A Desolation Called Peace

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

DOWN in the sand and the heat again, Peloa-2 closed around her like a strangling cloak. Eighteen hours hadn’t dimmed the sun. This planet rotated slow. Eighteen hours had thickened the smell of charnel rot. Mahit had expected it, and choked on it anyway. The body forgot pain. That was one of the first things Lsel Station’s imago-integration therapists had taught her when she was small enough to just begin to think about how it would feel to be part of a long chain of imago-memory. The body forgets pain, but it also writes patterns into itself: endocrine response and chemical triggers. Biofeedback that sets patterns. That’s memory: continuity plus endocrine response.

The charnel smell again, and the sick heat: repeated experience. Mahit wanted to gag. She thought, Yskandr, were you ever on a killing field?

And got back,

So this was something new she was adding to their imago-line. She wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

Walking back to their plateau-platform was different than it had been the first time. She was still frightened—still terrified, to be perfectly clear about it in her own mind if nowhere else—of the aliens they were talking to. But she had sung to them once, and she could do it again. And the composition of their little expedition was different: the same four escorts with their shocksticks, the same canopy made from the most Teixcalaanli piece of silk Mahit could imagine bringing—but with the addition of Twenty Cicada, vicious with his tiny box of deadly fungus and his questions to ask. It was going to be Mahit’s job, somehow, to find a way to ask those questions. In a language that wasn’t language, on a planet so hot she thought she would faint.

Three Seagrass kept brushing against her as they walked. At first Mahit had thought she was staking some sort of claim—I’ve had my hands inside you and now you’re mine, and she’d recoiled from the idea with a violence that evoked a wincing sympathy from the echo of Yskandr’s memories of Six Direction and his bed—but then she realized that it was almost certainly unconscious. She was just standing closer. Some wall, dissolved. An easy intimacy. Like any other lover Mahit had ever had. Not different at all. And the continuity of endocrine response worked for everyone, Stationer or Teixcalaanlitzlim or something else: endocrine response said, in that brutal language of the flesh, This person has had their hands inside you, and you welcomed them in. Let’s do it again. Here are nice chemicals to help.

On the crest of the plateau, the aliens were waiting for them. They weren’t the same aliens.

First and Second were replaced by what Mahit immediately called Third and Fourth: two more of the same species, but obviously two different individuals. Both of these were of a height—a good foot and a half above Mahit’s own, not counting their ears—and one was heavily mottled, dark and light in a roan pattern, while the other was a nearly unmarked grey, with one large black pigmentation mark that spread over half of its face. They had clearly been waiting some time. Mahit wondered if the whole lot of their negotiation team was going to be eaten for rudeness before they even got around to saying hello.

She decided to head that off at the pass. Either they’d be eaten or they wouldn’t be. (And was that easy fatalism the chemical cocktail of endorphins and oxytocin in her blood, or just her being more Yskandr than they’d been before? That bravado. The simplicity of decisions—) She walked up to Third and Fourth. Came just to the edge of the reach of their claws. The sun raked her, felt like a weight on her skull. And she opened her mouth, took a lungful of desert air, and sang hello as loud and well as she could.

She was still hoarse from the last time she’d done this. It would be harder, this time. But—but Three Seagrass came up to her side and sang with her, and even Twenty Cicada attempted to join them. A light tenor. Not very resonant. But singing. And Third and Fourth, after an agonizing pause, sang back. Hello.

They were in business.

The escort team set up the canopy and the audioproj—and their new toy, a cloudhook rigged for office work, the kind that spread a corona of files and feeds around its wearer—but this one manipulable by any hands that came near it. Three Seagrass had called it a strategic planning modality. Twenty Cicada had just said that it was a strategy table. The kind the Fleet planned wars on.

No time for language learning, now. No time, even, to decide if what they were learning was a language.

Given: these aliens communicated and understood communication.

Given: they communicated in a way that was not visible to Mahit, nor any other human being, as well as by sounds.

Given: they seemed entirely willing to eat entire planets alive, for scraps, and leave the waste to rot in the sun. All of those bodies, dead. All of those people, dead—

Given all of that, it was time for crude rebus drawings in holo.

The most disturbing part wasn’t that Third and Fourth picked up what she and Three Seagrass were doing very quickly, drawing lines of light in the shimmering desert air with their claws. The most disturbing part was that they both simultaneously seemed to know everything First and Second had done the day before—and that they moved in that awful, unsettling-uncanny joint motion that First and Second had also displayed. Third would finish a gesture that Fourth had started. Draw the other half of a figure that Fourth had begun. And they had precisely the same skill in drawing. The same skill, and the same style.

It was like they were two links in an imago-chain—but both embodied at once. The idea made Mahit squirm. (But wasn’t she herself a thing that was wrong, by all the standards she had learned on Lsel Station about what was the right and the wrong way to be a link in a long line of live memory?)

Communicating by rebus and song-snatch was slow and agonizing in the heat. They were circling around the idea of—it wasn’t anything so concrete as cease-fire. Maybe something more like managed retreat. If Mahit could only figure out why these creatures did what they did, she could get closer to asking them to do it somewhere else. Somewhere far away from Lsel Station (… and Teixcalaan, and oh, Darj Tarats was probably going to give her to Aknel Amnardbat on a platter). But she couldn’t get to why. She didn’t have any abstract concepts to work with, at all, except—

Carefully, when it was her turn to begin the next—sentence, phrase, communication unit—Mahit drew the outline of a human being. The outline of a human being, with its guts spilled out in spirals of light. And above it, the outline of an alien, the long neck, the carnivore’s claws.

Three Seagrass said, hurriedly, “I don’t think this is a good idea, Mahit!” but Mahit had her mouth open already, and the shape of the sung-spat noise on her tongue was the pidgin word for stop. For no, or cease, or stay away.

Don’t kill us.

There was a heatstruck silence.

Third lifted a claw—its hands were so delicate under those claws, and Mahit thought they were retractable, that they’d fold back for precision work—and did not rip Mahit open. Nor did it sing anything back to her. Instead it drew another human outline next to the eviscerated one. And another. And another. And another. As if to say, But you can make more of you.

How wide, after all, could the concept of “you” stretch?

Could it be as wide as a species?

On her other side, Twenty Cicada—his bald head gold-gone-angry-pink in the sun, his cheeks a sallow grey, heat-drained—sighed softly. “All right,” he said. “Enough of this.”

“What?” Mahit began, confused. But he had already produced his box of fungi, his box of maybe-poison, and held it out for both Third and Fourth to see. Held it like a prize, or like a challenge.

He pointed to the box. The alien eyes fixed on it like it had the gravitational pull of a black hole. And then he pointed to what Mahit had drawn. The dead human, torn up, wrecked. He shook the cube. The whitish fungus inside, dried to nothing now, rattled. The sound was too loud. (Were there no insects on Peloa-2? Was there really nothing here but silica sand and sunlight?)

The soundless communication passed between Third and Fourth, that impenetrable language again. They opened their mouths and sang, together, a bone-rattling noise, a wave of nausea. Mahit recognized something of the sound pattern she and Three Seagrass had identified as victory. But shifted. Made otherwise. She was so lost. She couldn’t talk to these things—these people, they were people, she had to keep thinking of them as people even as she tried not to vomit up everything in her stomach—without language. If she was a poet

(you should have been Teixcalaanli, what a poet you would have made)

a poet like Three Seagrass, then all of the vast weight of Teixcalaan had sent the wrong sort of storytellers here. What good was poetry now?

One of the escorts was talking to Three Seagrass, rapid and hushed. In Teixcalaanli, and for one terrifying moment, Mahit didn’t know language at all—all syllables were useless sounds.

said Yskandr, in her mind, like he had before. But this time he said it in Stationer, the language she’d drunk in with her first breaths of oxygen, and it snapped meaning back into place for her. Sounds had meaning. Words were symbols. She could think in language again.

Three Seagrass touched her, her fingers on the underside of Mahit’s wrist. “We have to leave,” she said, and Mahit had to work to parse it. To hear words in Teixcalaanli that weren’t all narrative, all implication. We have to become absent, we have to excise ourselves from here.

“What?” she managed, again, useless interrogative particle.

“Her Brilliance. The Emperor. Nineteen Adze, She wants us to send her a message. Both of us. Now. On Weight for the Wheel. The courier’s waiting.”

“We can’t,” Mahit said. “We’re—they’re not—”

Behind her, Third and Fourth were approaching Twenty Cicada. Circling him. He stood perfectly still, holding his box of fungal death. Perfectly calm. Mahit wondered if that was what being a homeostat-cultist meant. Not minding being about to die via enormous predatory enemies.

A claw tapped the box, once. The click of keratin on plastic.

Yskandr said inside Mahit’s mind, and with that came all of his certainty that Nineteen Adze was worth the absurd, agonizing, death-inducing amount of trouble she’d gotten him into, back when he was alive. All of his certainty that he’d loved her, and that it didn’t matter in the end, and he’d loved her even so.

“Go on,” said Twenty Cicada, strange and distant. “Take the shuttle and our escorts. I’ll be all right here, I think.”

“What are you going to do?” Mahit said.

“I’m going to bring them back a little piece of their dead,” said Twenty Cicada, still not moving at all. “And then see if they understand anything about why I did. Go.”

Third was drawing in the light again. A fractal shape, like the fungus. A shape that it laid over the image Mahit had made of an eviscerated human body.

“I don’t know what’s right,” said Three Seagrass. “But Nineteen Adze sent me here—or at least she didn’t stop me, and—she’s the Emperor.”

And Yskandr echoed:

“Don’t—die?” Mahit said, uselessly. She didn’t even like Twenty Cicada.

“Everyone dies eventually,” Twenty Cicada said, Fourth’s maw inches from his face.

Mahit thought, Everyone dies, except memory—and then turned to follow Three Seagrass back to the shuttle, and the Fleet, and Teixcalaan, waiting.

They’d left Twenty Cicada down in the desert with the enemy. Nine Hibiscus hated it, hated it viscerally, and she couldn’t exactly argue with the decision. Especially since the envoy and Dzmare (the spook and her pet, and oh, sometimes she’d really like to excise all of Sixteen Moonrise’s turns of phrase from her mind) had brought back with them the sworn promise that it had been Swarm himself who demanded to stay.

It was so exactly like him she believed it. It was precisely the same kind of deliberate use of the self in possible sacrifice as he’d done behind the sealed doors of the medbay, waiting to see if he’d die of breathing fungal spores.

She hated it anyway. She could wish her adjutant—her dearest friend, her longest friend—was less interested in keeping the whole world—the whole empire, the universe—in balance and more interested in selfishly saving his own skin. For her sake, if nothing else.

While the envoy and Dzmare went to answer their urgent imperial communiqué, supervised by Two Foam, Nine Hibiscus took an hour of leave from the bridge. (She was owed nine, but who needed nine hours of sleep?) She didn’t go back to her quarters. She went to Twenty Cicada’s, straightaway, and—he still hadn’t changed the password, of course. The door let her in.

There was an autoplay message rotating in holo above the work terminal he usually kept tucked away in a corner. It read, in the perfectly neat glyph-style that Twenty Cicada wrote in: Mallow, if I’m not here, water the plants and feed the star-cursed Kauraanian kitten.

She was not going to burst into tears. That was a fail-safe message, not a goodbye.

Nevertheless, she watered the plants. And when watering the plants revealed said star-cursed Kauraanian kitten, who had been sleeping in one of the plant pots like a strange void-black root vegetable—a root vegetable that yowled at her when she poured water on it by accident—she fed it, too. There were small bits of vat-meat for it, which it seemed to enjoy.

She was still feeding it—it had come to sit on her knee, and purr, and eat vat-meat from her fingers, which was unfairly cute—when her cloudhook alerted her to a priority message, sent on the command-only broadcast band. She played it, without thinking. All messages on that band needed to be heard.

This one resolved into Sixteen Moonrise, her image flooding one half of Nine Hibiscus’s vision while the other half stayed clear. She wasn’t on Weight for the Wheel any longer. She was on her own bridge, on the Parabolic Compression. Nine Hibiscus knew she should feel relieved, but she didn’t. Not in the slightest. She petted the Kauraanian kitten so it would stop yowling for meat (which only partially worked), and listened.

Yaotlek, said Sixteen Moonrise, on her distant flagship. I feel it is incumbent upon me—considering that you are my superior officer, however much we disagree with one another, and also considering that you are aware of the terrible capabilities of our enemies, both in their ships and in their bodies—to inform you that I have learned what I am sure you already know: one of your scouts has found one of the enemy’s home systems. Don’t blame your officers. They were entirely closed-mouthed. But the Twenty-Fourth Legion is just as clever as the Tenth, and when the Gravity Rose altered its trajectory and search pattern to fly home right through my legion—it became obvious that they had found what we are all looking for. I have confirmed, with my own scouts, what the Gravity Rose found.

I am preparing a strike force. I am willing, if you are willing to offer me the command, to lead it: the Parabolic Compression beside Weight for the Wheel, cutting through our enemy so that we might get close enough to burn them all out of the sky. Sanitize what might infect us; what will, undoubtedly, eat us.

I understand that you may wish to wait for your negotiators to return from their negotiation. I too, will wait. For a time.

My yaotlek, I would rather die ending this war before it leaches Teixcalaan of vitality than live through a long siege of attrition. I think you would, too. And besides, you are the hero of Kauraan: perhaps we’ll all make it through alive.

The message ended. The other half of Nine Hibiscus’s vision resolved to Twenty Cicada’s garden of a suite.

“Ah, bleeding fucking stars,” she said. The Kauraanian kitten looked at her, offended, and leapt off of her lap.

When the Emperor’s ezuazuacat sent a message on fast-courier, it went even more quickly than when the Fleet sent one. Five and a half hours, Five Agate had said. Five and a half to get the request and Eight Antidote’s list of questions to the flagship Weight for the Wheel, and then however long it took to record an answer, and five and a half hours back. She’d sent him to bed while they waited. He’d resented that, but he’d also guessed he’d deserved it: he’d gone out into the City, and had to be rescued, and there was the ever-present wondering of signal problem or incendiary device running through his head. He’d asked Five Agate if she’d heard from the Judiciary, and she’d told him to go to bed more firmly instead of answering, which either meant she hadn’t or she had and it was the bad answer. The incendiary device answer.

But Eight Antidote had gone, and slept, was glad he didn’t dream at all. He was sure he’d have dreamed of train derailments, if he had.

The message to the envoy was supposed to come back to Palace-Earth by noon the next day, but it didn’t. It didn’t come back by dinner, either, and Eight Antidote picked desultorily at his spiced livers-and-cheese in their lily-blossom wraps, even though he loved fried flowers normally. He was too nervous to eat. Everything seemed to be spinning just fractionally faster than he could keep track of. No one would tell him about the subway, and he didn’t know how to get his cloudhook to give him more useful information than what anybody could find out on the newsfeeds.

He had to stop watching the newsfeeds, after a while. Seeing the smoke come out of the subway tunnel was making him feel sick.

It wasn’t until just after sunset that Five Agate sent him an infofiche stick in the internal palace mail, asking him to come and see the answers to the questions he had asked. To see, apparently, not only Special Envoy Three Seagrass, but also Mahit Dzmare. Eight Antidote wondered if the fact that the message had both of them was a sign that Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise’s message of warning had been correct—Information was compromised by the Ambassador from Lsel Station. Or if Three Azimuth had been correct: Mahit Dzmare disrupted protocol and the right functioning of the world wherever she was, whether she meant to or not.

When he got to the Emperor’s suite, Five Agate was waiting for him on one of those white velvet couches. She wasn’t alone. She patted the seat beside her, which meant Eight Antidote was going to watch this holo with the Emperor Herself sitting on his left and Five Agate on his right. Five Agate’s child, Two Cartograph, who had made it very clear to Eight Antidote that he was seven years old, a whole indiction, and wasn’t going to go to bed until he wanted to, was reading a mathematics textbook, sprawled out on his belly on the Emperor’s tile floor. Eight Antidote didn’t think he’d ever done that, when his ancestor-the-Emperor had lived here. He didn’t think he’d ever been that comfortable doing it.

Five Agate asked him—or asked Her Brilliance, it was hard to tell—“Shall we hear what Three Seagrass has to say for herself?” and played the holo before she got an answer from either of them.

It wasn’t just Envoy Three Seagrass. It was her, and Mahit Dzmare right beside her.

On the holo, both of them looked very tired, and sweaty, and not happy at all. They were in a small room with metal walls and a window. The holo didn’t pick up much of the starfield that should have been outside that window, but Eight Antidote could guess what it looked like. He couldn’t see if there was anyone else there, listening to them make this recording, but from where they’d both put their eyes—Dzmare kept glancing to her left, and Three Seagrass was very deliberately not looking left at all—he thought there was probably someone. Someone who made at least Dzmare nervous.

What he’d asked, in his message to the Fleet, was simple: Why do you believe, Envoy Three Seagrass, that negotiating with our enemies will succeed? And why did you choose to go, instead of anyone else from Information? Only those two questions. He just wanted to hear her justification. To try to understand her, at all, and see if he believed what she was doing.

Envoy Three Seagrass had a clear alto voice run ragged. She sounded like someone who had gone to a very loud concert and sung along with the band, or a person who had been really enthusiastic at an amalitzli game the night before. She looked straight at the recording-cloudhook, so now Eight Antidote felt like she was looking straight into his eyes. Direct eye contact. He wanted to look away, and she wasn’t even here to look away from.

“Your Excellency,” she said, in exquisitely formal tense. “Ezuazuacat. Your Brilliance. My most esteemed greetings to you on the Jewel of the World, from the flagship of the Tenth Legion, Weight for the Wheel. I apologize for the brevity of this message, but we are, as you might imagine, somewhat busy.”

There was a pause. An emotion rippled across Dzmare’s holoimage face, and Eight Antidote thought it might be stifled laughter. The laughing that adults did when they were horrified and didn’t want children to know.

“You ask very complicated questions in small and simple packages, Your Excellency,” Three Seagrass went on. “Ambassador Dzmare and I will not be able to give you the sort of response you deserve, considering time and—other factors. But she—Mahit, here”—she gestured at the Ambassador—“is of the opinion that you deserve answers when you ask for them, especially at such a remove.”

Beside him, Nineteen Adze murmured, “… She would think that, wouldn’t she.”

“And you don’t?” Five Agate said, as if Eight Antidote wasn’t right here and they weren’t all talking about him.

“Oh, on this the Ambassador and I have tended to agree quite profoundly,” said Nineteen Adze, and Eight Antidote remembered, harsh and abrupt, what she’d said to him when she’d given him the spearpoint: You’re not Six Direction, no matter what your face looks like. I made sure you didn’t have to be. He wondered again what exactly she had done. For him, or to him—but the envoy was speaking again, the holo going on without respect for a conversation happening five and a half hours in its future.

“You want to know why I took this job. Instead of anyone else from Information. That’s the simple question, Your Excellency. I wanted to. The request came in, and I—wanted to, wanted to do something more than sit in my office and not sleep very much and fail at writing poetry.”

Next to her, Dzmare murmured, “Reed—” Soft and sympathetic. That must be the envoy’s use-name. It was strange that the Ambassador knew it. Stranger that she’d use it. Three Seagrass waved her off, a little falling gesture of one hand that seemed to mean later.

“Ask Her Brilliance about wanting to do something, if you don’t understand it, Your Excellency. I’m sure she’s watching this with you. And if you still think you don’t know why me and not anyone else from Information, ask her why she didn’t stop me, or send someone else with me.”

Nineteen Adze laughed, when the envoy said that. Laughed, and nodded. Eight Antidote was very sure he was being manipulated, over more than six jumpgates and five and a half hours of time—but it was so strange and refreshing to be manipulated by being earnestly told the truth. He needed to learn that one.

In the holo, the envoy sighed. “Your other question is harder. That’s why I’m sitting here with Ambassador Dzmare. She understands languages better than I do, even if I’m a much better diplomat than she is— It’s not her fault, she’s—” Three Seagrass looked as if she’d eaten the first word she’d meant to say, swallowed it back quickly, and replaced it with “—out of practice. Why do I believe that negotiating with our enemies might succeed? Because they talk, Your Excellency. Because when we figured out how to make communicative sounds that they knew were communicative, they talked back. Because—oh, because I grew up reading Eleven Lathe. Get Five Agate to get you a copy of Dispatches from the Numinous Frontier, you’re a ninety-percent clone of His Brilliance Six Direction, you’re old enough to understand it.”

Dzmare interrupted her, carefully. Like a swimmer diving into water without a splash. “Because, Your Excellency, the envoy likes aliens. Likes human aliens, at least—she told me so when she met me the first time—because she, unlike some Teixcalaanlitzlim, thinks humans who aren’t Teixcalaanli might be a kind of human. It’s easy to get from there to thinking that aliens might be a kind of—person. Even if they aren’t human persons.”

“Mahit,” said Three Seagrass, like she was shocked.

But the Ambassador went on. “I don’t know how they talk. I know they have more languages than the ones we’ve learned how to say words to them in, and that at least one of those languages isn’t one a human can hear. I know they don’t care about death the way we do, but that they do understand death. I know that they came back to the negotiating table, after the first meeting. And that they haven’t stopped attacking the Fleet, even during the negotiations. I know all that, and not much more. But I think they might be a kind of person. And if they are…”

“If they are, Your Excellency,” said Three Seagrass firmly, “there is the possibility of a brokered peace before we lose too many more Fleet ships. That’s all.”

A murmur in the background. Whoever else was with them, saying something inaudible. Dzmare looked frightened, or nauseated, or just annoyed. Stationers had too many expressions, and it was hard to tell what they meant. The envoy looked serene. “That is all. End recording.”

And then the holo vanished, and there was only the Emperor’s living-room suite, and Two Cartograph looking up from his homework on the floor, saying “Mama, does Eight Antidote do matrix algebra, because I can, and I solved all the problems while you were watching holo.”

Eight Antidote missed being seven years old, he decided. Being seven was so much simpler than being eleven.

He got up off the couch. He wanted to think about what he had just seen, and not talk about it, not with the Emperor Herself or Five Agate or anyone. “I can do some matrix algebra,” he said, and sat down next to Two Cartograph. “You want to show me?”

They came out of the recording room with the evaluating, watching eyes of Two Foam, Weight for the Wheel’s comms officer, still fixed on them. Three Seagrass had ignored her very determinedly the entire time they’d been on holo. It was easier to ignore her than to deal with simultaneously being observed by suspicious Fleet personnel—at least they weren’t wearing isolation gear any longer—and being called back to the flagship to answer, not a summons from the Emperor Herself, but some sort of evaluatory question sequence from the imperial heir. It was like getting an are-you-a-good-cultural-fit-for-my-team job placement interview, from an eleven-year-old. An eleven-year-old who looked exactly like every picture of His Brilliance Six Direction from when Six Direction was a child.

Three Seagrass had been just about willing to turn around and get back on the shuttle to Peloa-2 and let the kid deal with wanting to know for a few hours—her answers would have been more complete anyway if she could have kept working on the negotiation, kept trying to make the enemy understand that really, they didn’t like casualties very much at all, not even slightly. But Mahit had shaken her head. Had said, If anyone deserves answers about why Teixcalaan does what it does, it’s that child.

And then Three Seagrass had remembered, quite vividly and with some embarrassment, that Eight Antidote had been born to be Six Direction. To have one of Lsel Station’s imago-machines in his head, so Six Direction could have been Emperor forever. She guessed that Mahit felt complicatedly guilty about that. (And if Mahit was really more Yskandr Aghavn than she’d been six months ago, she probably also felt—thwarted. Frustrated. And guilty.)

(Which one of them had she fucked, last night? Which one of them had brought along that strange, lovely graphic story, with lines like it’s precious but it’s not a memory and I’m everything you need?)

(Did she really want to know? Probably not.)

When it came right down to it—when she was in front of the holorecorder, with Mahit to her right where she belonged, and a disapproving Fleet officer tucked in the corner, Three Seagrass decided to tell the kid as much of the truth as there was and see what happened. It was worth—well. It was that if she was going to do anything she was going to do it right. She’d been like that her whole life. The thing, entire, or not at all.

Nine Hibiscus was waiting for them on the bridge.

Three Seagrass bowed to her over her fingers, deeply, and Mahit did the same. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the imperial fast-courier shuttle glitter on its way to the jumpgate, their message inside it, passing across the windows of the bridge. There, gone. And here they were again, alone with the war.

“Have you heard anything from ikantlos-prime Twenty Cicada?” Three Seagrass asked. She kept thinking of him, alone with Third and Fourth and his box of fungi. Alone in the heat, like she and Mahit were alone with the war.

“Not yet,” said the yaotlek. “Nothing since you arrived. He has—oh, another half hour, before I send you both back down to get him. If he can be gotten.”

Three Seagrass suspected that if he didn’t radio in, there wouldn’t be much left to get. She’d—be sorry about that. Very sorry. It would be a waste. A waste in the way Twenty Cicada had explained it to her on the hydroponics deck. A flaw in the way the universe should function. A perversity. A use of resources that wasn’t the best use, or even a good use.

Maybe she’d become a homeostat-cultist, if she ever got home from the war. Or at least read some texts about it.

“We should go back anyhow,” said Mahit. “We weren’t finished.”

“The situation has shifted,” said the yaotlek. Three Seagrass winced, internally. That was never a good line for a negotiating partner to deliver. Not in any poem or handbook or case study she knew.

“How so?” she asked.

Nine Hibiscus’s face was unreadable. Everything about her looked closed off, protective, angry. She didn’t want to tell Three Seagrass what she was about to tell her, but she was going to do it anyway, probably because she didn’t want the Information Ministry—or Lsel Station—to screw up whatever it was she had decided to do. This was going to be extremely unpleasant. Three Seagrass attempted to brace herself. Mostly, she felt exhausted.

“The scout-ship Gravity Rose has found one of the inhabited systems of the enemy,” said Nine Hibiscus. “A planet and its satellite.”

“And?” asked Mahit.

“And I’m waiting for Swarm to come back with something more actionable than they want to keep talking or they’re full of fungal infiltrates and we cannot trust their dead. And if he doesn’t—well.” For a moment Nine Hibiscus looked like she had the first time Three Seagrass had seen her: the absolute perfect image of a yaotlek. Star-bestriding and unmovable. “Well, then the Fleet knows where their heart is. And I am prepared to sink my hands into it and tear it out. If I have to.”