A Desolation Called Peace

very good,> Yskandr murmured, and Mahit agreed with him. Nine Hibiscus was exquisitely in command, even when surprised, as she had clearly been surprised by Sixteen Moonrise. Mahit suspected she hadn’t even known the Fleet Captain was on board her flagship until she’d walked into this makeshift morgue with Mahit and Three Seagrass.

—who was in the middle of saying, serene and direct, “After extensive audio analysis of the samples you sent to the Ministry of Information, we believe that the sounds on the transmission are tonal markers, not specific speech—and unless this alien has got vocal cords made of synthesizers and a theremin, it can’t have made them by itself.”

“You could dissect it and find out, though,” Mahit added. “To be certain that it isn’t capable of producing sound via oscillating magnetic fields.”

“You’ve dissected the rest,” added Sixteen Moonrise. “You might as well look at its neck. Since I’m here, I’ll stay and watch. It’s my soldiers who are being killed by these things most imminently, after all.”

“If I’d known you were on board the Weight for the Wheel, Fleet Captain,” said Twenty Cicada silkily, “more than two minutes before you met me in the hangar bay, I would have made sure you also were invited to the autopsy.”

Mahit couldn’t turn around to see Sixteen Moonrise’s reaction, and having it occur behind her made her feel peculiarly exposed, her skin prickling with the crawling sensation of being watched, even if she wasn’t at all the focus of the watcher. She wanted to see. This tangle of Fleet Captains was—significant, important; if she and Three Seagrass were going to be useful enough to survive this war, she had to understand it.

Yskandr whispered to her.

Yet, Mahit thought. But it’s politics, and I need to understand—

And then Yskandr slipped away from her, a banked fire just out of reach, like some fish streaking silver-sided into the shadows of the hydroponic tanks.

Sixteen Moonrise, whatever her expression, was saying, “Swarm, I had always believed better of you—Porcelain Fragment Scorched docked four hours back, and I have been cooling my heels all unknown to the adjutant of our yaotlek?”

Twenty Cicada—Swarm. Mahit remembered what Yskandr had said to her, when she’d caught sight of his tattoos. Homeostat-cultist. With the name of an insect. A pervasive insect. Teixcalaanlitzlim weren’t supposed to have names which were animals, at all. Did insects not qualify as animals? She’d always assumed they did.

Nine Hibiscus watched the squabble with that same threatening impassiveness that seemed to be endemic to her, and then set her hands down on the metal autopsy table heavily enough to quell any further sniping. One on either side of the alien’s head, as if she could crush it between her palms. “Stay, Sixteen Moonrise. See the inside of our enemy. The medtech will fill you in on what you’ve missed. Now. You—” She pointed at Three Seagrass with her chin. “I want to know if either you or your barbarian linguist can talk back with these tonal markers you say you’ve identified. That’s the whole point of you. Figure out how to talk to these things before I decide they’re not worth the trouble of talking to.”

“What’s your broadcast system like?” Three Seagrass asked, bright and effervescent, as if this would be no trouble at all. Mahit knew better. They’d barely started interpreting the sounds on the transmission, spent half of their interpretation time too nauseated to think, breathing in gasps against the wrongness of those sounds. They might be able to say something to the aliens, but it was almost certainly going to be a wrong thing, a half-formed and misshapen utterance, distorted by human tongues and human minds.

Yskandr murmured, and she thought, Bait.

Just like Darj Tarats had used Lsel as bait for Teixcalaan.

Just as she herself was bait now—for Three Seagrass, for this Fleet. If she acted as Tarats’s saboteur. She didn’t know how she could. She didn’t—

I don’t want to be bad at my job on purpose, Mahit thought, a vicious little stab of a phrase, and felt Yskandr’s answering query of Oh? And your job is first-contact protocols now? as a stabbing pain from elbows to fourth fingers and her own voice in her own head. They were so very close now. And still the places they were misaligned bloomed into pain.

“We can prepare a transmission to be intercepted on the frequency they used,” said Nine Hibiscus to Three Seagrass. “Once you have a transmission to send. Bring it to me first. Twenty Cicada will show you to your quarters and to the communications workroom.”

That was some sort of a dismissal. The next gesture the yaotlek made, calling the medtech in his red scrubs over and Sixteen Moonrise to stand by her side and watch, was another. Mahit bowed deep over her fingertips, and found herself distressed all over again by the comfort of knowing that gesture was appropriate again, here. At how easily she’d been scooped up out of the Station, slipped easily into the politics and pleasures and poisons of Teixcalaan. At how much she wanted to be useful, and how much she hated that wanting.

The throat of the alien peeled open under her medtech’s scalpel like a perfectly ripe fruit. Inside Nine Hibiscus could see the usual sort of muscles, still sluggishly oozing red. Oxygenated blood. It hadn’t been dead very long, this alien, and wasn’t that disturbing, if she thought about it too deeply—this thing had been alive, and hungry, and acting with its own inexplicable intelligence, less than half a day ago, and if it wasn’t cut open like this, it could have been hiding, pretending, lying in wait to spring—

Sixteen Moonrise, persistent at her left elbow, leaned in and peered at the flash of the scalpel blade as it sliced the muscle free and revealed something that looked like a trachea, ribbed and rubbery. “It looks like a normal throat,” she said, and Nine Hibiscus wondered how many throats her fellow Fleet Captain had dissected personally.

“Open it. At the top, where the larynx should be,” Nine Hibiscus said, and her medtech did.

There were laryngic membranes, all right. A large but—from what she could remember from basic anatomy, aeons ago at the Fleet academy in her first year—standard sort of arrangement. Folds of alien flesh at the top of the alien trachea, all very regular and mammalian-standard: closeable to keep food out of the airway, capable of vibrating to produce sound when air was forced through them. Nothing that looked like it could produce those machine-screaming resonant noises from the intercepted recording.

Sixteen Moonrise said, “Go lower. Where the trachea branches into the lungs. It has lungs, right?”

The lungs were resting in metal basins across the surgery-cum-autopsy room, on a shelf. Nine Hibiscus pointed at them. “It had lungs. Two of them.”

Whatever political game Sixteen Moonrise was playing, coming onto her flagship and invading her medical labs, it seemed to have paled before the possibility of having come up with a good idea. Nine Hibiscus wondered if she’d aimed for a medical career before she’d joined the Fleet, or was just the sort of ghoul who watched autopsies and studied the inner workings of bodies for her own amusement. “Go lower,” she repeated, and her eyes were wide in a satisfied grin.

Nine Hibiscus nodded to her medtech, and he did as Sixteen Moonrise was suggesting, splitting the tube of the trachea open so it lay nearly flat, a ridged strip of stiff flesh. Where it began to divide, there was something—a bony structure like another voice box, surrounded by what looked like a deflated balloon connected to a whole series of muscles Nine Hibiscus definitely did not remember from basic anatomy.

“A syrinx,” said Sixteen Moonrise, with profound satisfaction. “Birds have them. Your spook and her pet are wrong, yaotlek—this alien can make all sorts of horrible noises with that thing.”

The balloon around it must be the part that vibrated, Nine Hibiscus thought, and the muscles were what held it at appropriate levels of tension. With a certain delicious squeamishness, she reached into the alien’s throat and stretched the membrane between her fingertips. It was strong and thick. Her fingertips were red.

If this had been her kill, she’d have smeared the blood on her forehead in victory. But she didn’t deserve that yet.

“Cut it out,” she directed the medtech. “With as many of the muscles as you can keep. And preserve it. I suspect my spook and her pet”—that, for Sixteen Moonrise’s benefit, an acknowledgment, a sidewise appreciation of the other Fleet Captain’s skill at predicting autopsy results—“might want to use it to make some of those noises themselves.”

“So you are trusting the Information agent,” said Sixteen Moonrise. They’d come away from the table to let the medtech do his work. Nine Hibiscus hadn’t washed her hands yet. There was something satisfying about having touched the alien and not being dead, or dissolving. Some small part of the mystery of them undone. They died. They died and bled and cooled and were peculiar but entirely understandable as collections of organs. Just meat, like any other dead thing.

“Why shouldn’t I?” she asked Sixteen Moonrise. “And if you tell me because she’s a spook, I will have to revise your intelligence downward, and that would be a shame. Specifics, Fleet Captain.”

Sixteen Moonrise refused to bristle, which Nine Hibiscus gave her some credit for. She said, “You have no idea who she is or where her loyalties lie, except perhaps to Teixcalaan. She’s not Fleet. This,”—she gestured at the alien, the medical bay, the whole situation—“is Fleet work. I never imagined the hero of Kauraan would want to bring in outsiders to prosecute a war. With all due respect, yaotlek.”

“I’m not a hero,” Nine Hibiscus found herself saying. “I’m a soldier. And Kauraan was won by soldiers, using the best possible intelligence I could procure. I don’t deny my people resources, Fleet Captain. I provide them. The Information agent will get us what we lack, without exposing my people—or yours, or Forty Oxide’s, or anyone’s—to these aliens any more than is strictly necessary.”

“The Fleet has an intelligence service,” said Sixteen Moonrise, and left it there, hanging between them like a challenge. Why haven’t you gone to the Third Palm, O yaotlek, if you are so concerned with providing adequate resources? She didn’t need to say it. Nine Hibiscus could hear it very well in the silence of the room, interrupted only by the occasional squelch of alien fluids coming from the medtech at work behind them.

“We don’t do first contact,” she said, as if that was an adequate answer. “Information does. And there’s only one spook, Sixteen Moonrise. Far more controllable than a squadron of Third Palmers.”

A flicker of some emotion behind those pale eyes. Nine Hibiscus wondered if she’d given Sixteen Moonrise too much information about her own distaste for the Fleet’s intelligencers. That would only be a true problem if the Fleet Captain of the Twenty-Fourth was herself a Third Palmer, or had been, before she became an officer—she had to check her public records. Or have Swarm do it. But they’d been so busy.

“One spook and one barbarian,” said Sixteen Moonrise, eventually. “A spook I could understand. One with an agenda that includes foreigners who were involved with starting this war? That, yaotlek, disturbs me. She’s from Lsel Station. Lsel Station is the little independent entity that told us about these aliens in the first place—”

“And brought down One Lightning, yes,” Nine Hibiscus said.

“One Lightning, and Minister Nine Propulsion along with him.”

Minister Nine Propulsion, Nine Hibiscus’s patron and mentor, her political protection. Sixteen Moonrise was implying that Nine Propulsion hadn’t retired—but that she’d been implicated in the coup, been pushed out and replaced. “I’m sure the former Minister is enjoying her retirement,” Nine Hibiscus said. It was so difficult to imagine Nine Propulsion doing something like getting involved in an attempted usurpation. She’d always been so careful, a watchful eye in the City, steady enough that Nine Hibiscus had felt she could always take appropriate risks and be backed up.

“Retirement is an interesting way to put it,” said Sixteen Moonrise. “Half the Ministry turned over, yaotlek, that’s not retirements.” That was a goad. She was trying to get Nine Hibiscus to complain about the new Emperor, about the new Minister of War, Three Azimuth, the very people who had given her this command—

(Who had sent her out here to defeat an impossible force with only one six of legions, half of which had signed on to Sixteen Moonrise’s little letter of insubordination. Which suggested—unpleasantly—that Sixteen Moonrise was right, and she was being punished for being Nine Propulsion’s protégé, and Nine Propulsion had been in on the attempted usurpation, after all—)

And if she said any of that, she’d be playing into whatever political game Sixteen Moonrise had brought with her from the Ministry to the front lines. She’d be admitting that her own loyalties might not be to the Empire, or even the Ministry of War. She refused to be entrapped like this. “A new Emperor has new military priorities. And Three Azimuth deserved the promotion. To tell you the truth, Fleet Captain, I hope I do as well as Nine Propulsion has, when my time in the front lines is done.”

Let Sixteen Moonrise think she hadn’t picked up the insinuation of Nine Propulsion’s disloyalty. Let her think she was simpler than she was.

“With your record, I can’t imagine otherwise,” Sixteen Moonrise said, which was vicious. Nine Hibiscus could hate her. If she didn’t need her and her Twenty-Fourth Legion to win this war, she could hate her quite a lot.

“That’s a lovely thing to say,” she told her, and smiled with the edges of her teeth showing.

Sixteen Moonrise matched her: that sliver of tooth-bone like a threat. “What I’m trying to convey, yaotlek, Ministers all aside, is that I don’t trust anything that came from Lsel Station. And attached to a spook just makes it worse.”

There was some agenda here, a deeper and more unpleasant one than a rivalry between Fleet Captains. Sixteen Moonrise wanted the Third Palm involved with this war. She wanted it very, very much. And that meant someone in the Ministry or the rest of the palace wanted political-officer attention on what Nine Hibiscus was doing.

“I do appreciate your candid opinion, Fleet Captain,” she said. “And be assured, I will keep as many eyes on the spook as are necessary. Let’s see what sort of work she does for us. I’ll reserve my judgment.”

“As you like,” Sixteen Moonrise said. “I believe your tech has extracted the syrinx, yaotlek. Fill it full of air and see if it screams for you before you let the spook have it.”

And with that, she saluted, spun on her heel, and left Nine Hibiscus alone with the dismembered corpse of their enemy, which had begun to stink of decomposition.

The adjutant Twenty Cicada did not escort Three Seagrass and Mahit to whatever quarters were prepared for them. Instead he mentioned, in an offhand fashion Three Seagrass recognized intimately—the precise air of a person who had to deal with vastly more complex logistics-management problems than this present one at least four times a day—that while their quarters were reconfigured for two beds instead of one, the pair of them could get straight to work.

“Envoy,” he said, as they followed him through the busy, fine-kept corridors of the Weight for the Wheel, being watched with unabashed curiosity by all sorts of Fleet personnel, “your cloudhook should have a map of the ship now that you’re aboard. You and Ambassador Dzmare have the communications workroom until twenty-two hundred hours—and the yaotlek will want some sort of result at that point.” He glanced back over his shoulder with a sharp smile, a narrow movement of the eyes and the corners of the mouth. Smiling looked odd on a person who lacked eyebrows and hair. Three Seagrass had never interacted with a person who took homeostasis-practice so seriously; most people with an unusual religion were less pointed about reminding you of it. She was … interested, she decided. Interested in how this man had come to his high place of power, while looking ever so not-quite-civilized. But eyebrows or none, Three Seagrass suspected Twenty Cicada knew his master Nine Hibiscus well enough to have meant what he said: the yaotlek would want a report at the end of the evening shift, no matter how late that shift ended or how well matched it was with the yaotlek’s own sleeping schedule.

“She’ll have it,” Three Seagrass said, and bowed very deeply when Twenty Cicada took this promise as sufficient collateral to nod to the both of them and disappear off at an angle on some business of his own—not an errand boy, that one. Not someone who usually escorted stray Information agents around the ship. Not that an adjutant would be—

And oh, there was the map, gleaming in tracery over her cloudhook. Four decks up, toward the bow. Easy enough.

“Follow me,” she said to Mahit, who was being very quiet. Unusually so, especially after she’d been all flashfire forwardness in the medbay. Had Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise spooked her? Three Seagrass didn’t remember Mahit spooking easily. But spooked or not, she followed, close at Three Seagrass’s left shoulder, their habitual positions all reversed. The ship map overlaid on the right side of her vision was easy to follow—someone, probably Twenty Cicada, had highlighted their destination with a small glowing star—and they moved up three levels of the enormous flagship without incident. On the fourth, though—oh, there was the security-conscious Fleet that Three Seagrass had always been taught about in Information briefings.

It came in the person of a serenely massive Fleet soldier, his hair in a neat queue, his energy pistol—all right, energy pistols, plural—holstered with elegant threat at each hip, who barred the door that Three Seagrass’s map required them to pass through on their way to the communications workroom. This soldier held out a hand, palm flat and authoritative, and Three Seagrass lurched to a stop, with Mahit just behind her.

“You are both out of uniform,” said the soldier. “Her especially.” He indicated Mahit with his chin. “What is your business on this deck?”

“I am the envoy Three Seagrass, seconded here by the Information Ministry,” said Three Seagrass, with some annoyance—wasn’t her envoy’s suit uniform uniform enough? But perhaps this soldier had never seen one. “And this is Ambassador Mahit Dzmare. Do check your manifests, sir, we’re on our way to the communications workroom on the yaotlek’s orders.”

The soldier blinked through some search function on his cloudhook, found whatever he was looking for, and then made her and Mahit wait. She could feel Mahit’s nervous energy like a thrumming power generator at her side, and yet her barbarian continued not saying anything. After an interminable fifteen seconds, the soldier pressed his fingertips together in the most cursory of acknowledgments, and waved them through. “To the left, Envoy. Ambassador,” he said, as if there had been absolutely no reason to stop them.

It happened again approximately two hundred feet down the corridor, the instant they’d passed out of visual view of one soldier and into the purview of the next. Three Seagrass was unpleasantly reminded of the Sunlit of her childhood, before the algorithmic reform, back when they would ask you the same questions if you’d switched jurisdictions, no matter how many jurisdictions you passed through. This soldier was shorter, brisker, and visibly horrified at Mahit’s lack of propriety: her complaint about you are both out of uniform was accompanied by an encompassing hand gesture, shoulder to foot, as if to suggest, What is a nice envoy like you doing with a jacket-and-trouser set like that?

Three Seagrass expected Mahit to take point on this one, to give the explanation of who they were as confidently as she’d introduced herself to the yaotlek in the medical bay. But she didn’t. She raised her eyebrows at Three Seagrass until Three Seagrass repeated what she’d told the last soldier, suffered through the waiting as the soldier consulted her cloudhook, and then breezily waved them onward.

The third time, at the door of the communications workroom itself, was just insulting. The previous impediment was still in view, and doing absolutely nothing about informing her compatriot that the two people standing in front of her had reasonable and assigned business behind the door she was guarding so assiduously.

“You’re—” the soldier began.

“Out of uniform, yes,” Mahit snapped, at last—snapped with a fluid and vicious intonation Three Seagrass didn’t remember her using back in the palace. Something in the tone, the deep and bored dismissal of the problem at hand.

I wonder what Yskandr Aghavn sounded like when he was pissed off, she thought, and didn’t like thinking it.

“If you would check your records,” she added, before Mahit could say anything else.

“There’s no need to be so abrupt, Envoy,” said the soldier, which didn’t help: if this one knew who she and Mahit were, why under every single bleeding star wasn’t she letting them into the workroom?

“We have orders to be inside that workroom,” Mahit said, with that same silky viciousness, her Teixcalaanli note-perfect. “Orders from your yaotlek. For the safety of the Fleet and the apt and skillful prosecution of this war.”

She was, Three Seagrass realized, quoting one of the Reclamation Songs—“Song #16,” one of the more obscure ones because it was so long and thus difficult to memorize. The apt and skillful prosecution of this war. Fifteen perfect Teixcalaanli syllables, with a caesura in the center. Fuck but it was a continuous heartbreak that Mahit Dzmare had been born a barbarian—

But would she have liked her as well, if she hadn’t been?

The soldier acting as doorkeep took her sweet time checking her records, though Three Seagrass thought she saw a flush on her dark cheeks—embarrassment, or even shame, to be so effortlessly put in her place by a barbarian. Mahit should be proud of herself.

She was about to say so, even—they were finally inside, with a delicious profusion of audiovisual and holorecording equipment arrayed like a bouquet of flowers for their use, and the door shut quite firmly against the doorkeepers outside—but Mahit went straight for the audioplay controls. She had the infofiche stick with the intercepted alien noises on it in her hands, and Three Seagrass absolutely didn’t have time to tell her that this particular audioplay looked like it was preset to full volume repeater before she broke it open and the familiar, completely hideous noises flooded the room—from every direction. The repeater was surround-sound, there were speakers in every wall, the horrible static-singing sounds were hitting her from every angle instead of just one—

They were getting into her bones, Three Seagrass thought, right before she threw up. The noises were getting into her bones and would sing in there forever, and she was going to die of nausea—

It stopped. Three Seagrass retched again, helplessly (how brilliant; the first thing the envoy does is vomit on the floor of the flagship, fantastic work on her part), and waited for the waves of queasiness to ease back.

“—sorry,” Mahit said, thinly. Three Seagrass looked up. Ah. At least she wasn’t the only one to have vomited on the floor. But Mahit had found the off switch for the audioplay. Two and a half minutes of that—the length of the recording—would have left the both of them incapacitated, not just embarrassed.

“… We forgot the bin liners,” she managed, and Mahit looked as if she would laugh if it was something her innards found advisable.

Instead, she swiped the back of her hand across her mouth, grimaced, and said, “That was worse than when we listened to it on the shuttle. Much worse.”

“That audioplay is set to repeater. All input is retransmitted through every speaker in every wall in here.”

Mahit considered this information, coiled and still, evaluating it—like she was tasting it, or maybe she was only tasting the sourness of her own mouth, like Three Seagrass was. Then she said, “We need a live alien. Not a corpse.”

“I don’t disagree, but—what makes you bring that up just now?”

“I think,” Mahit said, “that if a whole lot of them make those noises in a circle—like the speakers did—it amplifies. A reinforcing sound wave. Infrasound, not just what we can hear. I wonder if they know it makes us ill.”

“I suspect they do,” Three Seagrass said, as dryly as she could manage while looking around for some sort of cloth to wipe up or at least cover two persons’ worth of sick. “They’ve met a lot more live us than we have live them. Everybody on Peloa-2, for example.”

“All the more reason we need a live one,” said Mahit. “The one in the medbay was a mammal. Even if they’re scavenger mammals, weren’t we the same, a long time ago? And they have to be talking in more ways than just this, this noise—”

“Some way we can’t hear. A sign language, or—pheromones, or—” There were a lot of cabinets in this room, and none of them had anything absorbent in them—just banks of electronics.

“Or structural skin coloration that shifts in patterns, I don’t know. Anything, really. Probably not pheromones, pheromones would be more tonal markers, for mammals. I think. Comparative zoology is not my specialty.”

“All right. A live one. Maybe we can make this message good enough, even if it’s just tone-shrieking into the void, that they’ll send over someone we can see.” Three Seagrass opened another cabinet, and shut it again in frustration. “Give me your jacket,” she said.

“Why?”

Three Seagrass sighed. Mahit was brilliant, and was solving this entire puzzle just like she’d hoped she would, and yet she couldn’t recognize why Three Seagrass needed something made out of cloth. “To clean up with, unless you feel like working surrounded by un-bin-linered stomach contents?”

“Why my jacket?” Mahit said.

“Because mine is a uniform, which at least some of the Fleet on this enormous ship recognize as a uniform, and yours is a very nice and very absorbent piece of cloth. We should get you a uniform yourself, really. I’m sure they have some without rank signs, or I can try to adjust one of mine to fit you if you’d rather look like Information. It’ll save us time later, in the hallways…”

She trailed off at Mahit’s expression, which was as complicatedly hurt as it might have been if Three Seagrass had hit her across the face.

“I’m not a Fleet member,” said Mahit, too evenly, too sharply. “Nor am I a special envoy of the Information Ministry.”

“If you’re worried about insubordination for wearing a Teixcalaanli uniform, I’ll take responsibility?” Three Seagrass tried, puzzled as to the severity of Mahit’s reaction. All right, she was being slightly awful about the jacket, she wouldn’t have wanted someone to suggest her jacket be used as a rag—

“Of course you’d take responsibility,” said Mahit. “That’s always been your job with me, hasn’t it? Opening doors and taking responsibility and being an exact legal equivalent for your barbarian. Since the very beginning.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Three Seagrass said, shocked. She hadn’t. It was a stupid, flippant suggestion, that was all, not some kind of—assumption that Mahit couldn’t decide for herself what she should do. “Stars, Mahit, we’ll use my jacket instead, forget it.”

She shrugged out of one sleeve, was halfway through the next, apologetically turned away, when Mahit said, as narrow and distantly cold as Three Seagrass had ever heard her: “You didn’t mean it. But you said it, Reed.”

Her nickname, polished and sharpened to wound. In that mouth, which had not known to say it when Twelve Azalea had still been alive.

She snapped, “You think I said that, because you can’t hear anything but one of us saying you aren’t a Teixcalaanlitzlim whenever we speak to you.” Snapped, and regretted snapping, and at the same time felt that brutal and brittle glee she always had at getting right down to the meat of some argument, some problem, and sinking in her teeth, ready to tear.

“Don’t you?” asked Mahit. “Say that.” She was very still, very calm. Three Seagrass thought of snakes, of spiders, of all the creatures that stung when threatened. “You remind me I’m a barbarian all the time. Now, in the City before—and not just you, Three Seagrass, the soldiers in the corridors too, but at least they have the honesty not to pretend that I’m anything but what Teixcalaan thinks I am. You? You want to give me uniforms and make me useful and have a clever almost-human barbarian to show off on your arm—you decide that you want me and here I am, you decide it’d be useful if your barbarian exercised diplomatic authority and so I do, you decide I need a uniform so we don’t get stopped in corridors and you don’t think about what it’d look like if you dressed me up like a toy Teixcalaanlitzlim—”

“I asked,” Three Seagrass said, and she had asked, hadn’t she? She’d asked every time. She was almost sure she’d asked, she’d never given Mahit orders, she wouldn’t, the idea was absurd. But Mahit ignored her and kept going, like words were an infection she was squeezing from a wound.

“And you’d have liked it if I’d stayed with you in the palace, wouldn’t you have? You could’ve had me all this time to amuse you and not had to come all the way to a war—”

Before she could stop herself, Three Seagrass said, “Would that have been so awful? You staying with me.” Distantly, she thought it’d be absolutely terrible if she started crying. She’d never cried in arguments. Not since she had grown big enough to leave the crèche. Mahit did all sorts of things to her that she’d never expected, made her feel all sorts of new and complicated kinds of everything, including—apparently—hurt and miserable. All she’d done was suggest that a uniform might make things simpler, and now they were going to have this fight, which felt awful and unfixable and like Mahit had been saving it up, waiting for the inevitable point where she couldn’t stand Three Seagrass any longer and did this to whatever it was they had between them.

“No,” said Mahit. “It wouldn’t have been terrible to stay with you. Which is why I didn’t.”

“That makes no sense.”

Mahit had sat herself down at the central conference table, and now she put her face in her palms and hid her eyes from Three Seagrass. The last time they’d been around a conference room table, they’d stopped a usurpation with poetry. Now they couldn’t even write a message together, because they were having the most useless, incomprehensible, horrible argument Three Seagrass could remember having since her ex-girlfriend Nine Arch had broken up with her in the middle of exams during their second year of asekreta training.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Three Seagrass said again, louder. “It doesn’t. I’m sorry about the uniforms, and the jacket, and I won’t mention it again, but you aren’t being—”

“Explicable? Understandable? Civilized?”

“Fuck,” said Three Seagrass, hearing as she said it how her voice had gone narrow and high, uncontrolled. “If you didn’t want to come with me here, you didn’t have to.”

Mahit took her hands down and looked Three Seagrass straight in the face. It felt like her gaze had weight, weight and edges, a sudden revealed landscape of places to cut oneself open on. Again Three Seagrass found herself wondering what of this person was Mahit Dzmare and what was Yskandr Aghavn, and if all the ruinous confusion between them now was born of Mahit’s precious imago-technology—or if she’d never understood her. Not really. Only pretended to.

(Only pretended, like they were pretending they understood something of these aliens and their incomprehensible language that hurt humans to hear.)

Three Seagrass dropped her eyes first.

Mahit said, “Reed,” softly, and Three Seagrass looked up again, heliotropic, compelled.

“Yes?” she asked.

“When you figure out why I did have to come with you, we can talk again.”

“… again, at all?” There was something horrible in the idea: that she’d gone so far wrong that she wouldn’t even have a chance to keep going, keep trying. That there was some flaw in everything that was invisible to her. (She didn’t know why Mahit couldn’t have stayed on Lsel. Politics, of course, but there were other avenues than this mad gambit of a trip to the edge of a war to get out of politics. Mahit hadn’t told her why. She knew she hadn’t told her why, she’d avoided telling her quite deliberately, and now she was somehow supposed to figure it out—)

“We have work to do,” said Mahit, which wasn’t an answer at all. “We need to get one of these things to think this Fleet is worth talking to.”

They did have work to do. And less than six hours until the yaotlek would want that work. And yet Three Seagrass felt like she couldn’t think through the urge to cry, or grab Mahit by the arm and shake her until she explained. Until she stopped being—

Oh, say it, Reed. To yourself if no one else.

Uncivilized. Refusing to participate, like an animal or a child.

The silence between them dragged onward, endless and misshapen, as if gravity was off-kilter, the great engines of Weight for the Wheel shifted out of true, the universe undoing itself from its expected course. The room smelled of acidic vomit. Three Seagrass didn’t know what to say. Everything she’d said so far had made things worse.

She sat down at the table, two chairs away from where Mahit was. It was better than her other option, which was storming out of the room. She needed Mahit. And she needed to do the job she’d set herself when the request for a special envoy came in to the Information Ministry. She should never have been allowed to be here; almost everything about her being here was unauthorized. Aside from the fact that she was very, very good and that she’d found the smartest person she knew to help her with the linguistics and the culture shock of first contact, and that technically she had the requisite rank in the Ministry. But if she didn’t manage it—

If she didn’t manage it, she wouldn’t have a career. Also, probably, a whole lot of Teixcalaanlitzlim would die at the hands of these invaders, considering what they’d done on Peloa-2 and how the yaotlek was clearly having political problems with one of her Fleet Captains. Of which she had only five, hardly enough to prevent an alien attack force from spilling through the jumpgate and into Teixcalaanli space proper. A lot of dead people, if Three Seagrass didn’t figure out how to talk to aliens. Which was more important than her career. If less immediately stomach-churning.

And here was Mahit, waiting for her, or waiting for—something. The gulf of silence felt uncrossable.

She crossed it anyway. “Start with the third sound,” she said. “The one they make when they’re approached too closely. And combine it with—oh, the last one, the one that they made when they were chasing Knifepoint. I think that’s a victory sound.”

“Approach-danger plus hurrah-we-win,” Mahit said, dry as dust. “Could be worse. I hope we’re right about hurrah-we-win, otherwise we’re saying something like approach-danger and we’re-going-to-chase-you.”

“Do you have a better idea?” asked Three Seagrass, and was more gratified than she could bear to think about when Mahit nodded, and they began to get to work in earnest.