A Memory Called Empire

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

MAHIT thought about it all through the rest of the evening, while Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea did laundry, washing their grass-stained clothes, and they all watched the newsfeeds on the holoscreen replay One Lightning’s speech and the protest footage. Mahit thought about it obsessively, to the counterpoint of troop movements and political exhortations, tonguing the idea like it was a raw sore place in her mouth she couldn’t leave properly alone. She’d put Yskandr’s imago-machine back inside her jacket pocket. The small weight swung there like a pendulum heartbeat.

There were a lot of ways to misuse an imago-machine.

No, better: there were a lot of ways to use an imago-machine that made Mahit, Lsel-raised, Lsel-acculturated down to the blood and bone all despite her pretentions toward loving Teixcalaanli literature, feel the way Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea had described feeling about cheating on the imperial exams. There were a lot of ways to use an imago-machine that were, for lack of more specific vocabulary in either of her languages, immoral.

For instance, a person could take up an imago of their lover who had died—tragically, usually, this was a daytime-entertainment holovision plot—and carry them around instead of allowing that imago to go to the next aptitudes-identified person in the line, and destroy both themselves and the knowledge of generations in the process. That felt immoral. And then there were all the smaller variants: new imago-carriers coming back to the widows of the dead, trying to resume relationships which had ended. That actually happened, everyone knew someone, there were good reasons that Lsel had built psychotherapy into a science …

Make it worse, she told herself. The kind of misuse that makes you squirm, not just the kind that makes you sad.

An imago installed in a weak mind, one who passed just enough aptitudes for compatibility, but not enough to create a new, real, functioning person out of the two original personalities. An imago that ate the mind of the successor.

That one was bad enough that she didn’t want to think about

(how that was exactly what His Brilliance Six Direction wanted to do)

what it would feel like.

Good work, Mahit. You found something that you like less than what Three Seagrass suggested you might do.

Three Seagrass thought she should take Ambassador Aghavn’s machine and extract an updated Yskandr-imago to overwrite the one which fluttered, broken and useless and only half here in flashes, in her mind. Thought that if she needed that code so badly—and she did, she did—it was the only logical course of action.

Three Seagrass, for her part, was not volunteering for what would end up being experimental neurosurgery. Experimental neurosurgery on a planet—in a culture—which didn’t like neurosurgical intervention. Which found the entire concept squirmy. Immoral. Three Seagrass was volunteering Mahit.

Hey Yskandr, you could fix this, she thought, for the hundredth time, and got nothing back but silence except for the peripheral nerve buzzing. Who knew if she could even handle another imago? This one might have gone wrong because she was broken, unsuitable, incompatible; and even if she wasn’t, she remembered what the first time had felt like: the dizzying double overlay of perception, the sense of standing on the edge of a high precipice. The slightest movement and she would fall into the hugeness of someone else’s memory, and they hadn’t had enough time, to be a new person, to be Mahit-Yskandr, and the ghost of whoever Yskandr had absorbed when he was young, Mahit-Yskandr-Tsagkel …

That name, floating up from the shards of the imago in her mind; the echo of how it had felt when she’d looked it up in Lsel’s records, trying to trace back the line she was joining. Tsagkel Ambak, who had not been to the City but had negotiated with Teixcalaan from the bow of a space cruiser, ensuring the continued independent rights of Lsel and the other stations to mine their sector, four generations back. Mahit had read her poetry and thought it was dull, pedestrian, all about home, and had thought—had thought three months ago—that she could do better.

Maybe the new imago could tell her more about the imago he’d absorbed into the person she’d met when he entered her mind.

She was going to try it, wasn’t she. She’d already decided, without even realizing she’d come to the conclusion; she was going to try it because she was alone, and because it needed to be done, and because she wanted to be whole, part of the long line of ambassadors from Lsel—the line she should be part of, the line she’d been inducted into and was still reeling from the loss of. If she had been sabotaged she wanted to undo it; she wanted her imago-line back, she wanted it preserved. She wanted to be a worthy inheritor of memory. To safeguard it, for the people she was meant to be serving here, as an extension of Lsel Station’s sovereignty. For the people who might follow after her, and carry her mind and memory onward on her Station.

Patriotism seemed to derive quite easily from extremity.

Mahit supposed that was true for all the rioters in the City’s streets, too.

She found Three Seagrass in the kitchen, doing something incomprehensible to a plant: hollowing it out and stuffing it full of another substance, a paste made of rice and what looked like ground meat.

“Is that food?”

Three Seagrass looked over her shoulder. Her face was drawn and set. “Not yet. Wait about an hour, and it will be. Do you need me?”

“I need a neurosurgeon,” Mahit said. “If such a thing exists on this planet.”

“You’re going to do it?”

“I’m going to try.”

Three Seagrass nodded, once. “Everything exists in the City, Mahit. In one form or another. But I’m afraid I have absolutely no idea where to find someone who would be willing—and able—to cut open your brain.”

From the other room, Twelve Azalea called, “You don’t, Reed, but I bet you anything you can find someone who does.”

“Stop eavesdropping and get in here,” Three Seagrass shouted, and when Twelve Azalea appeared in the doorway, she affixed him with a pointed stare. “And where shall I find this person? I want my Ambassador alive afterward.”

“While you go see the Science Minister I will pursue someone via less official means,” Twelve Azalea said smugly. “I am attached to the Medical College as my Information Ministry post. Aren’t you glad you got me involved in this conspiracy?”

“Yes,” Three Seagrass said, “for several reasons, including the use of your flat as a safe house—”

“You are only fond of me for my material possessions, Reed.”

“And for your persistent connections to people outside of the court and the ministries. That too.”

“You could have just as many, if you wanted,” Twelve Azalea said carefully. “If you were interested in branching out.”

Three Seagrass sighed. “Petal. You know that’s a bad idea. It’s been a bad idea.”

“Why?” Mahit found herself asking. She couldn’t think of what would be bad about having out-palace contacts, for an asekreta.

“Because I’d use them as assets, Mahit,” Three Seagrass said, sharp, almost self-castigating. “Just as assets. And Petal here has actual friends, some of whom I’d probably find my way to reporting as anti-imperial, eventually. When it seemed appropriate or useful.”

“You consistently do yourself a disservice,” said Twelve Azalea. “All vainglorious ambition and—”

“Not enough empathy, I know,” Three Seagrass replied. “Wasn’t this conversation about you?”

Twelve Azalea sighed, and smiled, his eyes dark and wide, and Mahit realized they’d had this conversation a hundred times; it was settled, this thing between them, a carefully tended corner of their friendship, where Three Seagrass didn’t ask about what Twelve Azalea did outside of work and Twelve Azalea didn’t try to get any of his—what, peculiarly anti-establishment medical friends?—involved with government business in the form of Three Seagrass. They knew what lines not to cross, the two of them; knew them and kept them, and what Mahit was asking for was going to blur every single one. And yet they both seemed to be willing.

She hoped she deserved it. (Lsel Station deserved it—there was that patriotism again, she couldn’t get over how it was becoming a strange reflex—but her asekretim weren’t doing this for Lsel.)

“Yes,” Twelve Azalea was saying. “All about me, and how useful I am, and how much I’m helping you. I’ll get this done while you’re at your appointment tomorrow.”

Travel across the City was bad and getting worse, even in the clear light of the next early morning. Mahit was almost sure that she and Three Seagrass were being followed, as they left Twelve Azalea’s apartment building and headed back inside the subway: not by gold-masked Sunlit, but by shadows, the ghosts of people in grey. The Mist, Twelve Azalea had called the Judiciary’s own private investigatory force. If these were them—if these were real—the name was appropriate.

She could be imagining it. Paranoia was a very understandable response when a multitude of people were, in fact, out to get you. They’d taught that in the psychology classes on Lsel, and Mahit had less and less reason to disbelieve it. Besides, half of the subways were on delay or closed entirely, and angry commuters were not contributing to anyone’s sense of safety or well-being. The borders between the six-pronged palace complex and the rest of town were visible as borders, now, as they hadn’t been when Mahit and Three Seagrass had left Mahit’s confiscated crime-scene apartments with Twelve Azalea. There were Sunlit standing in a line, checking the cloudhooks of each Teixcalaanlitzlim, verifying identities. Behind them was the shimmering glass and wire wall of the City itself, irising open and shut for the approved visitors. It seemed like more of a direct threat than ever.

She was carrying the encrypted paper communiqué from Lsel under her freshly laundered shirt, attached to her ribs by virtue of an elastic sports bandage that Twelve Azalea had found in the back of one of his drawers, before they’d left him to find someone to perform back-alley neurosurgery and headed back toward the palace complex. Twelve Azalea had it because he’d twisted his ankle while playing some form of team sport with a ball and net, the same sort of thing which had been advertised on the flyer they’d been given in the garden. Twelve Azalea had been more willing to enthuse about it—apparently he played in an intramural team once a week—than Mahit had been willing to listen, but it hadn’t mattered: the bandage was conscripted into use, and now she felt like she was smuggling secrets across enemy lines. Even if they were her secrets to begin with, legally and morally.

“Think we’re going to get arrested?” Mahit asked.

Over-cheerful and under her breath, Three Seagrass said, “Not yet.” In her clean Information Ministry suit, she looked like a very fine, very precise edged weapon, and Mahit was not in fact sure what she would do without her.

“If not now, when?” she said, with a certain bleak amusement of her own, and then they had come up to the wall of gold-mirrored helmets. Three Seagrass presented herself and Mahit easily, unaffectedly—the very picture of a cultural liaison supervising the movement of her charge through closed doors. The Sunlit asked her for her cloudhook—she handed it over. The Sunlit asked her where they’d been—she explained, without deception or guilt, that they had spent the night at the house of her former classmate and good friend.

Mahit wondered again if the Sunlit shared one enormous mind with the City—whether this one was right at this moment considering the work of its fellows, in her apartment. It certainly was taking its time. It looked up, and behind Mahit and Three Seagrass—another of those flashes of mist-grey, a reflection in the smooth gold faceplate, something behind Mahit for the Sunlit to look at for too long, an endless little stretch—and down again. Perhaps it was consulting through its fellows with the Six Outreaching Palms. Conspiracy on conspiracy. She was being paranoid. No one was following them and Science wasn’t colluding with War to unseat the Emperor and there weren’t protests in the streets and the bomb in Plaza Central Nine had been an accident of circumstance, not for her at all, for something unrelated to her, a representative gesture for the people of Odile—surely.

The Sunlit waved her and Three Seagrass through, so abruptly she was actually surprised: adrenaline-drop prickles, hot and cold, slipping down her spine. Walking through the door opened in the City’s internal wall felt like climbing into the mouth of an animal. It shut behind them and Mahit thought of the circular teeth on the maws of some station-dwelling parasites, the kind which lived in crawlspaces and battened on to power cable insulation.

The palace complex was, in daylight, much more serene than anywhere else. Walls did that. Walls kept out the visible signifiers of unrest. The walk to the Science Ministry was easy, and the air smelled of the ever-present Teixcalaanli flowers, pepper-sharp and rich white musk, and there was a chilly sort of sunlight, and yet Mahit could not get her heart rate to come down to something lower than a thrum.

“I’d vastly prefer it if we came out of this one without declaring war, allegiance, or getting you kidnapped by Ten Pearl’s best ixplanatlim for experiments on your brain,” Three Seagrass said.

“I can promise you a lack of declarations of war,” Mahit told her, looking up at the silver-steel bloom of the Science Ministry, its pearl-inlaid relief decorations showing the tracks of subatomic particles, the shapes of proteins. “I don’t have that authority.”

“Wonderful. We’ll be fine.”

Inside, there was an episode of the now-familiar dance of high-court Teixcalaanli protocol. Three Seagrass made introductions and confirmed their appointment with Ten Pearl; Mahit bowed over her fingertips; inclined her body to a degree that felt right, and whether that was her own instinct or the leftover flickering presence of Yskandr didn’t really matter.

She and Three Seagrass were escorted to a windowless conference room, bland pale chairs around a bland pale table, no decoration except for an unobtrusive stripe of that same pearl-inlaid relief circumnavigating the walls right underneath the light switch panels. There they waited.

Three Seagrass tapped her fingernails on the table, a nervous gesture Mahit hadn’t noticed her making before. For her own part, Mahit had taken to fiddling with Yskandr’s imago-machine inside the pocket of her jacket, unconsciously, and had to make herself stop more than once, and she kept thinking that the communiqué bound under her shirt would crackle if she breathed too deeply, even though it wasn’t making any noise at all. The advent of Ten Pearl through the conference room door was a relief. She could do something, now that he was here to talk to. Waiting was … not working, right now. It wasn’t working at all.

“Minister,” she said, standing to greet him.

“Ambassador. A pleasure. I’d heard you were missing!”

Ah. So this was how they were going to play this out. Fair enough—the last time she’d seen Ten Pearl she’d played him for the benefit of the newsfeeds at the Emperor’s oration-contest banquet. She probably deserved having to fence her way through whatever interpretation of her absence from the palace Nineteen Adze had concocted.

“I’ve known where I was the whole time,” she said, and realized as she said it that she was going to abandon her previous pose as a barbarian and a rube; there was no point to that smokescreen now, and it hadn’t worked anyway. Two people at least had tried to kill her, once with a poison flower and once by ambush in her apartments. Being a barbarian—performatively, like a shield—hadn’t made her any less vulnerable than being a political operator would. She might as well be honest now. A clever barbarian, like Nineteen Adze had called her.

Ten Pearl laughed politely. “I’m sure you have! What a charming way of putting it. How can I help you, Ambassador?”

When Mahit had set up this meeting, she had intended to try to figure out if Yskandr had really been so obvious about his intention to sell imago technology to Teixcalaan as to run afoul of Science—a question which hardly mattered now. Yskandr was dead, and the person he’d sold the imago tech to was the Emperor. What she needed to know now was far more along the lines of who Ten Pearl supported for succession, so that she could figure out if he wanted anything to do with the annexation of Lsel, and if he could be manipulated in her favor to stop it.

“I don’t want to linger on unpleasant subjects,” she began, using just as many tenses as she wanted, no pretense of ignorance between her and the Minister now, “but I would like very much to know—for the sake of my own interests and health, you understand—what it was that you and my predecessor discussed on the night of his death.” She could feel how Three Seagrass sat up straighter next to her; the careful focus she had acquired.

Ten Pearl interlaced his hands. All his rings glinted, even under this bland fluorescent lighting. “Are you concerned you might make a similar mistake, Ambassador?” he asked. “Your predecessor ate something unpleasant, that’s all. Unfortunate. Our conversation was on very different topics than his eating habits. I’m sure you could avoid consuming such things, if you were careful.”

Mahit smiled, with all her teeth. Barbarian. But persistent. “No one will be specific as to what he ate,” she said. “It’s a fascinating omission.”

“Ambassador,” Ten Pearl said, the word drawn out slow, like he was coaxing her. “Have you perhaps considered that there is a reason for that omission? There are all sorts of other subjects we could profitably spend our time on right now. Perhaps we might discuss hydroponic nutrition factors, compared between small and large populations? We have so much to learn from each other, Lsel and Teixcalaan.”

It was inconvenient, Mahit thought, being furious. It dulled the edges of her vocabulary. And yet, here she was. Just as furious as she’d been in Eight Loop’s office.

She looked him straight in the face. “Ten Pearl, I’d like to know why my predecessor died under your care.” It wasn’t quite an accusation. (It was an accusation, just not a direct one.) Three Seagrass had put her hand on Mahit’s knee, warning and warm.

Ten Pearl sighed, a little resigned exhalation as if he was preparing to do something unpleasant and necessary, like disposing of rotten food. “Ambassador Aghavn’s activities and proposals were unsuitable; he implied, over an entirely civilized meal in which he was given multiple opportunities to renege, that he was prepared at any moment to flood the Teixcalaanli markets with technology which would upset the functioning of our very society, and that he seemed to have suborned or influenced our Glorious and Brilliant Imperial Majesty—it was my responsibility, as Minister for Science, to deal with the threat he represented.”

“So you killed him,” Three Seagrass said, fascinated.

Ten Pearl regarded Three Seagrass evenly. “Given the current situation,” he said with an encompassing little gesture toward Mahit, as if to include and circumscribe her in the general state of Teixcalaanli diplomatic affairs, and then to dismiss her with them, “I see little reason to deny that, while he was dying, I did not intervene medically. If Ambassador Dzmare would like to bring that up during an inquiry into medical malpractice, I am sure she could begin such an inquiry at the Judiciary.”

Had her influence fallen so far, in two days of unrest in the City and the government, that Ten Pearl could not only blithely admit to disposing of his political opponent—“did not intervene medically” was for Three Seagrass’s legalistic ears and nothing else, Mahit knew what he meant when he said it—but also be assured that Mahit had no pull with anyone at court who would be willing to punish him for doing so? Clearly Ten Pearl believed that the Science Ministry was beyond the reproach of whoever was going to inherit the imperial throne—

—and just as clearly, he believed that Six Direction was no longer, without Yskandr Aghavn and his promised technology, willing to defend Lsel Station, or any of its citizens. And thus he had no use for Mahit, if she wasn’t going to try to flood the market with immortality machines—no use except the use he’d have for any ambassador from a small satellite-state on the edges of Teixcalaan.

The deal, as Thirty Larkspur had said at the oration contest, meaning—as she hadn’t understood then—the deal between the Emperor and Yskandr, is off.

She managed to keep her voice even, her vocabulary pristine, and launched a test satellite into the orbit of the conversation: “I wouldn’t begin at the Judiciary, Minister; I’d begin with the Emperor’s own ezuazuacatlim, if I needed advice. I’ve found such safety there.”

“Have you?” Ten Pearl said. “I am glad; that’s a change.”

“Is it?” Mahit asked, and waited for it: she was beginning to suspect that Ten Pearl wanted to talk, wanted to make her feel powerless with his talking. Three Seagrass’s fingers were going to bruise her thigh, they were gripping so hard.

“Your vaunted hostess, Her Excellency Nineteen Adze, stood by precisely as I did,” Ten Pearl said. “At that dinner I may have defended the interests of my ministry, and thereby all of the Empire, but she let me do it.”

Mahit felt an icy clarity. She remembered Nineteen Adze saying he was my friend to her over tea—remembered the visceral, neurochemical familiarity of Mahit’s reaction to her, how what of her was Yskandr wanted to be near her and have a good time and feel challenged and safe at once—remembered how Nineteen Adze had watched her in the hallway of her office complex, watched her pick up the poison flower, bend her head to it as if to breathe. She could have so easily remained in the archway, still and silent in her white suit, and not intervening at all.

But she had. She had, for whatever reason, saved Mahit’s life. Even if she had not saved Yskandr’s.

“I do appreciate the warning,” Mahit managed to say. She was lying through her teeth. She could lie a little more. She aimed for tremulous, confused, upset. (She was upset.) “There have been certain unpleasant incidents—a flower given to me with toxic effects—do you think—”

“I,” Ten Pearl said, cutting her off, “am not about to be framed for floral assassination. I am a modern man, and the Science Ministry is not merely botanical.”

“We were not about to suggest,” said Three Seagrass, “that the Science Ministry was merely botanical.”

The resulting pause dragged on endlessly, and Mahit wondered which of the three of them was going to break first, either into shouting or into hysterical laughter.

“Is there anything you would like to suggest, Ambassador? Considering that I have not sent anyone with a flower to do away with you,” Ten Pearl said at last.

“You’ve made my position quite clear,” Mahit told him. “I’ll be in touch when things have calmed down, if we do end up having something to say to one another. Hydroponics. I’ll remember that.”

In the aftermath of their summary exit from the Science Ministry, Three Seagrass took Mahit to a restaurant. Mahit let her do it with only a token protest—Last time we tried this there was an act of domestic terrorism—and got Last time I made reservations; no one knows where we are, we’ll be fine as a response. It was nice to sit in the dim cavernous space, tucked in close to the wall of a booth, and have strangers bring her and Three Seagrass food.

She only thought about being poisoned briefly, when her soup arrived, and decided she didn’t care just this moment.

“Really, I thought you did very well,” Three Seagrass said, carving off a thin piece of meat from her meal, which seemed to be a side of an entire animal. Mahit was horribly tempted by the smell of it, and a little horrified at the same time: that had too much blood in it to have been grown in a laboratory. That had been a living thing, which breathed, and now Three Seagrass was eating it.

“I’m not sure what else I could have done, while he simultaneously confessed to Yskandr’s murder and informed me that absolutely no one cares about it,” Mahit said.

Three Seagrass wrapped the meat in a large purple-white flower petal. She’d ordered a stack of them, and was treating them like thin little breads—a conveyance for the flesh from the plate to her mouth. “Wept,” she said. “Swore revenge. Attempted immediate violence.”

“I’m not a hero in an epic, Three Seagrass.” Mahit resented how saying so made her feel ashamed, inadequate: she shouldn’t still want to want to be Teixcalaanli, emulating, a re-creation of literature. Not after this week.

The petal-wrap got smeared with a deep green sauce that seemed to be both condiment and structural glue, and then bitten into with gusto. Around her mouthful, Three Seagrass said, “I said you did well, all right? You did. I don’t know what you’re planning to do next, but you managed that meeting like someone born to the palace, or at the very least like a trained asekreta.”

Mahit felt color rise in her cheeks. “I do appreciate that.”

The pause between them—Three Seagrass smiling, eyes wide and warm and sympathetic, Mahit exquisitely aware of how her cheeks were red, red like flower petals or the meat Three Seagrass was eating—felt charged. Mahit swallowed. Found something to say.

“All aside from the murder confession,” she began, and was gratified when Three Seagrass sat up a little straighter, paid a little more attention—there’s work to be done here—“Ten Pearl’s overly interested in hydroponics. Ours are good, but they’re not the sort of thing that feeds a planet. I can’t think of why he’d want to talk to me about them, unless something has gone peculiarly off with the City’s food-growth algorithm…”

And found that what she’d found to say was interesting, now that she was saying it. “As off as the City’s security algorithm is.”

“You mean City-strikes. Like what happened to me in Plaza Central Nine. And … whatever is going on with the Sunlit. If something is going on with the Sunlit.”

Mahit nodded. “Ten Pearl became Minister because of his perfect algorithms. First the subway, when he integrated all the disparate lines into one algorithmic AI-controlled system, and then the City’s security apparatus. Yes?”

“Yes,” Three Seagrass said. “How did you learn that, anyway? It happened … oh, I wasn’t even out of the crèche yet.”

Mahit shrugged. “If I say imago-technology, but not functioning as I expected, will you be surprised?”

“Not anymore.” Another one of those strange, warm smiles.

Mahit couldn’t quite keep eye contact when she was doing that. “You said that there’d been eight City-strikes in the past year. When we were walking back, two nights ago. How many more is that than the year before?”

Three Seagrass tilted her head slightly to the side. “Seven more. Are you suggesting that the algorithm is faulty?”

“Or it’s being used faultily. An algorithm’s only as perfect as the person designing it.”

“Oh, that’s clever, Mahit,” Three Seagrass said, delighted. “If you want revenge on Science for a murder, murder Science’s reputation of impartiality.”

It was so utterly satisfying when Three Seagrass understood what she meant, without Mahit having to laboriously explain. “Ten Pearl’s reputation specifically,” she said, agreeing, “since it won him the Ministry, designing this algorithm, which is now hurting perfectly normal citizens of the Empire.”

“I like it,” Three Seagrass said. “We’ll need some data science people—an ixplanatl to make the statement look good—and someone to release the report widely—especially if it is connected to War, that’ll be an interesting needle to thread…”

“We’ll thread it. After I’m allowed back into my apartment. After this all is—quieter.”

Three Seagrass winced, and reached out to pat the back of Mahit’s hand. “What do you want to do right now? Still … what we talked about before? With the machine? I got a message from Twelve Azalea, while we were ordering, he’s come up with some medical person half a province away.”

That felt like the first good news Mahit had heard in a long time. Her skin went prickly, relief and excitement and a kind of intoxicating fear. “Yes,” she said. “I need to have access to that cipher even more now. I need to do something. Change something. Make the situation otherwise.”

Three Seagrass considered her, head tilted just slightly. Mahit wanted to look away. She had just suggested that she was preparing to intervene in the current political chaos. If there was a point where her liaison would balk, back away … but Three Seagrass merely nodded, and said, “I would be terrified.”

“Who says I’m not?”

“But you’ve done it before.”

“Under far more expert care than whoever Twelve Azalea has found for us.”

Three Seagrass looked like she wanted to bristle at that insult to Teixcalaanli medical technology, but she turned it into a shrug, instead. “He knows a lot of people. All kinds of people. I’m sure this person has at least some idea of what they’re doing.”

“If I die, or wake up scrambled,” Mahit said, “I want you to tell the next ambassador from Lsel—if there is a next ambassador—absolutely everything. As much as possible, all at once.”

“If you die, the Information Ministry is not going to let me near the next ambassador from Lsel, nor any other ambassadors.”

Mahit had to smile. “I’ll try not to.”

“Good,” said Three Seagrass. “Do you want one of these?”

“What?”

“A sandwich; you keep staring.”

Mahit’s mouth filled with saliva. “Was it an animal? Before it was food.”

“… yes?” Three Seagrass said. “This is a nice restaurant, Mahit.”

She was probably going to die of experimental brain surgery, all of her allies save two Information Ministry agents were either vanished or suspect, and Teixcalaan would most likely eat her home alive with bloody starship-teeth.

“Yes,” she said. “I want one.”

The meat, when she tasted it, bloomed on her tongue with juice.