A Desolation Called Peace

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

IT was possible—just barely, for a woman of Nine Hibiscus’s size and easily recognizable distinction of rank, but possible—to surprise someone on Weight for the Wheel with the sudden presence of their commanding officer, in a place they had never intended to encounter her. The trick to it, really, was in the Shard programming she had long ago refused to have stripped out of her cloudhook: she could, if she was careful, slip into the collective vision of every Shard pilot on the flagship, and triangulate the location of the person she very much wanted to find through three hundred pairs of eyes. (If that many Shard pilots had their cloudhook programming operational at one time, and if she could handle the multiplicity of vision for long enough to make it useful.) It was like standing on the bridge and cycling through all of the camera-eyes, but—faster. More mobile.

Her Shard pilots knew about it, of course. She would never have been willing to borrow their eyes if they hadn’t been asked, and signed on, and knew to turn their Shard programming off if they didn’t want her to accidentally see some private or personal moment. It helped that she had no access to their shared proprioception—her cloudhook couldn’t handle the new technology without being upgraded, and besides she’d probably have to plug herself into a Shard to get even close to the necessary processing power. But that lack of bodily access—she suspected that helped, when she asked if she could see through their eyes. Most of her pilots let her watch the ship through them when she needed to. It was one of the ways that they trusted her; one of the ways that their trust felt like a bright and blooming explosion of shrapnel in her chest, whenever she considered it too closely.

Now she used them—dipping in and out of Shard-sight at the intersections of corridors, trying not to get dizzy or run into anyone while her visual perception was elsewhere—to be where Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise was intending to go, before she got there.

Nine Hibiscus wanted to make her flinch. And then she wanted to very gently kick her off her flagship and back onto the Parabolic Compression where she belonged, and where her Third Palmer spywork habits would be somewhat confined. Keep her far away from Nine Hibiscus’s plans—whatever they ended up being—to deal with the alien homeworld the Gravity Rose had found. But even more than wanting to be able to keep secrets when she chose to, Nine Hibiscus was anticipating Sixteen Moonrise’s expression of strangled distress when she would be surprised. Anticipating it sharply enough that she knew she was letting her teeth show in her smile as she hurried down her ship’s corridors and elevator shafts, command deck to hydroponics to crew mess to—

—a tumbling vector of stars, the taste of panic-bile and metallic adrenaline in the back of her throat, her vision consumed by the vast arch of an alien ring-ship, slick metal and rippling distortion, too close too close too close and then the stars again, that Shard—wherever they were, and she hadn’t meant to slip out of the set of pilots who were safely on the Weight for the Wheel, off-shift—managing to pull back hard enough that they skirted asymptotically up from the ring, up, away—

Nine Hibiscus could feel her heartbeat in her wrists, her throat, the membrane of her diaphragm. Her heartbeat, or that Shard pilot’s, and this was without having a Shard and the updated proprioception programming. Just from visuals. No wonder some of the Shard pilots were calling this new programming the Shard trick.

Flicker-vision: Shard pilots on her ship, in the mess, in the hydroponics deck, in the fitness facility, an echoed sense of strain—psychosomatic, surely—as that pilot bench-pressed heavy plates away from his chest. Her heart still racing.

The wheel of stars, too fast.

Did they all feel this? All the time?

The wheel of stars—and fire, a flash of heat, of sick-sweet panic (there goes the engine, oh—), vision clouded entirely with red, red-to-white, and—

Gone. Blackness. Nine Hibiscus swallowed. She was hanging on to a wall, somewhere in a passage between Deck Six and Deck Five. She was entirely herself. That pilot had—had swept up away from the enemy ship, avoided a crash, and been shot from behind while in the process of moving through that escape arc. A little flash of fire, and nothing ever again.

Did every Shard pilot feel every death, if they were paying attention?

Gingerly, she reached through the programming one more time. Returned to the strain of the weight lifter. If he’d seen that death, he wasn’t reacting in any way visible in his field of vision. She swapped again. There was a Shard pilot with his programming on in the Deck Five mess, and he was sitting at one end of a long communal table, and at the other end, casual in shirtsleeves, her uniform jacket slung over the back of her chair, was the Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise, engaged in cheerful conversation with Nine Hibiscus’s own soldiers.

The spike of fury Nine Hibiscus felt was blinding-intense, like a shockstick blow to the solar plexus. Worse than watching that death—more disorienting for having just seen it. She didn’t even know which Shard had just died. Or how many more just like it would die today. And here was this—intruder, this underminer, this woman who was not with her own legion, her own people, but too concerned with infiltrating Nine Hibiscus’s people, her Fleet, her place, to be tending to the soldiers of the Twenty-Fourth that were hers by right—that this person would be eating with the Tenth Legion instead—it was the sort of rage that would make Nine Hibiscus stupid and careless. She let it happen to her. Let it wash through her, and then imagined it like the core of a ship engine, lodged in her chest, an animating force, secret and dangerous and shielded, under control.

She still wanted to get Sixteen Moonrise off her fucking flagship. That, at least, she could have some influence over.

When she walked into the Deck Five mess, it was nevertheless savagely gratifying that her people stood up to greet her when they noticed she’d come in. She grinned at them, wide-eyed and performatively incredulous—All this for me? Come on, go eat—and waved them back to sitting. They went. The conversation stayed at the same comfortable volume. Her soldiers were still hers. For now.

Sixteen Moonrise had been clever with her choice of seats: there were no open ones next to her. Nine Hibiscus took one in the center of the long table instead, and met the eyes of her Shard pilot for a long, shared-and-doubled moment of vision. She felt him turn his Shard programming off, for both their sakes now that they were in the same space. That doubled vision snapped away, and there was an echo, a feeling like she’d almost been breathing in time with him and now she wasn’t. A mild version of feeling his sibling-pilot extinguished in fire. She inclined her head to him, fractionally. Wished she could ask him about the programming, about—side effects.

And then she didn’t say a starfucked thing. She let Sixteen Moonrise keep talking, as if there was nothing wrong with what she was doing at all, and served herself a helping of rice noodle laden with soybeans and chili oil from the communal bowl in the center of the table. Soldier food. Warm enough to keep the vacuum out of your bones, or make you feel like it might.

She chewed and swallowed a few bites, feeling the energy of the table shift around her, reorient toward her presence. She licked her lips, chasing the last of the oil’s numbing heat. “Fleet Captain,” she said, convivial, “your crew must be very appreciative that you eat with them down in the mess. You do do this on the Parabolic Compression, don’t you? Or is this only because you’re our guest?”

Sixteen Moonrise’s electrum-shaded eyes blinked behind her cloudhook, a slow and faintly reptilian opening and shutting. “When my crew invites me,” she said. A nasty, insinuating answer: she was invited, both here and on her own ships, and Nine Hibiscus merely waltzed in and took a chair, disturbing her people’s privacy away from the eyes of their superior officer.

“A treat for you, then,” Nine Hibiscus told her. How rarely you must get invitations, to need to be specifically invited.

“I’m honored by the Tenth’s hospitality, yaotlek.”

“We are by all measures hospitable,” said Nine Hibiscus, and the soldier on her left laughed—good—and then cut herself off from laughing—less good. Nine Hibiscus wanted so very much to know what sort of conversation Sixteen Moonrise had been having here, to make her people so wary of free expression.

“I’ve found you so. Though it’s hardly your reputation.”

Nine Hibiscus raised one eyebrow. Blood-soaked starlight, she wanted this woman off her ship. “What is the reputation of the Tenth amongst your Twenty-Fourth, then?” she asked, melted-glass calm, harnessed-reactor-core calm.

Sixteen Moonrise shrugged one shoulder. The curve of her mouth was vicious and irreproachable in pretended innocence. “Insular,” she said. “Devoted.”

If Nine Hibiscus asked to whom, she knew what the answer would be: to you, yaotlek. And now she knew the shape of Sixteen Moonrise’s distaste for her—or at least her masters’ distaste, the Third Palm’s distaste—knew it without bothering to ask. It wasn’t that she was hesitating on the edge of a full, apocalyptic commitment to battle with the aliens. That had been a sop for the ambitions of the Fleet Captains of the Sixth and the Fourteenth, to get them to sign on to Sixteen Moonrise’s letter of proto-insurrection and concern. It wasn’t even that Nine Hibiscus had brought in Information to do the work that the Fleet shouldn’t have to do—though she suspected that decision hadn’t helped. It was that Sixteen Moonrise—or the Third Palm—or the Ministry of War in its entirety, a truly disturbing idea she could not entertain without feeling suddenly ill—thought that she was a risk to the Empire. That her people—their trust, their confidence, their willingness to die for her—would die for her, and not for Teixcalaan.

(Or would come to think of her as Teixcalaan. Something like that might have happened to One Lightning. And what had he made of it? A botched usurpation, a chaotic transition—she would never have—but if Minister Nine Propulsion had been in on the usurpation, there might be reasons the Third Palm thought Nine Hibiscus, her protégé, might try something similar.)

She said, “Hardly insular, Fleet Captain. We’re eating with you, aren’t we? And have been for … mm. How long has it been now, since you arrived? Days?”

“My adjutant, Twelve Fusion, is a commander I would trust with the Parabolic Compression for as long as is necessary for me to be elsewhere,” Sixteen Moonrise said. She sounded a little edgy, a little nervous. Good.

“Naturally,” Nine Hibiscus said, and took another bite of noodles. Her tongue was numb, a fire-lash. “What, if I might presume to ask”—the highest of polite forms, so polite as to be insulting—“is necessary for you on the Deck Five mess? I’m fascinated. Does the Parabolic Compression lack rice noodles?”

Now her soldiers did laugh, and more freely. She felt savagely possessive of them. So what if we are ourselves. We’re the weight that turns the wheel.

“I like your spice mix in the oil,” Sixteen Moonrise said, utterly bland. “I might ask you to lend me this deck’s chief cook, for a day or so.”

She was lodged in them like a burr. She didn’t want to leave, and she was willing to let Nine Hibiscus know what she was thinking, which meant—fucking Third Palmers—that she was confident in her belief that Nine Hibiscus knowing wouldn’t matter—

I wonder if I am supposed to die out here, she thought. I wonder if Sixteen Moonrise is supposed to die too, in the mouths of our enemy. Collateral damage her masters are willing to countenance—if it means destroying me as well—

(And who is going to win the war then, with all the Fleet Captains dead like my Shards are dying?)

“When we can spare such a necessary person as Deck Five’s cook,” she began—and then her entire cloudhook lit up with the red and white flare of an emergency message.

There was only one person on Weight for the Wheel who had accesses high enough to override her settings, spill a communiqué across her eyes without her granting permission first.

Mallow, Twenty Cicada’s message read. Medbay is under contamination protocols. I am inside. There is a fungal bloom from the corpse of our enemy. A medical tech is dead. It ate him. Acknowledge.

She was on her feet, one hand held up to stop any questions from the table. Her eyes flickered as fast as she could, calling up her messaging system, subvocalizing into it. Swarm, why are you inside?

A long ten seconds. I didn’t know better. Come see. I don’t seem to be dying yet.

I have Sixteen Moonrise, she wrote. Waited. Waited. Waited. She existed in a blank abeyance of panic, fear shoved so deep into her chest she felt perfused with it, existing alongside it.

And then: Starlight, Mallow, bring her along. Might as well.

Eight Antidote dreamed of disruptive persons and woke up with the images of the dream still hanging around him like a sticky miasma, a fog-wrapped morning that no amount of sunlight could entirely get rid of. He was formlessly upset, entirely sure he’d done something very wrong and equally certain that he hadn’t, not in the waking world: he’d only dreamed it, and the dream was fading. Fading, but not gone. Only gone to scraps.

He’d spent two whole days in the Ministry of War, coming back to Palace-Earth only to sleep, shadowing Minister Three Azimuth. Maybe that was enough to give anyone nightmares.

He’d followed her out of the gymnasium to the shooting range, and let her correct his aim like she’d corrected the position of his hands on the padded gym mats—and followed her back to her office, and simply, easily, magically—had not left. He would have left if she’d told him to. She just kept not telling him to.

She let him watch her discussion with the other Palms—Six, engineering and shipbuilding; Two, logistics—even her discussions with Eleven Laurel, who looked at Eight Antidote, curled on the Minister’s window seat, chin on his laced fingers on his knees and watching everything he could watch—with a complex expression, neither pleasure or displeasure. He had fixed the same expression on Minister Three Azimuth, with a leading pause she didn’t fill—and after that had ignored Eight Antidote like he was a throw pillow placed on the window seat for improving the décor. He tried not to feel hurt.

Late on the first day, closer to the end of the afternoon, Eight Antidote had brought the Minister a coffee. She’d laughed at him, and ruffled his hair, and told him that she didn’t drink coffee and that he was not an office aide.

He drank the coffee himself, and spent the rest of the evening wired and jittery and hugely terrified, hugely excited, when Three Azimuth began receiving reports that the Information agent and Mahit Dzmare—Mahit Dzmare, creature of disruption—had gone down to the dead planet of Peloa-2 and established first contact with the alien enemy. None of the reports were code Hyacinth. So all of them had to be aboveboard, simple chain-of-command reporting. Coming in on Fleet ships through the jumpgate postal system, standard courier, six hours of delay between message and receipt. Nothing like what the Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise had done, when she warned the Minister about the Information agent’s existence in the first place. Nothing secret.

It got—stranger, after that. Stranger being there, stranger listening. Suddenly all of Three Azimuth’s meetings were with members of the Science Ministry who studied xenobiology or the sort of Fleet soldiers who very calmly discussed acceptable casualty rates in an emergency situation. They stretched on into the night, not stopping to eat or drink or rest—and why hadn’t she sent him away, what did she want him to see, why was he staying, anyway?

An Ebrekti expert came in, close to midnight, and had a polite shouting match with the acceptable-casualty-rates woman about how long a first-contact experience could be allowed to go on before someone needed to do something to make sure nobody was dead, and Three Azimuth sat there, watching, making notes. Eight Antidote kept staring at the burnt hole where her ear had been and wondering how she’d been injured so badly. Thinking of which of these people were disruptive and how he’d know if they were.

It had been the darkest, coldest part of the night when he’d gone home, walked across the gardens and into Palace-Earth, shivering in his thin jacket. Gone home, fallen into bed, slept. He didn’t remember those dreams, but he knew he’d had them. And even so, he found himself walking through the dew-glittering grass back into the Ministry of War the next morning just after sunrise. Back into Three Azimuth’s office. He folded up small on the windowsill again, and some Fleet cadet brought him grapefruit and lychee juice for breakfast, and he listened. Listened, while Minister Three Azimuth received a message on fast courier from the yaotlek Nine Hibiscus herself, and watched it with only him, Eleven Laurel, and two of her own close staff in the room. (He shouldn’t have been there. He didn’t leave.) He’d never heard Nine Hibiscus’s voice before, only seen her image on holo, and it was strange to know she sounded like a person, not a threat or a puzzle to solve, just a woman with an easy, confident cadence to her speech and an urgency right behind the reserve with which she reported that her scouts had found an alien planet, a home—one of probably many, but a home—of the enemy that was eating her legions.

Listened, while Three Azimuth and Eleven Laurel calmly discussed historical precedent for massive planetary strikes. He knew of some. They were from eight hundred years ago, or more, when Teixcalaan had been—vicious. Uncompromising in stamping out rebellions.

Eleven Laurel had said lightly, “There are very good reasons the Fleet has shifted to a negotiation-and-subordination modality, Minister, which I know you’re well aware of, considering Nakhar…”

And Three Azimuth had answered, “Massive planetary strikes on people waste resources and goodwill, and create eternal enmity between new-integrated systems and Teixcalaan. As you said, Undersecretary: Nakhar is an excellent example of the success of negotiation and subordination. Do you have some reason to believe I’d revise my methodology so drastically now that I’ve become Minister? Her Illuminate Majesty appointed me to this position for good reasons.” It sounded like a warning.

“So she did!” Eleven Laurel agreed. “And for very good reasons—I am ever so well acquainted with your work on Nakhar. What was it they called you? The butcher of the Nakharese mind? So interesting to find out that there is something even a person with such an elegant epithet finds morally objectionable.”

Eight Antidote was sure he was not supposed to be hearing this. He was equally sure that Eleven Laurel meant him to hear it, meant him to think that only he, Third Undersecretary Eleven Laurel, was trustable in the Ministry of War. That Three Azimuth had done something as governor of Nakhar that was so very wrong that she could be—pressured (blackmailed?) with only the casual mention of it. That Eight Antidote should return to being only Eleven Laurel’s student. (Like Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise had been Eleven Laurel’s student?)

Disruptive persons, he thought again. And then, What happens to them afterward, once Three Azimuth knows who they are? Nothing good. Nothing he wanted to examine too closely.

And at the same time, he wanted with a stupid heartfelt instant want to defend her. Hadn’t her methods—however butcherlike—worked?

Did he want them to have worked, if it meant she’d do the same sort of thing again, to a whole planet?

Three Azimuth sighed, a delicate and annoyed sound. “The question is, Undersecretary, whether these enemies are people for whom morally objectionable applies.”

“We have only Information finding out,” Eleven Laurel said, with elegant distaste.

“Information and a barbarian diplomat. I’m not pleased about it either, trust me.”

Eight Antidote had had to say something then. He couldn’t stay quiet, not when they were considering a first-strike planetary destruction. He didn’t know what he wanted to say, only that he wanted them both to know he was there and listening.

“Why aren’t we—I mean, why isn’t the Fleet doing the negotiation?” he said. He knew he’d slipped when he’d said we. Knew he’d been in this office too long. It was awful, to know all that and to still realize it was a useful slip to have made, aligning himself with the two of them. He was going to learn something now. He missed thinking that mistakes were just mistakes. Since he’d become a spy, he felt bad about good things as much as he did about errors.

“The kid has a point,” said Three Azimuth. “We could—if we used the Shard trick, get one of your own people down in that negotiation, Undersecretary—”

Eight Antidote, confused, thought, the Shard trick? Just as Eleven Laurel shook his head, harsh negation, all of the lines on his face that Eight Antidote used to think were friendly going savage and frowning. “I don’t think that discussion is happening in front of an appropriate audience,” he said.

Which meant—which meant that Eight Antidote had just heard something he wasn’t supposed to hear at all, even more than he hadn’t been meant to hear about the butcher of the Nakharese mind. Something worse. Something stranger. The Shard trick. Something that was faster than fast couriers? He was waiting for Three Azimuth to shut Eleven Laurel down; she was his superior, after all, blackmail or no blackmail, and she’d seemed like she was really interested in the idea—

But all she did was shrug one shoulder a little, and nod, and no one talked about Shards or joining the negotiations again. It was back to endless meetings with Logistics, and Armaments. Supply lines. How to move weapons through jumpgates without breaking too many treaties at once.

Like the Minister of War wouldn’t cross Eleven Laurel at all. Which was backward. Like Eleven Laurel was the one who could identify disruptive persons, and had decided that the Minister herself, and maybe Eight Antidote too, were some of them.

That night Eight Antidote had crept back into his room in Palace-Earth and gone to bed straightaway, even though it was still hours before midnight. He wished he hadn’t. Less sleep would have meant less time to dream.

As she approached the medbay, every protocol subroutine in Weight for the Wheel’s ship AI shouted alerts into Nine Hibiscus’s cloudhook: STOP—DO NOT ENTER—DANGER—BIOLOGICAL HAZARD on endless and unrhyming repeat. It was far more jarring than a normal safety message. Those had prosody. This was … this was for being shocked and disturbed and terrified, and for being warned away, shaken out of normalcy by monosyllables. Nevertheless she approached the vacuum-sealed medbay doors. Sixteen Moonrise was following her, as avid as a vulture, and she felt full up with the weight of knowing that the alien enemy did have a home she could reach and attack, if she was willing to risk the ships and the loss of life.

Afterimage, too fast to do more than kick her heart rate up another few notches: that Shard-death by fire, the hideous relief she had thought she’d felt from the pilot—but that had to have been her own projection—emotion didn’t travel through Shard-sight. Or at least it never had before.

She peered through the heavy glass window set in the center of the medbay doors. It was her only view into whatever the fuck was happening to Swarm.

He’d shut himself off, closed down everything like the medbay was experiencing an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever. She assumed an alien fungal bloom that had killed at least one of her soldiers was an approximate equivalent to a hemorrhagic fever. If it spread like one, Twenty Cicada was already dead, even if he hadn’t finished dying yet.

Aloud, not caring if Sixteen Moonrise heard her, she called up her messaging system again and sent him a quick inquiry: “We’re here. What’s going on inside?”

“Well,” said Twenty Cicada, using the medbay’s intercom service—he must not be dying very hard yet, if he’d turned on the two-way communication inside that was meant for just this sort of emergency, infectious disease on the inside of those doors and a healthy ship on the outside—“currently I feel fine, and there is no one in here but one dead alien and one dead medical cadet—Six Rainfall, I think. He’s got fungi growing out of a wound on his hand.”

“You’ve turned on the purifiers, and none of the air in there is getting recycled back into the ship, right?”

“Yaotlek. Mallow, my dear, you know me. Of course the purifiers are on outgas cycle. We’ll make up the oxygen in about three days from the hydroponics decks.”

My dear was worse than Mallow, as a sign of how concerned Twenty Cicada was about his own life expectancy. Fuck, but she didn’t want to lose him. And she really didn’t want to lose him where Sixteen Moonrise could see her grieve. “I never doubted,” she told him, wishing she could see him. “Tell me about the cadet.”

“… Well, he found the fungus before it killed him, and he had time to send all of medical a message about it with microscopic analysis holos. That’s how I knew to come—I’m on that message list. So it’s slow, whatever it is that killed him. From what I can tell—and trust me, I am not doing what this poor child did and sticking my hand in the alien’s mouth—the original locus of fungus is growing out of its brain. The alien, I mean. Not Six Rainfall.”

Sixteen Moonrise said, “… Like a fungal herniation through the ethmoid bone? Into the oral cavity?”

“Quite exactly, Fleet Captain,” said Twenty Cicada, faintly sepulchral through the intercom. “Are you, perhaps, a biologist by training?”

“I never have had the pleasure of serving in medical,” said Sixteen Moonrise, which was not no, and also Nine Hibiscus despised her entirely for being useful as well as herself. “But if the fungus was living in its brain, that is how it might emerge to spore. A pressure downward, first through the ethmoid bone and then through the soft palate. The alien did have a soft palate, I recall.”

Nine Hibiscus interrupted her. “How did the cadet die?”

“He cut himself,” Twenty Cicada said. “And got the fungus in the wound. But I think it was anaphylaxis that killed him. Not the fungus itself. It’s—not very widespread. And he is cyanotic.”

One more question. The one she really didn’t want to ask. “And you?”

“No cuts, no anaphylaxis,” said Twenty Cicada, brisk and brief. “In a moment or two I’ll have a better readout on whether these things are aerosolizing or not—the ship is running me a particle diagnostic, it’s crude but it’ll tell me something—and the fungus isn’t very happy.”

“Happy,” Sixteen Moonrise said, flat.

“It’s been robbed of its host,” Twenty Cicada told her, “and it doesn’t much like living in Six Rainfall. Or at least in Six Rainfall’s bloodstream. It is wilting as I watch.”

“Perhaps it’d like his brain better.”

Nine Hibiscus turned on Sixteen Moonrise and took a step into her personal space. Used all of her weight and size to loom, to make a point of her authority. “We are not cutting open the skull of one of our dead,” she said, “to do experiments. Alien fungi or not.”

“I was hardly suggesting such a thing, yaotlek,” Sixteen Moonrise said, and managed to sound affronted.

“What were you suggesting, then?”

“That this fungus likes neural tissue, and is stable there. That our enemies might have sent this one as a trap. A bomb. A sacrifice. That you should check your spook and your spook’s pet for anaphylaxis—or fungal infiltrates in the brain. And your adjutant, as well. Yaotlek, I am not attempting to challenge you on your ship—I am frightened of what this might mean. Take it seriously, for the Empire’s sake if not your own.”

She could sound so very sincere. Cold, and sincere, and far too likely to be right to be dismissed—either from Weight for the Wheel or from this conversation.

“My own adjutant, as you’ve noticed, is inside the contaminant field,” Nine Hibiscus said. “I cannot take it more seriously than I am doing right now.”

Sixteen Moonrise nodded—and pushed onward. “And the Information officer? And the escort team you sent down with her? They could already have died. And already be spreading the fungus outside the contaminant field.” Nine Hibiscus thought she must be the sort of Fleet Captain whose command was always laced through with the intimation of threat. The Parabolic Compression would be an exquisitely tuned ship—tightened to snapping.

Through the intercom, Twenty Cicada said, “I doubt it, Fleet Captain. I have the results of the particle assay, and it isn’t aerosolizing at detectable levels. Whatever it does, that’s not how it spreads best. Be reassured.”

Nine Hibiscus couldn’t have sounded that calm or that comforting. Not from the other side of the medbay door. “Swarm,” she said. “Confirm that you mean you are unlikely to die of fungal infection?”

His laughter was sudden, strange. “Unlikely to, yes. But I’m not coming out of here until six hours have passed and I am sure. Besides, the Fleet Captain’s right, my dear—the asekreta should know about this development.”

“If she doesn’t already,” Sixteen Moonrise said, darkly, and Nine Hibiscus could imagine, quite clearly: the bodies of asekreta Three Seagrass and her barbarian xenolinguist ambassador, filmed over with mold, hours dead in the quarters she had assigned them—and worse, the bodies of her soldiers, haphazardly placed throughout Weight for the Wheel, each a locus of infection. If it did spread. But it hadn’t spread to Twenty Cicada—yet—

“Time to find out,” she said. “I’ll have them brought to the medical deck, and we’ll see.”

Everything else would have to wait until afterward.

Mahit woke warm—blood-heat warm, sharing-space warm, the deep primal comfort of being wrapped around another living person in a small space. There was no moment of confusion, no sensation of let me feel this a little longer before I think about how I got here: she knew at the first flicker of consciousness exactly where she was. She was curled around Three Seagrass in the lower bunk of their quarters on the Teixcalaanli flagship Weight for the Wheel: her knees behind Three Seagrass’s knees, her face pressed into the loose dark tangle of Three Seagrass’s hair, her naked hips a cup for Three Seagrass’s naked hips. Her hand curled over Three Seagrass’s rib cage, pulling her close. The sweet used ache between her thighs.

Oh, Mahit knew exactly where she was, and exactly what they had done, and how much she had enjoyed it, and how at the moment of orgasm, with half of Three Seagrass’s hand inside her, almost to the knuckle, she had seen in an explosion of gold the blurred faces of Nineteen Adze and the Emperor Six Direction and remembered an entirely different physical experience of climax. And how she—hadn’t minded that, either, just found her way back to herself enough to press Three Seagrass into the mattress and see if Yskandr had known any tricks for oral sex that she hadn’t figured out herself.

he murmured to her now.

And Yskandr murmured back to her, this to Darj Tarats?>

Just like that, all vestiges of desire vanished: she felt cold and clear and faintly nauseated, like she had been plunged into icy water and released again. She had managed to not think about what she had promised Darj Tarats for almost a whole twenty-four hours, lost in culture shock, disappointed fury, first-contact protocols, heat exhaustion, and really good sex—in that order. It had been very nice, not thinking about Darj Tarats, and how her eyes were his eyes now. How she was a spy here, embedded in this ship like a shrapnel shard, working her way slowly through to its heart. How she was a spy, and had been commanded to be a saboteur as well, even if she hadn’t figured out what to sabotage exactly—

Yskandr murmured.

He’ll like this, then, Mahit thought, deliberate and bitter. Look how much Teixcalaan trusts me. Admittedly, she’s not an Emperor, so you’re still a little ways ahead.

She could feel how she’d hurt him, feel it in the hollowness of her own chest, the ache of grief as vivid as tears. She tried not to be sorry, and was sorry, and didn’t know if she was sorry because she’d hurt him or because she was hurt, too. One more thing that integration therapists never warned you about: having two people’s heartsickness to evoke with a misplaced slice of self-recrimination.

Yskandr said, finally. do better than I did; the line of us should amount to something worthwhile.>

She’d never heard him so clearly describe the shape of his own despair, his own sense of self-hatred. It was like looking into a mirror that went on forever, a hole in the world abruptly made real. She was afraid when she asked him, quiet in the vault of their mind, hesitant: Darj Tarats would like Teixcalaan to smash itself against these aliens until they are both dead. I could tell him about Sixteen Moonrise—and then sabotage our negotiations on Peloa-2—I could get us all killed. Should I?

Yskandr said.

And because he had said that, her eyes were leaking tears when Three Seagrass turned over in her arms and pressed cool fingers to her cheek, tracing the wet.

“Surely,” she said, “you don’t regret me this much?”

She sounded devastated, which was not at all what Mahit wanted. She wasn’t sure what she wanted, but it wasn’t this: Three Seagrass looking like Mahit had hit her, just by weeping.

“No,” she said, and hated how her voice sounded thick and choked. “No, it’s not you, Reed, it’s not you at all, I—”

Words took too long, and were all in Teixcalaanli anyway. She kissed her instead.

It was still a good kiss, and Three Seagrass continued to be very good at kissing (when she wasn’t having an existential crisis over watching her Emperor commit ritual suicide on empire-wide holocast, at least). When they broke apart, Three Seagrass was tucked easily against Mahit’s shoulder, like they were designed to fit together.

“So,” she said, brisk and bright and with a gentleness that reminded Mahit terribly of Nineteen Adze (or reminded Yskandr of Nineteen Adze, which was probably closer to the truth), “if it’s not me you regret, Mahit, what is it? We did so well yesterday.”

“We did,” Mahit agreed. “We did, and we have such a long way to go, and—”

“Don’t tell me you’re doubting your own capabilities. You figured out how to sing to them. We really need a name for them besides the enemy, don’t you think?”

“—Probably, yes, and no, I’m not doubting my own capabilities, I’m—” She stopped. Her tongue felt like lead in her mouth. All of the neuropathic pain was back in her hands, a continuous sparkling flare, like being pricked by glass splinters. She didn’t know what to do, and Yskandr didn’t know what to do, and Three Seagrass was going to keep hurting her like she had yesterday, keep thinking of her as my clever barbarian and not as Mahit Dzmare, no matter how many times they kissed, and there was no such thing as safety and no such thing as going home.

“Mahit?” Three Seagrass asked, and cupped her cheek in a narrow palm. “I don’t like using interrogation techniques on gorgeous people I’ve just slept with, but you’re worrying me and also not providing me with much to go on, and eventually the training just kicks in.”

This was almost certainly a horrible, delicious, and representative example of Information Ministry humor. It was funny. And it was everything, absolutely everything, wrong with how the two of them were going to be together, and Mahit was tired. Tired of—

Yskandr murmured, whisper-thin,

Only the sudden stop at the end?

Electric laughter, and more of that hideous, grief-stricken hollowness flooding her chest. Her hands hurt so badly.

“If I was,” she began, shutting her eyes and turning her head away from Three Seagrass so that there was nothing but that gentle touch and the hot darkness behind her eyelids, “if I was being the sort of agent of Lsel that I ought to be, considering how I managed to arrange to let you steal me at all, I should be trying very hard to not do well at talking to the aliens.”

Three Seagrass made a clicking noise with her tongue. “Lsel Station would prefer an endless war?”

Mahit sighed. “No,” she said. “Darj Tarats would like Teixcalaan to waste itself to exhaustion against … whoever these people are. What Lsel Station entire wants is a much more complicated political analysis, and we’re certainly not happy with all of these beautiful warships going over our heads in a continuous stream. But Darj Tarats is who I am supposed to be working for, when I’m not working for you.”

Honesty was awful, and it was an intense, full-body relief at the same time—a tension released. I guess we’re both compromised now, for good.

Yskandr murmured.

Three Seagrass kissed her cheek, a quick and sharp brush of lips. “You are fascinating, Mahit. Someday I want to know why you decided to tell me that. I’m good in bed, but I’m not that good.”

Mahit found herself laughing, despite all her better instincts. “Because, Three Seagrass, I don’t think I’m going to do what Darj Tarats wants me to. And—someone should know. That I thought about it first.”

“That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I’ll think about it,” Three Seagrass told her, and disentangled them enough to sit up. “Come on. Let’s get breakfast and get ready to go down to Peloa-2 again. Since you’ve apparently decided to not commit sabotage?”

“Apparently,” Mahit said, and reached for her discarded bra, which had ended up tangled in the springs of the upper bunk sometime in the previous evening’s scramble.

“Excellent,” said Three Seagrass. “Also, you’re really pretty naked. Just so you know, before you put your underwear on again.”

Mahit stared at her while she grinned a creditable Lsel-style grin, and then got up, stretching her hands above her head and arching her back, giving Mahit an excellent view of all of the muscles in her shoulders, the curve of her spine, the fall of her hair unbound. She was still staring when Three Seagrass picked up, with that same covetous curiosity that she’d had when stripping Mahit out of her clothes, the slim volume of The Perilous Frontier! that Mahit had left on the fold-out desk in her hurry to get dressed for their first trip down to Peloa-2.

“… It’s Lsel literature,” she found herself saying, and hated that she sounded apologetic about it.

Still naked, Three Seagrass sat down at the desk and opened it up. “Who drew it?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Mahit said. She’d pulled the covers up over herself, wrapped her arms around her knees. She felt like she was preparing to be hit, and she didn’t even know why. She hadn’t drawn it. “A teenager. I bought it from a kiosk on one of our residential decks—”

“You have lots of kiosks,” Three Seagrass said, absently, turning the pages. She read fast. “One of them tried to sell me kelp beer. It was horrible.”

Kelp beer was horrible. “Some people like it,” Mahit said. When had Three Seagrass found time to be accosted by a kelp beer salesman? Before or after she’d run into Aknel Amnardbat?

“Mm. I’d rather this—the line art is really very well done, and this Esharakir character—”

“What about her?”

“She reminds me a little of you. I think. I have to read the rest, to decide.”

“We have time,” Mahit found herself saying. “It’s not long. Come back here, if you’re going to read it? The bed’s more comfortable than the chair.”

The dreams started with the twisted, melted flesh of the Minister of War’s ear, except it wasn’t the Minister of War, it was Mahit Dzmare in the gardens, and it was all of her face. All of her face, and the tiny beaks of the palace-hummers dipping into the wet, twisted ruin of it, drinking. Like a person who had been exposed to a nuclear shatterbomb strike and was melting of poison. Was poisoning everything she touched.

In the dream she said his own words back to him. He remembered that part. She said, They don’t even have to touch you to do it, and was covered with birds, and burnt and slippery with lymph, and then she wasn’t Mahit Dzmare at all but one of their enemy, one of the aliens, long neck and strange spotted skin and predator’s teeth—and not burnt. Not at all.

Not burnt, just very carefully holding one of the palace-hummers in its long-fingered hand, delicate except for the claws, and in the dream Eight Antidote remembered thinking that surely it would eat the bird, remembered being killing-afraid, panicked-afraid, and trying to ask it not to while it preened the tiny feathers with the crystalline-laced clawtip of its index finger.

There were worse things after that, but he couldn’t remember them right. Just the sense that he had done something terrible, and knowing it was something that he’d done in the dream.

He got up. Showered—facing away from the cameras, as usual—dressed. One of his spywork outfits: grey on grey. He almost looked like a normal kid. Almost. Kids maybe wore colors. He didn’t really know. He pulled his hair back, combed it straight and even, and tied it with a silver and leather cord. If he didn’t look like a kid, maybe he should just look like a spy. He had a grey jacket, a long one with layered lapels, a grown person’s jacket, and it matched well enough.

He was going somewhere. He realized that in the middle of pulling the jacket on, and decided to sit down and decide where, before he left. It wasn’t going to be the Ministry of War. He thought he might scream if he did that again, and that was both babyish and not helpful.

He knew a little bit about Mahit Dzmare. Not very much. But a little bit. And he had watched her speech on the newsfeeds, the one that happened right before his ancestor-the-Emperor had died, the one that had started the war. He’d watched that a lot of times. And he had—oh, he had disruptive person rattling around in his skull, making him feel strange and a little sick. (Was he a disruptive person? Could a person become an Emperor without being a disruptive person?)

But Mahit Dzmare wasn’t alone, when she’d been here in the City—and she wasn’t alone now, when she was out conducting first-contact negotiations on a Fleet warship. She was with the same person both places. And that person was the Third Undersecretary for Information, Three Seagrass. Or—Special Envoy Three Seagrass. Same person. And Eight Antidote didn’t know much about her, at all. And she was a lot easier to think about than a planetary first strike.

The rumor was she’d written the song the rioters who were still loyal to Emperor Six Direction sang during the attempted usurpation. The one that went released, we are a spear in the hands of the sun. The one that got stuck in Eight Antidote’s head all the time, and probably in the heads of a lot of other people too.

She was a poet, Three Seagrass. Before she was a—whatever she was now.

He called up a public search on his cloudhook for her work. There was a lot of it. She hadn’t written anything—or at least anything public—in the past two and a half months, though, and he really didn’t want to sit around reading poetry all morning. He’d end up feeling like he’d have to write an essay about it afterward, and submit it to one of his tutors. And it wouldn’t explain much about her; it was all from—before.

There were other searches he could run. He was Eight Antidote, His Excellency, associate-heir to the sun-spear throne of Teixcalaan, after all. He was all of that, even if he was eleven, and his cloudhook had a lot of accesses. Probably more than he knew about. Probably more than he’d ever thought to use, or knew existed.

He queried the general records office for every public activity Three Seagrass had been recorded as doing in the last month. The general records office had a very annoying interface—it was part of the Judiciary Ministry, apparently, or at least it was a Judiciary glyph that spun in midair while the office’s AI decided whether or not he was allowed to know what Three Seagrass did in her free time. He wondered if the Sunlit used an interface like this. Probably not. They had their own ways of seeing.

Three Seagrass hadn’t done a lot of things, it turned out. Not in the past month. She spent money in restaurants. She had her uniforms dry-cleaned, which everybody did. She didn’t buy anything strange or big or connected to aliens, and she didn’t write any messages that went off-planet (or at least she didn’t write any personal messages that did—the General Records Office didn’t keep track of what Information sent in or out. Which was probably good. Probably. Even if Eight Antidote wished he could see into Information’s records of who Three Seagrass had been talking to). What she did do had happened all in an eighteen-hour period right before she left the City: she got reclassified as a special envoy, withdrew most of her savings and added them to an account that was definitely Information property, ordered a whole lot of new uniforms, and left from the Inmost Province Spaceport as supernumerary cargo on a medical transport called the Flower Weave.

And then she was gone. Gone, and vanished to the other side of all the jumpgates between here and the aliens she’d decided to talk to.

Eight Antidote knew where he was going now. The Flower Weave made a circuit of close-in jumpgates to the Jewel of the World—its captain was really weirdly meticulous about noting all of them—and it was back in Inmost Province Spaceport right now.

A medical transport captain would not have an agenda about the palace or inter-ministry competition. A medical transport captain wouldn’t know anything about aliens, or disruptive persons. A medical transport captain would just tell Eight Antidote what his impressions of the envoy had been. And that was what he needed. He needed to figure out if he thought it was a good idea that this envoy and Mahit Dzmare were talking to the aliens Three Azimuth had sent a whole yaotlek’s six of legions out to kill instead.