A Desolation Called Peace

CHAPTER TEN

NINE Hibiscus was on the bridge when the enemy sent their ships close enough to see. There was that, at least. She hadn’t needed to be fetched. When the slick grey three-wheeled rings—two of them, a large ship and a small one—appeared out of the black in a shimmer of discontinuity, just at the farthest edge of Weight for the Wheel’s visual range, she was right there, as shocked as anyone else. They hadn’t come so close before. Which meant they could have come this close all along, and hadn’t—an idea that made her skin crawl even as she held up a hand, arresting, and said, “Hold.”

They’d been playing the envoy’s message on open channels for seven hours, bouncing it off the back side of Peloa-2 and deeper into the alien-controlled area of the sector. Even so, Nine Hibiscus was surprised by having someone answer. If this was an answer, and not an attack force, right here at the heart of her Fleet, as sudden as a shockstick pressed abruptly behind the ear in the dark.

Two ships could mean anything: an advance scout, here to prove that they could in fact materialize right beside a Teixcalaanli Eternal-class warship like Weight for the Wheel without anyone noticing their approach; or a diplomat and an escort, one big and one small; or even an attack strike, if they had some weapon even more destructive than the corrosive semiliquid net that had eaten her Shard pilot. Two ships was not enough information.

“Captain,” said Five Thistle, and then corrected himself hastily. “Yaotlek, they are still coming closer, I have our energy cannons locked on their vector of approach.”

They were all staring at the ring-ships, all her soldiers, all her officers, as if their own eyes could make the ships legible just by seeing. The weight of human attention on an inhuman problem. Nine Hibiscus’s heart thrummed, adrenaline-shimmer. Her chief weapons officer had just slipped and forgotten her rank, called her by the name he’d always known her by, when their enemies had been understandable, manipulable, predictable.

Every last person on this bridge was waiting for her to make a decision. Attack, or hold. Hope that the Information Ministry’s agents were as clever as they seemed, and that no matter how alien and vicious, these aliens were people that could be spoken with—or obliterate them before they could get any closer. She couldn’t stop thinking about the Shard that she’d had shot down. How that pilot had begged to die before she was eaten. How every other Shard pilot she could hear had begged with her, their biofeedback full of terror and blanked-out shock. The echoes of that shock, still rebounding.

And yet. And yet, she’d called for a special envoy. She’d gone to Information, rather than to the Third Palm, who had never liked her methodology with humans, let alone what she might want to do with aliens. Information had prepared a message. And after that message was sent, something had changed.

“Hold,” she repeated. “Wait for my signal. Two Foam, are you recording on all open channels?”

“Yes,” Two Foam said. “Nothing yet but Fleet unencrypted chatter and our outgoing alien message—I’ve got it muted on pickup in here to preserve our ears, but it’s loud as you want outside.”

“Tell me if it changes,” Nine Hibiscus said. “The instant, if it changes. Five Thistle, stay on that vector and wait for me.”

The ring-ships spun. They were closer. Nine Hibiscus noticed how tight and shallow her breathing had become, and inhaled through her nose, out her mouth, old calming exercises from her first year as a Fleet cadet. They hadn’t worked very well for her then and didn’t work very well now. The smaller ring-ship had shifted in front of the larger one. They spun in different directions, like the shells of electrons around an atomic core, a probabilistic cloud, difficult to see. The smaller one was darker. There was a red tinge to its grey-slick metal. Blood on a deck floor that hadn’t been cleaned properly. A stain.

Almost, she dropped her hand and told Five Thistle to fire. Almost.

“I have something,” said Two Foam. “They’re playing our message back at us, yaotlek. It took me a minute to understand—it’s the same message as we sent, so I didn’t realize—but it’s amplified, like a sine wave reinforcing. Louder.”

Bleeding stars, but I hope the envoy knew what she was saying when she sent that, Nine Hibiscus thought, because they’re saying it too. Only one way to find out, though.

“Get the Reflective Prism on the comm,” she said, and was reassured at the serene command in her own voice. Reflective Prism was the nearest of the Tenth Legion warships to her own position, and she needed someone within the arc of audio interference of the ring-ships. “Tell Captain Twelve Caesura or his comms officer to play the envoy’s message too. Aim at the enemy. Let’s let them know we hear them. And for fuck’s sake, if anyone fires a weapon, I will space them.”

“Understood, yaotlek,” Two Foam said, her hands busy in the air, her eyes already tracking back and forth in micromovements, fast enough that she looked as if she was having a seizure instead of manipulating the communications universe of the Fleet that her cloudhook was projecting for her. The entire bridge felt like an extension of Nine Hibiscus’s own skin, that shimmering intensity which was her people paying attention to her, hanging on every word, waiting for her to show them the way out of this impossible situation just like she’d done in so many impossible situations before.

Right now she thought she might manage it. Might. Sunfire and space willing, she might just manage it. If she kept moving. Which meant she needed to keep the aliens talking.

“—Someone get the Information people up here, now,” she added, feeling her mouth stretch into a barbarian parody of a smile. “Go. Go. Eventually we’re going to need to say something else than what we’ve got, and I can’t make those noises, people. Move.”

The Kauraanian kitten didn’t like being carried in any way Three Seagrass could come up with carrying a kitten. Holding it by the scruff of its neck seemed rude, especially since she didn’t exactly know when she was going to get to put it down, and cradling it like it was a human infant made it puncture her with all of its many, many claws.

Eventually, she stopped carrying it and let it sit on her shoulder instead, which it seemed to enjoy. There was still some puncturing involved, but it was less malicious and more stability-oriented. She still had no idea what to do with it. There was absolutely no way she could bring it to the room she was supposed to share with Mahit, and she didn’t want to go there anyway. Not yet. Maybe not at all.

In the City, this would be when she’d find herself a decent bar and an interesting stranger to amuse herself with for a while. Maybe there were bars and strangers on Fleet ships. (There would absolutely be strangers. Possibly a stranger would like a Kauraanian kitten. Three Seagrass could hold out hope!) She asked her cloudhook to direct her to the nearest location that was both recreational and not a fitness and training facility (she could think of nothing she wanted to do less than exercise, stars), and followed where it led her.

Which … wasn’t a bar. Exactly.

It probably would have been a bar, if it wasn’t on a Fleet ship. There were tables, and music—something Three Seagrass dimly remembered had been popular last winter, with a lot of synthesizers in—and dimmer lighting than in the corridors, and lots of strangers, and even some food that wouldn’t have been out of place in a bar: fried noodles, maize kernels soaked in spices and vinegar, cassava chips. What there wasn’t was alcohol.

No getting drunk on your off-shift, apparently. Not on the Fleet’s credit chip, at least.

Everyone was sober, which meant everyone turned to look at her when she walked in. It was fairly gratifying. Three Seagrass could imagine the picture she made: Information envoy in coral-orange, the brightest uniform in this sea of Fleet grey-and-gold, with a kitten on her shoulder. An absurd picture. Possibly a threateningly absurd one.

“Hi,” she said, brightly. “What kind of food is the best here? For me, and also for this—creature.”

There was a resounding silence. Three Seagrass waited for it to shatter. It always did. Curiosity and interest would win every time, if she was just patient enough and expressed sufficient bravado.

Still, the ten seconds of détente were excruciating. Then, a woman who had been sitting alone along the not-a-bar—she was wearing the rank sigils of a cuecuelihui, a specialist officer of some kind—said, “Hot-fried noodle cake. Why have you got a cat, Envoy?” and the whole room relaxed.

“The adjutant gave it to me,” said Three Seagrass, and took the empty seat beside the cuecuelihui. “Do you want it? It seems very friendly. If—sharp, on the ends.”

“No,” said the cuecuelihui, “I definitely don’t want a Kauraanian kitten,” and held out her arms for it.

Three Seagrass felt a sharp pang of recognition: this person knew exactly how to take control of a conversation, combine surprise and confusion and generosity to engender rapid trust. How nice! Someone trained in basic interrogation! Like finding a lost asekreta sibling on a Fleet ship. She coaxed the kitten off her shoulder and let it settle on the cuecuelihui’s knee, where it transformed itself into an ovoid of contently vibrating black fur and claws.

“I’m Three Seagrass,” she said, once freed of animalian encumbrances. “Are you serious about the noodle cake, or are you trying to make the Information spook look bad via capsaicin poisoning?”

“I’m serious about the noodle cake, unless you’re especially sensitive to capsaicin poisoning, Envoy.” The cuecuelihui sketched a bow over her fingertips without dislodging the kitten. “Fourteen Spike, of the scout-gunner Knifepoint’s Ninth Blooming, Tenth Legion. We don’t poison spooks unless necessary.”

Knifepoint’s Ninth Blooming was the ship which had brought back the transmission of hideous alien noises. Maybe Three Seagrass had picked the right recreation area after all, even if there wasn’t any alcohol to be served. She said, “Thank you,” in two formality-modes higher than what she’d been using before, and watched Fourteen Spike figure out why she was being thanked. It didn’t take that long. Definitely a trained negotiator. A spy, even! A Fleet spy, but that hardly mattered.

“You’re using that recording,” said Fourteen Spike. “The one Knifepoint took before we got chased back here. Good fucking luck, Envoy. I speak five languages and that stuff isn’t language.”

Three Seagrass nodded. “I’ve noticed,” she said. “But Information makes a habit of speaking to the unspeakable, so one has to try, no?”

“Better you than us.”

“Five languages. What do you use those for on a scout-gunner?”

There was an art to this. Like playing a amalitzli game against a new opponent, gauging skill and speed, but all with words. It was what Three Seagrass was for. It was—so much easier than thinking about Mahit Dzmare.

Fourteen Spike shrugged, a fractional amused motion, and said, “Talking. We do that. Even in the Fleet. It isn’t reserved for spooks.” She had begun petting the Kauraanian kitten, and it purred like it wanted to be a starship engine when it grew up.

“Oh, I’ve heard that the Third Palm of the Fleet is very good at talking,” Three Seagrass said, matching that shrug exactly—and was surprised, delightedly surprised, when Fourteen Spike’s face went still and quiet and cold.

“Not just the Third Palm,” she said.

“Forgive my ignorance,” Three Seagrass told her, and left her the opening to explain herself. She suspected Fourteen Spike wouldn’t be able to resist. She’d touched some nerve, some place of pride at the core of her, and she’d defend it, and Three Seagrass would know something new.

“We’re the Tenth Legion, not Third Palmers,” said Fourteen Spike. “We don’t need political officers to get our missions done, if you understand me. Envoy.”

Unspoken but obvious: We don’t need Information, either. And more importantly: the Tenth Legion under Nine Hibiscus really, really didn’t like being ordered around by the Third Palm of the Ministry of War.

Which was run by Eleven Laurel, he of the have you ever spoken to him interrogation in the spaceport bar back in Inmost Province. He whom the Emperor Herself was worried about. Fascinating.

“Oh, I think I have an idea,” said Three Seagrass. “Forgive the insinuation. We are, of course, only the Information Ministry, and can’t possibly know everything.” She smiled, deliberately wide-eyed. “I think I’d like that noodle cake. And if you don’t mind—and it isn’t classified, naturally—I’d love to hear more about your missions.”

If she played this right, she could stay here all night being useful, and not have to talk to Mahit at all until the morning. It made her feel guilty and faintly ill—she didn’t avoid problems, she really didn’t—but right now, a not-bar with a useful Fleet contact was just so very much easier. Than everything.

Mahit lay flat on her back in the dark and tried to feel the ship around her, the great engine of it, the hum of live machinery. Her face was a foot from the ceiling. After she’d finished reading The Perilous Frontier! there had really been nothing else to do but go to bed. She’d taken the higher bunk, both out of deference to Three Seagrass if she ever came back to their assigned quarters (it was miserable climbing a bunk-ladder in the dark, everyone knew that), and out of wanting what comfort she could get from enclosure. If she ignored the drop to her right side, the distance to the floor, she could be inside her own sleep-pod on Lsel, safe.

Not that she’d been safe there. But the habits of memory created all kinds of false harbors. Narrow, confined spaces to sleep in, suspended inside the complex shell of metal that was a Station—or a ship, even a Teixcalaanli one—were correct. They felt right. She reached up and brushed the ceiling with her fingertips—and found them numb still, waking to shimmering prickles when they touched its surface.

Neuropathy. It happened more often now. Or—it surprised her more often now, how it could sneak in even when she wasn’t trying to work with her imago. With either version of her imago. She was going to have to learn to live with it, wasn’t she. As a permanent part of herself.

A sensation of sorrow, from very far off: not even a thought, but an emotional echo. How she herself wanted to cry, and didn’t want to want to, and felt also that Yskandr was—sorry, wished that there was an otherwise life for them, where this wasn’t happening—

It is very late at night, and I am on a Teixcalaanli warship, and I have fought so badly with my friend that she won’t come back to a room I am in. Also I am an exile twice over, once from my home and once from Teixcalaan, which could never have been my home. And my hands hurt. I have every right to wallow.

Yskandr said, and there was a chilled finality to the way he said it that made Mahit want to press him further, like she’d press on a bruise.

How are we not?

Anywhere in all the world, in the language they both so habitually spoke in the privacy of their mind—the language which was neither of their own, but was the Empire’s. Mahit couldn’t seem to find a way to stop. It was the language they both thought in best.

I didn’t buy us anything. I made myself a spy, that’s all. Someone else has my eyes: Darj Tarats sees through me. No promises of any reward. And he’ll want worse than spywork if I tell him about the conflict between the yaotlek and Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise. There’s his sabotage. Turn them against each other fully, paralyze this Fleet, make Nineteen Adze have to commit more legions to the war, ones that aren’t at each other’s throats. It wouldn’t be that difficult. Sixteen Moonrise is looking for levers, and I’m a likely one. She left the rest of it alone: she didn’t want to talk about Three Seagrass with Yskandr any more than she wanted to talk about Three Seagrass with Sixteen Moonrise. Which probably meant she didn’t want to think about Three Seagrass, considering that Yskandr was right here inside her head with her.

he said, dry and distant. until you report back. Not anyone’s eyes and not anyone’s saboteur.>

Is that how you justified not returning to Lsel? If you couldn’t report, you remained your own person? How fragile a peace that is, Yskandr. And here you said we weren’t in exile.

He was wrong about that, Mahit thought, exile happened in the heart and the mind long before it happened to the body that moved in space, across borders—and thinking this, thinking no, felt the neuropathic pain spike in her hands, right down the ulnar nerve through the elbow, like a punishment. Except it hurt him, too, it hurt them, they were one person, and the neurological damage from Aknel Amnardbat’s sabotage was neither of their faults. Even if it spiked when she found one of the jagged edges between their integration.

As if I knew how to send a message to Tarats from the heart of the Teixcalaanli flagship anyhow, she said, which was a sort of apology. An offer: can we put this away, for now, given all the rest of the circumstances we find ourselves in?

And a response—a flush of warmth all through her, a sense that perhaps she could sleep. A gentle sort of tiredness, like a gift from her own endocrine system. She shut her eyes. Curled on her side, facing the wall, her hands folded tight against her chest, protective. Breathed out.

And was startled to full, adrenaline-sharp consciousness when there was a loud banging on the door.

Her first thought was that Three Seagrass had come back after all—but she’d left the plastifilm VOID password-note on the door’s touchpad, and she hadn’t changed the password itself yet. Three Seagrass could have let herself in. This was someone else. Mahit swung herself off the edge of the bunk, finding the lower bed with her toes and stepping lightly down onto the floor. She wasn’t dressed for this—the loose culottes and tank of her pajamas were not in any sense official, nor in any sense Teixcalaanli—

Yskandr told her, and she was utterly grateful. The jacket helped. It had some structure to it. The Perilous Frontier! was a weight against her ribs.

Whoever it was hammered on the door again. Shouted—muffled through the airtight metal—something that sounded like Envoy! Ambassador!

There was absolutely no point in pretending she wasn’t here, and opening the door wouldn’t make her any less safe than keeping it closed: this was not the Jewel of the World, or Lsel, or anywhere else Mahit had ever been. This was a Teixcalaanli warship, and there was nothing outside it but airless void, far closer than it was on a Station. Ships were smaller. Ships weren’t peoples, even if they were societies. There was no disappearing into a ship, even a ship carrying five thousand. (Especially a Teixcalaanli ship: Mahit hadn’t found the camera-eyes yet, but she knew they were here, watching—even without Sunlit behind them to analyze and follow and adjust.)

She opened the door. There was a soldier there, a man of medium height and a fashionable Teixcalaanli military haircut—low hairline accentuated by the sharpness of how he’d pulled his hair back into its queue, the tight fishtail braiding. “Ambassador,” he said. “The yaotlek wants you and the envoy on the bridge immediately. I am to tell you that your message worked, and she needs another one right away.”

The thrill that spun up her, thighs to vagus nerve to throat, was victory, as sharp and sweet as anything she could remember: it had worked, they had figured it out, the aliens were talking back. Mahit knew she was grinning, Stationer-smile, all teeth—knew it by the way that the soldier recoiled slightly, and didn’t care. She deserved this. She and Three Seagrass had established first contact, and everything else—their fight, Sixteen Moonrise, Darj Tarats, the whole war—didn’t matter at all. Not this minute. “That’s fantastic,” she said. “That’s—brilliant, really.”

It might be the most significant thing she’d done in her entire life. The list of people who had established a communicative relationship with a previously uncontacted spaceflight-capable alien species was now, in total, the Emperor Two Sunspot (and whatever aides she’d had, of course), Three Seagrass, and Mahit Dzmare. It was terrifying. It was amazing. She felt on the verge of hysterical, delighted laughter, or tears, or—she’d never dreamed of this, astrobiology hadn’t been an aptitude she’d even tested for, and linguistics had always been about human beings, but—oh. It had worked.

“Where is the envoy?” the soldier asked, interrupting Mahit’s excess of internal delight and sending her just as easily crashing down into the humdrum, miserable reality of having driven off her only friend (if friends were even a category that Teixcalaanlitzlim could fit into, and that was the horrible crux of everything, wasn’t it).

She shrugged.

“Wasn’t she also assigned to these quarters?” the soldier continued, obviously checking some kind of manifest on his cloudhook.

“Yes,” said Mahit. “But she is out, currently.”

“It’s 0200 hours,” said the soldier, puzzled, and then lifted one shoulder and put it down again, as if implying that, well, Information agents must keep very peculiar hours to go along with the rest of their very extensive peculiarities. “… Um. Do you know when she’ll be back? The yaotlek wants you both. Immediately.”

“I’m sure she does,” Mahit said. “But what you have, sir, is me. I suggest you use your surveillance camera-eyes and your cloudhook’s search algorithms to find the envoy—try bars, or some sort of park or recreation area with flowers, if a ship like this has them—she likes those—while I put on clothing that is appropriate for the bridge. I’ll be a moment.” She took a step backward into the room, and the door, no longer commanded to remain open by her proximity, slid shut in the soldier’s face.

Yskandr asked, mildly incredulous.

Mahit remembered deliberately, which was a skill she’d only really understood since acquiring an imago, even though all Lsel children were trained in the basics of how to do it, in anticipation of future need: to recall, very specifically, an event from one’s own life which was the automatic reference point for a present action or feeling. To show, in such recall, how you thought, the patterns of your mind, so that your imago could learn them and follow them and engrave them deeper with their own overlays. A pathway to joint neuroplasticity. Mahit called up the gardens of Plaza Central Four, the taste of green-colored ice cream, the scent of crushed grass under Three Seagrass’s folded and napping arms. Called up, too, Twelve Azalea telling her that this sort of trouble was exactly like the trouble Three Seagrass had always gotten into, when they’d been trainees together. Slumming in garden parks, ice cream for breakfast after terrible, dangerous, interpersonal adventures.

Yskandr murmured.

Mahit did. Mahit did, hugely, and wished she didn’t.

Yskandr went on, taking in whatever Mahit’s missing of Three Seagrass meant for him, for them, and placing it aside while there were more immediate problems. Like he’d placed aside the question of exile. They were getting good at compartmentalizing. sharp. Pointed. Clean lines. I know you have that sort of outfit.>

I have a formal dress that is that outfit. She’d brought one, and only one—a long black thing, architectural in design, a dress that was all angles and no drape, collarbone-exposing, with sleeves to the wrists. She’d brought it to the City, too, and had never worn it there. She’d never worn it at all.

Yskandr, do you even know what clothing types for female-bodied people are?

Both of them were better with Teixcalaanli style, then. On Lsel Mahit wore what everyone wore, which was trousers and jackets and various undershirts or undertunics, mostly grey and black and white.

Yskandr told her.

Like Nineteen Adze.

Well, she could do worse.

When Mahit opened the door again, in white trousers and asymmetric draped shirt and a short, Lsel-style cropped jacket (she’d had to leave The Perilous Frontier! in the other one, there wasn’t room for it in this iteration), the soldier was still there, exactly as he had been. He blinked at her for a very long moment. She wondered if he was thinking of Nineteen Adze, the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze, in her pristine white suits, before she’d been soaked in blood and rendered suitable for the sun-spear throne.

“Have you located the envoy?” Mahit asked him, lightly.

“Not personally,” said the soldier. “The ship has. Are you ready now, Ambassador, or is there anything else you need to do?”

If he was thinking of Nineteen Adze, thinking so wasn’t making it difficult to be snide and impatient toward the barbarian.

“Show me,” Mahit said. “Quickly. I imagine the aliens won’t wait for very long before they decide we don’t know how to say more than hello.”

Walking onto the bridge, Three Seagrass experienced a moment of debilitating psychological vertigo: standing next to the yaotlek, right behind the comms officer’s station, was a tall woman all in white with short dark hair, poised and utterly in control of herself. She was aware of the process of understanding what she was seeing: not, of course not, the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze, her once-possibly-patron and definitely-now-Emperor. Impossible, for three reasons. The Emperor couldn’t have gotten here from the City so quickly (Three Seagrass was intimately acquainted with the fastest route by now, and really, what a mess it would have been to get an imperial vessel through some of those ports!); no one was deferring to this woman, as they all would be if she was the Emperor; and, well. She was Mahit Dzmare, not Nineteen Adze at all.

The curls of her hair just brushing the collar of her white jacket. That was Mahit, entirely.

And yet Three Seagrass felt as if she had been punched in the solar plexus, breathless and knocked back with superposition of imagery. Whatever game Mahit was playing, it was one with high stakes—

Why, for the sake of every sun and every bleeding star, had she had that stupid fight with Mahit? And not come back to their quarters? She wanted to be in on this. She should have been in on this. Instead, here she was, late to what might be the most important act of communication in her life, in yesterday’s uniform, which had both Kauraanian kitten hairs and hydroponic waterstains on one sleeve. Having stayed up through a sleep shift talking to Tenth Legion soldiers and avoiding everything else but fried noodle cakes until an on-duty member of the Fleet had come to fetch her posthaste to the bridge.

Looking at her Ambassador, already here and at work, dressed in perfectly designed white—it made her chest ache. Which was inconvenient. At best.

“Yaotlek,” she called across the bridge, pitched to carry and to be as respectful as possible. “I apologize for my tardiness—there was an episode with a kitten—but I see you are already in the Ambassador’s capable hands.”

There. That was an opening. It was even possible that Mahit might forgive her, a little, if she kept positioning them both as absolute equals. That seemed to be the crux of the whole miserable mess.

Nine Hibiscus turned toward her, but Mahit did not—Mahit bent her head close to that of the comms officer (Three Seagrass consulted her cloudhook, and pulled up the officer’s name, Two Foam, ikantlos first-class, and a whole string of service records which she really didn’t need right now, the War Ministry’s internal user interface for personnel lookup was utterly clunky compared to Information’s, but at least she’d gotten access to the ship’s network at all), and made a quick gesture in the air, as if she was drawing an orbital arc with her fingertips. Two Foam nodded to her.

“Behold your handiwork,” said the yaotlek, and Three Seagrass left off staring uselessly at Mahit and looked instead at her very first glimpse of their live enemy.

Or at least their enemy’s ships, presumably with live enemies inside them, rotating slowly at the edge of Weight for the Wheel’s visual range, rings on rings. A small ship and a large one. Three Seagrass thought they were peculiarly beautiful. Like the ringed mouths of cave-dwelling fish. An inhuman, somewhat disturbing beauty, but beautiful in symmetry at least. And if they liked symmetry, and were mammals, and had decided to talk back—well, then, she’d manage this, wouldn’t she. Of course she would.

“What have we been saying back to them?” she asked Nine Hibiscus, walking by her, the comms officer, and Mahit to stand by the curved plastisteel windows, four layers thick between her and vacuum, only vacuum between her and the aliens.

“That we heard them play our message back—and then, since I didn’t have either you or the Ambassador, Envoy, for a good twenty minutes, Two Foam and I switched to visual composition. If they can hear us and they want to talk, then they can see images that we transmit on the same channels.” Nine Hibiscus had come to stand next to her, a large solid form, immovable, like a star that satellites could orbit around. Three Seagrass wished rather a lot that she’d spent a little less time trying to get rid of the kitten and feeling sorry for herself, and even a little less time talking to Fourteen Spike about how impressive the yaotlek was, and a little more time going to the bridge, even if Twenty Cicada had obviated her of the direct responsibility. Since Fourteen Spike was right about the yaotlek and her impressiveness. She was the sort of person who made you want to do what she asked, before she asked it.

“Images are easier than trying to speak their language with my extremely limited and machine-mediated vocabulary, yes,” Three Seagrass agreed. “And the aliens do have eyes that seem to work in the usual fashion, based on the autopsy. What’s the visual?”

“Two Foam is drawing it,” Nine Hibiscus said. “Your Ambassador is helping. She’s a decent hand at orbital mechanics, which is interesting.”

“She was raised on a space station.”

Nine Hibiscus lifted one shoulder, suggesting that living in space did very little to guarantee that a person knew how space worked. Three Seagrass assumed that was valid. Then the yaotlek said to her, “Envoy, before we send this message—you and the Ambassador are willing to meet face-to-face with these things, yes? Given appropriate military escort.”

“Are you inviting them onto the ship?” Three Seagrass asked, as blandly as she could manage while thinking, quite vividly and nauseatingly, of all those holoimages of the disemboweled people on Peloa-2.

“Certainly not,” said the yaotlek.

“Without much more substantive communication,” Three Seagrass said, warily, “I would prefer not negotiating on their ship. No matter whether I am with the Ambassador, a military escort, or you yourself. It shows a certain weakness.” Also, she didn’t trust those pretty cave-fish mouths, spinning in space: she had already had enough of the physical effects of these aliens and their noises to last several lifetimes, and that was without whatever resonant capacities the material of their hulls provided.

“Funny,” Nine Hibiscus said, “the Ambassador said the same thing, nearly word for word. Don’t think we’re such rubes at negotiation, Envoy, just because we’re the Fleet. We’re sending you down to Peloa-2. And presumably, they will also send down their representatives. Or at least that’s what Two Foam is attempting to draw.”

Down amongst the eviscerated. Delightful. “Let me see,” Three Seagrass said, and braced herself for being near enough to Mahit to brush one of those pure white sleeves in apology.

Mahit didn’t say hello. But she did shift slightly, so there was room around the holodisplay Two Foam was working at for Three Seagrass to see properly. The comms officer clearly knew how to draw: she’d sketched two little humans, and two aliens that looked very like the dead thing in the medical lab. Below the two humans and the two aliens was a static flat image of Peloa-2, captured from real holo. As Three Seagrass watched, the aliens and the humans descended on parallel arcs, the orbit Mahit had sketched with the gesture of one hand, and stood facing one another on the surface of the planet. They were extremely out of scale. Neither humans nor evisceration-prone aliens were several thousand feet in height, even when engaged in critical negotiations.

“You need to put the ships in,” Three Seagrass said. “Ours and theirs. So it’s clear that we want to talk specifically to the ones right out there.” They were still spinning, those three-wheeled rings. Spinning and not moving yet, just transmitting louder and louder self-reinforcing renditions of the message Three Seagrass and Mahit had written. Come talk. Come talk. Come talk. For our mutual benefit.

Mahit nodded. “She’s right. Both ships, and when they get to Peloa-2—when we get to Peloa-2—do you know the symbol for volume? For increasing volume?”

Two Foam looked at her as if she’d said something in her own incomprehensible language, instead of a perfectly understandable Teixcalaanli sentence. “The glyph for crescendo?” she asked. “… If you want me to draw that, I can…”

Mahit’s face acquired a particular amused, arch expression that Three Seagrass didn’t think she’d ever possessed back in the City. Again, she wondered if what she was seeing was the other person, the other Ambassador from Lsel Station, dead and machine-reborn Yskandr Aghavn. (And worse, in terms of the inconvenient timing of the realization: she felt a sudden spike of hope that it wasn’t Mahit that she’d had this terrible fight with, but Yskandr, and everything could still be put back the way it had been. That would be nice, wouldn’t it. Most things turned out not to be nice, so perhaps she should immediately forget she’d thought of it.)

All Mahit said was, “That has eleven strokes and doesn’t even look like a sound wave, ikantlos, of course not the glyph for crescendo. Let me show you.” And instead of sketching an orbit in the air she made a gesture with one cupped hand, moving across space: a small curve, a larger one, a larger one still. Like a cone of sound.

“Oh,” said Two Foam. “Volume. Absolutely.”

Three Seagrass really needed to get Mahit a cloudhook so she could move holoimages around, but bloody stars, she hardly needed one, did she? Two Foam drew exactly what she’d described: three cupped curves, increasing in size, being emitted from the aliens and the humans once their silhouettes were standing on the surface of Peloa-2. Like they were talking to each other.

“That’s good,” Three Seagrass said. “I like it. Anything else, Mahit, or should we transmit?”

Transmit, and get ready to go down there. We’re not going to have time to make up. Maybe that’s easiest.

“We’ve kept them waiting long enough,” said Mahit. “Send it. And let’s see how much audio playback equipment we can make portable, and does the Fleet have exceptionally strong antiemetics?”

“You’d have to ask medical,” said Two Foam.

“Someone ask medical,” said Mahit. “I can’t talk to anyone. I’m not a citizen.” And she smiled, terrifying and far too beautiful with all those teeth exposed, gesturing to her entire lack of cloudhook.

“I’m disappointed in you, Cure,” Eleven Laurel said, and Eight Antidote cringed so hard he almost fell off the bench he was sitting on and into the reflecting pool in the garden outside Palace-Earth. Which would have been hideously embarrassing, and bad aquaculture besides. Splash, one wet kid and a lot of ruined water lilies, smashed pink petals.

“I don’t like being snuck up on,” he said, which was true and also not a good response to being surprised by a teacher who was disappointed. But he’d really thought he was alone.

“Pay more attention, then,” said Eleven Laurel. “You’re easy to spot, right out in the open like this, and you’re not watching your blind spots. Do they not teach you anything in Palace-Earth about your own defense?”

“I’m eleven,” Eight Antidote said. “I know how to kick a male-bodied person between the legs and bend anybody’s arm back far enough so that they scream, but I don’t have much body mass or height leverage, and also the entire City watches me. Haven’t you seen the camera-eyes? If I get kidnapped, the Sunlit will kidnap me right back.”

“I certainly hope they would,” Eleven Laurel said, and came around the bench to sit next to Eight Antidote. All of his very long limbs folded up too much; the bench was too high for Eight Antidote and too low for him. His knees stuck up. “It would be a bad time in Teixcalaan indeed if the Sunlit let the imperial heir stay kidnapped.”

Eight Antidote wondered if that was some kind of threat. It felt like it might be, but he didn’t understand the shape of it, or why he was being threatened right now, in this way. Was Eleven Laurel implying the Sunlit were currently not trustworthy, or that they could become so, if Eight Antidote continued to be disappointing? Either version was bad. Either version was frightening.

He asked, “Why have I disappointed you?”

Eleven Laurel sighed, a long, deliberate release of breath. “When a person—young or old, seasoned or brand-new—is brought into the sort of meeting like the one you were party to, Cure, a meeting in which one Ministry is suspicious of the motivations of another one—and then that person chooses to go directly from the Ministry that had hosted them to the Ministry under suspicion, direct and brazen—well, that person must either be very young, very stupid, or very untrustworthy. Or all three. I am hoping that it isn’t all three, in your case.”

“You followed me.”

“As I was saying, you’re not watching your blind spots very well. You’re a fair sneak, Your Excellency, but you light up the entire Palace when you walk in a Ministry front door in broad daylight. Especially the Information Ministry.”

Eight Antidote liked being called Cure a lot better than Your Excellency, but maybe he didn’t deserve an affectionate use-name right now. He’d made a dumb mistake—apparently—the worst kind of mistake, the kind you don’t know is a mistake that you could make, so you can’t avoid it. He said, “I guess you wouldn’t have liked it better if I wriggled in through the Information air ducts instead.”

Eleven Laurel cleared his throat like he was pushing away a laugh. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t have liked that any better. I’d have liked that worse—then I’d know you were trying to be surreptitious. You’ve at least managed the benefit of my doubts by being obvious. Now. What did you tell Information about what you heard at War, Your Excellency?”

“Nothing,” Eight Antidote said, and tried to make himself sound offended, insulted, and not let his voice go high and whiny like a baby’s. “I cross-checked, Undersecretary, to improve my understanding of communication over interstellar distances. So I could better understand what I heard at War.”

“That does sound plausible,” Eleven Laurel said, and then said nothing more.

Eight Antidote knew this trick; knew it from Nineteen Adze, knew it from his tutors, knew it from how he’d tried to use it himself on One Cyclamen just an hour ago. It was the trick where he was being invited to get himself in trouble by continuing to talk, by explaining more, to make how uncomfortable this conversation was go away. He wasn’t going to fall for it. Not this time. (And if he was actually really upset that Eleven Laurel was manipulating him like this, like he was an asset and not a person, well, he never should have expected otherwise; people like him didn’t have friends, even grown-up friends, and also he wasn’t going to cry. Or even sniffle like crying was a possibility.)

“Are there any other ways I’ve disappointed you?” he asked, instead.

Eleven Laurel patted him on the shoulder, a brief touch that almost felt parental. “Not yet. Try to watch your blind spots, would you? It’d be nice to see you live to be Emperor.”

And then he stood up, brushed his trousers clear of dust with his hands, straightened his already-straight cuffs, and strode off through the gardens. Eight Antidote was about to call after him, That’s not the way out, but thought better of it. Either Eleven Laurel wanted to wander through the lily-maze, or he didn’t, and Eight Antidote didn’t owe him any help. He got up himself—kicked a clod of dirt into the pool, which he knew was self-indulgent and environmentally irresponsible, and he didn’t care one bit—and headed, finally, to talk to Her Brilliance the Emperor. If he was going to get accused of spying by someone he thought had liked him, he should actually do some spying. And he was sure Nineteen Adze would want to know about the Lsel Ambassador appearing, suddenly, on the site of the battlefront.

And maybe about Eleven Laurel implying to Minister Three Azimuth that the Emperor Herself didn’t trust the Ministry of War. Telling her that would serve him right.