Merely a Madness Read Online Free PDF Page A

shacks and shanties, or crawled out from under them.
    The bus must have driven through the gentrified portion of the makeshift city, because this place looks like a rubbish dump. Some of it is on fire.
    The noise is incredible. The locals scream and shout, and bang whatever they are holding together. They jump up and down, twirl about, as if judgement day has come. And over there, three of them are – oh my God, they can't be. Oh my God, that's just disgusting.
    Despite himself, Mullen's eyes flicker upwards, away from the sight and towards the blue of the sky.
    But it's no longer blue. It's gone weird. The sky is now a dirty yellow smudge. There are long streaks of red and black that make it seem as if the stars themselves have fallen.
    Curls of smoke spiral up all over the horizon. There are fires everywhere, not just in this dump. Any one of them could be the Harbin-Beck mine. He can't get his bearings from that. Instead, he looks for the other landmark he knows: the Valadez space elevator. He searches the horizon, turns slowly in the mud, once, and then again.
    The elevator is so big that even these vast palls of smoke couldn't obscure it. But it's gone. He remembers the shuddering and shaking in his dreams on the railway platform. Mullen cannot even begin to comprehend the firepower it would take to destroy the elevator in one night. His last small hope falls away and the emptiness of the truth sets in. This is not just a small, localised uprising or a few criminals hoping to rob the tourists.
    The brute with the rotten nose pokes him in the back again. Mullen grips Hannah's hand like it's the last of his sanity. He glances over at her. She has said nothing since he handed over his passwords. Twenty minutes of silence from Hannah is either a miracle or the apocalypse. Definitely the latter , Mullen thinks. He's expecting her to be on the verge of tears again, but she's not. She's grinning wide as a shark, and her eyes are shining, taking in the bacchanalian antics all around.
    Arnou and his brutes herd them through the mud and the rubble. Earthling children follow, singing and spitting. They look nothing like Martian children. These creatures are lanky, bony. This one's legs are malformed; that one has a dent in his skull like a bite out of an apple. If it weren't for the fact that half of them are naked, he wouldn't be able to tell one gender from another.
    No matter what Hannah says, the Earthlings are definitely a different species now. She strides along beside him, ignoring the catcalling, even smiling back at them.
    Mullen remembers thinking earlier that she might be insane. Sure, he feels like he's going crazy, but that's a natural reaction. This … this euphoria, the way she's beaming from ear to ear, it's nothing less than completely cracked.
    When ( if ) they get back to Mars, he's going to have to … no, who is he kidding? He always knew he was in love with an insane woman. He's going to keep on ignoring it, the same way he always does.
    Something about the destruction around them – the rubble, the ruins, the way everything is burning – is nagging at him. It's too much, but his thoughts keep skittering away from him whenever he tries to concentrate on anything other than the feel of Hannah's hand in his own.
    They walk for over an hour. By the time they stop, Mullen's feet are soaked through his socks and boots. He's got blisters on both heels where his socks have been rubbing against wet skin.
    They have reached an honest-to-God actual building made out of bricks and not sheet metal, cardboard, rubble, or spit. It's big – at least three stories high. There are bars on the windows. A razor-wire fence surrounds it. Two armed Earthlings stand guard at the gate. Guns have been illegal for everyone except mine security for centuries. Mullen wonders where they got them.
    They are herded through corridors littered with dead guards. There's blood on the walls, fresh enough that it still glistens. Mullen averts