A Memory Called Empire

CHAPTER THREE

THIS time, Mahit approached the Judiciary complex on foot, Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea walking in an ever-shifting pattern around her. She felt like a hostage, or someone who was worried about political assassination, both of which were too close to accurate for her to be particularly sanguine. Besides, she was on her way to break into a morgue. Or help someone with legitimate access to the morgue bring people without that access inside. Either way. She was being political.

She wished she had better instructions from the Stationer Council as to just how she should be political. The majority of her instructions, after find out what happened to Yskandr Aghavn, were on the order of do a good job, advocate for our citizens, try to keep the Teixcalaanli from annexing us if the subject arises. She’d gotten the impression that about half the Council—particularly Aknel Amnardbat, the Councilor for Heritage, which tended to take diplomacy and cultural preservation within its purview—had been hoping she’d like Teixcalaanli culture just enough to enjoy her assignment and dislike it sufficiently to discourage further cultural interpenetration into Stationer art and literature. The other half of the Council, led by Councilor Tarats for the Miners and Councilor Onchu for the Pilots (what Mahit thought of as the practical half of Lsel’s six-person governing board, and so much for Aknel Amnardbat’s hopes for her, really) had harped on keep the Empire from annexing us and also continue to make sure we are the prime source of molybdenum, tungsten, and osmium—not to mention information and travel access to the Anhamemat Gate. Was “my predecessor has been murdered and I suspect I am involving myself in an under-table investigation in order to protect Stationer technology” a case of “try to keep the Teixcalaanli from annexing us”? Yskandr would have known. Or at least have had a strident opinion.

The part of the City which contained the imperial government was enormous and old, shaped like a six-pointed star: sectors for East, West, North, and South, and two more: Sky, extending out between North and East, and Earth, pointing out from the middle of South and West. Each sector was composed of needle-sharp towers jammed full of archives and offices, tied together by multilevel bridges and archways. Stacked courtyards hung in midair between the more populated towers, their floors translucent or inset with sandstone and gold. At the center of each was a hydroponic garden, with photosynthesizing plant life floating in standing water. The unbelievable luxuries of a planet. The flowers in the hydroponic gardens seemed to be color-coded; as they moved closer to the Judiciary, their petals shaded redder and redder, until the center of each courtyard looked like a pool of iridescent blood, and Mahit caught sight of the building that had been her first destination, a practically unthinkable number of hours earlier that morning.

Twelve Azalea brushed a burnished green-metal plate next to the door with his index finger, tracing a sweeping figure that Mahit thought might have been a calligraphic signature—she caught the glyph for “flower” hidden in the middle of it, and his name written out would have “flower” along with one of the glyphs for “twelve” and some adjustment for the type of flower. The doors to the Judiciary hissed open. When Three Seagrass raised her hand to touch the plate too, Twelve Azalea caught her around the wrist.

“Just come inside,” he said under his breath, shooing them both through and letting the doors seal shut behind them. “You’d think you’d never snuck in anywhere before…”

“We have legal access,” Three Seagrass hissed. “And besides, we’re on the City’s visual record—”

“Which our host doesn’t want us to associate with his access,” Mahit said pointedly, just loud enough to be heard.

“Exactly,” said Twelve Azalea, “and if we get to the point that someone is scraping City audiovisual for ‘who went into the Judiciary today,’ we have such bigger problems, Reed.”

Mahit sighed. “Get on with it; take us to my predecessor.”

Three Seagrass’s mouth compressed into a thin, considering line, and she slipped back to walk at Mahit’s left shoulder while Twelve Azalea led them underground.

The morgue looked the same. The air was chill and smelled forcibly clean, like it was being churned through purifiers. The ixplanatl—or Twelve Azalea, after he was done investigating—had covered Yskandr’s corpse with the sheet. Mahit was abruptly consumed with crawling dread: the last time she’d stood here, her imago had sent up terrible flares of emotion and endocrine-system hormones and then vanished. And she’d come back anyway. A nasty flicker of sabotage reoccurred: Was this room somehow inimical? (Did she want the room to be inimical, so that the sabotage could not be either her own failure or from someone on Lsel?)

Twelve Azalea peeled the sheet down again, revealing the dead face of Yskandr Aghavn. Mahit came close. She tried to see the corpse as a material shell; a physical problem of the present world, instead of something which had housed a person like she housed a person. The same person.

Twelve Azalea pulled on a pair of sterile surgical gloves and gently lifted the corpse’s head, turning it in his hands so the back of its neck faced Mahit, hiding the largest of the preservative injection sites, the one in the great veins of the throat. The corpse moved like something fresher than three months dead: supple and floppy.

“It’s quite difficult to see—a very small scar,” he said, “but if you press down at the top of the cervical spine, I’m sure you’ll feel the aberration.”

Mahit reached out and pressed her thumb into the hollow of Yskandr’s skull, directly between the tendons. His skin was rubbery. Too much give, and the wrong kind. The small imago-scar was a tiny irregularity under the pad of her thumb; beneath it was the unfolded architecture of the imago-machine, a firmness as familiar as the skull bones themselves. Her own was identical. She used to rub her thumb against it while she was studying. She hadn’t done that since the imago-machine containing five years of Yskandr’s experience had been surgically installed inside her. It wasn’t one of his habitual gestures, and it was a tell, outside of the Station, and so she’d let it dissolve into the new combined person they were supposed to be becoming.

“Yes,” she said. “I feel it.”

“Well then.” Twelve Azalea smiled. “What do you think it is?”

She could tell him. If he had been Three Seagrass, she might have—an impulse she knew was dangerous even as she felt it; there was no appreciable safety in confession to one Teixcalaanlitzlim over another, not after a single day—but she was desperately alone, without Yskandr, and she wanted.

“It’s certainly not organic,” she said. “But he’s had it for a long time.” A sidestep. She needed to get through this unwise bit of corpse-handling and back to her rooms and shut a door and deal with wanting … friends. A person wasn’t friends with Teixcalaanli citizens. A person especially wasn’t friends with asekretim, the both of them were Information Ministry—

“I never heard of him having spinal surgery,” said Three Seagrass. “Not in all the time he was here. Not for epilepsy or anything else.”

“Would you have noticed?” asked Mahit.

“With the amount of time he spent at court? He was very visible, your predecessor. If he disappeared for a week someone would have commented that His Majesty must be missing him—”

“Really,” said Mahit.

“I did mention he was a political man,” Twelve Azalea said. “So you’d say the metal was, perhaps, inserted before he became Ambassador.”

“And what does it do?” Three Seagrass said. “I am far more intrigued by that possibility than when it was installed, Petal.”

“Does the Ambassador know such technical matters?” Twelve Azalea said, lightly. Teasingly, Mahit thought. Perhaps even insultingly. He was baiting her.

“The Ambassador,” she said, gesturing to herself, “is not a medical practitioner nor an ixplanatl, and could not possibly explain the neurological effects of such a device in any detail.”

“But it is neurological,” said Three Seagrass.

Twelve Azalea said, “It’s in his brainstem,” as if that was a sufficient answer. “And it is certainly not Teixcalaanli; no ixplanatl would adjust the functioning of a person’s mind in such a way.”

“Don’t be insulting,” said Three Seagrass. “If noncitizens want to stuff their skulls with metal it is their own business, unless they plan to become citizens—”

“The Ambassador was certainly involved with the functioning of Teixcalaan, Reed, you know that, it’s practically why you applied to be this new one’s liaison—so it does matter that he had some kind of neurological enhancement—”

“I am entirely fascinated by this information,” Mahit said pointedly, and then cut herself off as both Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea abruptly straightened and composed their faces to formal stillness. Behind Mahit the morgue door opened with a shallow hiss. She turned around.

Coming toward them was a Teixcalaanli woman dressed entirely in bone-white: trousers and many-layered blouse and a long asymmetrical jacket. The planes of her face were dark bronze, her cheekbones wide, her nose knifelike over a wide and narrow-lipped mouth. Her soft leather boots were soundless on the floor. Mahit thought she was the most beautiful Teixcalaanli woman she’d ever seen, which likely meant that she was mediocre to ugly by local standards. Too slight, too tall, all dimension in the face in the nose, and difficult to look away from.

She catches all the light in the room and bends it around herself.

That didn’t feel like Mahit’s own observation. It had floated up in her mind the way an imago-borne skill would, like knowing how to gesture like a Teixcalaanlitzlim or do multivariable calculus—perfectly natural and perfectly alien to Mahit’s own experiences. She wondered if Yskandr had known this woman and was again angry that he wasn’t here to ask. That he’d absented himself when she needed him, left nothing but these shreds of thought, brief impressions.

Three Seagrass stepped forward and lifted her hands in precise formal greeting, her fingertips just touching, and bowed deeply.

The newcomer did not bother to return the gesture. “How unexpected,” she said. “Here I thought I’d be the only one coming to visit the dead at this hour of night.” She did not seem perturbed.

“May I present the new Ambassador from Lsel Station, Mahit Dzmare,” Three Seagrass said, using the highest formal construction of the phrase, as if they were all standing in the Emperor’s receiving hall instead of a sub-basement of the Judiciary.

“My condolences on the loss of your predecessor, Mahit,” said the woman in white with perfect sincerity.

No one else in the City had called Mahit by her given name without considerable prompting. She felt suddenly exposed.

“Her Excellency, the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze,” Three Seagrass went on, and then murmured, “whose gracious presence illuminates the room like the edgeshine of a knife,” one fifteen-syllable-long participial phrase in Teixcalaanli, as if the woman in white came with her own premade poetic epithet. Perhaps she did. The ezuazuacatlim were the Emperor’s sworn confidantes, his closest advisors and table companions. Millennia ago, when the Teixcalaanli had been planetbound, the ezuazuacatlim had also been his personal war band. It was, according to the histories available on Lsel, a less violent title in recent centuries.

Mahit was not so sure of “less violent,” considering the epithet. She bowed. “I am grateful for Your Excellency’s sympathies,” she said, during the process of bending from the waist and getting upright again, and then pulled herself straight, imagined herself as someone who could loom, perhaps even loom over unfashionably tall Teixcalaanlitzlim with dangerous titles, and asked, “What brings a person of your responsibilities to, as you said, visit the dead?”

“I liked him,” said Nineteen Adze, “and I heard you were going to burn him.”

She came closer. Mahit found herself standing elbow to elbow with her, looking down at the corpse. Nineteen Adze straightened out Yskandr’s head from how it had been turned and pushed back his hair from his forehead with gentle and familiar hands. Her signet ring glinted on her thumb.

“You’ve come to say good-bye,” Mahit said, implying the doubt she genuinely felt. An ezuazuacat did not need to sneak around like a common ambassador and her miscreant asekretim companions, not to look at a corpse. She had some other reason. Something had shifted for her when Mahit had arrived, or when Mahit had informed the ixplanatl that Yskandr’s body should be burnt. She had expected that the presence of a new ambassador would certainly set off some political maneuvering—she wasn’t an idiot—but she hadn’t thought the ripples of disturbance would reach as high as the Emperor’s inner circle. Yskandr, she thought, what were you trying to do here?

“Never good-bye,” Nineteen Adze said. She looked at Mahit sidelong, a brief gap of smiling white visible between her lips. “How impolite, to imagine a permanent farewell for such a distinctive person, let alone a friend.”

Were her hands, so careful on the corpse’s flesh, looking for that same imago-machine Twelve Azalea had noticed? She could be implying that she knew all about the imago process; perhaps she imagined she was even talking to Yskandr, inside Mahit’s body. Too bad for the ezuazuacat that he wasn’t hearing her; too bad for Mahit, too.

“You’ve certainly picked an unusual hour for it,” Mahit said, as neutrally as she could manage.

“Certainly no more unusual than you. And with such fascinating company.”

“I assure Your Excellency,” Twelve Azalea broke in, “that—”

“—that I have brought my cultural liaison and her fellow asekreta here to be witnesses in a Lsel ritual of personal mourning,” Mahit said.

“You have?” said Nineteen Adze. Behind her, Three Seagrass gave Mahit a look which clearly expressed, despite fundamental cultural differences in habitual facial expressions, a chagrined admiration of her nerve.

“I have,” Mahit said.

“How does it work?” Nineteen Adze inquired, in the most formal and delicately polite mode Mahit had ever heard someone use out loud.

Perhaps when Mahit received a fifteen-syllable poetic epithet of her own it would involve following through on initial poor ideas. “It’s a vigil,” she said, inventing as she went. “The successor attends the body of her predecessor for a full half rotation of the station—nine of your hours—in order to commit to memory the features of the person she will become, before those features are rendered to ash. Two witnesses to the vigil are required, which is why I have brought along Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea. After the vigil the successor consumes whatever of the burnt remains she desires to keep.” As imaginary rituals went, it wasn’t a bad one. Mahit might even have liked to have such a ceremony done as part of the integration process with an imago. If she ever went back to Lsel she might even suggest it. Not that it would have made a difference for her.

“Wouldn’t a holograph do just as well?” Nineteen Adze inquired. “Not to disparage your culture’s habitus. I am merely curious.”

Mahit just bet she was. “The physicality of the actual corpse adds verisimilitude,” she said.

Twelve Azalea made a small, choked noise. “Verisimilitude,” he repeated.

Mahit nodded with solemnity. Apparently she was trusting the asekretim after all, or at least trusting them to not break character. Her heart was racing. Nineteen Adze glanced with undisguised delight between her and Three Seagrass, who looked entirely composed aside from the wideness of her eyes. Mahit was sure that the entire invention was about to come crashing down around her. At least she was already inside the Judiciary; if the ezuazuacat decided to arrest her, there wasn’t all that far to go.

“Yskandr never mentioned such a thing,” Nineteen Adze said, “but he was always reticent about death on Lsel.”

“It’s usually much more private than this,” said Mahit, which was only partially a lie. Death was private except for where it was the beginning of the most intimate contact two people could have.

Nineteen Adze pulled the covering sheet midway up the corpse’s chest, smoothed it once, and stepped away. “You’re so little like him,” she said. “Perhaps the same sense of humor, but that’s all. I’m surprised.”

“Are you?”

“Very.”

“Not all Teixcalaanli are the same, either.”

Nineteen Adze laughed, a single sharp sound. “No, but we come in types. Your asekreta here, for example. She’s the precise model of the orator-diplomat Eleven Lathe, except a woman, and too thin through the chest. Ask her; she’ll recite his entire oeuvre for you, even the parts where he unwisely got involved with barbarians.”

Three Seagrass gestured with one hand, the motion both rueful and flattered. “I didn’t think Your Excellency had been paying attention,” she said.

“Never think that, Three Seagrass,” said Nineteen Adze. Mahit couldn’t quite tell if she meant to be threatening. It might just be how she said everything.

“I am fascinated to meet you, Mahit,” she went on. “I’m sure this won’t be the last time.”

“I’m sure.”

“You ought to return to your vigil, don’t you think? I sincerely wish you a joyous union with your predecessor.”

Mahit felt quite near to hysterical laughter. “I wish that also for myself,” she said. “You honor Yskandr with your presence.”

Nineteen Adze seemed to be having some sort of complex internal reaction to that idea. Mahit wasn’t familiar enough with Teixcalaanli facial expressions to decipher hers. “Goodnight, Mahit,” she said. “Asekretim.” She turned on her heel and walked out as unhurriedly as she’d come in.

Once the door was shut behind her, Three Seagrass asked, “How much of that was true, Ambassador?”

“Some of it,” Mahit said wryly. “The end bit, where she wished me a joyous union and I agreed. That part, absolutely.” She paused, mentally gritted her teeth, and got on with it. “I appreciate your participation. Both of you.”

“It’s quite unusual for an ezuazuacat to be in the morgue,” said Three Seagrass. “Especially her.”

“I wanted to see what you’d do,” Twelve Azalea added. “Interrupting you would have ruined the effect.”

“I could have told her the truth,” Mahit said. “Here I am, new to the City, being led astray by my own cultural liaison and a stray courtier.”

Twelve Azalea folded his hands together in front of his chest. “We could have told her the truth,” he said. “Her friend, the dead Ambassador, has mysterious and probably illegal neurological implants.”

“How nice for us, that everyone lies,” Three Seagrass said cheerfully.

“Cultural exchange by mutually beneficial deception,” said Mahit. She lifted one shoulder in a shrug.

“It won’t stay mutually beneficial for long,” said Twelve Azalea, “unless we three make an agreement to keep it so. I still want to know what this implant does, Ambassador.”

“And I want to know what my predecessor was doing being friends with Her Excellency the ezuazuacat and also the Emperor Himself.”

Three Seagrass slapped both her hands down on the morgue table, one on each side of the corpse’s head. Her rings clicked on the metal. “We can trade truths just as well as lies,” she said. “One from each of us, for a pact.”

“That is out of Eleven Lathe,” Twelve Azalea said. “The truth pact between him and the sworn band of aliens in book five of Dispatches from the Numinous Frontier.”

Three Seagrass did not look embarrassed, though Mahit thought she might have reason to. Allusions and references were the center of Teixcalaanli high culture, but were they supposed to be so obvious that any one of your old friends could pick up the precise citation? Not that she’d read Dispatches from the Numinous Frontier. It wasn’t a text that had ever reached Lsel Station. It sounded like one which probably hadn’t got past the Teixcalaanli censors—religious texts, or texts that could be read as statecraft manuals or unsanitized accounts of Teixcalaanli diplomacy or warfare, rarely did.

“Nineteen Adze isn’t wrong about me,” Three Seagrass said, serenely enough. “It worked for Eleven Lathe. It’ll work for us.”

“One truth each,” Mahit said. “And we keep each other’s secrets.”

“Fine,” said Twelve Azalea. He shoved a hand backward through his slicked-down hair, disarraying it. “You first, Reed.”

“Why me first,” Three Seagrass said, “you’re the one who got us into this.”

“Her first, then.”

Mahit shook her head. “I hardly know the rules of truth pacts,” she said, “not being a citizen, and never having the pleasure of reading Eleven Lathe. So you’ll have to demonstrate.”

“You’re really enjoying that, aren’t you,” said Three Seagrass. “When you can make a point of being uncivilized.”

Mahit was, in fact. It was the only enjoyable part about being alone and alternately entranced and terrified by being surrounded by Teixcalaanlitzlim, who up until today had been both much less upsetting and much more approachable by virtue of primarily appearing in literature. She shrugged at Three Seagrass. “How could I be anything but distressed at the great distance which separates me from a Teixcalaanli citizen?”

“Exactly like that,” Three Seagrass said. “Fine, I’ll go first. Petal, ask me.”

Twelve Azalea tipped his head slightly to the side, as if he was considering. Mahit was almost sure he’d already come up with his question and was delaying for effect. Finally, he asked, “Why did you request to be Ambassador Dzmare’s cultural liaison?”

“Oh, unfair,” Three Seagrass said. “Clever, and unfair! You’re better at this game than you used to be.”

“I’m older than I used to be, and less awestruck by your charms. Now go on. Tell a truth.”

Three Seagrass sighed. “Vainglorious personal ambition,” she began, ticking off her reasons on her fingers, beginning with the thumb, “genuine curiosity about the former Ambassador’s rise to the highest favor of His Majesty—your station is very nice but it is quite small, Mahit, there is no sensible reason for the Emperor’s attention to have come so firmly upon your predecessor’s shoulders, however nice the shoulders—and, mm.” She paused. The hesitation was dramatic, but Mahit suspected it was also genuine. All the embarrassment that had been lacking in Three Seagrass earlier was now visible in the set of her chin, in how she avoided everyone’s eyes, even those of the corpse. “And, I like aliens.”

“You like aliens,” Twelve Azalea exclaimed, delighted, at the same time as Mahit said, “I’m not an alien.”

“You’re pretty close,” Three Seagrass said, ignoring Twelve Azalea entirely. “And human enough that I can talk to you, which makes it even better. Now it is absolutely no longer my turn.”

Clearly Three Seagrass hadn’t wanted to admit that in front of another member of the Information Ministry, and Mahit could almost imagine why—to like, in the sense of having a preference for, persons who weren’t civilized. It was practically admitting to being uncivilized herself. (Never mind how it was also suggestive. That verb was distressingly flexible. Mahit would think about it later.) She decided to be merciful, and go on with her part of the game, and leave Three Seagrass alone.

“Twelve Azalea,” she said. “What was my predecessor’s political situation directly before his death?”

“That’s not a truth, that’s a university thesis,” Twelve Azalea said. “Narrow it down to something I know, Ambassador.”

Mahit clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Something you know.”

“Something only he knows,” Three Seagrass suggested. “For parity.”

“Truthfully,” Mahit said, choosing each word carefully, “what have you to gain from knowing what sort of implants the Lsel Station Ambassador has in his brainstem or anywhere else?”

“Someone murdered him and I want to know why,” Twelve Azalea said. “Oh, don’t look so shocked, Ambassador! As if you weren’t thinking the same thing yourself, no matter what Reed and the ixplanatl told you this morning. I know better. It’s all over your face, you barbarians can’t hide a thing. Someone murdered an ambassador, and no one was admitting it. Even Information isn’t talking about it, and I do have some medical training—I was almost an ixplanatl, once—so I thought I’d be the best possible candidate to find out why the court was covering it up. Especially if the cover-up came from Science rather than Judiciary; Ten Pearl in Science has been feuding with Two Rosewood for years—”

“That’s the Minister of Science and our Minister for Information,” Three Seagrass murmured, quite imago-like in her adroit filling in of information.

Twelve Azalea nodded, waved a hand for quiet, went on. “I got myself assigned to this investigation to make sure Ten Pearl wasn’t pulling one over on Information, and I came down here and investigated on my own because ixplanatl Four Lever was annoyingly aboveboard and I still didn’t know why the Ambassador was dead. Finding the implant was chance. Now that I’ve enticed you down here I think the one is connected to the other, but that’s hardly where I started.” He shook out his sleeves, set his palms flat on the table. “And now it’s my turn to ask.”

Mahit braced herself. She was more prepared to tell the truth—she was even predisposed to confess, just now, with the relief of Twelve Azalea admitting that Yskandr had been murdered coming close on the heels of Three Seagrass being so publicly embarrassed, being so un-Teixcalaanli and recognizably human—she was falling into the Teixcalaanli patterns, now, dividing everyone into civilized and uncivilized except inverse, backward. She was as human as they were. They were as human as she was.

She’d tell some of the truth, then. When Twelve Azalea inevitably asked. And deal with the consequences afterward. It was better than making a blanket decision that no one could be trusted because they were Teixcalaanli. What an absurd premise, from someone who’d spent their whole childhood wishing she could be an imperial citizen, if only for the poetry …

“What does the implant do, Ambassador?”

Hey, Yskandr, Mahit thought, reaching for the silence where the imago should be, watch me. I can commit sedition too.

“It makes a record,” she said. “A copy. A person’s memories and their patterns of thought. We call it an imago-machine, because it makes an imago, a version of the person that outlives their body. His is probably useless now. He’s dead, and it’s been recording brain decay for three months.”

“If it wasn’t useless,” Three Seagrass said carefully, “what would you do with it?”

“I wouldn’t do anything. I’m not a neurosurgeon. Or an ixplanatl of any kind. But if I was, I’d put the imago inside someone, and nothing Yskandr had learned in the last fifteen years would ever be lost.”

“That’s obscene,” Twelve Azalea said. “A dead person taking over the body of a living one. No wonder you eat your corpses—”

“Try not to be insulting,” Mahit snapped. “It’s not a replacement. It’s a combination. There aren’t that many of us on Lsel Station. We have our own ways of preserving what we know.”

Three Seagrass had come around the table and now she laid two fingers on the outside of Mahit’s wrist. The touch felt shockingly invasive. “Do you have one?” she asked.

“Truth pact time is over, Three Seagrass,” Mahit said. “Guess. Would my people send me to the Jewel of the World without one?”

“I could present convincing arguments for both options.”

“That’s what you’re for, aren’t you? Both of you.” Mahit knew she should stop talking—emotional outbursts weren’t appropriate in Teixcalaanli culture and were a sign of immaturity in her own—and yet she wasn’t stopping. All the helpful, mitigating voices she ought to have had with her were silent anyhow. “You asekretim. Convincing arguments and oratory and truth pacts.”

“Yes,” said Three Seagrass. “That’s what we’re for. And information extraction, and getting our charges out of unfortunate or incriminating situations. Which this is becoming. Are we done here, Petal? Did you get what you wanted?”

“Part of it,” said Twelve Azalea.

“Good enough. Let’s go back to your quarters, Mahit.”

She was being gentle, which was … There was no part of that which was good. Mahit took her wrist back, stepped away from her. “Don’t you want to extract more information?”

“Yes, of course,” Three Seagrass said, as if saying so didn’t matter. “But I’ve also got professional integrity.”

“She does,” Twelve Azalea added. “It’s infuriating, occasionally. ‘Likes aliens’ or not, Reed is really quite a conservative at heart.”

“Goodnight, Petal,” Three Seagrass said, sharp, and Mahit was not proud of how grateful she was to know she wasn’t the only person rattled.

The message-box had filled up with infofiche sticks again by the time Three Seagrass had led Mahit back to her quarters. Mahit looked at them with a dull and inevitable sense of despair.

“In the morning,” she said. “I’m going to sleep.”

“Just this one,” Three Seagrass said. She held up an ivory stick set with a golden seal. It was probably real ivory, from some butchered large animal. Sometime earlier Mahit might have been offended, or intrigued, or both. Now she waved a hand at it: If you must. Three Seagrass snapped it open and it spilled its holographs in pale gold light all over her hands, reflecting off the cream and red and orange of her suit.

“Her Excellency the ezuazuacat wants to meet with you at your earliest convenience.”

Of course she did. (Of course she’d have an infofiche stick made out of an animal.) She was suspicious and smart and she knew Yskandr, and she’d been prevented from getting what she wanted in the morgue, so she’d try to get it another way.

“Do I have a choice?” Mahit asked. “No, don’t answer that. Tell her yes.”

Yskandr’s bed smelled like nothing, or like Teixcalaanli soap, an empty smell with just the suggestion of mineral water. It was wide and had too many blankets. Curled up in it, Mahit felt as if she was a collapsing point at the center of the universe, sinking in on herself in recursions. She didn’t know what language she was thinking in. The starfield art above the bed glimmered in the dark—it was gauche—and she missed Yskandr, and she wanted to be angry with someone who would understand how she was angry—and the Jewel of the World made the small settling noises of any city around her outside the window—

Sleep hit her like a gravity well, and she gave in.