A Desolation Called Peace

CHAPTER TWENTY

NINE Hibiscus knew the shape of the Parabolic Compression without ever having set foot on its decks: knew it as she knew her own ship. Eternal-class flagships were all built on the same bones, the same enormous and delicately balanced armatures of steel and shipglass. The same design. She could be standing on the Parabolic Compression’s bridge and have the arc of vision she had now, the consoles in the same places, only the uniforms changed, exchange the Tenth for the Twenty-Fourth, one Fleet Captain for another—

Almost, almost she wished that she could make that switch. Take Sixteen Moonrise’s place, her hands on the navigational controls, flying her ship on a brutal-fast trajectory through alien space, her mouth shaped around the insubordinate words—Don’t listen. Even Emperors can be mistaken. There’s nothing about these enemies worth talking to—all they do is poison us, and they will poison us forever if we don’t burn them out.

Nine Hibiscus could imagine it all too easily, and not only because she had cored out her own belly with guilt when she gave Swarm the order—the permission—to destroy Sixteen Moonrise if he—if they—could. Guilt wasn’t a sufficient impetus to want to die in place of one of your soldiers.

Wondering if that soldier was right, after all—now, that was enough to wish yourself on the bridge of a distant flagship, even as it shattered under alien energy-cannon fire: a blaze of killing-blue, pinpoint-precise (Swarm was always precise—bloody fucking stars, this was never going to stop hurting, was it), and then a sparkling cloud, glitter of glass and metal, spreading slowly in the void.

What was left of the Parabolic Compression slowed its arc forward. Somewhere in that glitter was all that remained of Sixteen Moonrise.

The alien ships withdrew, as quickly as they’d appeared; whatever cease-fire they had brokered was holding. For now.

Nine Hibiscus let herself wish it hadn’t, wish it as savagely and miserably as she liked—she was a soldier, a leader of soldiers, she was not meant to have ended a war like this—and then locked her wishing away, as if she’d swallowed slow poison her own self.

Nineteen Adze brought him a bowl of tea. It was the second-most surprising thing Eight Antidote had ever seen her do. The first had been when she hugged him, without preamble, taking him from the guiding hands of the Sunlit in public, in the gardens right in front of Palace-Earth, and wrapping him in her arms. She was very thin, and taller than him, and her arms were ropes of muscle. He had thought she’d throw him in prison, or just lock him in his rooms forever, which would be the political version of the same thing, but—this. A fast, savage hug. He couldn’t remember when someone had hugged him last. Hugs were for little kids. He’d hugged Two Cartograph, Five Agate’s son, when they’d stopped playing, but that wasn’t the same thing at all.

The Emperor hadn’t locked him up, or locked him away. She took him to her suite. Kept a hand on his shoulder, firm and guiding, even when the world slipped sideways, a shadow in a corridor resolving into the shadow of some Shard’s vision of three-ringed death—a memory, he told himself, not real, not anymore. Took him to her suite, and told him that she’d be back in a little while, when she had finished wrapping up the day. And left him there. Unguarded. Cloudhookless. (Probably his cloudhook was going around and around on the subway still.) He could have left, or gone out the window, or—anything—

Instead he sat on a window seat behind the long white tufted couch, and stared into the early-afternoon sun on the water gardens below, and tried to remember where he was. Where the edges of him were. He didn’t know if he’d ever go all the way back to just being in one place, being absolutely sure of who and where and what he was. It was dizzying and awful, and he guessed he deserved it. The afternoon stretched into evening. He slept a little. Maybe. He might have dreamed he slept, or imagined it, or remembered someone else’s sleeping. But when he was all the way awake again, the world outside the window was flooded blue and fuchsia with the end of sunset.

And then the Emperor Herself came back, and sat on the windowsill with him, and handed him a bowl of tea, clear green and sweetly astringent. He wondered if she’d made it. It seemed like the perfectly absurd sort of thing she’d do. He drank some. His hands still worked, and so did his throat, and he tasted the tea with only the tastebuds that were absolutely and definitely his, so that—helped. It did.

He said, “I’m not sorry,” because he wasn’t, and because if the Emperor was going to punish him, he wanted to deserve it.

Nineteen Adze looked at him for a very long time, long enough that he wanted to blush, and cringe, and get away, even though he did none of those things. Then she nodded, as if she’d come to some satisfying conclusion, and said, “Good.”

Eight Antidote blinked in surprise. “Good?”

“Good. You’re sure what you did was right. You had your reasons to do it, you made a plan, you executed that plan. You didn’t harm anyone else in the process, aside from scaring that Shard pilot half to death, thinking she’d gotten the imperial heir killed or brain-damaged, and she’ll be all right. So: good. What did I tell you about successors?”

“That you would rather an—um. An annoying one, than a dull one.”

Nineteen Adze, when she smiled, looked more dangerous than when she didn’t. “You are absolutely an annoying successor, little spy. And not dull at all.”

“Did it—did what I did work?” he asked, suddenly helpless not to.

The Emperor held out her hand, tilted it one way and then the other. Maybe so, maybe no. “What did you want to have happen?” she asked.

Eight Antidote thought about being a spy: about keeping all his own desires as close as possible, unrevealed, even when asked directly. About choosing, always, if he was going to tell. He could keep doing that. He probably should. He’d be an Emperor, if there was an Empire left, and he couldn’t just tell people what he wanted to have happened, they’d use it against him—

But Nineteen Adze had told him about his ancestor-the-Emperor, and the machines from Lsel Station. About what he might have been. She’d told him that, and he’d used it against her, and yet they were both still right here.

“I wanted the Teixcalaan you told me about,” he said. “Eighty times eighty years of peace, and no one deciding a whole planet is worth killing just to prove a point. I wanted—I wanted to stop Three Azimuth’s order, and I wanted to send mine instead, and I want us to win the war anyway.”

“The war is ending right now, and that planetary system remains intact,” said Nineteen Adze. “I expect you were part of that. What you did inside that Shard…”

The war is ending, she’d said, but not how, or why, and Eight Antidote realized he was shaking hard enough that tea spilled over his knuckles. The Emperor took the bowl away from him. Held it for him. “It’s called the Shard trick,” he started. “They can all do it. Not just me.”

“Pilot Four Crocus explained in detail,” said Nineteen Adze. She didn’t sound pleased. It wasn’t really the sort of thing a person was pleased about, Eight Antidote guessed. Technology like that. Like the Sunlit, but more. (He wasn’t going to tell her that it was still going on inside his mind. He wasn’t. He didn’t know what she’d do. To him or in general.)

“Eleven Laurel didn’t want you to know,” he said instead.

“—Ah,” Nineteen Adze said, like he’d given her something she needed. A last part of a pattern, slotting into place. “That’s useful, Eight Antidote. Thank you for that. I wasn’t sure which one of them—the Minister or the Undersecretary—was responsible.”

“Are you going to…” He didn’t even know how to ask the question.

The Emperor shook her head. “No,” she said. “I can watch him much more closely inside the Ministry of War than I’d ever be able to if I let him out unsupervised into the Fleet.”

“And me?”

“Am I going to do something to you?”

He nodded.

She sighed. “I wish, you know, that you could trust me. But you wouldn’t be you, if you did. No, Eight Antidote. No, I’m not going to do anything to you, except wait for you to grow up and take this job out of my hands.”

It was only in the quiet afterward, when he’d gone back to his own room, and crawled into his bed, that he remembered what Nineteen Adze had said about Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus and why she’d made her yaotlek after what she’d done on Kauraan: not because I thought she was too dangerous to keep alive, little spy. Because I thought she might just be dangerous enough to stay alive.

Remembered that, and couldn’t fall asleep at all.

Everything on the hydroponics deck of Weight for the Wheel was green. The air felt luxurious, almost too thick for Mahit to breathe. There were flowers—lotuses, lilies—all through the rice and the vegetable gardens, mixed in like they were as necessary as calories. Probably they had been, to Twenty Cicada. This had been his kingdom. Three Seagrass had told her so, told her all about the conversation they’d had, here, when she’d been convinced that the last thing Twenty Cicada would ever do would be to let Teixcalaan allow a species as wantonly and uncaringly destructive as the aliens had seemed, to exist.

The two of them were leaning on the decorative railing. Mahit wondered who was standing where: Was she where Twenty Cicada had been, or was Three Seagrass? Whose narrative was going around again?

Yskandr told her, and she said, Overdetermined, back at him. Call and response.

Without prompting or preamble, only taking enough time to set her shoulders and lift her chin, like Mahit was a problem that needed as much of her headlong determination as any of the negotiation she’d done on the bridge, Three Seagrass asked her, “Do you want to come back with me?”

At least she hadn’t said, Do you want to come home with me?

“No,” Mahit told her. She couldn’t look at her while she did it. “No, but—where’s back?”

“The Jewel of the World,” said Three Seagrass, which—of course. There was no other real place for a Teixcalaanlitzlim, was there. “I mean. I have a flat. I have to—do the dishes. Probably talk to the Emperor Herself, too. But—if it’s the City you don’t want, I could—I mean, there’s got to be some system out there which needs an overqualified asekreta and has a halfway decent poetry salon—I could get transferred. Is what. I’m saying.”

“Reed,” Mahit said, soft, and Three Seagrass stopped talking, turned to her, tipped her head up. Her eyes were very dark and very wide. She was still so small. Mahit forgot, most of the time.

She bent down, and kissed her mouth. Not for long. Not long enough to be yes.

“Don’t do that for me,” she said. “Don’t leave the City. Go home. Do your dishes. Talk to the Emperor, if there’s time after doing the dishes.”

Three Seagrass snickered. It was a wet sound; the sound a person made when they were laughing but had meant to cry. “Dishes, then Her Brilliance the Edgeshine of a Knife, in that order, yes. Fine. And where will you go?”

“I don’t know,” Mahit said. It was true. There were no places left: there was no such thing as home, not for her, not anymore. Darj Tarats had taken his flitter-ship back through the Anhamemat Gate. The ceasefire Twenty Cicada had brokered extended throughout the entirety of the alien fleet, whether its prey had been Teixcalaanli warships or Lsel itself. All humans were one thing, to them: one sacrifice had, for now, bought a collective peace. Lsel had not even been touched—Mahit had heard the transmissions from Teixcalaanli supply ships passing by that proved it. And yet she believed what Tarats had told her on the bridge: if she came back to Lsel Station while he and Aknel Amnardbat were in power, she would die under their hands. One, or the other. Heritage or Miners. All safety torn up, tossed away. And for what?

Now we are exiles truly, she thought, and couldn’t even muster up an internal tone of recrimination: she’d been right, all along, and Yskandr hadn’t. But Yskandr would have followed Three Seagrass back to her flat with its undone dishes, its promise of poetry salons—Yskandr would have taken that offer the first time she made it, three months and a war ago.

“It doesn’t have to be with me,” said Three Seagrass. “If that’s your problem with going back to the City—that I’d—I still don’t understand why you feel half the ways you do about how much I like you, but I promise I’m perfectly capable of pretending we don’t know each other or never kissing you again, and you’re still the Ambassador if the Emperor says you are, so there’s work…”

Mahit cut her off, a hand on her shoulder, gentle as she could. “No. It’s not you. I— Reed, I don’t understand why I feel half the ways I do about how much I like you, either. But I like you a great deal.”

Yskandr murmured.

I want, Mahit thought, and with that phrase felt all the tumbling headlong desire to fall, and be subsumed, and be—oh, the Teixcalaanlitzlim she’d imagined herself in all those long-ago language instruction classes when she’d called herself Nine Orchid and thought poetry would be enough to make her the kind of person that a Teixcalaanlitzlim would automatically think of as a person.

“If it’s not me,” Three Seagrass asked, “then—what? If you tell me you’re planning to join the fungal hive mind, I’m going to be angry and also not believe you. You’re enough people already, and you like being a person, not a—that.”

“I’m just Mahit Dzmare,” Mahit said, wry. “Imago and all. Just one person.”

I want, she thought again, and Yskandr finished for her.

No such place.

She tried again. “Three Seagrass, I want—work, and I want—things I can’t have, that don’t exist or never did, and I want—I want, if you ask me to come to the City with you a third time, I want to be able to say yes and mean it.”

Three Seagrass was quiet. Listening. Turning over what Mahit had said; Mahit imagined the problem like a pebble in her mouth, an impediment to clear verse. After a moment she took a deep breath of the green-laced air and settled her shoulders. “I want someone to remember that I like being called Reed,” she said. “And to—not be bored. You’re never boring. I like your—that graphic story. I don’t know stories like that one, and I’d like to. You make me have to think, Mahit, and that’s not fair, no one else makes me work this hard and like it at the same time.”

Mahit found herself laughing, soft, a hand covering her mouth. “Are you complimenting or insulting me?”

Three Seagrass considered this with more gravitas than Mahit thought it strictly deserved. “I don’t know,” she said, finally. “Both, probably. Mahit—”

“Yes?”

She could see Three Seagrass steeling herself, drawing her shoulders back, breathing from the diaphragm. Like Mahit was an oration contest she wanted to win. “What if—those other systems I mentioned, what if you went there?” she said. Mahit opened her mouth to reply, but Three Seagrass waved her quiet with a gesture of one hand. “You went there,” she went on, “and I didn’t. Her Brilliance would send you anywhere you wanted to go. It wouldn’t be the Jewel of the World. It’d be somewhere—new. And you could write to me, if you wanted me to not be bored. I’d write to you. You could mail me more volumes of The Perilous Frontier! and I’d—send you new poems, and—anything else you’d want to hear, from me…”

“You would?” Mahit asked. After all this time, she had apparently retained the capacity to be shocked by sweetness.

“I would,” Three Seagrass said. “And you could decrypt your own mail. Promise.”

She was bad at smiling like a Stationer. She showed every tooth she had, the bright bone-white of them. A smile like starlight and threat. Mahit wanted, abruptly, to teach her how to do it right.

She smiled back. She felt brittle and fragile and on the verge of tears, and still she didn’t want to not smile. It was—

Yskandr told her.

The Emperor Six Direction, promising peace in exchange for betrayal. Nineteen Adze, who didn’t see light between loving someone and thinking they needed to die before they could do harm. Compared to those, letters and a temporary post on some distant provincial Teixcalaanli planet seemed like something she could countenance.

“I’d write back,” she said. “All the time.”