A Memory Called Empire

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE Sunlit arrived quite quickly once they had been summoned: three of them in their identical golden helmets, faceless and efficient. Three Seagrass had done the summoning, setting up some communion between her cloudhook and the door’s alarm system and then executing a credible impression of tremulous, infuriated surprise—an emotion which Mahit suspected was fairly close to how she actually felt, just expressed, for a purpose. Whatever vast reservoir of emotions Three Seagrass might possess seemed only to be expressed for purpose, or outgassed in vivid bright hysteria. The kind of control she had over herself made Mahit tired to think about.

She could also be tired because she’d been awake for nearly thirty-two hours. Sleep was an unimaginable territory, reserved for people who didn’t have dead bodies in their apartments. At least she was unlikely to get herself arrested. The Sunlit seemed collectively distracted, or else they simply believed her: she’d come back to her apartment and been set upon by the dead man, and in the ensuing struggle he had been killed by his own weapon. No, Mahit had never seen a weapon like the thick needle before. No, she didn’t know how the man had gotten in. No, she didn’t know who had sent him, but in this time of unrest, there were surely a multitude of possibilities.

She hadn’t lied once. And yet they were trusting her.

Yskandr was gone again, but gone differently; all through the questioning Mahit’s palms and the soles of her feet had been alive with prickles, as if her extremities had been rendered out of flesh and into shimmering electric fire—not quite numbness. The same feeling she’d been having right before the flashes of imago-memory, but continuous now, and without the accompanying visions. Peripheral nerve damage, except she hadn’t damaged anything. Unless the imago-machine in the base of her skull was damaging her right now as she answered questions in Teixcalaanli, expressionless, calm. The place Yskandr should be felt like a hollow bubble, a missing tooth. A cavity she could tongue inside her mind. If she pressed too hard on it the sweeping vertigo came back. She tried to stop doing it. Fainting right now wouldn’t help at all.

“Patrician first-class Twelve Azalea,” said one of the Sunlit, turning toward him like a gyre on ball bearings, machine-smooth, “what brings you to Ambassador Dzmare’s apartments so early in the morning?”

Ah. Perhaps they hadn’t believed her after all; perhaps they were being subtle. They’d use Twelve Azalea to crack open her story like the vacuum seal on a seed-skiff, and bleed all the protecting atmosphere away.

“The Ambassador asked to meet with me,” said Twelve Azalea, and that was not going to help at all.

“I did,” Mahit interjected. “I was looking forward to a meeting over breakfast with Twelve Azalea to discuss…” She cast around for something they could be discussing that was not suspicious in any way. There wasn’t much. “… requests made to the Information Ministry by Lsel citizens during the period within which there was no acting ambassador.” There.

If a golden face-shield could express all the skepticism of a raised eyebrow, this one was. “That sounds like an extremely urgent matter, that must be addressed before business hours.”

“Both the patrician and I have very busy schedules. Breakfast suited us. Or it did, before I was set upon by the intruder,” Mahit said pointedly. She felt as if she was about to vibrate out of her skin. Neurological fire and the effervescent distant shivering of sleep deprivation. She smiled, Stationer-style, and wondered if the Sunlit had flinched under the shield. All her teeth were exposed. Like a skeleton.

One of the other Sunlit asked silkily, “What happened to your suit, Twelve Azalea? You seem to have encountered a water feature.”

Mahit had seen Teixcalaanlitzlim blush before, but never someone employ it as masterfully as Twelve Azalea did then: a spreading embarrassed dull red under the smooth brown of his cheeks. “It’s very … I’ve been a little worried, what with the demonstrations … I tripped,” he said. “I fell in a garden, like I was drunk; and it was too late to go home, I’d have missed my appointment…”

“Are you quite all right?” the Sunlit inquired.

“Aside from the injury to my dignity—”

“Of course.”

Three Seagrass, curled in the corner of the couch with her feet drawn up under her, said, “Will you be removing the body? It is quite hard to look at.” She still sounded tremulous and barely controlled; Mahit wondered if she had slept, aside from the brief moment when she’d found her napping outside the Emperor’s audience chamber. Probably not.

One week since she’d arrived in the City, and hadn’t she been quite the agent of destruction. For Three Seagrass at least. (For Fifteen Engine—Yskandr—) She wanted to do something. Push something until it broke in her favor, for once.

“This is the second time in a week we have been in personal danger,” Mahit said. “After the bombing, and the general condition of your City in preparation for the war…” She sighed, deliberate. So distasteful, political unrest. “I thought it would be best to have a meeting in my own apartments rather than anywhere we would have the misfortune of being disturbed, and yet this has happened.”

All three Sunlit looked at her. She stared back at their blank false faces, jaw set.

“We would like to remind the Ambassador,” they said—all three at once, a strange choir, and were they the City, were they the same AI that ran the walls and the lights and the doors, were they subsumed in the Science Ministry’s algorithm too—“that the yaotlek One Lightning did offer his personal protection to you. And you declined.”

“Are you insinuating that this unpleasantness would not have happened if the Ambassador had agreed?” Three Seagrass broke in. “Because that is a fascinating conjecture, coming from the Empire’s very own police.”

They rotated, a slick, frictionless shift, to focus on Three Seagrass. She lifted her eyebrows, widened her eyes to show the whites—daring them to do something about her.

“There are procedures,” said one of them, perfectly even, “for making formal accusations of that nature, asekreta Three Seagrass. Would you like to avail yourself of them? We are at your service, as we are at the service of any of the Empire’s citizens.”

That was, Mahit thought, a threat of its own; less direct but not even a little less predatory.

“Perhaps I will make an appointment at the Judiciary,” Three Seagrass said. Her expression changed not a bit. “Are we done here? Will you be removing this unfortunate man from the Ambassador’s rug?”

“It is an active crime scene,” the Sunlit said. “The entire apartment complex. We suggest that the Ambassador make arrangements for alternative accommodations during our investigation. We are sure, given this morning’s newsfeeds, that she has many options.”

Mahit glanced at Twelve Azalea over the Sunlit’s shoulder—he was the only one of them who might have seen a newsfeed this morning—but he just shrugged. She didn’t know what she had missed. Maybe it was merely an exposé on the Lsel Ambassador’s unseemly attachment to the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze.

“When can I expect to have access to my own suite again?” she inquired. Still trying for polite, if pointed: they were all on edge now, she and her liaison and the Sunlit.

One of the Sunlit shrugged, a remarkably expressive motion. Some neurological ghost of Yskandr flickered through the large muscles in Mahit’s own shoulders—he’d shrugged like that—that kind of shrug was performative, insouciant, done more with the outer arms (was he here or was he not, she wished she had even the slightest true idea).

“When we are done investigating,” said the Sunlit. “You are of course free to go. We understand the accidental nature of the man’s demise.”

So, not arrested for murder. Just exiled, again, this time from her own apartment, from Lsel diplomatic territory …

She had the imago-machine, safe inside her shirt, but what she didn’t have was the mail. And with the mail, any instructions that might have come to her from Lsel. Instructions for her, not for dead Yskandr being warned about her. Instructions that would take into account the problems of a live Lsel ambassador. She turned to Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea, shrugged herself—trying to keep the motion her own, not a Teixcalaanli imitation—and said, “Let’s get out of these officers’ way…”

If she could just pick up the basket of infofiche at the door. There was a communiqué from Lsel there, something printed on plastifilm, like orders always were back home, and then rolled into a tube as if the mail-delivery person had tried to make it look like an infofiche stick.

She swept her hand through the bowl as she walked out—caught the tube of paper in her palm.

“Ambassador,” one of the Sunlit said, reproving, as she reached. “Don’t worry, we will not open your mail. We don’t have that kind of access.”

But they would have, if they did, she was sure. Mahit left the actual infofiche sticks in the bowl, as if chastised, and smiled with all her teeth, not caring if it was rude. “See that you don’t,” she said, and then the door to what ought to have been safety was irising shut behind the three of them, and they were in the City, alone, with absolutely nowhere to go.

“I used to do this when I’d spent all night in the library and couldn’t go back home before the next lectures,” said Three Seagrass. She handed Mahit a small bowl of ice cream she’d bought from a proprietor who had set up their business in the shell of a motor vehicle under a spreading, red-leaved tree.

“Don’t believe her,” Twelve Azalea said. “Ice cream in the public gardens is what she used to do after she stayed out all night clubbing.”

“Oh really?” Mahit scooped up some of the ice cream on the disposable plastic spoon it’d come with—it was thick and smooth, made of cream that had come out of a mammal recently, and Mahit had no intention of asking what mammal. When she turned the spoon in the early morning light, the ice cream glinted pale gold-green. Feeling as if she was completing a ritual, she asked, “Is this going to poison me?”

“It’s made of green-stonefruit and cream and pressed oil and sugar,” Three Seagrass said, “the latter two of which I’m sure you have on Lsel, and the former of which, again, we feed to babies. Unless you’re allergic to lactose, I think you’ll be fine.”

Mahit’s primary experience with lactose had been in its powdered milk form, but it hadn’t done her any harm. She put the ice cream in her mouth. It was shock-sweet, dissolving to a complex flavor she’d expect to be savory—a green taste, rich, that coated the tongue. She picked up more, licked it off the back of the spoon. It was the first food she’d had since before she’d been nearly killed by the poison flower—the first murder attempt of last night, what was even happening to her—and she could feel her blood sugar struggling out of the hole she’d dropped it into. Being exiled into the City began to seem a little less insurmountable.

Three Seagrass led the three of them out onto the lawn, a manicured hill covered in a bluish-green grass that had no scent at all, and surrounded by more of the same red-leaved trees, their boughs nearly brushing the ground. It was like a tiny gemstone, one facet of the Jewel of the World, glimmering. Uncaring of her suit—it was wrinkled anyway; Mahit assumed that grass stains wouldn’t matter—Three Seagrass sat down, and began to consume her own ice cream with a deliberate and concentrated attitude.

“I don’t know why I’m even still with you,” Twelve Azalea said, flopped on his back in the grass. “I haven’t been kicked out of my apartment by the Sunlit.”

“Solidarity,” Three Seagrass said. “And your documented inability to leave well enough alone.”

“This is more trouble than we’ve ever been in, Reed.”

“Yes,” Three Seagrass said cheerfully.

“That was … that was odd, wasn’t it?” Mahit asked. She kept going over it in her mind. How easy it had been to persuade the Sunlit that she’d acted in self-defense. Their not-that-subtle threat implying that if she’d only gone over into One Lightning’s custody at the Ministry of War—the Six Outreaching Palms—none of this would be happening to her. “That they just … let us go. Exiled us from my apartment, and didn’t ask us to wait in some police station to be questioned. Despite the degree of trouble we are undoubtedly in.”

“It’s not unusual that they let us go, necessarily,” Three Seagrass said. “I don’t know how self-defense is adjudicated on your station, but we tend to allow a substantive benefit of the doubt in the favor of the person claiming it.”

“What’s odd was the part where the Sunlit suggested you wouldn’t have had to commit murder in self-defense if you’d only turned yourself over to the War Ministry,” Twelve Azalea added, with an expansive shrug. “Or why Reed here thought it was a good idea to threaten them right back.”

Mahit licked the back of her spoon, chasing that green taste. When it was clean, she asked, choosing the words deliberately, as careful as she’d ever been: “Who do the Sunlit serve?”

“The City,” Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea said, together and at once. Rote answer, memorized answer—the answer provided by Teixcalaanli narrative about how the world was.

“And who runs them?” Mahit went on.

“No one,” said Three Seagrass. “No one at all, that’s the point, they’re responsive to the City-AI, the central algorithm which keeps watch…”

“Like the subway,” Twelve Azalea added. “They’re the City, so they serve the Emperor first.”

Mahit paused, trying to find the edges of the question, the right way to ask it. “The subway’s algorithm was made by Ten Pearl,” she started, thinking of the flash of memory that her imago had given her, how Ten Pearl had won his ministry—an infallible algorithm.

“Ten Pearl doesn’t control the Sunlit,” Twelve Azalea said. “The Sunlit are people.”

“People who respond to the City’s needs,” Three Seagrass said, slow, testing the idea. “People who go where the City tells them they ought to go—and the central AI core is run by Science, I assume—”

Mahit interrupted her. “Who controls the Six Outreaching Palms?”

“The Minister of War is Nine Propulsion. She’s new—less than three years in the City—but her record in the fleet’s impeccable. Annoyingly so; I had to look her up in Information’s database once.”

“Three Seagrass,” Mahit said, “could the Minister of War change what is meant by the City’s needs? For … any reason at all, really.”

“What a deliciously awful suggestion, Mahit,” Three Seagrass said with an exhausted silkiness. “Are you proposing a conspiracy between two of our Illuminate Emperor’s ministries to subvert the police?”

“I don’t know,” Mahit said. “But it’d be one plausible explanation for this morning.”

“Plausible doesn’t mean likely,” Twelve Azalea said. He sounded offended. Disturbed by the idea. It was a disturbing idea. Mahit didn’t blame him. She couldn’t think of why War would do such a thing, even if it was possible. And she didn’t much want it to be possible.

How many eyes does the City have on us right now?

Three Seagrass said, “Talk it over with the Ambassador, Petal, I’m taking a nap.”

“You are?” Mahit said, incredulous.

Three Seagrass, having finished her ice cream, took off her jacket, lay down on her belly in the grass as if making a point, and dropped her forehead into her crossed arms. Muffled, she said, “I’ve been awake for thirty-nine hours. My judgment is entirely impaired and so is yours. I have no idea what to do about your immortality machines, a possible conspiracy between Science and War, the war in general, the fact that various members of my government want you to die, which I am expressly against for both professional and personal reasons, and you still have not told me what the Emperor said to you—”

“You spoke to His Illuminate Majesty?” asked Twelve Azalea, flabbergasted, at the same moment as Mahit said,

“Personal reasons?”

Three Seagrass snickered. “I am taking a nap,” she repeated. “Talk to Petal, Mahit, or go to sleep, we look like slumming asekretim trainees, no one will bother us in a garden in East Four, and I’ll … think of a plan when I’m awake again.” She shut her eyes. Mahit could see her go limp—whether she was sleeping or just pretending to was somewhat beside the point.

“Was she like this when you were students?” Mahit said, feeling entirely overwhelmed.

“A … less terrifying version, yes,” said Twelve Azalea. “Did you actually have an audience with Six Direction?”

Eighty years of peace, the Emperor had told her, in that audience. He’d spoken the words with such vehemence, such naked want. Eighty years of civil servants feeling so remarkably secure that taking a nap on a lawn was preferable to finding political shelter. The vast arc of the sky was so blue and so endless, and Mahit felt so very tiny under it. She was never going to get used to the unboundedness of planets, even a planet that was mostly a city.

“Yes,” she said. “I did. But I can’t talk about it now.”

“How long have you been awake?”

“About as long as she has, I guess.” Longer, possibly. Mahit had lost track. That was a bad sign. Her fingers were still prickly, almost numb. For the first time she wondered what it would be like if she was like this forever; if she was damaged in an unfixable way. If everything she would ever touch again would be dim electric fire, and not sensation.

If she could learn to live with that. She wasn’t sure. Abruptly she felt on the verge of tears.

Twelve Azalea sighed. “Much as I hate to say it, I think Reed is right. Lie down. Shut your eyes. I’ll … keep watch.”

“You don’t have to,” Mahit said, out of some impulse to protect at least one person from the spiraling mess that association with anything Yskandr had touched was becoming.

“I already desecrated a corpse for you, and now I sound like a bad holoproduction of Ninety Alloy. Go to sleep.”

Mahit lay down. It felt like giving in. The grass was surprisingly comfortable, and the sunlight was dizzyingly warm against her skin. She could feel the tiny lumps of Yskandr’s imago-machine and the Lsel communication lying pressed against her ribs. “What’s Ninety Alloy?” she asked.

“Military propaganda spun through a remarkably addictive romance storyline,” Twelve Azalea said. “Someone is always telling someone else they’ll keep watch. Usually they all end up dead.”

“Pick a different genre to quote from,” Mahit said, and then found herself falling away from consciousness, easily, lightly, the dark behind her eyelids opening up like the soft comfort of freefall.

She couldn’t stay asleep long, even as exhausted as she was. The garden filled up with Teixcalaanlitzlim as the morning wore on, and they ran and shouted and enthusiastically bought ice cream and strange breakfasts made of rolled-up pancakes. None of them seemed to be concerned with civil unrest or domestic terrorism. They were just young, and happy, and there was sunlight and laughing voices in dialects of Teixcalaanli that Mahit didn’t know and wanted to. (Some other life. Some other life when she’d come here alone, imagoless in truth, and—studied, wrote poetry, learned the rhythms of other ways of speaking that didn’t come out of a textbook. Some other life, but the walls between lives felt so thin sometimes.) After a while Mahit couldn’t even pretend she was sleeping by keeping her eyes shut, so she sat up. There were blue-green grass stains on her elbows. Some of the prickling nerve pain had died back, but it was still there as an undercurrent, a distraction, a thread underneath the worse pain of her damaged hand.

Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea were talking quietly, their heads together, bent over a piece of infosheet; the easy familiarity between them made Mahit feel hideously lonely. She missed Yskandr. She kept missing him, even when she was angry with him, and she was angry with him almost all the time.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Mid-morning,” said Three Seagrass. “You might want to see this, come here.”

At Three Seagrass’s side was a small pile of news: a whole bunch of pamphlets and plastifilm infosheets, wide transparent sheets of foldable plastic, covered all over with glyphs. The ones on top of the pile seemed to be an angry university-student pamphlet on atrocities committed in the Odile System by overzealous imperial legions, an advertisement for discounted tickets to a game of handball between two teams from provinces Mahit didn’t recognize but were clearly endowed with a great many fans, and a broadsheet full of new poetry, most of which was simultaneously very bad in terms of scansion and very happy about One Lightning. Mahit thought again about who was running around so blithely in this garden. Slumming asekretim trainees, Three Seagrass had said. University students. This was a place young people felt safe, safe enough to be mildly radical. To pass around pamphlets for just about anything, and not worry about the imperial censorship boards. Who would censor kids just learning to be servants of empire?

The infosheet that Twelve Azalea was holding seemed to be a newsfeed—stories, sketches, headlines. Twelve Azalea ran his fingers over it, and the text moved under his command: it was like he was holding a transparent window made of news. Mahit caught sight of a small Item of Note! in the lower left: her name spelled out in Teixcalaanli glyphs, rendered awkwardly syllabic. LSEL AMBASSADOR MAKES HIGH-PLACED FRIENDS, it read. Is the new ambassador from distant Lsel still as close with the Light-Emitting Emperor as the old one? Surveillance photographs suggest SHE IS! Last seen in the company of the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze entering Palace-Earth AT MIDNIGHT …

“Delightful,” Mahit said. “Gossip.”

“Not that,” said Three Seagrass. “That’s fine. It’s probably good for your—brand. Look at the headline, that’s what I wanted you to see.”

IMPERIAL ASSOCIATE EIGHT LOOP ISSUES STATEMENT ON LEGALITY OF ANNEXATION WAR, the headline-glyphs spelled.

“Huh,” Mahit said. “Give me that? I wouldn’t expect public dissent from that direction—”

Twelve Azalea handed it over. Mahit kept reading: Eight Loop’s statement was short, impenetrably layered in references to Teixcalaanli precedent, and composed in unrhymed political verse, which she ought to have expected, considering the woman was head of the Judiciary—but after staring at it for a long moment she thought she understood what Eight Loop was getting at.

While going to war was entirely at the Emperor’s discretion (of course it was), a war of expansion was legally required to be conducted beginning in an atmosphere of perfect serenity, which was—if Mahit was reading the Teixcalaanli legalese correctly— a time in which there were no actual threats to Teixcalaan to be faced before the fleet could go off conquering. “What threat is she implying exists?” Mahit asked. “And why would she suggest that Six Direction is not competent to run this war, now? Didn’t they grow up together?” Weren’t they allies?

Three Seagrass shrugged, but she looked like she’d been given a present: a puzzle to solve. “She isn’t exactly saying there’s a direct threat to the integrity of the Empire, though there’s always some sort of rumor that this is the year some alien species or other is actually going to invade human space. She’s just saying that His Brilliance didn’t prove there wasn’t a threat. It’s not quite a condemnation of his inaction, more like a suggestion that he’s missed something important that he should have thought of. Like he’s not fit to rule anymore, if he can’t remember things like this…”

“I don’t like it,” Twelve Azalea added. “It’s sneaky.”

It was sneaky. “She sent for me,” Mahit said. “As a further point of data. It was Eight Loop who got a new Lsel ambassador here as soon as Yskandr was dead.”

“Was murdered; it’s all right, we know,” Three Seagrass said.

“Was murdered,” Mahit agreed. “But either way, she sent for me, and now she is doing this, and I want to see her in person.”

Three Seagrass clapped her hands together. “Well,” she said. “We don’t have anywhere else to be until your appointment at the Science Ministry, and that’s tomorrow. Since we can’t go back to your apartments, and I don’t imagine you want to call up the ezuazuacat for help again…”

“Not without a better reason than wanting a shower and an actual bed,” Mahit said. “I might get to that point by this evening.”

“Then we might as well walk straight into Eight Loop’s offices.”

“We’ve napped in a garden and now we’re invading the Judiciary?” Twelve Azalea asked, plaintive.

“You can go home, Petal,” Three Seagrass said. It had much the same attitude as Eight Loop’s little insinuation: You could go home, but you’d be letting down the side.

Twelve Azalea got up, brushing off his much-abused suit. “Oh no. I want to see this. Even if the Mist do ask me questions about what I was doing sneaking around in the morgue. And they might not even know it was me.”

They made quite a picture, Mahit suspected: two Information Ministry functionaries and one barbarian, all wrinkled and grass-stained; one with a long tear up the sleeve of her jacket from struggling with Eleven Conifer’s awful needle (that would be her) and one looking as if he had hidden in a water feature—which he had (Twelve Azalea); only Three Seagrass seemed to wear her disarray as if it was the height of court fashion. Nevertheless they received little direct opposition on their way into the Judiciary: the doors still opened to Twelve Azalea’s cloudhook, which implied that even if he was being stalked by some sort of Judiciary-specific investigatory force, they hadn’t forbidden him from being here, and the functionaries within the Ministry kept a quiet sort of watch on them as Three Seagrass walked them through the layers of bureaucracy separating Eight Loop from the sort of annoyance that came in off the street.

That bureaucracy parted for Three Seagrass like over-irradiated plastic, rotten-soft under pressure. There was something wrong with it; they were moving too easily up the great needle-spear of the Judiciary.

Mahit thought about mentioning her growing sense that she was following Three Seagrass into a trap. But if she mentioned it perhaps that trap would close around them, needle-teeth like a thousand Judiciaries pointed inward …

Eight Loop could have been waiting for her all along. (Nineteen Adze had suggested as much, when she’d insinuated that Mahit should find out who had sent for her in the first place. But she couldn’t afford to use Nineteen Adze’s judgment in place of her own.)

An elevator took them up the last few floors to Eight Loop’s own offices: a tiny red-crystal seedpod of a chamber, semi-translucent. Inside of it the air felt hushed, charged. Mahit found herself staring at how the light fell on Three Seagrass’s face, turning it from warm brown to a ruddy color as if she’d been dipped in blood.

“This is too easy,” she said.

Three Seagrass tipped her head back, rolled her shoulders. “I know.”

“And yet we are in this elevator—”

“I could make Petal press the emergency stop, but it’s a bit late to have second thoughts, Mahit.”

“Clearly Eight Loop wants us to have this meeting,” Twelve Azalea said. “As we also want to have this meeting, I am not seeing the reason for your distress.”

“Eventually,” Three Seagrass said, dry and distant and a little regretful, “you might have to do something someone else wants, Mahit.”

The part of her that was cued onto Teixcalaanli double meanings, allusion and reference and hidden motives—that part of her which, if she was being honest, was why she was a good politician, why her aptitudes had spelled for diplomacy and negotiation and came up green, green, green with Yskandr’s—that vicious part suggested that it was entirely possible that Three Seagrass had been working for Eight Loop this whole time. If she was so insistent on Mahit keeping this meeting …

And would it change anything?

It should. It didn’t. It was too late, anyway. The elevator doors opened.

Eight Loop’s office was nothing like Nineteen Adze’s white-quartz serenity of a workroom: despite being at the very top of the Judiciary tower, it felt tightly enclosed, almost claustrophobic. The pentagonal walls were lined with infofiche and codex-books, overlapping and stacked double on the shelves. The windows—and there were windows centered in each of those faceted walls—were drawn over with heavy cloth blinds. Daylight crept out from under them and advanced only an inch. In the middle of the room Eight Loop herself sat like the central core of an AI, a slow-beating heart nestled in information-bearing cables: an old woman behind her desk, transparent holoscreens in a vast arc above her. They were all inward-facing: the images on them backward, pointed toward Eight Loop’s eyes and not Mahit’s, feeding her a dozen views, Cityscape and dense-glyphed documentation and what Mahit thought was a star-chart rendered in two-dimensional flats.

“Good morning, Ambassador,” said Eight Loop. “Asekretim.”

Mahit bowed over the triangle of her hands pressed together. “Good morning. Thank you for agreeing to see us.”

Nothing about Eight Loop’s expression shifted; she was statue-still, unmoved, flat black eyes lacking either interest or dismay. “It saves time,” she said. “You coming to me.”

“I came a very long way on what has turned out to be your command,” said Mahit. There was little point in dissimulation; she was here to ask why. Why Eight Loop had possessed such urgency, two months ago, when Yskandr had died; why she needed a Lsel ambassador at all.

“I appreciate the promptness with which Lsel answered my request,” Eight Loop said. “It is admirable; that kind of cooperation will only help your people in the future. I suggest you stick to it.”

That sounded like a dismissal: No, I don’t need you after all, go and supervise the entry of Lsel into Teixcalaanli space like a good barbarian. The absorption of her Station into the Empire. Cooperatively. Mahit had only just arrived here. What had she done—or not done—in the week she’d been at court that had rendered her useless to Eight Loop? When Eight Loop had wanted her so badly?

Had she never wanted her at all, but instead a Yskandr—or just any Stationer, anyone with an imago-machine which could be harvested for use—if she was the Emperor’s crèchesib, if she’d been in on Yskandr’s idea of keeping Six Direction alive through imago-machines, then she would have wanted a new ambassador right away, whoever it was, as long as that ambassador could get an imago-machine. Or could have their own pulled out of them.

Anger broke over her like a distant and enormous wave. She felt icy cold.

“Your statement in the newsfeeds this morning,” she found herself saying, “didn’t suggest that you were in favor of the annexation of Lsel. Or of annexation in general. Quite the opposite, in fact; I found myself quite offended on behalf of His Brilliance’s judgment—”

“Mahit,” said Three Seagrass warningly.

“Don’t concern yourself with your charge’s impropriety, asekreta,” Eight Loop said. “Her confusion is understandable.”

“You demanded an ambassador,” Mahit said. “I’d like to know why. And what I might do for you which does not involve merely my meek cooperation.”

Still perfectly, insufferably calm, Eight Loop spread her hands out on the surface of her desk. Her knuckles were gnarled, hugely swollen; Mahit couldn’t imagine her holding a stylus. “In the two months it took you to arrive, Ambassador,” she said, “the situation here has shifted. I am sorry if you had hopes that I retained some special purpose for you. I am afraid I do not, in our current circumstances.”

Helpless, in less control of herself than she thought she’d ever been—worse than when she’d killed the man in her apartment, worse than feeling all of Yskandr’s neurochemistry light up in fireworks at the touch of Six Direction’s hand, Mahit asked: “What do you want me to do?”

She sounded plaintive. Desperate, like an abandoned child. Three Seagrass’s hand was on her waist, suddenly, small fingertips pressed to her spine, and she realized what she was saying, and shut her mouth.

“Go back to work, Ambassador,” Eight Loop said. “There will be a great deal of it for you, no matter who sits on the sun throne or stands behind it. No matter whether Six Direction gets his war and draws One Lightning off with it; or gets his war and fails to do so; or doesn’t get it at all. Or points it at some sector you don’t care about. There will be work for the Ambassador from Lsel Station. That is enough for any citizen; it should be enough for you.”

The elevator doors were open, behind them. Backing into them, Mahit felt as if she was stumbling, hardly able to keep her feet; in the small red-lit chamber of their descent, all she could hear was the harshness of her own breathing.

What had she missed? What had shifted? What had made Eight Loop first want someone with access to imago-machines, if that even had been what she had wanted a Lsel ambassador for—but what else was one specifically good for—and then decide that there was simply no point in having one at all?

Looking at Three Seagrass’s and Twelve Azalea’s faces, tinted red, concerned, she thought that three hours of sleep in a garden really hadn’t been enough; she was erratic, she was alone, she wanted—she wanted Yskandr. Someone else to hold her up, in the center of the vast machinery of Teixcalaan.

Mahit sat on a stone bench outside the Judiciary, her head in her hands, and let Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea talk over her.

“—we can’t go back to her apartments—”

“I know you can run on stimulants and bravado for days at a time, Reed, but some of us are human—”

“I am not suggesting she isn’t, please do not insult me or her by insinuating that I don’t think she’s as much of a human being as a citizen is—”

“I’m not, for fuck’s sake. Maybe you can’t hold yourself together with wire and tea and your vainglorious ambition, you’re slipping as much as she is—”

“Do you have a suggestion or are you just going to insult me?”

Twelve Azalea sat down on the bench beside Mahit. She didn’t look up. It was too much work to look up, or intervene. “Come back to my place,” he said heavily. “I’m in this up to my ears anyhow, I’m on every recording the City has of you two for the past six hours, I have lost even the shreds of plausible deniability. You might as well.”

A long pause. Mahit watched the sunlight track across the plaza’s tilework, making it shimmer.

“Such a noble sacrifice,” Three Seagrass said finally. Edged. A challenge.

“Maybe I want to help you,” Twelve Azalea replied. “Maybe I like you, Reed, maybe I’m your friend.”

A sigh. Mahit thought of how water shimmered too, how water and light moved the same way, if you thought about physics correctly. Ripples.

“All right,” said Three Seagrass. “All right, but if there are assassins at your flat I am giving up and applying to join the Fleet and get off-planet, for safer working conditions.”

The noise Twelve Azalea made was not quite laughter; it was too choked for that.

Twelve Azalea kept a flat farther out from the palace complex than Mahit had yet been—a forty-minute commute, he said, but not everyone who worked for the Information Ministry had such cushy perks as Reed had managed, some people had to pay rent on their salary—Mahit thought he was talking just to talk, to hear himself say the normal sorts of things a person might say.

Away from the palace and the central districts the City shifted in tone—there were more shops, smaller, an emphasis on food prepared while the customer waited or organics imported from a long way off, the other continent or off-planet, artisan-made items, everything simultaneously disposable and in imitation of some ideal. Mahit had thought they would be stared at by Teixcalaanli pedestrians: a barbarian and two asekretim, all disheveled and on their way into a residential neighborhood, but they weren’t the source of tension on these streets. The Teixcalaanlitzlim were managing that all by themselves.

At first she had thought that there simply weren’t that many people, that the population of Twelve Azalea’s neighborhood was at work, or lower than the number of dense, tall, flowerlike buildings would suggest, but the way Twelve Azalea’s expression changed from mild serenity to puzzlement to growing dread put that possibility right out. There was something wrong. The air felt charged, a psychological echo of how she’d felt right after the bomb in the restaurant. She trudged, following Twelve Azalea around corners. She couldn’t remember ever having been this tired.

Three Seagrass said, clipped, “We should take a different street, Petal. This one’s got a demonstration at the end of it.”

“I live on this street.”

Mahit looked up. The missing populace was gathered in a protean mass that was spilling out of the sidewalks and into the street itself. Men, women, children-in-arms, holding placards and purple banners. Their faces were Teixcalaanli-still, unreadable, intent. Even the children weren’t loud. The hush felt more dangerous than noise would be. It felt intent.

“Those people aren’t for One Lightning,” she said. “Not unless public acclamations have gotten much quieter in the past three days.”

“A public acclamation we could walk right through,” said Three Seagrass, “as long as you were willing to pretend to like rhyming doggerel long enough to shout anything that alliterates with yaotlek—”

“This is politics, and I really thought my neighborhood wasn’t prone to this sort of thing.”

“You should know better, Petal,” Three Seagrass said, resigned. “Have you even looked at your demographics? You’ve moved into a trade sector, all these people are—”

“—are for Thirty Larkspur, they’re wearing those flower lapels,” Mahit broke in. They’d all stopped moving. The demonstration approached, slow-growing like a fungus. The people that made it up walked together, encroaching. One of the placards had a snatch of poetry on it that Mahit recognized: These things are ceaseless: star-charts, disembarkments / the curl of unborn petals holds a hollowness.

Nine Maize’s couplets, which had so upset the oration contest.

“Yes,” Three Seagrass agreed. “This neighborhood is as wealthy as it is because of outer-province trade and manufacturing, which means that they like Thirty Larkspur, who is nominally an imperial heir, and yet these people are waiting for the Sunlit to come and shut them down for being actively treasonous and demonstrating for peace against the wishes of the current Emperor.”

No more treasonous than Eight Loop had been, in her editorial, Mahit thought. She thought she’d figured out part of what was going on. Something had passed between the two imperial-associates, some deal they’d made: Eight Loop and Thirty Larkspur were bargaining.

They seemed to be working together to discredit not only One Lightning and his attempt to usurp the imperial throne by public acclamation, but also to discredit the authority of the sitting Emperor at the same time. One Lightning, in charge of this war now, and relying on it to shore up his support, was judicially suspect, according to Eight Loop’s editorial—and publicly unwanted, according to this demonstration of Thirty Larkspur’s partisans. And Six Direction? Well, he was failing, mistaken in his attempt to allow a war of annexation in a time not entirely peaceful, a time where there might be external threats, whether those were some mysterious alien or just the continued unrest in the Odile System and how it was sparking protest even here in the City—he was misunderstanding the law—and that misunderstanding was being rejected by his own populace, who didn’t want a war …

The Judiciary and Thirty Larkspur working together. Mahit could—almost—almost see the shape of what they wanted.

If she wasn’t so tired.

“Is there a back alley into your flat, Twelve Azalea?” she asked. “I have seen enough of the Sunlit today, and I think they will be here soon—”

It turned out that there was. They ran for it like they were being chased.