A Desolation Called Peace

Mahit imagined it, civilization—humanity—blooming like tiny flowers, caught between mouths in the dark, lips that kissed and talked and built. It was a gorgeous phrase, in Teixcalaanli. You might have been a poet, if you hadn’t died—

That stung. She smeared tears out of her eyes (and when had she started crying?) with the back of one numb, painful hand. It felt like using a mitten. It also hurt less than it had before, which was some bare comfort. She tried to breathe slowly, an even flow of oxygen.

Did you know? she asked, after a long while. Did you at least suspect, that the Councilor for the Miners was using you as bait to draw Teixcalaan into the war the Empire is fighting now? You, and the whole Station right along with you?

Mahit didn’t get a straight answer; she got the emotional equivalent of a flinch, a squirming sense of avoidance, of needing to think of something else. Got that, and took it for yes, and also for and I wished I hadn’t understood. The silence in her pod felt hollow, oppressively bleak. She had helped to start that war, out of desperation and need: doing exactly what Tarats had always wanted Yskandr to do, what he’d always refused. Squirming guilt rose up in her stomach. No wonder Yskandr hadn’t wanted to share this with her. No wonder her hands hurt so badly.

Resigned, from a very long distance away:

Mahit tried to imagine it herself: Lsel Station, if the Teixcalaanli Emperor Twelve Solar-Flare had never found a jumpgate that spilled her out into this sector of space. If there had never been a historical epic written about that discovery by Pseudo-Thirteen River, if Mahit had never learned that epic in language classes and quoted it to imperial subjects to prove her erudition. She failed entirely. She wouldn’t exist. There would be no constellation of endocrine response and continuity of memory that bore a single bit of resemblance to Mahit Dzmare. The feat of imagination that Tarats was attempting was—there was no other word for it but heroic.

Like something out of a Teixcalaanli epic poem. That heroic.

Mahit laughed, a raw sound that ended in a bubbling, weepy cough, choking on her own ridiculous fluids. She couldn’t do it at all. She thought in Teixcalaanli, in imperial-style metaphor and overdetermination. She’d had this whole conversation in their language.

Deliberately, she thought in Stationer, We’re not free.

And in the same language, Yskandr agreed:

Inside Palace-Earth there were three kinds of ways to be seen. There was the normal way, where Eight Antidote was in a place with other people and they looked at him with their eyes or their cloudhooks. He was good at avoiding the normal way, if he wanted to. It helped that he’d never lived anywhere else, and most of Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze’s staff had come over from Palace-East and were still getting lost in corridors even two months later. It also helped that he was small, and had a tunic and trousers in soft grey that eyes slid off of, in addition to all the bright gold and red and grey things that stuffed his wardrobe otherwise. He managed not being seen all the time.

But there were two other ways, and he hadn’t figured out how to disappear from them yet at all. There were the City-eyes, its cameras and locational tracking and the collective link of the Sunlit to crosscheck any errors, how the Emperor always knew exactly where he’d gone. Eight Antidote had checked his clothes for a tracking bug once, and found absolutely nothing, and felt pretty stupid afterward: locational tracking was algorithmic. He’d learned that from one of his tutors, one of the ones Minister Eight Loop sent him from the Judiciary, like an economist was the kind of present a kid would want. The City mapped him based on capturing his image and the location of his cloudhook, and predicted where he’d been when he’d dropped out of view for a minute, and it was really accurate. He’d done the math, for that same tutor. Most of it. Some of it was too hard still, kinds of equations he’d never seen.

The third way was the trickiest. The third way was being seen because of asking questions. Having someone—some adult, usually—see inside his head. And the person who was most dangerous to ask questions of (well, most likely to use those questions to figure out what Eight Antidote was thinking without him ever saying anything out loud) was the Emperor Nineteen Adze. It figured that she was definitely the person he needed to ask about the Kauraan campaign. Everybody else wouldn’t tell him the truth, or would tell him something that sounded true and was slanted away from it, like a tree growing out of the side of a building where it didn’t belong. A tree that looked like you could put your weight on its branches and swing, but if you tried, the whole wall would come down along with you and the tree instead.

He’d never get any better at hiding his thoughts when he talked without practicing. This was definitely true and also not very comforting at all. True things weren’t, mostly. Still, it helped to think about: even if the Emperor knew why he was asking her questions, he’d learn what gave him away, and next time he’d do better. He needed to learn. He was already eleven, and some of the cadets in the Ministry of War were only fourteen and had real responsibilities; that was just three years away, and he wasn’t a cadet, he was the heir to the Empire. He might not have three years to get ready.

The Emperor was in the Great Hall, as usual for midafternoon: she took public meetings and petitions, like Six Direction had before her, and sometimes she gave pronouncements, and once or twice a week Eight Antidote came to sit by the sun-spear throne and listen, on the Emperor’s request. Watch, she’d said. Watch who comes to ask for help, and who doesn’t. Today wasn’t one of his scheduled days. Today he slipped into the Great Hall, quiet in his grey clothes and his soft shoes, the only thing that didn’t gleam, that wasn’t patterned. The Emperor was wearing gold and white, layers of suiting, the points of her lapels echoing the points of the throne, and she was talking to some ixplanatlim wearing poppy-red, the color of doctors and medical scientists. The verse in the children’s song about the kinds of Palace employees went red for blood and for the ease of pain and had a tune that Eight Antidote wished was either less memorable or less cheerful. He wondered what the Emperor wanted to talk to medical people about, or what they had to say to her.

She was young. Not like his ancestor-the-Emperor, who had been dying, and talked to medical ixplanatlim all the time. She shouldn’t need them. Not for a long time yet.

He crept closer. The City-eyes had spotted him, of course, but he wasn’t trying to fool them right now; he just wanted to be quiet. He kept his back to the wall and shifted sideways between the fan-arch ribs of the roof where they met the ground. Sank down on his heels and sat cross-legged there, in a shadow. Grey like a shadow, a darker spot on the tiled floor, not really here—just here to listen.

“—find out,” Nineteen Adze was saying. “I don’t want your supposition that this woman died in a shop fire in Belltown Two because she was carrying an incendiary device and it went off prematurely. I want your certainty, and I want to know who she was. If it was her device, or if she was carrying it for someone else, or if it wasn’t an incendiary at all but some poor unfortunate in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The ixplanatlim didn’t look happy—they glanced at each other, like they were all trying to get out of being the person who had to say something to the Emperor she didn’t want to hear. Finally, one of them—a woman, her ash-brown hair in a triple queue down her spine, dull against the bright red of her uniform—took a step forward. “We wouldn’t have come without completing the investigation,” she said, “if the dead woman hadn’t had one of those anti-imperial posters pasted over what was left of her face, the ones that were all over the City before the recent—um. Difficulties. Your Brilliance.”

Eight Antidote could tell when Nineteen Adze was paying attention because she wanted to, instead of because she had to. She made all the air go out of a room, even a room as big as this one. Her fingers tapped on one of the arms of the throne, one-two-three-four-five, and then stilled again. “A defaced battle flag poster?” she asked.

The ixplanatl dragged her eyes off the Emperor’s hand and back to her face. She nodded. “Plastered to her face with the same glue they’d use to stick it to a wall.”

“Postmortem.”

“Yes, Your Brilliance. Someone else stuck it to her corpse. Before any investigation personnel arrived.”

“And there’s no visual record of this mysterious corpse defacer.”

“The fire took out the nearest City-eye, and—”

Nineteen Adze waved a hand, cutting her off. “Go to the Judiciary with this. The corpse, too—any further autopsy should be run out of their facilities,” she said. “You’ll have an appointment with the Minister of the Judiciary by the time you walk over there. Tell Eight Loop what you just told me. And Teixcalaan does appreciate your concern, and your expertise.”

When people left the vicinity of the sun-spear throne, it was like watching starships try to break orbit—an effort. Eight Antidote had never felt that, that pull. It was probably because he belonged here, and they didn’t.

“You can come out of the shadows now, Eight Antidote,” said the Emperor, and Eight Antidote sighed.

It would be so nice if Nineteen Adze were less good at noticing. But that would make her a less good Emperor, too, according to every poem he knew: Emperors saw the whole of Teixcalaan, all at once, so why wouldn’t they see one eleven-year-old kid in a corner? He got up and came over to the throne, thinking, When I’m Emperor, will I see too? and then deciding not to worry about that right this minute. It wasn’t the question he wanted to ask.

Neither was “Did someone get murdered?” but that was what came out of his mouth first off.

“Unfortunately people get murdered all the time,” said the Emperor, which was condescending—Eight Antidote knew that; he wasn’t a baby.

“Most murders don’t have three medical examiners talking to the Emperor about them,” he said.

“True,” that Emperor told him, her eyes wide-smiling, and Eight Antidote didn’t trust her, really, didn’t know her, really, but his ancestor-the-Emperor had loved her enough to make sure she ended up on the sun-spear throne, and that was something to remember when her smiling at him made him feel seen in the way that he wanted to be seen. “Come sit, little spy, since you’ve been listening already.” She patted the wide arm of the throne.

Little spy wasn’t half as nice as Cure, but it was more honest. Eight Antidote perched on the throne arm, like a palace-hummer alighting, comfortable—it was more than wide enough for him—but poised to leave at any moment. When he was sitting there, he looked at Her Brilliance and waited, keeping his face as expressionless as he could manage.

“… You look so much like him, it’s almost reassuring that you spend half your time hiding in shadows,” said the Emperor, and Eight Antidote felt a rush of satisfaction at having made her react to him. He knew he looked like Six Direction. Knew that he’d only look more like his dead ancestor the older he got, and if he tilted his head just a little to the right, and lifted his chin and his eyebrows—

—Nineteen Adze pulled back from him a good inch before she caught herself doing it. Interesting.

“My ancestor-the-Emperor would have had a difficult time not being seen,” he said. “You do, too. It is a very large throne.”

“It is a very large empire, little spy,” said Nineteen Adze, and sank back into that throne. Eight Antidote wondered if it was comfortable if your legs were long enough; it certainly wasn’t comfortable when your legs were eleven-year-old size, like his. He’d tried it out. But Nineteen Adze looked so very much like she belonged in it: the corona of spearpoints like a crown behind her, metal-grey and gold. Like Six Direction had looked. Like a pilot embedded in a ship …

“I wanted to ask you something,” he said, and knew that he was going to give away what Eleven Laurel in the Ministry of War was teaching him, if he asked his question. It wouldn’t be his secret training anymore, it would be—oh, like everything else. Just part of being him, being him inside the palace. Inside his life.

From the depths of the throne, Nineteen Adze said, “I’ll try to answer.”

“Why wouldn’t you be able to?”

“Ask,” said the Emperor. “Find out.”

Eight Antidote sighed, shoving air through his nose, curving in on himself until his elbows were on his knees, his chin in his hands, still perched on the throne arm. “Why did you pick Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus to be yaotlek, Your Brilliance?”

“What a fascinating question. Are you thinking of spending time in the Fleet?”

He might have been. He hadn’t thought about it out loud, inside his head, where it could turn into a real desire, something he could ask for and not get. But—maybe. He’d be good at it. He could solve the cartograph puzzles Eleven Laurel set him, even the hard ones.

“I’m too young,” he said.

“In all likelihood that will change,” said Nineteen Adze, which she seemed to think was funny and Eight Antidote wasn’t very sure about. “What interests you about Nine Hibiscus, then?”

He could lie.

But then he wouldn’t get the answer to his question.

“Undersecretary Eleven Laurel says you sent her out to die for Teixcalaan. As fast as possible.”

Nineteen Adze made a noise, a click of her tongue against her teeth, considering. “Honestly,” she said, “I’d prefer she didn’t die very fast at all, if she has to die for us.”

That wasn’t really an answer. He tried again.

“Is it because of Kauraan? That you picked her?” Another secret given away. Eleven Laurel probably wouldn’t like him anymore, wouldn’t tell him anything important if he was just going to go tattle to the Emperor Herself.

The Emperor was leaning up out of the throne and putting her hand on Eight Antidote’s shoulder, a warm weight. There were calluses on it. He knew the stories about her, how she’d been a soldier, how she’d met his ancestor-the-Emperor on a ground campaign, where they fought with shocksticks and projectiles. On a planet, in the dirt.

“Yes,” she said. “But not because I thought she was too dangerous to keep alive, little spy. Because I thought she might just be dangerous enough to stay alive.”

By the time Three Seagrass reached her sixth commandeered passenger berth (six different ships taking her through six different jumpgates, and none of them very nice to ride in), she’d packed up her special-envoy suits in favor of an expensive, difficult-to-wear jumpsuit-overall in some black wool crepe that made her look like she had a great deal of money and a vastly different cultural background than the one she’d actually got. It exposed most of her sternum when she wasn’t wearing its matching jacket, and its matching jacket had eight zippers. She’d bought it at her fifth stopover, on Esker-1, a planet on the Western Arc she’d never been to before: full of rich import-export families, the sort that Thirty Larkspur, lately demoted to Special Advisor on Trade from the heights of attempted insurrection, had come from. Esker-1 produced trade, and also choral singing, which Three Seagrass found inexplicably overwhelming to listen to. The choral singing, not the trade. Trade was easy. It let her buy terrible wealthy-importer-family-scion jumpsuits and catch a ship off-planet that was headed someplace a member of the Information Ministry in good standing oughtn’t be, unless she was on assignment.

Esker-1 was in a system situated squarely between three jumpgates: two full of traffic, in and out of Teixcalaanli space, and one that dumped you out near a backwater planetary system that was contested territory when some emperor bothered to contest it, but was otherwise content to be loosely attached to the Verashk-Talay Confederation … and was four days sublight travel from the back end of the Anhamemat Gate, or what Three Seagrass was almost entirely sure was the back end of the Anhamemat Gate. It was that backwater where Three Seagrass had gotten to, and she felt, vertiginously, like she really had exited the properly ordered and expected universe.

That might be the number of jumpgates she’d been through in three days. She’d never crossed this many in this short a time, and she kept thinking about those debunked tabloid newsfeed articles from half an indiction back—the ones that said too much jumpgate travel would scramble your genetics and possibly give you cancers.

It also might be that while she’d been off-City—had even done her mandatory stint on a distant border post, like any good asekreta cadet who wanted all the best marks on her work history before graduation—Three Seagrass had never once yet been outside of Teixcalaan entirely. Outside the world. In the places that were—otherwise. Where the stars rose and set by different rules, and no one bowed over their pressed fingertips to say hello, and too many people smiled like Mahit had: all teeth.

The ridiculous jumpsuit helped. It let her pretend she was the sort of person who would like being here, in a dingy resource-poor spaceport full of barbarians, looking for the right ride off this shithole. Not deeper into Verashk-Talay space—thank fuck, she was terrible at their languages, she’d taken the mandatory six-month class as a cadet and forgotten everything about it as soon as she’d passed the exam. She’d been on the political specialist track, not the negotiator-with-not-currently-hostile-enough-to-bother-with governments track. Her current and regretful capacity to communicate in either Verashk or Talay was limited to asking for the location of a washroom and ordering one large beer, please, the sort of phrase that bored cadets yelled at each other gleefully in hallways.

Right now she had ordered one large beer, please, and was trying to convince a cargo-barge engineer to shove her in along with whatever she was shipping to Stationer space. Whatever it was had to be somewhat circumspect, since this barge was headed through that back-end jumpgate she was pretty sure would spit her out right next to Lsel Station. The same jumpgate the aliens had come through, according to Mahit’s intelligence. Three Seagrass wondered if this engineer was worried about alien attacks, or being caught in a war zone. Probably not—but fear of aliens could certainly be why Three Seagrass had only been able to find this one ship headed where she needed to go.

“I don’t care what it is you have in the crates,” she said in Teixcalaanli. “I want on your ship, that’s all.”

The engineer was stony-faced. Not politely neutral like a Teixcalaanlitzlim, but aggressively flat. “The shipping manifest is for cargo only,” she said, shaping the syllables with deliberate care. “Cargo only. Not persons from Esker-1.”

I’m not from Esker-1, Three Seagrass thought, with a tiny internal cascade of despair. I’m from the Ministry of Information. None of this would help her. It would make things worse. If this engineer didn’t want a wealthy trader from the Western Arc on her barge, she definitely wouldn’t want an Information Ministry agent.

“Where I am from is not important,” she tried. “It is where I am going that matters.”

“There are other barges. Go buy them beers.”

There were other barges. None of them were trying this route, the skip into Stationer territory through the back end. It had taken her hours to track down this one.

“Your barge is fastest and most direct.” Three Seagrass tried a Stationer smile, with teeth. It didn’t do much; the engineer remained unmoved. “Really, I have no idea what is in your crates, and I don’t want to know. I want you to take me through the Anhamemat Gate.”

“And what then?” asked the engineer.

“And then you drop me with your cargo, on Lsel Station.”

“And you will tell the customs agents what? I think no. I think this is a bad idea, for you, and also for us.”

Three Seagrass knew how to do this conversation as an Information agent; she knew how to do this conversation back on Esker-1, where she’d just been City Teixcalaanli and thus mysterious and interesting. The first one was the exercise of social power, and the second one was grift: being too compelling to ignore, and too slippery to hang on to. Neither was going to work here. (She’d always liked aliens. But there was a difference between liking and knowing how to talk to—and this was why she needed Mahit—)

She had one option left, though less of it than she’d had before she’d acquired the ridiculous jumpsuit.

She blinked, micromovements of one eye behind her cloudhook, and projected a shimmering, twisting hologram of a very large number onto the table between her and the engineer. “I think this is a less bad idea than you do,” she said, “and all I need is the address of your barge’s financial institution to show you how … Perhaps you have some debts, some refurbishing costs, that you would like not to worry about?”

The engineer’s face moved for the first time. She wrinkled her nose. Three Seagrass wasn’t sure if that was distaste or interest. The silence went endlessly on. Three Seagrass suspected the engineer was talking over a private subvocal line to her captain, checking whether the amount was enough. It had better be; after this Three Seagrass was broke, and writing to the Ministry for more discretionary funds was very unlikely to produce them. Certainly not in time for it to matter. Maybe she’d be stuck on this nowhere planet forever. She’d have to improve her Verashk. Or possibly her Talay. Immersion would help—

“We won’t be responsible for you on the Station,” the engineer said at last. “And you pay before you board. You pay right now.”

Darj Tarats had beaten her to the best seat at the bar. Seeing him—aged and cadaverous to Yskandr’s eyes, familiarly skeletal to her own memory, the burnt-clean shell of a man who’d spent the decades of his early working life in an asteroid mine, and then had become a politician, who had been a philosopher of ruining-empire and quiet revolution all that time—made Mahit’s stomach flip over, a quick nauseating spike, and then settle into shimmering alert. Alive to the possibility of disaster.

She was beginning to think this was the most comfortable state for her to function in, and wasn’t that just delightful.

She sounded like Yskandr to her own self, sometimes. More lately.

Darj Tarats was sitting next to Dekakel Onchu, and they were both on their second-at-least glasses of vodka. Mahit was, clearly, late.

Late, and surprised: she’d expected to find only Onchu here, at the same pilots’ bar as their first meeting; the Councilor’s suggestion, when she’d sent an electronic note saying that she had, indeed, asked her imago about Darj Tarats. Darj Tarats, who wanted the war now being raged all around, but not in, Stationer space, and was content to use Lsel as bait to draw Teixcalaan out. Darj Tarats, who Yskandr trusted more than she did, even though she’d done what he’d wanted and Yskandr never had. Mahit resolved to ignore all of the signals her endocrine system would send her for the duration of this conversation, knowing even as she made the decision that it was both impractical and likely physically impossible to accomplish.

“Councilors,” she said, and took the seat on the other side of Onchu. “There are twice as many of you as I expected.”

“Dekakel has predictable drinking habits, Dzmare,” said Darj Tarats. “This is the bar to find her in, if a man wanted to catch up with his friend in a less formal setting than the Council chambers. As I see you have noticed.”

It was an obvious power play—so obvious that Mahit was briefly annoyed she didn’t rate a better one. Use Dekakel Onchu’s first name, intimate the longstanding friendship between the two of them, and then call Mahit by her surname without the title she still owned by rights. There was no Ambassador to Teixcalaan save her. She was the imago-line.

Shut up, would you? she told Yskandr, and waved the bartender over.

“What the Councilors are having,” she said, and then turned to Tarats and smiled, taking a certain vicious joy in how baring her teeth would always feel like a threat now, how smiling this brightly even on Lsel was a kind of threat. “Councilor Onchu was kind enough to introduce me to the best vodka on-Station, yes,” she told him. “It’s a pleasure to drink with you as well, Councilor.”

He was unreadable. It was going to drive her crazy (no, that was Yskandr, Yskandr’s twenty years of pent-up frustration and competition with this man). He didn’t return the smile. “You came back home from the Empire,” he said. They were talking right through Onchu, and she was letting them, sitting a little back on her bar stool. “That’s unusual for your imago-line.”

you wouldn’t know—>

That you were committing treason, yes, shut up, I need to talk and if I say what you’re thinking, we’re both fucked, all right?

Prickles up and down her spine, chiding. But Yskandr backed off, retreated—for a moment Mahit felt dizzyingly alone. Dizzyingly herself, which was a very naked thing to be.

“Haven’t you heard?” she said, still smiling. “I was sabotaged. Who knows what I’ll do? Heritage certainly doesn’t.”

Dekakel Onchu laughed, and shoved her lowball glass, half finished, the ice floating and clinking and turning the vodka cloudy white, over to Mahit. “Have the rest,” she said. “Tarats owes me another—he bet you’d go all Yskandr Aghavn at us, superior and elusive. I told you, Darj, this one is direct when forced. And I was right about the sabotage.”

Mahit took it. Drank it. All of it, including the ice chips, fast enough that the alcohol burned and she had to work not to cough. When it was empty, she put it down on the counter, upside down, with a sharp click, loud enough to make her feel brave—floating. Flying. “Councilor,” she said, when she had her breath back. “Your compatriot for the Pilots told me to consult with my imago about you before I came back to her. So I have. Here I am. Heritage probably would prefer I wasn’t. Or at least she’d like to see inside my skull a bit. How about you?”

The bartender approached with Mahit’s drink, and she waved it over to Onchu instead. Playing musical drinks; playing who has power here. She didn’t, she knew that; she was having this drink at all because she was in the sort of trouble with Heritage she didn’t know how to get out of, but—

Yskandr murmured, and she agreed. Onchu accepted the glass without the slightest bit of comment.

Tarats extended a grey-brown hand, tilted it side to side. “On balance,” he said, “I’d also like to see inside your skull. If I could see my own reports on your imago-integration, as opposed to Heritage’s, of course. Interesting, that you came back. Interesting, that you retain enough of your imago-line despite putative sabotage to consult with it. Interesting, that you spent the time since you returned doing absolutely nothing instead of informing someone about all of these intriguing facts.”

Mahit wasn’t going to flinch. She wasn’t. She hadn’t been doing nothing. She’d been trying to recover her balance, her sense of herself, the shape of a life—any life—that could encompass both Lsel Station and Teixcalaan, two Yskandrs and one of her and whoever they were going to be. Admittedly she’d done a lot of that thinking while walking aimless loops around the Station, but she hadn’t come up with any better way of processing. Physical motion helped. That was right out of basic psychotherapeutic technique that every kid on Lsel knew.

She didn’t flinch. She said, “It’ll be Heritage who gets to see.”

An offer. If you do nothing, either of you, Aknel Amnardbat will take me apart and I will be useless to you.

I’ve had luck with sanctuary before—

The flash of memory, tangled: gin-blue, Nineteen Adze’s dark hands on her (his) cheeks, the texture of her lips, the taste of juniper. The scent of juniper, when Yskandr had learned that Tarats was willing to use Lsel as bait to lure Teixcalaan into war with some force larger than itself.

Onchu said, contemplatively, “For a while, I considered whether Heritage can legally commit imago-line sabotage at all. Considering that it’s their purview to manage our collective memories in the first place.”

Tarats nodded to her. “Your conclusions, Dekakel? Doubtless you have them.” He was ignoring Mahit, entirely. Gambit refused. She didn’t know why, either.

“Heritage can’t,” said Dekakel Onchu. “But an individual working for Heritage—even the Councilor for Heritage—absolutely can. Darj, someone should cut that woman’s imago-line loose into hard vacuum.”

On this, Mahit thoroughly agreed. Maybe Pilots would help her even if Miners wouldn’t—she just needed some way to be too useful to be sent into the careful surgical maw of Heritage’s analysts, who would know instantly that she’d had entirely unscheduled adjustments to her imago-machine. If they didn’t simply kill her outright, and cover up Amnardbat’s sabotage thereby.

“I don’t disagree,” Tarats said. “I knew her predecessor, and he would have done nothing of the kind; and that imago-line of Heritage councilmembers is six generations long. Something has slipped. This … business … with Dzmare is more of the same.”

“Personally,” Mahit said, as dry and unconcerned as she could manage, which wasn’t very, “I’d prefer not to be Heritage’s business at all.”

“You should have gone back to the Empire, then,” said Tarats, looking at her directly. Finally, looking at her directly.

“You spent such time trying to convince Yskandr to come home,” she replied. “Here I am.”

Here I am, you used to want this.

Upsettingly, Yskandr murmured, me to come home. To control.> Mahit’s stomach felt like she’d drunk more vodka than she’d even been served: a slow and crawling nausea. It would be nice to have had the alcohol if she was going to feel the effects.

“Your imago knows me,” Tarats said, as if he could hear Yskandr as well as she could. “You say the sabotage you experienced was insufficient enough that you still have some continuity, even if it is out of date—I have what I wanted from him, thanks to your good work. If you’d stayed in the Empire, or if you’d come to me when you returned and been willing to go out again, perhaps I could have found a further use for you, too.”

She needed to hear him say it. Out loud, in this bar full of pilots, where he could be overheard. “What did you want from Yskandr?”

Darj Tarats’s eyes were the coldest brown Mahit could imagine; brown like dust, like rust in vacuum. “Teixcalaan’s gone to war,” he said. “Right over us; ships come through our gates all the time, and not a one stops here with legionary soldiers to annex this Station.”

“It won’t last,” Onchu muttered. “That not stopping.”

“It will,” said Tarats. “They’ve larger problems than us. It’s quite refreshing.”

Mahit thought, vicious and distant and cold, that Tarats was too satisfied with himself—too satisfied with what he’d helped her do, back in the City. He’d created this war between the Empire and some greater, worse thing beyond the Far Gate as a political pressure point, a fulcrum to turn a succession crisis on and simultaneously divert a war of conquest away from the Station. He’d done it all to benefit his desire to lure the Empire into a destructive conflict. He’d succeeded, and that was too pleasant a thought for him to let the possibility that Onchu was right—that no power, whether Teixcalaanli or alien, could leave resource-rich mining stations alone forever—ruin his sense of accomplishment.

“How will you know if they change their minds?” she asked, out of pure, apolitical—if anything could be said to lack politics that came out of her mouth now, what the Empire had done to her tongue was more than language—spite.

“I assume I’ll have about thirty minutes’ warning to scramble our pilots,” said Dekakel Onchu, “when the farther mining outposts start getting shot up.”

“Before Dzmare came back to us, we might have had a clearer view, even from the City,” Tarats said.

That was the crux of it. Why he wasn’t helping her, why he didn’t care if Amnardbat killed her or took her apart: he no longer had his window on the Emperor. Yskandr Aghavn was dead, and Mahit Dzmare returned home in what he considered to be a state of failure, sabotaged or not; what was the point of showing her some special treatment? Of offering a rescue?

“I am still Ambassador to Teixcalaan,” she said. She was. She hadn’t resigned. She’d taken—leave, really, an extended vacation. She’d tried to come home.

I know, I know, but I wanted—

Tarats shrugged, an infinitesimal, tired motion of his shoulders. “So you are, though I doubt that will last past Heritage’s examination.”

“And then you’ll have no eyes at all, no one who has met and knows the new Emperor—”

She sounded desperate even to herself. But Tarats was looking at her, quite directly, as if she was a piece of molybdenum ore, something to hold up to the light and watch for reflective facets in. She held still. Made herself be quiet.

“You’re not wrong,” he said, finally. “You’re quite like Yskandr, too. Maybe enough like Yskandr.” Another pause. Mahit found that she was holding her breath. “You do this, Mahit Dzmare: you go to your scheduled meeting with Amnardbat and her surgeons. But it won’t be her surgeons there. It’ll be mine.”

She didn’t breathe out. “Yours, and they’ll do what?”

“Strip you of your imago-machine,” said Darj Tarats, “and check it for sabotage, in truth; and if it is whole enough, put it into the brainstem of a new Ambassador to Teixcalaan. One I—and Dekakel, here, perhaps—have chosen. Some young person right out of the aptitudes. Clearly you are damaged, Dzmare, and you were Heritage’s choice to begin with. Best we start over.”

For a strange objective moment, it sounded like a good idea to Mahit. Go in to this scheduled checkup as if she had nothing to hide; let Tarats take her imago-machine, all of the memories of two Yskandrs and one Mahit, out of her. Relieve her of the responsibility, entirely, of being either Lsel’s representative in Teixcalaan or finding a way to love Teixcalaan while being a Stationer, and not suffocate of it. Be free.

There’s no such fucking thing. Her own voice, this time, not Yskandr’s. The same tonality. The reassurance of blur.

She asked, “And what happens to me? In this hypothetical scenario.”

“This year’s aptitudes are coming up,” Tarats said. “Retake them. For a new imago-line, or for anything else you like. You came back to the Station: be a Stationer. And all you have done and learned and remembered will be enshrined forever in the imago-line of ambassadors.”

It was the sort of offer that got made to people who ended up with incompatible imagos—whose gender identity was stronger than they had thought it was and found a cross-gender memory match unbearable, or who were too close to the web of relationships their predecessor had maintained and couldn’t figure out how to navigate them without emotional damage, or whose imago-line was so weighty and long that they weren’t able to integrate fast enough and shattered under the strain. One of Mahit’s agemates had been one of those. A hydroponics engineer, given an imago thirteen generations of memory long. The highest aptitude scores on systems thinking and biology on the Station, and she’d just collapsed under the weight. Two weeks, and she was stripped out of the line, and allowed to retake the aptitudes a year later.

Mahit didn’t know where she’d ended up.

It was a bad offer.

She couldn’t imagine what she’d be without Yskandr. She didn’t know how integrated they were—or weren’t—or how deep the damage of sabotage went; she didn’t know if there’d be anything left of her if this imago-machine was carved out of her skull like Five Portico had carved out the other one. Not to mention the poor, stupid kid who would get the hybrid of three, a double dose of Yskandr and whatever there was of Mahit herself—and the first of their line, the negotiator Tsagkel Ambak, who mostly existed as a feeling.

some Yskandr said. Both of them, maybe, the young and the old. A kind of fear of what they were, all of them, together; a protectiveness of that same thing.

And besides, she didn’t trust Darj Tarats to actually do it. She’d walk into the Heritage medical facility and lie down on the table, and it would be Amnardbat’s people after all, and what then?

Both Tarats and Onchu were looking at her. She wondered what shape her expression was. Her face felt numb and wooden.

“I don’t know what to say,” she said, because she didn’t.

“I could offer you a position on a mining station instead,” said Tarats, “but it’d be a waste, unless you’re a sight better at operational and financial analysis than the usual diplomatic types.”

“Amnardbat would call me back,” Mahit said, because that was true, and because she didn’t want to live as Tarats’s creature, preserved by his sufferance, in charge of an asteroid mine, out of the way. But what choice did she have?

“She would,” Tarats agreed, and said nothing more.

They were all bad offers, and if Mahit turned them down, she had nothing at all. She waved for the bartender. If she ordered another vodka, maybe she’d have a chance to think—come up with some angle, something she knew that only she knew, that wouldn’t be preserved down an imago-line—

Yskandr told her.

Mahit opened her mouth.

All the proximity alarms on the pilots’ deck of the Station went off at once.