiangong was.’ ”

“Okay,” said January, but Anya just flipped to another page and read more.

“‘Senator Aubrey Gale and their Artemis, River, both arrived at Thirtieth Winter Gala together, but halfway through the evening Aubrey left for another party. Witnesses speculate over some sort of rift in House Gale, as River was seen wandering the party seeking their sibling before taking the train back to Songshu.’”

January winced. Anya flipped the page.

“‘While many Great House Artemises are invited by their siblings to present proposals to the Senate or are appointed to head subsidiary committees, the Apollo of House Gale’s actions keep their Artemis firmly outside of politics–’”

“Stop,” said January. “Stop reading. What are you trying to say?”

Anya closed the book and looked at him. “I’m trying to decide how much of a terrible person I am. You have a very expressive face, you know. You tried to hide it, but you think all of those things were awful to have done to your sibling. I thought they sounded awful myself, but my experience is limited. Yours isn’t.”

“Anya,” said January. “I mean, Aubrey.” He reached out and set his hand on top of theirs, over the book. “It doesn’t sound great, I admit. But we might not have the full story. Maybe River doesn’t like politics, and you’re doing them a favor.”

“And abandoning them at a party was just for their own good?”

“Maybe you made a mistake,” January said. “Maybe you got carried away and snuck off to visit your secret lover. It doesn’t matter. The point is, if you’re not going to jump to the worst conclusions about me, you can’t jump to them about yourself. You’ve had a head injury. People have to be nice to you, including you.”

Anya twisted their hands together underneath January’s. “But if the last time we spoke I was cruel to them, and I go back now and they’re angry at me-” The worry was threaded through their voice like a thin blue line. “What if they won’t help me?”

“Aubrey,” said January. “I don’t have any siblings. But my parents had them, and lots of my friends, and I’m pretty sure that ‘siblings’ means that you fight like cats and dogs all the time but you close ranks to support each other the instant one of you is hurt. You’re hurt, and both you and River are adults. I’m sure you can table whatever fight you think you might have had until your memories come back.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” said January. “And if not, I’ll make them.” He crossed his arms and tried to make his biceps bulge.

Anya looked at him levelly and then snorted. “Very convincing.”

“Plan B is to just recite ballet movements at them. I know I always fell in line when my instructors started chanting, ‘Plie, releve, saute,’ over and over again.”

“Are those particularly difficult movements?”

“No, they’re the basics. I was eight. But they made us go back to the basics whenever we misbehaved, and you can only plie so many times as an eight-year-old before you want to explode.”

Anya smiled, their worry about their sibling forgotten. “It’s funny to imagine you being eight. You must have been even smaller than you are now.”

January made an incredulous noise in his throat and reached back to snatch the pillow off the bed to gently whack them. “I keep telling you! I’m! A normal! Height! For! An Earthstronger!”

Anya pulled their chair back out of reach, then stuck a hand forward and snatched the pillow. They stood up and loomed, whacking him back. “Plie! Releve! Saute!”

January was helpless from laughter, and Anya wasn’t much better. A part of January wished that he could have this every night. Talking and laughing and just existing together with Anya.

But Anya wasn’t Anya, not really. Or at least they weren’t just Anya. They were also Aubrey Gale, which was a bigger, much more important chapter in their life than this brief time with January. January wasn’t even a chapter in their book. He was just a short break from it. The intermission.

But intermissions could be special too, for all that they were short. It was a chance to breathe, to see your friends, to let the story settle. So January laughed, and went for the spare blanket to counterattack Anya’s pillow, and tucked the moment into his memory for all the days after Anya went home.

Anya was starting to feel more like a person living their life and less like an actor who’d gotten up on stage and forgotten all their lines, permanently. Having two weeks of working memory was a big improvement over having two hours, and Anya held onto every memory they made like a lifeline.

Their name was Anya.

Their friend was January.

They lived in Tharsis, on a planet called Mars.

They worked as one of four street sweepers covering the Dengta district.

Anya repeated these facts to themselves every night before they went to bed, after studying the facts of Aubrey Gale’s life as long as they could afford to keep the light on. Though they were, of course, trying to memorize all of Aubrey’s – their – life as well, this life was far more immediate and thus precious.

Aubrey’s life was an insubstantial lost thing, and though Anya knew it was foolish, if they forgot everything again tomorrow except one thing, they wanted to remember being Anya.

The evening after January had assured them that River would still help Anya even if they were fighting, Anya lay awake. His laughter still echoed through their ears, and the pillow was so massively fluffed from combat that it nearly enveloped his head. Anya peered over the side of the bed at him and forced themself not to snicker. It had taken a while for January to stop bursting into laughter and fall asleep, and they didn’t want to wake him and start all over or else they’d be up half the night making each other laugh.

January had been sleeping without his cage for the past few nights, and the silver metal dimly gleamed like a ghost. Anya had eyed the cage-ghost and the way it looked like a person in the corner, and then turned onto their other side so they couldn’t see it.

Eventually Anya fell asleep, and for the first time that they could remember, they dreamed.

It was nonsensical. There was a lake in a ballroom, filled with reeds and mist and a vibrant fresco of birds wreathed with nebulas on the vaulted ceiling. Music was playing, and behind Anya someone was laughing in a familiar voice.

They turned, but the mist was all around them now, and they couldn’t find the voice. They knew that person, they did, but they just had to see their face.

Anya stepped into the reeds and their foot slipped on something wet. They stumbled, and looked up to see a massive white bear come out of the mist. It was enormous – its shoulders came up to Anya’s collarbone, and it was carrying a fish in its jaws.

Anya froze.

The bear stared at them, and twisted its head. To the right, to the left, and then again. Anya watched, and realized that it was moving with the music. Almost as if it was dancing.

Then the bear dropped the fish, and it opened its mouth so that Anya could see every single one of its two-inch teeth. Anya screamed.

Anya jolted awake in the dark and banged their knee on the wall as they tried to sit up.

January was saying something nearby. “Anya, shh, it’s all right. Anya?”

Anya got themselves arranged cross-legged and squeezed the covers to their chest as they looked down. The starlight from the window was just bright enough to make out the outline of January, crouching next to the bed with his hands gripping the edge of the mattress, clearly straining to see in the dark.

“January?”

“I’m here,” said January. “You’re all right, you’re just in my apartment. I think you had a nightmare.”

“I think so, too,” said Anya. “I haven’t dreamed before.”

“Maybe that’s a good sign,” said January. “Dreams are made up of memories, aren’t they? What was it about?”

Anya thought, but the nightmare was already fading fast. It seemed far away and intangible compared to blankets and darkness and January’s groggy voice.

“There was a dancing bear,” they said, and because they were looking at January, they saw him flinch.

“Oh,” he said. “And it was…scary?”

“Yes,” said Anya. “It was white. Are bears usually white?”

January got up without saying anything and went over to his cage. Anya heard the quiet shush as he shut himself in, and then he came back to sit on the floor next to his pillow.

“Polar bears are,” he said, and he sounded almost normal. “This is still a good sign. You’re, um, you’re remembering metaphors.”

“Polar bear metaphors?”

“Yeah. The government runs a safety PSA every month or so about how Earthstrongers are three times stronger than Natural people, which is the same difference as Earth polar bears and Earthstrongers. So an Earthstronger without a cage is like having a polar bear on the loose.”

January was clearly doing his best to stay calm, but there was a thin line of brittleness threaded through his voice, like there had been when he’d told Anya what naturalisation was.

“I see,” said Anya. “You didn’t have to put on your cage.”

The apartment was quiet for a moment.

“I don’t want you to be scared.”

“I’m not scared,” said Anya firmly, because it was true. They’d never been scared of January – all he’d ever done was help them and complain about getting dust down his shirt, which did not make him a very frightful person.

“You woke up screaming.”

“It was just a dream. Or, you said dreams come from memories, didn’t you? Maybe I came face-to-face with a dancing bear before I met you.”

“I don’t think you’d be here if you’d come face-to-face with a polar bear before,” said January. “And polar bears don’t dance.”

There was a long, fraught silence where January didn’t say “but I do,” but Anya heard it anyway.

Anya hated dreaming.

“It’s fine,” said January at last. “This is a good sign. Go back to sleep, Anya.”

Anya wanted to say something to fix it but couldn’t find the words, so they closed their eyes and listened to January’s cage click on the floor as he pulled the spare blanket back around himself.

In the morning, Anya got up before January and tucked the covers around him – curled up tight into a ball – before they went to the table to keep copying down the information from January’s coworker’s book.

They were making tiny flashcards from the paper of the grocery bags and some spare butcher paper that the grocery clerk had been kind enough to give them. These included things like the names of important House Gale staff, and major historic Gales and their policies.

It was rather like being in college, Anya thought. If they’d ever been to college.

January, when he got up, gave them a sleepy smile, and Anya was full of hope that perhaps not all was lost. Though he did keep the cage on even as he wandered over to scrounge together some breakfast.

Still, he snagged a few flashcards from the end of the table and glanced at them while he went about making toast for two one-handed.

“Who’s your head of security?”

“Sasha Martinez,” said Anya promptly.

“Who’s your chief of staff?”

“Mx. Ren.”

January flipped the card and looked at the back. “Does Mx. Ren have a first name?”

“Not that I could find,” admitted Anya. “But most of the key people’s last names are on here, so I’m going to hope that I was a very polite person and just call everyone by their last name.”

“Fair enough,” said January, going to the next card. “Who’s your best friend?”

“You,” said Anya, watching his face, and was gratified when January smiled.

“You can’t say that,” he said, mock-scolding, but Anya could tell that he was pleased. “Real answer this time.”

Anya tried to remember what was written on the notecard and couldn’t. Who would make sense as a Senator’s best friend? “My sibling?”

January flipped the card. “No, it’s someone named Yumao Shi.”

“Oh,” said Anya, holding out their hand for the card. “I’ll have to put it back in the study pile.”

They tucked it back into the stack, then went over to make the bed while January fiddled with the tea things.

“Hang on,” said January from behind. “Do that again, but be Aubrey Gale this time.”

Anya looked over their shoulder. “Do what?”

“Walk across the room.” January was eyeing them speculatively, fingers tapping on the side of the lightest glass he owned.

Anya, bemused, walked back across the room.

January shook his head. “No, you’re walking like a street sweeper. Or an ordinary person. Not a Senator.”

Anya raised an eyebrow. “What do you know about walking like a Senator?”

“Nothing,” said January, “but I know a lot about walking like a King, and I imagine it’s pretty close to that. Have you seen the clothing the Great Houses wear? They say that Tharsis is very enlightened and doesn’t have any royalty because it’s technically a colony, but look at them. They’re basically royalty.”

“And you’re moonlighting as a king on the weekends, are you?”

“Not anymore.” January set down the glass and stepped around the table into the open space near the elevator. He did something with his feet that Anya didn’t follow, and then suddenly, he wasn’t just standing, he was elegant lines of motion that were temporarily motionless. “But once I was King Mark in Tristan und Isolde, and most recently I was the Swan King in Swan Lake.”

And then he swept one arm up above his head in an arc and bowed low, his arms one fluid flared line. It was the loveliest movement that Anya had ever seen.

Then he stood back up and he was just January again, meandering over to sort out the toast.

Anya found their voice. “What was that?”

“That was moving like a King,” said January. “Now make that bed like a Senator, your toast is getting cold.”

Anya went to work that morning with January’s voice spinning in their head. It was all about moving fluidly, and having good posture, and knowing what you were going to do before you did it.

Head up, they told themself as they started their route on the westernmost street of Dengta. Shoulders back.

They carefully swept with precise, planned strokes, and by the end of the day they felt a little more like Aubrey Gale.

They were heading home in the Tharsese twilight – January would just be getting off work, but he still had the train ride before he would be home, so Anya usually started making supper – when a small child came whooping out of a doorway missing a shirt.

“Akira! Get back here!” The child’s parent appeared behind them, wearing a thick dress and looking flustered. They charged out the door toward the child, and Anya jumped back to get out of the way.

The parent saw Anya move and went white. In the next instant, they’d gone down to one knee, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, he just ran out-”

Anya realized that the parent was talking to them. The parent was near tears, for some reason, and the child had stopped laughing and circled back around to clutch at their parent’s skirts. “It’s all right,” said Anya, wondering why the parent was kneeling. Had they really impersonated a Senator so well? “Please get up.”

“Oh, no,” said the parent. “I mean, I will, but you go on ahead. Please.”

Anya hesitated, but the parent didn’t move, and so they went down the street, glancing back after them. It was only after Anya had moved a good ten feet away that the parent stood up, took their child firmly by the hand, and went back into their house, speaking quietly.

Anya asked January about it when he got back from Tereshkova Wharf. “Someone knelt to me today,” they said as they handed him lukewarm soup. “I guess the Senator movement training worked.”

January dropped his spoon into his soup. “Someone knelt to you?”

Anya nodded.

“Are you all right?” He stood up and leaned across the table to see them better, as if Anya was hiding an injury.

“Of course I am,” said Anya. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because you almost weren’t.” January sighed. “Look, people don’t kneel to show respect here. They bow. Kneeling is what they teach Earthstrongers to do on the Crossing if they end up uncaged and too close to a Natural person.”

“Oh.”

“It’s for safety, and it’s also helpful legally,” said January. “You’re less likely to fall over and hit someone if you’re kneeling, and if you do manage to hurt someone while you’re kneeling then at least you can prove to a jury that you were actively trying to minimize harm.”

“I surprised them,” said Anya. “It was getting dark, and they were chasing their child. They didn’t expect to see me.”

When they thought back, the person had been short, and hadn’t been wearing a cage. They’d just thought of them as a short person, but that wasn’t the sort of judgment that people made on Tharsis.

People always were something. Natural, naturalised, Earthstronger. It was like breathing for January and the other street sweepers, to look at people and sort them. Anya wasn’t used to it yet. They weren’t sure they wanted to be.

January nodded. “Well, they did the right thing.” He picked up his spoon and added, a little hesitantly, “and you can also ask someone to kneel, if you feel unsafe. It’s not rude. I’d rather you ask than be scared.”

Anya had hoped that January had forgotten about their nightmare. Judging by this, and the fact that he had kept his cage on to eat dinner, he hadn’t.

It was a mess, and Anya couldn’t help but feel like custard had exploded all over the kitchen and they had no idea how to clean it up. Anya set their own spoon down and reached across the table to capture January’s hands and squeeze them as tight as they could.

“January,” they said, “You will never have to kneel to me. I’m not afraid of you.”

“It’s not about being afraid. It’s about feeling – unsafe.”

“I trust you,” they said. “I know I’m safe when I’m with you, no matter whether you’re caged or not, near or not.”

January smiled, a little wistful, and rubbed his thumb against Anya’s. The metal was cool between them.

1. Merrick didn’t usually stage dramatic readings wherein he translated Mandarin-to-English on the fly, but an unsettling Natural child he was tangentially acquainted with had offered to smuggle him a vial of a medication to treat altitude sickness if he did.

[↺ go back]

2. January had also hoped that the tame polar bear the Tiangong kept as a pet might be hanging around the reception desk, because it was kind of cool to see something with a fourteen-inch-long paw drop a fish in front of the guests and ask for head scritches. He hadn’t told Anya about it yet because it would make a good surprise, and if the bear wasn’t around then they wouldn’t feel like they’d missed anything.

[↺ go back]

Chapter Text

One day before January and Anya’s next day off, Merrick brought another newspaper to work^[1]. “THREE IMPOSTERS PRETENDING TO BE AUBREY GALE FINED FIVE THOUSAND YUAN,” he read.

Val, across the room, met January’s gaze and raised an eyebrow. January fought down his doubt and shrugged at her.

On their next day off, they got up early to try and beat the line. Anya carefully braided their hair – it took approximately one minute, which January took as a promising sign that their muscle memory, at least, was not gone – and they emerged out of January’s apartment building into a freezing Martian morning that was lit by enough streetlamps for Anya to barely see and January to stumble along next to them.

They waited for the trains in what amounted to predawn in Tharsis. January was blinking very slowly and trying to wake up, but the cold was so sharp he was fairly certain his body was attempting to revert to ancestral lizard memory and go into hibernation instead.

Anya abruptly nodded their head once, like they’d decided something. “I’m Aubrey Gale.”

January’s brain started up like an antique car. “You are.”

“No,” said Anya. “I mean, I’m going to be Aubrey Gale no matter what. Even if I’m not, even if my memory comes back in three or four months and I’m actually just a communications clerk named Mingli Jianding, I’m going to be Aubrey Gale.”

“Have you remembered something?”

“No,” said Anya. “I’ve just decided that I’m going to do better. Aubrey Gale wasn’t a good senator. They weren’t helping people. Or hurting people. They were just there. But that person in line was right; they have a lot of power, and I’m going to use it to do something.”

They sounded determined. It was, to be honest, a little unsettling. “Like what, take over the world?”

“No,” said Anya, looking at him. “I just think minimum wage should be enough for you to have a friend over for dinner without you having to take heatless showers.”

January hadn’t realized they’d noticed. “I don’t-”

Anya looked at him, level. “The primary water meter is in the main room of your flat. And I can hear your teeth chattering through the door.”

“Right.”

“Also, we need to bring back paper record-keeping.”

January smiled. “Or at least terrible ID photos that don’t have any filters on them.”

Anya hesitated. “You don’t have to come with me, you know. I mean, I have just decided that I’m going to commit Schrodinger’s identity theft. Up to this point there was a chance that I’d gracefully bow out and tell the truth if my memory came back, but I’m not going to now. Even if I’m not – maybe especially if I’m not – I’m going to do this. If it all goes wrong-”

“Shut up,” said January, a bit louder than he’d intended. “Shut up, of course I’m coming with you. We’re in this together, remember? It was my idea, anyway. And you need me. For moral support purposes.”

Anya’s spine lost its stiffness and they knocked their shoulder companionably into January. “And I’m sure the fifty thousand yuan reward isn’t even a consideration.”

“Well,” said January, wavering between full honesty and coming across as a bit more noble than he actually was. “It’s maybe a little consideration.”

Anya laughed. “You can have it,” they said. “At least until I fix things in the Senate and you don’t need it to live anymore. Then I’m going to come and bully you into taking me out for tea every week until you spend it all.”

January felt an unexpected pang. It was a nice thought, but it would never happen. If they pulled this off, Anya wouldn’t have time for anything except the life of an important Senator, and January was probably destined to work at Tereshkova Wharf until Mars became a swamp or the heat death of the universe arrived.

If this worked, he was going to lose them. Tharsese Senator Aubrey Gale had no space in their life for Earthstronger Refugee January Stirling.

The train slid into the station, and this time Anya got on without looking back. January got onto the separate, smaller traincar for separate, smaller people and tried not to think.

The line this time was shorter. There appeared to be less people aiming to impersonate Aubrey Gale, but still plenty of people angling for the smaller reward for a successful tip.

After about an hour in line, they’d moved up enough that they could see the post office – they were about half a block away – and they could see someone in pink overalls come out of the door and start working their way up the line, pausing to talk briefly to each person before moving on to the next. Occasionally they pointed back at the post office and the person they were speaking to stepped out of line and walked to the post office doors, but mostly they didn’t.

As the person got closer, January could hear their question: “Tip or Aubrey?”

They asked it to each person in front of them, with most people saying, “I’ve got a tip about Aubrey,” or “I know where the lost senator is,” and then the person said “Thank you, wait here,” and moved on.

Then the person – short for somebody Natural, but still taller than January – stepped up to January and said, breezily, “Tip or-” They paused, catching sight of Anya hovering just behind January’s shoulder. “Um, Aubrey,” they said, dragging their eyes back down to catch January’s.

“Aubrey,” said January confidently, and when the person raised a sarcastic eyebrow that managed to convey both amusement and incredulity that an Earthstronger would try to imitate Aubrey Gale, he added, “Not me, though. Them,” and he jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Anya.

The person smiled. “I admire the ingenuity, but it doesn’t count as a tip if you’re just pointing at people in line.” They looked over him at Anya. “You’re claiming to be Aubrey Gale?”

“I am,” said Anya evenly. “And he’s not here with a tip. He’s with me.”

The person tilted their head, ever-so-slightly. “Okay,” they said, “All potential Aubrey Gales are asked to go up for the screening questions now. River’s calling this whole thing a lost cause by the end of the day, and we want to at least cycle through all the potential Aubreys rather than waste time on everyone who saw someone with long hair speaking Russian at the supermarket.”

“I see,” said Anya. “I would like January to accompany me.” They set their hand on January’s shoulder so it was clear who they meant, and January felt warm.

The person shrugged. “Fine with me, but you’ll have to do the interview alone – make sure he’s not feeding you answers.”

Anya nodded their agreement, and together they and January stepped out of line and headed for the post office doors, past the skeptically assessing eyes of everyone with questionable tips.

Inside, there was a small lobby and a shorter line consisting entirely of Natural people with long dark hair. They were all looking, with various degrees of anxiety, at a door that appeared to lead into an office.

“I feel like I should put together a kick line,” joked January as they joined the end of the line and he gained several flatly incredulous stares from the various Aubrey claimants. “You’ve got the height for it – everyone looks within a few inches.”

“Kick line?” said Anya.

“Yeah, you know, da, daa da-da-da…” He trailed off when Anya just stared blankly at him. “You get in a line of people and put your arms around each other’s shoulders-” he stepped back into an open section of lobby – all the people in line were staring at him now – and put his arms out to pretend he was in a line of people. “And then you all kick in unison. Like this.”

Certainly he looked foolish, doing a one-man kick line in the middle of the post office lobby, but it made Anya smile, and it was worth it.

January thought that perhaps a lot of things would be worth it to make Anya smile.

A voice cracked through the air. “Get away from them!”

January put his foot down and turned his head in time to see someone in a black vest barrel toward him and roughly shove him down.

January, whose first response to a Natural person unexpectedly touching him had been carefully drilled into him during the Crossing, did not grab back, but rather went with the motion and went down on his back, hard. Metal dug into his side as his arm got jammed underneath him.

When he blinked and his brain caught up to process everything that had just happened, he noticed two things. One, his elbow really hurt. Two, there was a metal rod hovering just beneath his chin that was giving an unsettling hum.

He looked up.

Somebody tall in a black security officer vest was glowering at him. January opened his mouth but couldn’t think of anything to say, stuck between startled and afraid.

“What do you think you’re doing?” said the person harshly. “And if you can’t explain in the next thirty seconds, you should know that an attempted assault charge has a sentence of ten years in maximum security.”

Anya appeared next to January and said, in a carrying voice as flat as stone. “What is the meaning of this?”

“Didn’t you see-” the person turned their head enough to see Anya, and paused for a fraction of a moment. “They were kicking at you. Earthstrongers have enough force to shatter your leg.”

“Wait, no,” said January, “I wasn’t-”

“He wasn’t,” agreed Anya. “He was demonstrating a dance move. That’s all. He was standing back so he wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

“Right,” said the person, skepticism dripping. “Who are you, and why are you vouching for this Earthstronger who shouldn’t be in here?”

“I’m Aubrey Gale,” said Anya. “And he’s with me, because he helped take care of me until I could return. Surely you don’t think I would have stayed away this long unless I was injured and in need of help? January provided it, and I brought him along with the intent to thank him, though you’re doing a poor job of showing thanks, aren’t you, Mx. Martinez?”

Mx. Martinez looked as if a willow tree had just reared up and bit them. January was sure that his face looked much the same – Anya had spoken like a ruler, like they expected to have the last word on any matter they faced.

No; not a ruler. A senator.

Martinez glanced back at the line of other wannabe Aubreys, and several of them nodded. With a sigh, Mx. Martinez put away their baton and said to Anya, “You’ll go next, then. If you’re real, we’ll figure out what to do, but if not, you and your Earthstronger leave, got it?”

“Of course,” said Anya graciously.

“He waits outside.”

“Okay,” said January quickly, trying to cut off Anya’s frown. He got to his feet and  dusted himself off. “I need some fresh air, anyway. I’ll see you when you’re done, Aubrey?”

“You will,” promised Anya, and then Mx. Martinez led Anya over to the door, and January went out the front, feeling Mx. Martinez’s eyes on the back of his neck.

It was still cold outside, and the line had somewhat shrunk. The pink overalls person was still chatting with people towards the end. January leaned his back against the wall, stuck his hands in his armpits, and settled into wait.

Anya was nervous. They told themself that they didn’t have any reason to be, but they were nervous anyway. They hid it fairly well, they were sure, but hiding the feeling didn’t remove it, and now that January was gone they felt like they’d lost the one person who would back them up.

Sasha looked tired. It wasn’t outright obvious, but there was a weariness in their eyes that Anya suspected wasn’t supposed to be there. Then again, Sasha was the head of House Gale security and Anya figured that losing a senator would be rough on any security person, particularly the one who was supposed to be in charge.

Inside the little room was Solly Francis, whose hair was full of reef knots. They had a piece of paper filled with neatly printed characters centered in front of them, and their face was perfectly composed.

I am Aubrey Gale, Anya told themself, and said, “Hello, Mx. Francis. You seem stressed.”

Solly blinked and looked up as Anya sat down across from them. Sasha settled in to lean against the wall, arms crossed while they eyed Anya.

“Just a little,” said Solly, friendly like they were with strangers. “Long day, you know how it is. What’s your name?”

“Aubrey Gale,” said Anya without hesitation.

“Good,” said Solly. “Do you have any questions for me, or are you all right if we get down to questions for you?”

“Is River all right?” Anya asked. It surprised them, that they’d asked. They’d been turning over thoughts of their sibling ever since they’d realized that being Aubrey Gale meant they had a sibling. They were anxious to see them and promise they’d be better to them, but they hadn’t realized it had been so urgent in their mind. “I haven’t seen them since the internet went down, and I know they’ve been in the papers acting like they’re fine, but – well, the papers aren’t always true.”

Solly’s eyebrows twitched in something like surprise. “I can’t say much before we check your identity,” they said gently, “But I can promise you that River is fine. A little shaken up when the internet when down, and concerned about you, naturally, but that’s all.”

“Thank you.”

“First question, then. What’s your favorite color?”

Anya’s breath caught.

This was stupid. They were doomed. They’d studied political policy and senatorial news clippings, not the social pages. They thought, frantically, to the few photos they’d seen of Aubrey. They wore a lot of red.

“Red.”

“Correct. What’s the name of the bill you proposed to the Senate last year?”

Anya knew this one. They answered, and then, carefully, they elaborated on what the bill was supposed to accomplish, and which supporters they’d managed to gather. It hadn’t passed, of course – Aubrey was an overall ineffectual senator – but it had at least gotten close.

Perhaps, they thought, if they expanded on the things they did know, Solly might forego the questions like favorite movie or most frequently used room in Songshu – the  things that Anya would have no way of knowing unless they were really Aubrey Gale and their memory worked.

Thankfully, as the questions went on, Solly relaxed and Sasha got less tense, and it became a bit more like a chat rather than an interrogation. Anya stopped second-guessing themself and just answered the questions, and before they knew it nearly an hour had passed.

“And finally, what did Kali get you for your seventh birthday?”

“Trick question,” said Anya easily. “The gift that we told everyone about was haptics, but in actuality Kali had gotten us that two weeks before to give us time to recover from the surgery in time for our actual birthday. On the day, Kali canceled all their appointments, filled the waterfall in their room with bubble bath soap, and turned the heat up to have a spa day.” Anya couldn’t hold the smile off their face at the thought. “We flooded their whole room and half the hallway. Songshu smelled like lavender bubbles for weeks.”

Solly set down the paper and looked at Sasha, who’d stopped leaning against the wall and had started leaning forward the more Anya talked.

“Sasha?” Solly said.

“Kali forbid anyone from ever mentioning that,” said Sasha quietly. “It was such a waste of water. They had the junior guards rip up the carpet and cart it down to Tharsis’s recycling plant in plainclothes.”

“Okay,” said Solly. “Wow. Um, welcome back, Senator Gale.” They looked both wildly relieved and incredulous, as if they couldn’t believe they’d really found them. Anya felt the same.

They’d remembered something!

And it was something only Aubrey could have known, which meant they weren’t impersonating anyone after all. They tried to keep from grinning, to look as if this was only what they expected, but inside they wanted to leap up and dance for joy.

They knew who they were.

They were Aubrey Gale.

That wouldn’t have stopped them from taking Aubrey’s place, but it was a relief. Things would be easier this way.

“Thank you,” said Anya. “It’s a relief to be back.”

They would be better than they had been, they promised themself. Yes, they were back, but they would be different. As soon as they’d gotten the rest of their memories back, they’d start helping people like January.

“What happened, Senator?” Sasha asked. “Did you get kidnapped, or were you sneaking off down to the clubs again? River just said that you were gone after the internet went out.”

There was something off in Sasha’s tone now. Solly was clearly catching it too, frowning at Sasha, but Anya didn’t know what was wrong.

“It’s a bit of a blur,” Anya admitted. “The reason I’ve been gone for so long is that I’ve been in the hospital with a bad concussion. January’s been taking care of me after I got out, but I’m missing a lot of memories. Including basically all of the last few months.” And beyond that, but they figured it wasn’t prudent to mention that at this point.

“January?” Solly looked confused.

“My friend,” said Anya. “He’s waiting outside.”

“But a hospital would have reported it if you checked into one,” said Sasha, warily.

“I didn’t check in under Aubrey,” said Anya. “I was very confused, and the memory loss was worse a few weeks ago. If you put in a request for the records of a person named Anya at the Fengrenyuan Hospital, you’ll find me.” And find that Anya’s memory loss was more extensive than reported, but hopefully Anya would be home and have River on their side by then.

“Sasha,” said Solly, “I really think it’s them. They passed all the questions, even the new ones, and River wanted to talk to anyone who did.”

“Fine,” said Sasha. “Sorry for the doubt, Senator. River is eager to see you.”

“I’m eager to see them as well,” said Anya.

“Then we’re off,” said Sasha. “Solly, you and Ren can finish up here, can’t you? Chen and Ivanov should be coming off break soon and can help you wrangle the line if need be, but I’ll take the Senator up to Songshu now.”

“Yes,” said Solly. “Try to take a few pictures of the reunion, won’t you? I know it’s not your job, but the media team is still in pieces over the drones. I dug out some of the Gale grandparents’ antique cameras and left them in Aubrey’s study. Please use them.”

“No promises,” said Sasha. “Senator?” They held the door open and gestured Anya out.

“Senator,” called Solly, quietly behind them. Anya looked back. “I’m sorry about Max,” they said, and their impenetrable cheer cracked a bit with sympathy. “That had to be hard to read about in the news.”

Anya blinked. Of course they’d known that Senator Aubrey Gale was married to Max Song, but knowing that and suddenly being faced with the fact that Aubrey Gale was them, and that they were now – and had always been – a married person was a bit of a shock.

Being widowed when they couldn’t even remember their spouse was more of a shock. They tried to pull an expression of discreet grief onto their face and said, “Thank you, Solly.”

Sasha wasn’t looking at them as they stepped out. “We’re going out the back,” they said.

Anya stopped two steps down the hallway. “That’s fine,” they said, “but would you get January?”

“Why?”

“He helped me,” said Anya. “He let me stay with him and he slept on his own floor for two weeks because he only had one bed. He’s the most gallant person I know, and I would very much like to look after him in turn now that I can.”

Sasha sighed. “There are screening processes, Senator. You can’t just go about declaring people are your friends without background checks. I know everyone looks like a friend when you’re drinking-”

“Sasha Martinez,” said Anya. “I haven’t had anything but water since I woke up with head trauma three weeks ago. I’ve been stone-cold sober this whole time, and I know I can trust January.”

Sasha blinked. “Good for you, Senator,” they said at last. “Fine. I’ll get him, but the cage stays on.”

“Fine,” said Anya, and crossed their arms to wait as Sasha went past the Aubrey-lineup and stuck their head out the door.

After some conversation that Anya couldn’t quite hear, Sasha turned and came back, followed by January, who looked intimidated.

“Did they threaten you?” Anya asked as January fell into step and Sasha led them out a back hallway.

January’s eyes were very large. “I think so,” he whispered. “I mean, there were a lot of very scary words and I think I might have agreed to give away my firstborn if I sneeze on you, but I think the overall gist was I should behave, or else.”

“No one is taking your firstborn,” said Anya. “And I think Sasha would rather you not take off the cage, but other than that you’re just fine.” Their eyes flicked to Sasha’s neck, which appeared to be flexing interestingly as they bit back a complaint.

“Yes,” said January, overeager. “No problem. Absolutely. I’ve never taken off my cage around you ever and never will.”

Anya laughed.

Sasha turned, aghast. “Senator! You didn’t let-”

“I can’t be sued, like, retroactively for endangerment, can I?” January sounded worried. “Aubrey! You know politics stuff, that doesn’t actually happen, does it?” He caught Sasha’s glare. “I mean, Senator?”

“First off,” said Anya, “The law against taking off your cage is for when you’re in public – it doesn’t apply if you’re at a workplace with the appropriate safety measures or in your own home. And second of all, you were very careful and you asked my permission to take off your cage, which I granted. So no, you’re not getting retroactively sued. And third of all, Sasha, he’s allowed to call me by my first name if he wants.”

Sasha muttered something under their breath that sounded like ‘Aubrey’ and ‘reckless’, and Anya pretended not to hear. Instead, they looked sidelong at January, who appeared to be sort of embarrassedly glowing.

The train ride up to Songshu was long and made Anya anxious, for some reason, but they told themselves it was the altitude change. January was turning an interesting color as they rose up the sides of the Valley, and Sasha came along with a shot that would help his body adjust. They carried it in a little medical case, and when they set the case down on the seat next to January, the train gave a jolt and January wobbled forward, catching himself with his hands and knocking the case off.

It gave a sharp crack when it hit the train’s floor.

“No,” Anya said nonsensically, and Sasha and January both turned to look at them.

There was something frightening ticking just out of sight in the back of Anya’s mind. They kept hearing the crack, echoing louder in their memory. Their temple hurt. Someone’s fingers were red.

Anya blinked. No one’s fingers were red. Nothing was wrong. Sasha and January were still staring. “Sorry,” they said, smiling faintly. “It startled me, that’s all.”

Sasha didn’t say anything and picked up the case before opening it and getting out the needle. January winced when it went in but didn’t otherwise complain, and they were quiet until Sasha packed up the case and left again.

“It’s all right,” said January quietly. “We’ll be all right. That creeping sense of looming dread is just from the altitude change.” He smiled, though it wasn’t perfectly sterling. Evidently the shot took a bit to kick in.

“I know,” said Anya. “There’s really nothing to worry about. I am Aubrey Gale.”

“Exactly,” said January, and winked. “Just tell that to River, and we’ll go from there.”

Anya wanted to explain further, to tell January that they had remembered something and this really wasn’t an act at all anymore, but then Sasha came back to tell them that the train was stopping soon, and they didn’t get the chance.

After they got off the train, they walked through the pine trees that smelled like home, and then they were in front of Songshu, and River Gale was waiting on the steps.

Something flickered in the back of Anya’s mind. They recognized this person. Something equally fast went over River’s face and disappeared, and then they came down the steps and threw their arms around Anya’s neck.

“I thought you were dead,” they said, muffled. Anya hugged them back, and then River squeezed tighter. “I have a plan,” they whispered, barely audible, into Anya’s ear. “It’s going to fix everything, but you just have to play along a little longer, okay? Please. I can’t do this without you.”

Anya, unbearably relieved that River wasn’t mad at them, wasn’t sure what that meant. “Okay,” they whispered back, “River, I’ve got to tell you something-”

“Perfect,” said River, drawing back and speaking at a normal volume. “I’ve got lots to tell you, too. But we need to tell the staff you’re back, and I need to radio Mx. Francis that you got here safe, and then you and I can catch up.” Their gaze caught on January, lurking back a bit. “Who’s this?”

“January,” said Anya. “He helped me get home.”

“Oh,” said River. “That’s nice of him. Do you want him to wait with you?”

“Yes,” said Anya, and then they and January were guided into Songshu. Past the front doors lay an opulent lobby with willow trees, and a grand set of stairs that led up into a tower. There were several interns and staffers and guards walking in various places around the grand lobby and stairs, and all of them stopped and stared when Anya and River walked in.

“Everyone!” said River, and though they weren’t loud, they still had all the people’s attention. “I’m happy to announce that Aubrey is back safe!” Everyone clapped when River did, and Anya tried to incline their head and act like they were the sort of person who was used to being applauded for walking into a room.

Though everyone was clapping, the reception was still weirdly mixed, they noted. Most people looked relieved to see Anya, though a few looked confused, and every single security guard gave Anya an uncertain look and then looked directly at Sasha, as if they were waiting for a cue.

When Anya turned, Sasha just looked at them impassively and said, “This way, Senator.” They were herded into a sitting room just off the stairs, with several couches and plush chairs and a hypnotic green pattern on the carpet like waving grasses.

River disappeared for their radio call as soon as Anya had taken a seat on a velvety green couch, and Sasha took up a position just outside the door. January hovered near Anya, looking around.

“Okay,” he said quietly, “Is it just me, or do all the people in the black vests look like they’re waiting for you to explode?”

“It’s not just you,” said Anya. “I noticed it, too. I think – based on something Sasha said, I think I might be struggling with alcoholism. It wouldn’t be publicized, but that might explain the security officer’s unease, if I’m known for sneaking off.”

“Really?” said January. “I mean, it’s fine if you are, I’m sure there’s lots of help available, but you haven’t seemed – you know. Like you’re going through withdrawal or anything.”

Anya shrugged. “Maybe I was nearly finished with my program. Or maybe it’s true what they say, and adrenaline is a hell of a drug. I have had a lot of excitement and uncertainty lately.”

January gave a little half-shrug, and ran a nervous finger along the collarbone piece of his cage.

“Speaking of excitement,” said Anya, dropping their voice even further. “Guess what the last question in the interview was?”

January stepped in close to Anya – when he was standing, he was barely taller than them – and lowered his voice, too. “Was it about your great-great grandparent’s name? I knew all these fancy senators had to memorize their whole lineage. That’s just like kings.”

“No,” said Anya, trying to keep the smile off their face. “They asked me what I got for my birthday when I was seven.”

January’s eyes widened. “That’s not good,” he said, “Did you guess?”

“No,” said Anya. “I remembered.”

“But that wasn’t in anything that Val gave us,” said January, who had at this point memorized most of Aubrey Gale’s life by virtue of being Anya’s study partner. “Val’s partner didn’t have much on your childhood.”

Anya grinned and waited for January to get it.

“Oh!” he said, too loudly, and then, when Anya whacked his shoulder and shushed him, he said, quieter, “You remembered-remembered. Aubrey! That’s wonderful!”

“I know. I don’t have everything yet – it’s mostly just my seventh birthday and the sense that this place is really familiar, but I think it’s a good sign, don’t you?”

“It’s a great sign!” said January. “Your brain’s getting better. Probably being home and around all the people you know is helping jog your memory, too.” He whirled around, looking at the room. “We should get them to give you a tour so you can see more things. Or, well, if you don’t want to tell them about the amnesia yet, you can say you want to give me a tour, and then if we get lost we can blame it on me wandering off.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Anya, reaching out to tug on his arm and turn him back around. He turned, looking so happy at the thought of Anya getting better that it made him practically shine. It made something happen in Anya’s chest; they wanted to do something with all his joy for them. They weren’t sure what, though.

January was still looking at the curtains and the chandelier like he could collect pieces of Anya’s memory just by staring at them. Anya squeezed his arm and his eyes dropped down to meet theirs.

“January,” they said, softly, holding his gaze. His face was close now, and his pupils had gotten large and dark. “Thank you.”

January swallowed. He was perfectly still. “Don’t thank me,” he said, “You did the hard parts all yourself.” He closed his eyes, and Anya wondered, wildly, if he was going to kiss them – and then his eyes snapped open and he stepped backwards and bowed. “Senator,” he said, voice unexpectedly rough. “Welcome home.”

Anya was struck with an abrupt sense of loss, which was foolish. Of course January hadn’t been about to kiss them. Why would he want to? Anya was an ineffective senator who’d gotten lost and wandered into his apartment, and he was a dancer on a different world that hated him. That was hardly a basis for romance; it was miraculous that they’d become friends at all.

Besides, Anya was married. Or, well, recently widowed. Even if they wanted to, it wasn’t the time to go about kissing dancers in fancy parlors.

“Thank you,” they said. “Though you still don’t have to call me that.”

There was something wistful in January’s face. “I know,” he said, and didn’t say anything more. After a second he retreated to a chair across from Anya and finally sat down.

The next second, he sprang up again when the door opened and Sasha came in with a small case, the kind designed to carry delicate tech.

“Senator,” said Sasha briskly, “Can you give me Max’s thumb drive? The Tharsese Marines are on our back about returning it, and River thinks that if anyone had it, it was you.”

Anya looked at January. January shrugged a bit – it was Anya’s choice.

Anya looked back at Sasha, who looked tired, and decided that if they couldn’t trust their head of security and their sibling, then they couldn’t trust anyone.

“Mx. Martinez,” said Anya, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but the reason I was gone so long is that I hit my head and lost my memories. A lot of memories. To be totally honest, I remember brief flashes of my childhood, and that’s it. I didn’t even remember my name. And I’m very sorry, but I don’t remember anything about a drive.”

Sasha stared. “That’s what you’re going with? Amnesia?”

“I – yes,” said Anya. “It’s the truth.”

Sasha shook their head. “Fine,” they said, harsh, and for the first time Anya realized that Sasha was angry with them. “Say it’s amnesia. It’s still River and I’s testimony against yours. And it’s your rifle that fired the shot.”

“Sorry,” said January. “What? Shot who?”

Sasha just dropped the case on a side table and threw open the door. River and five security guards filed inside. “Aubrey Gale,” said Sasha, stone-faced, “You’re under arrest for the murder of Max Song.”

Anya felt cold. Someone’s fingers were red; no one’s fingers were red.

“What?” said January, loudly, and four of the security guards pointed their guns at him.

“January, don’t do anything stupid,” hissed Anya, brain churning wildly. “River, what’s this about?”

River smiled, sad. “It’s the best I can do, Aubrey. You won’t go to the Jupiter hulks – we’ll argue that it wasn’t premeditated, so you should stay on Mars.”

The security guards started forward. Anya’s heart was racing. What was happening?

“River!” said Anya. “I don’t- I hit my head when the internet went out, and I don’t remember anything. I came home to get help because January figured out who I was. I don’t remember shooting Max – I don’t remember doing anything.”

“Hang on,” said River, holding up a hand. The security guards stopped. “You don’t remember what you were doing when the internet went out?”

“I promise I don’t,” said Anya. River was watching them, waiting. Anya didn’t know what they wanted. They didn’t know how to ask for their help. “I don’t know what to do. I can’t testify for myself if I don’t even remember what happened. Can’t- can’t all this wait until I’m better? You’ve got good doctors here, I know that.”

River bit their lip. “What do you remember?”

“I remember our seventh birthday,” said Anya. “Lavender bubbles and Kali and you. That’s it.”

“Wow,” said River. Then, “I’m sorry. But even if you don’t remember, you did kill Max. And though we don’t understand why you did it, you can’t be allowed to go free.” They shook their head a bit like they were shaking something off. “I’ll visit you, I promise. You might even like it. You’ll have access to a library in prison – you’ll be able to read.” They nodded at the security guards, and they came the rest of the way forward and took Anya by the wrists.

“Hey!” said January, stepping towards them, but several gun safeties clicked off with an echo around the room, and he froze.

“Don’t do anything you’ll regret,” said Sasha. “We can send you home after you’ve given your statement to the police – they’ll be here in an hour, we just radioed down.”

“You can’t do this!” January said. “River, I know Aubrey wasn’t the greatest sibling to you in the past, but you should have seen them these past few weeks. They’ve been worried sick about you, and feeling terribly about how they’ve treated you, and you should let them get a chance to prove it before you throw them in jail forever. They’re hurt – you can’t just convict people for crimes they don’t remember!”

“He’s distraught,” said Sasha. “I don’t want him wandering around Songshu with an attitude and no background check.”

“You can hold them together until he calms down,” said River, and two of the security guards grabbed January’s wrists, rougher than they’d grabbed Anya’s.

“Listen,” said Sasha leaning down to look January in the eyes. “I’m sure you think you know them, January, but Aubrey can be very charming when they want to be. Ask yourself this: if Aubrey really had a head injury and couldn’t remember their past, would they have been able to answer every single question about their identity correctly? They knew every single one of their legal policies of the past ten years. That puts a bit of a hole in this amnesia claim. They were lying to you, January.”

“No, they weren’t.” January was stubbornly holding his ground despite the officers trying to pull him out of the room. “They studied. They re-learned their entire political platform in a week to convince you they were who they were, and to get help so that they could get their brain fixed and remember it all themselves. And instead you’re throwing them into jail. You’re an awful House and an awful sibling.”

“That’s it,” muttered one of the guards holding January’s arms, and they swept January’s leg so that he stumbled back and lost his balance, and the two of them dragged him out of the room.

River lifted their chin and met Anya’s gaze, evenly, as Anya was pulled out to follow him.

Songshu didn’t have a holding cell, but it did have a safe room/duststorm bunker with no windows that was ordinarily an infrequently used meeting room.^[2] Both Anya and January were placed inside to wait for the police to come. January had been patted down for his cage key – which had been taken and tucked into Sasha’s pocket – and had his right wrist handcuffed to a chair. Anya hadn’t been restrained, but the door had been locked and at least two people were standing guard outside.

“I’m sorry,” said January, a few minutes after the click of the door’s lock had sounded.

“What are you sorry for?”

“I shouldn’t have suggested you were Aubrey at all. It was just a trap to find a scapegoat for whoever shot Max.”

“No,” said Anya. “You did the right thing. I am Aubrey, and it would have been more unjust to have some poor impersonator get up here and find themselves blindsided with prison rather than political power.”

“Well, they would have deserved it for impersonating you,” January grumbled. “I really don’t think you shot them.”

Anya shook their head. “No one can really know what they’ll do under pressure until it happens. We don’t know the situation. Perhaps I just made the wrong choice.”

“Oh my gosh. Saying things like that is exactly what will make a jury convict you as guilty. Isn’t there some sort of medical deferral thing for cases like this? Can’t you get one of those?”

“I don’t think so.” Anya started to pace, but they made sure to stay in front of January – it would be rude to walk behind him when he couldn’t comfortably stand or get out of the chair. “Remember, according to the hospital, my brain is baseline fine. My memory storage is still intact, they just think I’m repressing it.”

January shook his head. “This whole thing is stupid. You wouldn’t shoot Max if you disagreed with them. You’d talk to them. That’s your very first instinct. That’s what you did when you woke up in the street with a total stranger, and that’s what you default to every time.”

 “It’s fine.” It wasn’t really fine, but Anya was hoping that if they said it enough they might start to believe it. “I know they at least have talk therapy in prison. Maybe that will be enough to bring my memory back.”

“But not your life,” said January. “Now River’s going to be the Senator and I don’t think they’ll do a very good job if their first instinct is to throw their sibling under a bus.”

“They said it was the best option,” said Anya. “They’re a linguistics researcher, and they’re very smart. If they say this is the best option, I think it is. I promised I was going to be a better sibling from now on. That means trusting them.”

“Well, I don’t.”

The silence stretched, and then there was a click and the door swung open. “I’ll shout if I need you,” said Sasha’s voice to someone outside, and then Sasha came into the room, closing the door and standing just in front of it with their arms crossed.

January shifted in his chair and glared. “What do you want?”

“I just wanted to talk to Aubrey,” said Sasha. “Off the record. Nothing you say will leave this room, Aubrey, not even in court. I just want to know – why?”

Anya had a feeling they knew what Sasha was asking, but they didn’t have an answer. “Why what?”

“Why did you shoot Max?”

They shook their head. “I don’t know. I told you, I can’t remember anything.”

“Stop lying,” said Sasha. “You can keep your amnesia defense in the courts, I don’t care. I just want to know. We can take January to another room if you think he’s going to talk. But can’t you just let me have the truth? I’ve been in this House for decades, Aubrey. At least an explanation.”

“This is the truth,” said Anya. “I don’t remember. If you take January away that’ll still be the story, but I’d rather you didn’t.”

“What’s the point of him?” Sasha asked. “Is he supposed to be revenge? I told you, there was nothing going on with Max and River. And now the only unusual thing going on with River is that they’re depressed because you disappeared on them. They’ve not spoken a word about the difference between the twelve reborn languages in weeks.”

Something itched at the back of Anya’s mind. That was incorrect.

“I think you mean revived languages,” they said. “And really the only majorly successful one is Hebrew. Cornish is second most successful, but most other languages that had revival attempts are still dormant.”

“Cornish?” said January, who appeared to be somewhat pettily attempting to pretend Sasha wasn’t in the room, “I had some neighbors that spoke Cornish. What’s it mean, that it’s revived?”

Anya would rather talk to January than Sasha, particularly if they were about to go to prison for who knew how long. “When there’s no living speakers, a language is considered dead,” they said. “But if people successfully bring it back as an everyday language for native speakers, then it’s considered revived. Do you remember any of it?”

January considered. “Owr peren,” he said. “Gold pear. That’s what the neighbors called the decorations in the forest.”

Anya wished they had some paper to write this down with, and then realized that Sasha was still in the room, and they looked like they had seen a ghost.

“What’s wrong?”

Sasha didn’t speak for a moment, but just stared very hard at Anya. “Okay,” they said, like they were deciding something, “Why’s Old Church Slavonic important?”

Anya wasn’t sure why they were doing more tests, but they were equally certain that they knew this one, that the information was tucked away in the box in their head marked ‘languages’. It was a bit bigger than they’d previously thought, because January hadn’t asked anything of them but English and Mandarin and the occasional Russian, but Anya suddenly suspected that they knew quite a lot of languages.

“It’s considered the first Slavic literary language and the oldest written Slavonic language we have. It’s part of the Indo-European language family, so if you want to know anything at all about the historical development of the Slavic languages, you need to be at least familiar.”

Sasha nodded once. “Why is saying ‘happy’ funny?” They said the word happy in a deep baritone, pitching their voice down to make the word come out low and loud.

“Because happy is counted as a detail – it’s description,” said Anya. “It belongs in the higher register. Putting it in the low vocal range makes it a command, so you’re saying, ‘be happy right now’ rather than ‘I’m feeling happy’. One of the calves once tried to convince me that the low register was the correct register as a prank, and I had to go back and request edits to two different papers once I figured that out.”

“Sorry,” said January. “Calves?”

“Mammoth calves,” said Anya, and then they paused and ran back their own words. “I speak Mammoth?”

“You can talk to mammoths?” January’s voice had hit an interesting register.

“Yes,” said Sasha, and they were speaking quickly now, as if there were some urgent deadline to meet. “You. Person I am looking at right now.” They were staring hard at Anya. “What is your name?”

“Aubrey Gale,” said Anya, uneasy.

“No,” said Sasha. “You said the memory loss was bad. You said you didn’t even remember your name at first. When you say your name is Aubrey Gale, do you have an actual memory in your head of people calling you that, or are you assuming that you are Aubrey Gale because all of the other details fit?”

Anya closed their eyes and thought hard for a moment. “I don’t have a memory of that,” they said, “but I don’t remember a lot of things. I do remember the lavender bubbles with Kali, though, so I have to be Aubrey. You said so yourself, that no one else would know about that.”

“No,” said Sasha, grim. “River would.”

Behind them, the door opened, and River walked in.

1. No one had specifically asked him to keep reading newspapers aloud, but several people had told him how helpful it was to know what was going on without waiting to borrow the library’s solitary paper English-Mandarin dictionary. So he’d kept doing it – Mandarin was his fourth language, and he could use the practice.

[↺ go back]

2. Infrequently used because it was the least beautiful room in Songshu, and also had no windows, so the lighting alternated between a grim twilight or a sterile hospital white depending on how many lights were turned on. Being in it for prolonged periods of time had a sort of tendency to warp the atmosphere of whatever meeting took place into a grim war-room.

[↺ go back]

Chapter Text

River looked surprised, and then uneasy to see that Sasha was already in the duststorm bunker. “The police are twenty minutes out,” they said. “Did you hear already?”

“No,” said Sasha. “But I was wondering, River, if you could tell me a joke in Mammoth.”

River blinked. “What? Why?”

“Just curious,” said Sasha, in the least curious voice Anya had ever heard.

River shrugged and shifted from foot to foot. “I don’t know, I can’t think of one right now. Is this really the time?”

“I think it’s exactly the time,” said Sasha, as they moved between River and the door. “I particularly think it’s the time because the police are coming to arrest Aubrey, not River, and I think it would be prudent to make sure we give them the right Gale, don’t you?”

“What is happening?” whispered January, desperately.

River had gone pale. “Look, knock-knock, who’s there, orange, orange you glad to see me. Happy? We don’t have time for this, we need to get Aubrey ready to go.”

“Mammoths don’t knock,” said Sasha, “and mammoths have three different words for orange.”

“That joke hinges on a pun in English, not Mammoth,” said Anya, softly, pieces fitting together into a painful, ugly, puzzle. “Aubrey.”

River – no. Aubrey – the real one – was on the verge of tears. They clenched their fists tight at their sides and glared. “You couldn’t even do this for me, River? You couldn’t- you would have loved prison, you could just read and hide away from people all day. That would kill me, you understand. It would.”

“Aubrey,” said Anya. “I don’t- I don’t remember what’s gone wrong with us, but if I’ve done something to you-”

“Shut up,” said Aubrey. “You don’t know anything, you couldn’t handle it. We’re being blackmailed, did you know that? And Kali made me marry Max because we’re under orders to tank the solar fields until Consul Song gets approval to sell them to Beijing. Do you know how much pressure I’m under, all of the time? There’s no way to fix this, River, and if you get put in charge and try to give everyone singing lessons in Mammoth it’s all going to go to custard a lot sooner.”

“Blackmail?” said Sasha.

“Aubrey,” said Anya. “I want to help. Let me help.”

“Fine,” said Aubrey, and they stepped up to Anya, planted both hands on their shoulders, and shoved them. Hard.

Anya fell backwards, into the table and a rolling chair, whacking their head on the edge and getting their arm caught in the chair’s back, twisting painfully.

“Anya!”

Anya scrambled to get back up as they heard January shout. Sasha had their hand on their gun, and Aubrey was standing behind January.

January, who was handcuffed to the chair he was sitting in.

Aubrey had pulled out a shoelace tied in a loop and had hooked it around his neck, pulling taut beneath his jaw. It was three inches above where the collar for his cage ended. The cage left him plenty of space to breathe. The string didn’t.

“Stop,” said Sasha, low. “Let him go.”

“I don’t get it,” said Aubrey, hands wrapped so tightly around the ends of the string that their knuckles were white. “Why do people keep falling in love with you? Max did, this Earthstronger did. You can see it on his face. It’s not normal, right, Sasha? All they know is obscure languages and how to be mildly off-putting, and people just fall in love with them left and right.”

January’s adam’s apple bobbed harshly just beneath the string digging into his neck. He had closed his eyes, and was breathing very slowly.

“What do you want?” said Anya.

“I want you to go to jail,” said Aubrey. “I want you to go on being me. We’ll tell everyone that you turned yourself in, and courts will be nice to you since you’re so honorable. You’ll get out in fifteen or twenty years because you’ll have perfect behavior and probably the prison guards will all fall in love with you, too, and then you can publish all the books you’ve written. And I’ll be you, and I’ll be the head of House Gale and manage this whole mess so you don’t have to.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then I guess-” Aubrey paused, and leaned down and put their head next to January’s. “What’s your name, again?”

They loosened up on the string a bit, and January, eyes still closed, rasped, “January.”

“Then I guess January dies,” said Aubrey.

“That doesn’t gain you anything,” said Sasha. “You’ll go to jail for longer.”

“It teaches River the kind of hard choices you have to make,” said Aubrey. “If they can’t make this one, then they can’t do what’s necessary to be a Senator.” They stared at Anya. “Your choice.”

Out of the corner of their eye, Anya saw Sasha go for their gun, and Aubrey yanked hard. January made a strangled noise and clutched at his throat with his free hand. The string was pulled too tight for him to get a grip. “Or I guess Sasha could get him killed,” said Aubrey, eerily calm.

“Martinez,” said Anya, short, and Sasha took their hand off their holster. Aubrey eased up enough for January to cough his way into shallow breathing. He tried one more time to get a grip on the cord with his gauntleted fingers, and when that didn’t work, he rested his palm on his chest for a moment, and then slowly let it drop down on top of his other hand, the one cuffed to the chair.

Anya tore their eyes off January and looked straight at Aubrey, holding their gaze. “Okay,” they said, “I don’t want him to die. But can you just explain, please, what happened before the internet went out? I don’t know if I’ll ever remember, and I want to understand.”

Aubrey hesitated.

“Please,” said Anya. “You can be me. I’ll be you. I just want to know why.”

“Okay,” said Aubrey, and they explained.

Aubrey and Max had been on one of their media-mandated walks where they alternated between silence and grating on each other like petting a cat from tail to ears. Aubrey was itching with the fact that Max would rather have had River instead of them, and itching more with the fact that Max wouldn’t even admit it.

After uncomfortable silence number eight, Max dug in their pocket and held out a thumb drive like a peace offering. “Do you want to see something good?”

“A thumb drive?” Aubrey said, unimpressed.

“See what your haptics can pull off of it,” said Max as they took it. “It’s very encrypted, but-”

Aubrey sucked in a breath. “It’s a virus,” they said. “That’s- what does it do? Something to do with haptics?”

“It’s a full wipe,” said Max. “They’ve been developing it for military use, in case someone ever manages to corrupt the haptics system. It’ll clean out all the data ever stored in your haptics – saved passwords, filter preferences, user IDs – and hard reboot all the tech.”

Aubrey thought of the hundreds of personal notes and saved map routes and alarms all saved to their haptics. “That sounds like a mess,” they said. “Would it destroy social media accounts, too?”

“Everything connected to the haptics system,” said Max. “This would probably take out all of Tharsis’s internet for days, if not weeks. It’s still a prototype, but it has been performing well in the simulations I’ve been running.”

“And now I’ve got it,” mused Aubrey, closing their fist around it. “The power of the internet in the palm of my hand.” They’d been joking. They’d used their joking voice. But Max’s face fell a little bit.

“Hah, yeah,” they said, holding out their hand. “I can take it back now.”

Aubrey pulled it back.

“Aubrey,” said Max, starting to frown.

“Lighten up,” said Aubrey, dancing backward. “I’m just messing with you.”

“It’s not funny,” said Max, starting after them. “Aubrey, hand it-”

Max stumbled, just a bit, as their foot went sideways into an unseen divot in the red dust. It was the sort of thing that Kali had always called an opportunity – to get the jump on a Marine was a very rare thing, and it would be a shame not to take a advantage of it. Aubrey dropped the drive into their pocket and swung up their rifle.

They were joking. They were still joking. It was just nice to imagine a future where they weren't looking ahead at five years of grating, emotionless Max pining after grating, emotionless River.

Max looked up. “Aubrey, what are you-”

Aubrey wanted to say something clever and snide. “Look who’s the scary spouse now,” maybe, or “Can’t you take a joke?”

In the end, all that came out was a gunshot blast.

Max fell to their knees, hand pressed red over their heart in shock.

They weren’t dead yet. Aubrey stared, mostly horrified, partly fascinated, and partly glad that the internet connection was spotty.

In the ringing silence after the gunshot, Max stared at Aubrey in shock, mouth open. And then they sucked in a breath with a wince and bellowed, “RIVER! RUN!”

Aubrey gaped, horrified, at Max, and then swung the rifle stock to hit them and stop them from shouting anymore. Max slumped over to the side and didn’t move.

Aubrey’s thoughts were seeds and smoke on the wind, scattering and reforming and never coming to a clear shape. What must River think? What were they going to do with Max? What was going to happen to them?

The answer to one of those questions came as a soft gasp. Aubrey spun to see River standing there, lacking their usual tote bag of haptics equipment and notepads, with just their rifle slung over their shoulder.

“Aubrey?”

“River,” they said, “It’s not what you think.”

“Did you kill them?” River couldn’t tear their eyes away from Max, and Aubrey was abruptly annoyed. They were River’s sibling, and they couldn’t even merit first concern? Max might have been attacking Aubrey, for all River knew.

“I’m okay, since you asked,” said Aubrey, acid-sharp.

River jolted to look at Aubrey. “That’s good,” they said, and took a deep breath. “But it’s going to be- a lot more serious, if you’ve killed them.” They started forward, skirting around Aubrey to kneel down next to Max and press a hand to the pulse in their throat.

Aubrey waited.

“Oh,” said River at last, and sat back. They turned their head to look at Aubrey. “Aubrey,” they said, and there was nothing but sadness in their voice. Aubrey hated pity. “We’re going to have to call Sasha.”

“No,” said Aubrey.

River’s eyes flicked down to where Aubrey had tightened their grip on their rifle’s barrel. “We have to,” they said. “We can’t hide this. The police will see it in the halos.”

“Not yours,” said Aubrey. “Halos are weird on you.”

“They’ll see this,” said River, glancing down at Max again. “Death makes an impression in everybody’s head. Even mine.”

The fear was so solid in their chest that Aubrey didn’t know how they were breathing. “River,” they said, “I won’t go to the hulks on Jupiter. I won’t.”

River stood up and faced them, but didn’t come near. “I’ll help you,” they said. “I’ll do what I can, you’ll have House Gale’s full support, and if we come clean right away that’ll help us claim manslaughter, or at the very least that it wasn’t premeditated.”

“No,” said Aubrey, uselessly, because they couldn’t think of any way to save themselves. And then their hand brushed the pocket with Max’s thumb drive, and they did. “River,” they said, “Are the halos connected to the haptics system?”

River blinked. “They link up, yes,” they said. “But halos read the energy from your brain, not data from your haptics. They just store pattern observations from previous halos in your haptics.”

“Okay,” said Aubrey. “You’ll help me?”

“I’ll be with you,” River promised. Aubrey stepped forward and hugged them, tight, and after a moment River hugged back. When they did, Aubrey pulled the thumb drive from their pocket and jammed it into River’s temple as they hit the eject button.

Thumb drives^[1] worked based on the electricity in your skin. It was a very minute, very precisely calculated amount that would conduct the data from a drive straight to the haptics implanted in your brain.

Pressing the thumb drive to River’s temple downloaded the virus a fraction of a second faster.

River shoved Aubrey back and didn’t lower their hands, as if they were going to defend themselves. “What did you download-” Then they collapsed.

A second later, Aubrey did, too.

“You were gone when I woke up,” said Aubrey. “I didn’t know where you went, and then Sasha and the security team had come and found us and they tried to save Max. They got their heart restarted for a few minutes. Long enough for them to wake up.”

“Max isn’t dead?”

Aubrey shook their head and laughed, bitterly. “The first thing they said was your name, and I just said ‘Here’. Then they told Sasha that Aubrey shot them, right before their heart stopped again. They couldn’t get them back after that. So I just kept being you. It was pretty easy. All I had to do was act overwhelmed and correct people’s grammar.”

January’s hand was still moving, ever-so-slowly, as it had been doing the entire time Aubrey spoke. It was the slightest twisting motion. He opened his eyes and looked directly at Anya.

“I see,” said Anya. Then, “Sasha, now!”

There was the sound of snapping plastic as January ripped the arm of the chair off. He’d untwisted the gauntlet of the hand that had been cuffed, and he flung the piece of plastic blindly backward towards Aubrey.

Aubrey shrieked and dropped the string, ducking away, and January dove forward under the table as Sasha drew their gun and pointed it at Aubrey.

For five seconds, the room was perfectly silent save for Aubrey and January breathing heavily.

“No,” said Aubrey, and ran at Anya.

Sasha fired.

The gunshot was loud and echoed in Anya’s brain.

And River remembered. They remembered hearing a gunshot while working with the mammoths. They remembered Aubrey, and Max’s body – still warm, no heartbeat. And they remembered what had happened after Aubrey had downloaded unknown software into their brain.

When River woke up, their head was full of echoing empty caverns and deep inscrutable wells. They groaned, and blinked, and stared at the dusty sky. Their thoughts came back slowly and quietly. So quietly, and before River could look at any of their thoughts, they realized that the internet was gone.

They did as any person did upon finding something missing, and looked where it ought to be, and then winced as it felt like rubbing sandpaper in their head when they tried to reach for their messages.

Everything else came back after. A gunshot. A body. Aubrey and a drive.

River pushed themself to sit up, quickly, and then froze when they saw Aubrey laying on the ground mere feet from them.

River got to their feet and looked at them. Their face was different. Less symmetrical, a mole or two, different ears. Their filters were gone, but they didn’t appear injured, just unconscious. “Aubrey?”

Their sibling faintly groaned, and River revised their guess on what had happened. They’d thought that the drive had just taken their internet connection so that River couldn’t call Sasha. But the download had had the faint iron tang of a virus as it had burst into River’s haptics, and the thing about viruses was that they spread. Through social media feeds, through messaging systems, through five feet of proximity.

River looked through the pine trees in the direction of Songshu. There was a dust storm gathering on the plains past it. Then they looked the other direction, towards Tharsis. Max’s body was turning the red-orange Martian dust redder. It was all over their fingers, as if they’d tried to staunch the flow.

If the internet was gone, and the virus really had knocked out the haptics, like Aubrey had seemed to think, then it was Aubrey’s word against River’s as to what had happened.

Aubrey was glamorous, well-liked, and the Apollo of House Gale, which would be integral to all of the decision-making processes of getting the internet back up.

River was not.

River took one last long look at their sibling, groaning on the forest floor, then slung their rifle down next to Aubrey and took off running towards the tracks that connected Songshu to Tharsis.

They arrived at the tracks just as the dust started really swirling. There were boxes and crates stacked around the tracks, but no train. River snuck in between two crates and tucked their coat sharply around themself and settled in to wait.

They waited all that afternoon, all through the night – River slept in fitful, cold snatches – and most of the way through the next morning before they heard the chatter of workers coming to the tracks.

“Internet’s down for three days, minimum.”

“I heard three weeks is more likely.”

“If it is three weeks, you better be glad the valley trains can still run. Otherwise we’d all starve up here just because no one thought to put a manual electric control on the system. Thankfully someone did.”

“An engineer someone. We always build in redundancies in the case of catastrophic failure.”

“You’re not an engineer today, pal. Shut up and pull the lever.”

River breathed very quietly, but wasn’t too worried about being spotted. The dust had been swept up like snow, and they were mostly buried in a red pile of sandy debris with just their shoulders sticking out. If they ducked down, their hood was enough of a sandy brown to just look like more dirt.

River waited for two more hours while the trains came up from the valley bearing a few crates and a few governmental officials with urgent messages, and then chose their moment and crept into an empty car to hide themselves in the back.

Nobody got on for the return trip, so River stood up once the train was moving and looked out over Tharsis as the train descended into the Valley. They didn’t know what to do, or where to go. Tharsis wasn’t big enough for someone to permanently disappear forever. So River watched the towering buildings rise along with their heart rate and tried to just breathe. They’d figure it out.

River got off the train and stepped straight into a riot.

Earthstrongers were thronged around the train platform, yelling about city trains and internet and access. People were shoving and shouldering through, and though River hunched their shoulders and tried to look short, people noticed.

“Hey, what are you going to do about it?”

“Where are you going?”

“Are you the train manager? You can’t just stop the trains, we have work!”

“No,” River said, “No, I’m not.”

But nobody listened, and people were shoving, and grabbing, and River got slammed into a wall, hard. Cold fear washed down their back. They were trapped – there were Earthstrong hands in front of them and a stone wall behind them. River covered their face with their arms and tried to make themself small. After a few moments of people shouting at each other about jail time, the hands shoved River one final time and slipped off.

Their head was ringing when they opened their eyes, and lights were floating in fuzzy dark patterns all over their vision. River had to get out of there. They leaned against the wall and stumbled away from the noise and the shouting, and gradually it got quieter.

The wall ended, and there was an empty space that took River far too long to recognize as a street. Their head was swimming, and they were dizzy, and everything about the past two days had been awful and they wished they hadn’t happened. They wished they could forget.

River took one step into the street and saw a flash of something white, and then the pain in their head grew into the furious roar of thousands of angry bees, and they closed their eyes and fell into the noise.

River opened their eyes. Sasha was kneeling over Aubrey, hands pressed to their thigh. They were shouting orders toward the door, where the clatter of security officers could be heard.

River leaned down and looked under the table. January was crouched there, holding one hand to his chest like a wounded animal and looking lost.

“Are you all right?”

January, to be totally and completely honest, had no idea what was going on. First Anya had been Aubrey, and then Anya had been River, and then River had been Aubrey, and then whoever the sibling was, they were trying to kill him because they thought he was in love with Anya, which he hadn’t thought was that obvious.

And then there’d been a bit of a standstill, and January wondered what was the point of being a polar bear in a cage if he couldn’t even rescue himself, and Anya-Aubrey-River had gotten the person behind him to start talking, and he’d gotten his gauntlet off to try and rip his way out of the chair and go for cover.

Which had worked.

But now his hand was stinging and he was pretty sure there were plastic splinters in his palm because it hurt badly but he was afraid it would hurt more if he looked at it, so he didn’t.

There had been a gunshot, and shouting. Now Anya was crouching in front of him, and holding out their hand. January gave them his hand that was still in its gauntlet and unhurt, and let them pull him out.

The sibling was groaning on the ground, and Sasha’s hands were red where they were pressed against their thigh. Someone in a doctor’s robe ran through, carrying a medical case.

Cold fingers caught January’s chin and turned his face back towards Anya. “It’s being handled,” they said calmly. “Now, are you all right?”

They were calm, and confident, and January loved them. It had snuck up on him, somehow. Little moments of laughter and kindness and clever words had grown into something massive that meant when January had thought he was going to die, all he had wanted was to hear their voice.

“What’s your name?” January asked, hoarse. “Your real one, if you actually did figure it out in all that.”

They smiled. “I did,” they said. “I remembered. It’s coming back now. I'm pleased to meet you, January Stirling. My name is River Gale. And Reka Shtorm, and Jiang Dafeng. If you get me a working halo I can do it in Mammoth.”

January smiled. “Do mine instead.”

“January Stirling, and Yanvar Basseyn, and Yiyue Hai.”

They took January’s injured hand by the forearm and drew it forward to look at it. January looked, too. There was a rough red mark where the handcuff had dragged, and the handcuff itself was still dangling from him. He’d dropped the plastic chunk that remained of the chair’s arm, but there were five narrow splinters he could see in his palm, and more red scratches that were slowly seeping blood.

“I think you’ll live,” said Anya – no. River Gale. “But I want a doctor to take these out, and also to look at your throat.”

January nodded, relieved and helpless to resist someone who sounded calm and in charge when his body was still coming to terms with the fact that panic time was over.

River led January out the door and down the hall, where the shouting grew quieter and distant.

“What’s going to happen now?”

“Aubrey’s going to go to jail,” said River. “For murder, and attempted murder, and identity theft. They won’t be able to run House Gale anymore, so that will fall to me. Senator River Gale.” They made a face. “I suppose I’ll have to get used to the sound of that. And I’ll have to figure out something to do about the blackmail and Beijing.” They caught January’s eye. “And what sort of legislation might allow you to buy your own groceries rather than enlisting unsuspecting roommates to do it.”

It was the first hint all day that Anya – January’s Anya, not Anya-the-very-important-Gale-person – was still in there, and January laughed, relieved. He stepped closer to them, intending to say something funny about Earthstronger landlords, and accidentally bumped into them. His body still felt jittery and alien after the adrenaline rush, and he hadn’t actually intended to walk into them, though it wasn’t hard.

Still, River’s opposite shoulder brushed against a wall as they went with the movement, and their shoulders hitched in the tiniest gasp.

Fear.

January went down onto one knee. His heart broke. He tucked his un-gauntleted hand behind his back. “I’m sorry.”

River shook their head and pulled composure back over their face. “Please get up. It’s not your fault. It’s just memories still coming to the surface.”

January had a feeling he knew what kind of memories they were. Earthstronger safety announcements, death tolls, all of the popular anti-immigration rhetoric. River wasn’t a blank slate anymore. They were a very important and insulated Natural person with years and years of knowledge that Earthstrongers were dangerous to them. They might still like January, but they’d never be truly comfortable around him. Not anymore.

“It’s okay,” he said, standing up slowly and giving them plenty of space. “I can find your doctor’s office on my own. I’m sure you’ve got lots of Gale stuff to be doing besides looking after me.”

River frowned, but then Sasha hollered, “Gale! The police are here!” and their head snapped toward the lobby. 

“Go,” said January.

“Straight that way and then left,” said River. “There’s a sign.” They stopped and looked at his face, careful. “You’re sure you’ll be all right?”

“Positive,” said January, and he made sure to smile on the lie.

There was no one in the doctor’s office, so January sat on a table, and then bit his lip and picked out the largest pieces of plastic he could see. Then he started bleeding rather a lot, and dug through drawers until he found plasters to haphazardly apply, one-handed.

The door slammed open and made him jump as the person with the medical kit barreled through, barking orders to the police officers who carried Aubrey on a stretcher.

January hopped off the table and stood in a corner out of the way. The doctor and the two police officers spoke rapidly to each other and went to work on Aubrey’s thigh with gauze and clear liquid and a pair of metal tweezers that looked like just the thing to extract a bullet. After an uncomfortable five minutes, something metal clinked in a pan and the police officers started packing and bandaging the wound while the doctor snapped off their gloves and read the machines Aubrey had been hooked up to.

Then they noticed January. “You’re not supposed to be in here.”

The police officers’ heads snapped up, quickly.

“I’m January,” said January, trying to look nonthreatening. “River sent me? My hand got hurt.” He held his palm out as proof, feeling like a child presenting a paper cut. The doctor’s eyebrows shot up.

“What happened?”

“I broke a plastic chair,” said January. “I tried to get all the pieces out, but-”

The doctor sighed. “Of course you did. Sit down over there and take that mess off your hand.” Under their breath, January heard them grumble, “Barbarians.”

January sat in the visitor’s chair and peeled the plasters off his palm. Several of the gashes started bleeding again. The doctor came back with new gloves, a clean damp cloth, a smaller pair of tweezers, and some very thick eyeglasses that made their eyes look massive. They wiped off his palm with a no-nonsense attitude, gripping it tight in one hand, and then applied the tweezers to it with the other.

January bit his lip and looked past their shoulder. The police officers were talking quietly to each other and watching Aubrey. After a moment, one of them went through Aubrey’s pockets and found a small thumb drive. They both investigated it for a moment, and one produced a clear evidence bag from a pocket and placed it inside. The taller of the two officers carefully labeled the bag with a pen and then left, leaving the shorter one to stand next to Aubrey and look around a bit awkwardly.

When the doctor was done, they quickly wrapped his hand and said, “Don’t take that off for at least four hours.”

“Thank you,” said January. Feeling wildly embarrassed to take up more of this brusque person’s time, he still asked, “Do you think you could look at my neck?”

The doctor’s stare was flat. “Why?”

“River wanted me to get it looked at,” said January. “I got choked, kind of.” He wished Anya was there. It was mortifying to report that he’d been a damsel in the whole event.

The doctor grunted, and then clinically put their hands around his neck and felt things in a way that made January feel like he was a dog being checked for ticks. “You’ll live,” they said, pulling off the gloves. “Don’t wear scarves or anything that might tug around your neck until the bruises go away.”

“Thank you,” said January, but they were already gone across the room to Aubrey.

January stood up, and the police officer came over and he sat back down again. “Excuse me,” said the police officer, who seemed rather young up close, “but were you involved in the incident with the Gales?”

“Kind of,” said January.

The young officer pulled out a notepad and an old-fashioned voice recorder. “Could you tell me what happened? Nobody’s allowed to leave the house until they’ve given a statement.”

“Right,” said January, and he started to talk.

River emerged from six hours of managing police officers, security guards, the media team, and various other House Gale staff with a splitting headache and a head full of shaken-up memories. All they really wanted was to lie down in the dark for an hour with a cool washcloth on their head to think.

There was so much to do. They had to start the paperwork for a forced abdication of Senator-ship for Aubrey^[2], they had to organize paid time off for Sasha and all the security team members to give their testimony on Max’s last words during Aubrey’s upcoming trial, they had to figure out what strings House Gale was still able to pull to keep Aubrey from going to the Jupiter hulks, and they had to go talk to the accountants to figure out what they were going to do about the energy fields.

On top of all that, they also had to email their department head at the University and explain that they weren’t dead – they doubted Aubrey had bothered to show up to cover River’s linguistics class – and then they had to resign their position, effective immediately. River wasn’t looking forward to that. The friendly quiet of the university and the few other rampantly niche researchers had been the closest thing River had had to friends. Nobody was particularly close with one another – except perhaps Professor Shang, who had always been friendly – but they’d all understood one another to be the same kind of person. Strange and intense and shoved into the corners at family gatherings so they wouldn’t embarrass anybody. River was going to miss that.

When they’d been Anya, they’d privately thought that they’d have friends once they got their memory back. Real ones, not just politically advantageous ones. And probably Aubrey did.

River didn’t, though. River had been alone for a long time before they’d ever lost their memory, and River was alone now.

Well. Not anymore. Now there was January. January was the best friend that River had ever had. January was the only friend that River had ever had.

Evidently River needed to be better about making friends, because what sort of a person did it make them that they could only be friendly to people who introduced themselves by saving River from angry mobs?

But they had January now, and he was all the more precious for being unique. They’d have to find him later, after they went through their memory to make a list of the next sixteen fires that needed to be put out. And then perhaps they’d sleep, once all their memories felt sorted and familiar.^[3]

Maybe after that River could find the time to sit down and figure out exactly what it was they'd meant to do when they'd seen how happy January was to hear that they were recovering.

Instead, what they got was Dr. Okonkwo cornering them outside of their room and telling them that Aubrey was stable enough to be transported to the main hospital in the Valley, and they’d probably have to be there for a week before they could be actually arrested.

“Okay,” said River. “I want you supervising their transfer to the hospital, and can you send me the name of their doctor?”

“Yes,” said Dr. Okonkwo, and stepped away.

“Wait, how was January?”

Dr. Okonkwo turned back. “Who?”

“The Earthstronger,” said River. “I sent him to get checked out. Is he all right?”

Dr. Okonkwo frowned. “Fine. He would have been out of my office much sooner if he hadn’t decided to give his statement to the police in my visitor chair.”

River repressed the urge to roll their eyes. “But he’s done now, I presume. Where is he?”

Dr. Okonkwo threw up a hand. “I’m not his keeper! I’m barely yours and your sibling’s. Speaking of, I want to see you for scans first thing tomorrow to talk about all this amnesia business.”

River inclined their head in a motion that could be interpreted as a yes, which was the closest to a promise Dr. Okonkwo was going to get. They grumbled and went off down the hallway. River looked longingly at their bedroom, and then went to find Sasha.

Sasha was in the security office, glancing at camera feeds^[4] and scribbling out a report. There was already a stack of paperwork next to them.

“River, you should be in bed.” Sasha looked like they would have liked to fall down asleep where they sat, but only sheer tenacity of will was keeping them going.

“I will soon,” River promised. “I just wanted to check on January. Did someone think to give him a room, or am I going to find him curled up on a couch somewhere?”

“Neither,” said Sasha. “He left.”

“What?”

“He came and asked me if he could go after he gave his statement, so I gave him the reward and he left.”

River wondered if perhaps the amnesia had given way to a new and exciting form of brain injury that included hallucination. “You gave him the reward for finding me,” they said slowly, “and then he left? On the train?”

“That’s the only way back down to Tharsis,” said Sasha. “I mean, I didn’t physically give him fifty thousand yuan but I got the finance people to write down the check and he signed his bank info to it. It should be processed by tomorrow.”

“But January doesn’t have a bank account.”

Now Sasha looked like they were questioning River’s sanity. “What do you mean, he doesn’t have a bank account?”

“He doesn’t,” said River. “Most of the Earthstrongers don’t; they’re paid in small amounts of energy on their train charge cards. I don’t know what banking information he gave you, but it wasn’t his.”

Sasha swore in Russian, and then in Mandarin and English for good measure. “This House cannot take a single additional count of fraud,” they said. “We have to go talk to the finance people.”

“You do,” said River, heading for the door. “I need to go find January.”

January had gotten off the train by Fengrenyuan Hospital and just wandered. He didn’t want to go back to his apartment, which was cold and tiny and didn’t even have Anya – River – in it. He watched the lights on the Tiangong go up in the distance and thought about all the places he was never going to show them.

Well, he couldn’t show them anything they hadn’t already seen – important Great House people went to the Tiangong all the time – and anything else he might be able to show them – like the kids who would chalk flowers on your elevator door on holidays – wouldn’t be something someone with an indoor water display would care about.

The best thing to do would be to forget about it. To forget about the last three wonderful weeks and go on with his life like nothing had happened. After all, everyone was where they were supposed to be now. The world had gotten jolted off track when he’d first brought River up to an apartment that was never meant for them, and it had settled back into place now that they were home again. It was stupid to feel like he’d lost something he’d never had in the first place.

If he was going to forget them, he had to focus on falling out of love with them first.

It would be hard when loving River was like breathing. They would be everywhere now. He would hear about their policies in the work gossip and he would love them. He would see their picture in the paper and he would love them. He would see them in a parade from half a mile away and he would love them.

And they could never possibly love him back, they’d never even have room for him, so he would have to struggle on with the business of getting over them when he’d just keep falling in love every time they smiled or spoke or did something clever.

January resolved that he could mope for as long as his walk lasted, but when he went inside he would just have to suck it up and go on with his life. Stiff upper lip and all that. Huzzah.

It was thirty minutes to midnight and he was inching his way toward the nuclear apartments’ door when he remembered there were no biscuits in his flat. Biscuits were a bit of an extravagant expense, but he was back to grocery-shopping for one now, and besides that he was miserable. And the grocer’s was open until midnight.

He turned back to the grocery store and set his back against the wall.^[5] He waited, just long enough to realize that prying reminders of River out of his life was going to be impossible, and then he pulled his phone out of his pocket and started to navigate to the grocery app with fingers that shook from the cold.

“January,” said a voice. “What are you doing?”

Fingers wrapped around his and pulled the phone from his hand. January looked up and saw River, bundled warmly into an elegant blue coat.

“Buying biscuits,” he said wetly, and was horrified to realize that he was crying. He brushed quickly at his eyes and said, “What are you doing here?”

“The finance people said you gave them your banking information.”

“Oh,” said January. “Sorry. They seemed very excited about it, and I didn’t want to explain your sibling’s secret blackmail-financial-pressure situation since I didn’t actually understand it myself.”

He shrugged. He didn’t say that accepting money for helping River felt dirty now, that it would feel like he’d traded away someone he loved for a paycheck, and he didn’t think he could live with himself if he was the kind of person who’d sacrifice love for money. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t going to have the person he loved whether or not he took the money, but it was the principle of the thing.

And besides, he hadn’t fulfilled the terms of the reward. He hadn’t found Aubrey Gale after all.

Instead, he said, “It didn’t sound like you had fifty thousand yuan to just throw away, so I just wrote one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine and hoped they would figure it out after I left.”

“Tharsis bank account numbers are only eight numbers.”

 “They should figure it out pretty quick, then.” January waited for them to leave, but River was still holding his phone and looking at him like they were searching for something.

“I also came here because I wanted to thank you,” said River. “Truly. You’ve done so much for me, and I can’t imagine how to ever pay you back.”

“You don’t have to. I don’t want you to. Just knowing you’re all right, that’s enough.” January swallowed hard. “I only have one favor to ask, to make all of this easier.”

“Of course,” said River, uncertainty on their face.

“Don’t smile at me,” said January. “Don’t wave at me if you see me on the street. I don’t want to be in love with someone I can’t – ” His voice caught, and he shook his head. “I’ll never get over you if you’re nice to me.” January reached forward and took his phone back with careful fingers, not touching them. “Goodbye, Senator.”

He slid past them and walked as quickly as he could towards the nuclear apartments. The streetlights blurred in his vision and he wished there was a dust storm he could blame it on. Instead, there was a faint shushing noise all around him, and he realized it had started to rain.

A hand caught his wrist and spun him around. Raindrops sparkled in River’s hair as they caught his gaze and held it. “No. You don’t get to call me Senator. You can call me River, you can call me Jiang, you can call me Anya, but you can’t call me Senator.” River was fierce and frightening. January still loved them.

They weren’t done. “If I could run away from this and live with you in your tiny flat for the rest of my life, I would, but I can’t. You know I can’t. But I am not going to sacrifice my entire life to being Senator and lose you. Is it so unbelievable that I might love you too, January?”

January’s heart was racing. It was unbelievable. And more than that, it was impossible. “Great Houses don’t fall in love with Earthstrongers,” he said, “They don’t.”

“Senator River Gale disagrees,” said River, and they took his face in both of their hands and tilted his eyes up to meet theirs. “They do.”

January reached up and tucked a damp strand of River’s hair behind their ear. They didn’t flinch. Raindrops fell in long dark streaks through the dim light from the nearest streetlamp, which caught the light in River’s eyes like embers.

River’s fingers were growing warm against his jaw. “January,” they whispered, and they leaned down and kissed him.

Behind them, the grocer’s lights clicked off and they were suddenly adrift in the dark, surrounded only by the shush of rain and the glimmer of stars and water. January closed his eyes and kissed River back.

1. So named because they could provide an update or a mod to one’s haptics by pressing your thumb to them.

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2. While Great Houses had several times had their leaders continue to lead their House from jail, those leaders had been convicted for primarily white-collar crimes. It was a practice severely frowned upon by the public, and had a tendency to tank the reputation of any House that did it, so it didn't happen very often.

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3. They already had a list of memories to share with January, starting with the fact that they had met Ming the Tiangong bear for the first time when Ming had brought them a fish and attempted to ask for scritches by turning her head.

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4. The Songshu house cameras operated on closed circuit loop that hadn’t connected to the internet except to upload backups. The internet outage had wiped all their data, but they were still able to record new information. They did delete all video after 24 hours with no storage, so the security team’s juniormost officers had been taken off of patrol and put on rotating camera observation duty.

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5. The NO EARTHSTRONGERS sign had been graffitied over a few days ago with a flood of flowers and spaceships and fish. It was cheap spray-paint, the kind teens used, and it stretched all the way to the top of the wall, which meant that either Earthstronger teens had found a stepstool or that for some reason Natural teens had decided the wall was worthy of graffiti. January thought it was pretty.

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