A Memory Called Empire

CHAPTER FOUR

YSKANDR was not back in the morning.

Mahit woke as empty-minded as she’d fallen asleep. She felt cavernous and echoing, a glassy fragility that was like the very beginning stages of a hangover. She put her hands out in front of her, held them flat. They didn’t shake. She tapped her fingertips against her thumb in alternating rhythmic patterns: it was as easy as it ever had been. If she had neurological damage—if her imago-machine had fucked up irrevocably and burnt out the neural pathways that were supposed to have inscribed Yskandr permanently into her, made them one individual out of two—it wasn’t showing up on the kind of basic workup she could do for herself. She bet she could walk toe-to-heel on a painted line, too. Not that it helped.

On Lsel, now would have been past time to go see her integration therapist and be very distressed. This sort of thing—the cascading failure in the morgue, the blackouts and emotion-spikes and then silence—she had never heard of an imago integration going wrong like hers was going wrong. On Lsel she would have checked herself in to the medical decks. Now she was sitting on Yskandr’s bed in the center of Teixcalaan and being infuriated that he wasn’t here with her, instead. And if she was suffering neurological failure it didn’t seem to be having effects that a Teixcalaanli medical professional would notice, even if she wanted to see one.

Yskandr’s bedroom had narrow, tall windows, three of them in a row, and the dawn sunlight came in in floodlight beams. There were tiny floating motes in them, dancing weightlessly—perhaps she was having neurological symptoms, or some kind of ocular migraine.

She got up, walked over (heel-toe, just to see) and swept her hand through them. Dust. Dust motes. No air scrubbers in the Jewel of the World. There was a sky, too, and plants. Just like other planets she had been on, those brief visits. She was being ridiculous. It was only that everything was strange and she was so alone that was making her have these flights of paranoid fantasy.

Three months wasn’t enough time for anyone to integrate properly. She and Yskandr were supposed to have had a year, a period to grow into each other, for her to absorb everything he knew and for him to dissolve from a voice in her mind to an instinctive second opinion. There were meditation practices and therapy sessions and medical checks and she had none of that here in the place she’d always wanted to be most.

Yskandr, she thought. Your precursor has gotten you and me and the whole Station in more trouble than any of us strictly deserve, and you’d enjoy it, you’d love this whole mess, so where the fuck are you?

Nothing.

Mahit slammed the heel of her hand into the wall between two of the windows, hard enough to hurt.

“Are you quite all right?” Three Seagrass inquired.

Mahit spun around. Three Seagrass, already impeccably dressed as if she’d never removed her suit in the intervening night, leaned against the doorframe.

“How wide is the Teixcalaanli concept of ‘you’?” Mahit asked her, rubbing her hand where she’d hit it. She’d probably bruised herself.

“Grammatically or existentially?” Three Seagrass asked. “Get dressed, Ambassador, we have so many meetings today. I’ve found you Fifteen Engine—your predecessor’s former liaison—and pinned him down for a late breakfast in the Central City. And you would not believe the things that Information has in his file. If you want to make him nervous, ask him about his ‘charitable donations’ to humanitarian organizations which have been implicated in supporting that nasty little insurrection out in Odile.”

“Do you sleep?” Mahit asked dryly. “Grammatically or existentially, as you prefer.”

“Occasionally, on both counts,” Three Seagrass said, and vanished into the outer suite as swiftly as she’d arrived, leaving Mahit to think about what little she knew of Odile—there was some kind of petty rebellion there, but it had been kept quiet on the versions of Teixcalaanli newsfeeds which arrived on Lsel, as such things tended to be. Odile was on the Western Arc—one of the last systems annexed by Teixcalaan, at the beginning of Six Direction’s reign, when he’d been a military emperor first and foremost, a starship captain. Why there would be an insurrection there, Mahit wasn’t sure. But if she could pressure Fifteen Engine with having bad politics, she might have an advantage—if she needed one.

Three Seagrass was rather determined to be useful, wasn’t she.

Mahit dressed in her most neutral Stationer greys, trousers and blouse and short jacket that would only be out of place in the City by virtue of not being Teixcalaanli, which was to say, incredibly conspicuous but not overt about it, and spent the whole time wondering if she’d live long enough to get imperial-style clothes made. In the outer room of the suite, she discovered that Three Seagrass had come up with bowls of some sort of creamy yellow porridge.

“Not poisonous, promise,” she said, sucking a mouthful off a spoon. “The paste is processed for sixteen hours.”

Mahit accepted a bowl with only mild trepidation. “I am convinced you aren’t deliberately trying to get me killed, if only for reasons of your vainglorious personal ambition,” she said. Three Seagrass made an undignified noise through her nose. “What would happen if the paste wasn’t processed?”

“Cyanide,” Three Seagrass said cheerfully. “Natural antinutritional factor in the tubers. But delicious. Try yours.”

Mahit did. There wasn’t much point to refusing. There was nothing safe; there were only gradations of exposure to danger. She felt deliriously unmoored, and that was before any cyanide exposure. The porridge was faintly bitter, rich and delicious. She licked the last of it off the back of her spoon when she was done.

They took the subway out of the palace complex. Three Seagrass led Mahit down four levels and across a plaza swirling with lower-level functionaries in pale cream with no red patrician shading on their suits—tlaxlauim, Three Seagrass explained, accountants, they travel in swarms—before descending into the station she claimed would take them out of the palace complex and into the City itself. Someone had plastered the walls of the subway entrance with what looked to Mahit like political posters: the Teixcalaanli battle flag, a fan of spears against a starry backdrop, rendered in lurid red and with its spears turned into part of a graffiti-style glyph that Mahit had to peer at to decipher. It might have been the word for “rot,” but she wasn’t sure. “Rot” had fewer lines than six.

“Those’ll be taken down by the time we get back,” Three Seagrass said, plucking at Mahit’s sleeve to redirect her down the stairs. “Someone will call for maintenance. Again.”

“Not your favorite … political party?” Mahit guessed.

“I,” said Three Seagrass, “am an impartial observer from the Ministry of Information, and have no opinions at all about the sort of people who like putting up anti-imperial propaganda posters in public spaces and then don’t bother to participate in local government or apply to take the examinations and join the civil service.”

“Is there a lot of that going around?”

“There’s always a lot of that going around; it’s only the posters that change,” said Three Seagrass. “These ones aren’t holographic, which is sort of a pleasant difference—not walking through them.” At the bottom of the staircase was a sleek train platform, its walls decorated—where there weren’t more posters—with mosaic-tile images of roses in a hundred colors, shading white to gold to shocking pink.

“This is Palace-East Station,” Three Seagrass explained. “There are six stations in the palace complex—six for the cardinal points of the compass, except flat.” She gestured at the subway’s map, where the palace complex appeared as a six-pointed star. “It’s more symbolic than practical, considering that you get off at Palace-Earth for the imperial apartments and cosmology says it ought to be Palace-Sky.”

“What’s at Palace-Sky?” Mahit asked. The train carriage, when it came, was as spartan and clean-lined as the spaceport had been, full of Teixcalaanlitzlim in white. Most of them looked like the Teixcalaanlitzlim in paintings and photographs—brown and short with wide cheekbones and broad chests—but there were people from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds, all kinds of planetary systems. She even thought she’d spotted a freefall mutant, all long limbs and codominant pallor and red hair and exoskeleton to hold him upright under gravity. But all of the subway riders were dressed the same, save for the colors on their cream sleeves that indicated what branch of the civil service they belonged to. All employees of the palace, of the City. All Teixcalaanli, more so than she’d ever be, no matter how much poetry she memorized. She held on to a metal pole as the train began to move, at first hurtling through a dark tunnel and then emerging into the open air of an elevated track. The City swept by through the windows, buildings blurring.

“Archives, the Ministry of War, and the Imperial Censor Office,” said Three Seagrass, answering her earlier question.

“That’s not wrong, cosmologically.”

“What an opinion you have of what we send out into the universe,” Three Seagrass said.

“Literature, conquest, and things that are forbidden. Isn’t that accurate?”

The doors hissed open; half the Teixcalaanlitzlim exited. The ones who got on in their place were more colorfully dressed; some were children. The smallest children stared at Mahit unabashed, and their minders—parents or clonesibs or crèche caretakers, it was hard to tell—did little to redirect their attention. They all stood well back from Mahit and Three Seagrass, despite the crowdedness of the carriage, and Mahit wondered about touch-taboo, about xenophobia. When Yskandr had been here—when imago-Yskandr had been here, so, fifteen years ago—there hadn’t been obvious avoidance of physical interaction with foreigners, and it wasn’t in any of the cultural context she knew for Teixcalaan.

Changes in comfort levels with strangers were indicative of insecurity; she knew that from the very basic training in psychological response that all Lsel citizens had as part of their aptitude testing. Something had changed in the City, and she didn’t know what.

“We took the Palace-East line and we’re headed to Plaza Central Nine,” Three Seagrass said, shrugging, as if that was an answer to what Mahit had asked, and pointed out the interlocking subterranean lines on the carriage’s wall map. The subway laced through the City like ice crystals on a pane of glass: a fractal merging of multiple lines, an impossible complexity. And yet the Teixcalaanlitzlim used it with impunity and ease; there had been a precisely calibrated countdown clock on the platform, saying when their train would arrive, and that countdown clock had been correct.

Plaza Central Nine had more people than Mahit had ever seen in one place. Every time she thought she understood the scale of the Jewel of the World she realized she was wrong. There were no points of useful comparison with Lsel. Lsel—the largest of the ten stations—could support at most thirty thousand lives. There were a quarter that many Teixcalaanlitzlim moving through this singular plaza, uncontrolled, unguided by corridor-lines or shifting gravitational field strength, going wherever they wished. If there was an organizing principle to their movement it was something out of fluid dynamics, which had never been Mahit’s area of educational expertise.

Three Seagrass was an exemplary guide. She hovered at Mahit’s left elbow, close enough that no curious Teixcalaanli could take it into their heads to approach the barbarian foreigner with inopportune questions, but far enough to preserve a modicum of Mahit’s personal space. She pointed out architectural features and points of historical interest, falling automatically into polysyllabic couplets when she wasn’t paying enough attention not to. Mahit envied her that effortless fluidity of referents.

In the center of the plaza the bright steel and gold and glass of the buildings peeled outward like the petals of a flower, revealing a burst of bright blue atmospheric sky. Mahit made Three Seagrass pause in the direct center so she could tilt her whole upper spine back and look at it. The vault of it, dizzying—endless—it seemed to spin. She was the center of the world and—

—her hand bleeding bright red into the gold sun of the ritual bowl (his, not her, Yskandr’s hand), the sky shaped like this, a vault glimmering with so many stars as he looked up at it through the petal-explosion roof of a sun temple, and through the sting and the dizzy whirl of the sky he said, “We’re sworn to a purpose, now, you and I—your blood and mine—”

Mahit blinked, hard, and the flash was gone. Her spine hurt from the bending, so she straightened up. Three Seagrass was smiling at her.

“You’re sunstruck,” she said.

(imago-struck)

“I ought to take you to a temple and have a divine throw gold and blood at you. Haven’t you ever been on a planet?”

Mahit swallowed. Her throat was dry, and she could still smell the coppery blood from ago, a scent afterimage. “The sky was never this color on any planet I’ve visited,” she managed. “Don’t we have a meeting to get to? Side trips to religious officials will surely make us late.”

Three Seagrass shrugged expressively. “The sun temples aren’t going anywhere. There are litanies at every hour. More, if you’re going out-of-City or joining the military, and you want to shore up your luck and earn the favor of the stars. But the restaurant’s just over there, if you can bear to stop standing in the exact middle of Central Nine.” She pointed, straight-armed.

The restaurant in question was open and bright, with shallow bowls of water glistening with floating many-petaled pale blue flowers set as centerpieces on each white-stone tabletop. Mahit found it terribly ostentatious, and suspected that Three Seagrass didn’t realize that that much wasted water was even something to remark on.

Fifteen Engine was waiting for them at a corner table. He was middle-aged, broad shoulders over a high barrel of a stomach, steel-grey hair combed back from an aristocratically low hairline and tied in a tail bound with a metal ring. His cloudhook was exactly as she’d remembered it—as Yskandr had remembered it—an oversized bronze structure that ate up his left eye socket, cheekbone to browbone. She felt an echo of the flash of emotional intensity she’d gotten off of just Three Seagrass saying his name: distant fondness, distant frustration. But shadowed, half remembered. Perhaps she hadn’t felt them at all. Ghost memory, not the imago giving her anything useful.

Mahit realized she’d thought Fifteen Engine would be younger, someone only five or ten years her senior. But he’d been Yskandr’s cultural liaison when Yskandr had arrived, twenty years ago, and only for a brief time: her imago might be young, but her imago was also fifteen years out of date, and whatever Fifteen Engine knew of him would be similarly aged.

Mahit lifted her hands to greet him, nevertheless. The pressure between her fingertips felt electrical, like she could feel all the nerves in her arms, an echo of all the times Yskandr had done this motion. Almost as if he was back with her.

When Fifteen Engine lowered his palms, he looked her over and said, wryly, “Stars, Yskandr, she’s a quarter of your age. What does that feel like?”

“I knew it!” Three Seagrass said, shoving Mahit in the shoulder. “You’ve got one of those machines, and of course you’d have the brain of your predecessor stuck in your head—”

“Hush,” Mahit said, and sat down. She did it like she’d sat when she was eighteen: awkward, girlish, too-long limbs folding into her chair, and she watched Fifteen Engine’s hopeful expression change to wariness.

“Yskandr may have somewhat exaggerated the degree of carryover,” she said, clipped.

“But you are in there—”

“Not at the moment he isn’t,” Mahit said, and hoped that Three Seagrass would understand that statement as something that intentionally happened with imago-machinery, not as a fundamental error. “In addition, I am fascinated to know that my predecessor was so profligate with sharing what is proprietary technology.”

“I see it’s taken your liaison approximately thirty-six hours to get the same information out of you,” Fifteen Engine said.

“Extenuating circumstances, patrician, considering that Yskandr is dead.”

“Is he,” Fifteen Engine said, dust-dry.

“The man you knew, yes.”

“I have no reason to be speaking with you, then,” Fifteen Engine said. “I have been out of interstellar politics for the better part of two decades. I resigned from the Information Ministry more than ten years ago. I live quietly and pursue my own work away from the vicissitudes of the central government.” He gathered himself to stand, pushing back his chair from the table. The bowl of flowers and water shook; some of the water slopped over the side and ran across the stone to drip onto the restaurant floor.

Transfixed by the waste, Mahit said, “He must have trusted you,” trying to salvage something of the meeting, but Fifteen Engine took a step back, avoiding the puddle adroitly—and the world flashed white and roared.

She was lying on the ground, her cheek wet in the spilled water. The air roiled with thick, acrid smoke and shouting in Teixcalaanli. Part of the table—or part of the wall, some heavy immobilizing marble—had come down on her hip and pinned her with a radiating spike of pain when she tried to move. She could only see a partial visual arc—there were chair legs and debris blocking her—but in that arc was fire.

She knew the Teixcalaanli word for “explosion,” a centerpiece of military poetry, usually adorned with adjectives like “shattering” or “fire-flowered,” but now she learned, by extrapolation from the shouting, the one for “bomb.” It was a short word. You could scream it very loudly. She figured it out because it was the word people were screaming when they weren’t screaming “help.”

She couldn’t see Three Seagrass anywhere.

Wetness dripped onto her face, as wet as the spilled water but from the other side. Dripped and collected and spilled over the hollow of her temple and across her cheek and her eye and was red, was blood. Mahit turned her head, arched her neck. The blood flowed downward, toward her mouth, and she clamped her lips shut.

It was coming from Fifteen Engine, collapsed back into his chair, the front of his shirt—the front of his torso—torn open and away, his throat studded with shrapnel. His face was pristine, the eyes open and glassily staring. The bomb must have been close. To his right, from the angle of the pieces she could see.

Yskandr, I’m sorry, she thought. No matter how much she disliked Fifteen Engine—and she had been developing a very direct and powerful dislike, just a moment ago—he was someone who had been Yskandr’s. She was Yskandr enough to feel a displaced sort of grief. A missed opportunity. Something she hadn’t safeguarded well enough.

A pair of knees in smoke-scorched cream trousers appeared in front of her nose, and then Three Seagrass was wiping the blood off her face with her palms.

“I would really like you to be alive,” Three Seagrass said. It was hard for Mahit to hear her over the shouting, and even the shouting was being drowned out by a rising electric hum, like the air itself was being ionized.

“You’re in luck,” Mahit said. Her voice worked fine. Her jaw worked fine. There was blood in her mouth now, despite Three Seagrass’s efforts to smear it away.

“Great,” said Three Seagrass. “Fantastic! Reporting your death to the Emperor would be incredibly embarrassing and possibly end my career and also I think I’d be upset—are you going to die if I move the piece of the wall that’s fallen on you, I am not an ixplanatl, I don’t understand anything about non-ritual exsanguination except not to pull arrows out of people’s veins and I learned that from a really bad theatrical adaptation of The Secret History of the Emperors—”

“Three Seagrass, you’re hysterical.”

“Yes,” said Three Seagrass, “I know,” and shoved whatever was pinning Mahit to the ground off of her hip. The release of pressure was a new kind of pain. The hum in the air was growing louder, the space between Three Seagrass’s body and her own beginning to shade a delicate and terrifying blue, like twilight approaching. The marble restaurant floor had lit up with a tracery of aware circuits, all blue, all glowing, coloring the air with light. Mahit thought of nuclear core spills, how they flashed blue as they cooked flesh; thought of what she’d read of lightning cascading out of the sky. If it was ionized air they were already dead. She struggled up on her elbows, lunged for Three Seagrass’s arm, and catching it, hauled herself to sitting.

“What’s wrong with the air?”

“A bomb went off,” Three Seagrass said. “The restaurant is on fire, what do you think is wrong with the air?”

“It’s blue!”

“That’s the City noticing—”

A section of the restaurant’s roof shuddered and fell, ear-shatteringly loud. Three Seagrass and Mahit ducked simultaneously, pressed forehead to shoulder.

“We have to get out of here,” Mahit said. “That might not have been the only bomb.” The word was easy to say, round on her lips. She wondered if Yskandr had ever said it.

Three Seagrass pulled her to her feet. “Has this happened to you before?”

“No!” Mahit said. “Never.” The last time there had been a bomb on Lsel was before she was born. The saboteurs—revolutionaries, they’d called themselves, but they’d been saboteurs—had brought the vacuum in when their incendiaries exploded. They’d been spaced, afterward, and the whole line of their imagos cut off: thirteen generations of engineering knowledge lost with the oldest of them. The Station didn’t keep people who were willing to expose innocents to space. If an imago-line could be corrupted like that, it wasn’t worth preserving.

It was different on a planet. The blue air was breathable, even if it tasted like smoke. Three Seagrass had hold of her elbow and they were walking out into Plaza Central Nine, where the sky was still the same impossible color, as if nothing had gone wrong. A stream of Teixcalaanlitzlim fled across the square toward the safety of other buildings or the dark shelter of the subway.

“Is it possible,” Three Seagrass asked, “that Fifteen Engine brought the bomb with him? Did you see—”

“He’s dead,” Mahit interrupted. “Are you suggesting he was some kind of—self-sacrifice?”

“Badly managed, if he was. You’re not dead. Neither am I. And nothing about Fifteen Engine’s record, ties to Odile or no ties to Odile, suggests he’d be in with domestic terrorists or suicide bombers or the kind of activists for whom posters are definitely not enough—”

“What would be the point of killing us? He wanted to talk to me—well, to Yskandr—and you’re the one who asked him to breakfast for me in the first place.”

“I’m trying,” said Three Seagrass, “to figure out just how badly I have misread the situation and determine how much danger you’re actually in—or if this is just terrible luck—or if something’s set off another rash of bombings—”

“Another?” Mahit asked, and instead of answering, Three Seagrass stopped walking. Froze, her hand on Mahit’s elbow, jerking her to a standstill.

The center of the plaza unfolded in front of them. What Mahit had thought were tiles and metal inlay when she’d walked across them were instead some kind of armature, emerging from the ground and corralling the crowd inside walls of gold and glass, crackling with that same blue light. Words scrolled up their transparent sides as they drew closer, pinning Mahit and Three Seagrass in the center of a little group of smoke-stained, shocked Teixcalaanlitzlim. The words were printed in the same graphic glyphs as the street signs and subway maps. A four-line quatrain, repeating over and over. Stillness and patience create safety, Mahit read, the Jewel of the World preserves itself.

“Don’t touch the City,” Three Seagrass said. “It’s keeping us confined until the Sunlit get here. The Emperor’s police.” The corners of her mouth curved down. “It shouldn’t be holding me—I’m a patrician—but it probably hasn’t noticed yet.”

Mahit didn’t move. The walls crawled with gold poetry and blue shimmering light.

“What happens to people who can’t read?” she said.

Three Seagrass said, “Every citizen can read, Mahit,” as if Mahit had said something incomprehensible. She reached up to her cloudhook, tapping the frame of it where it rested over her left eye, adjusting. The thin pane of transparent plastic that covered her eye socket lit up red and grey and gold, like an echo of the patrician colors on her sleeves. “Hang on,” she said. “That should do it.”

She shoved her way to the front of the crowd. Mahit followed in her wake. Walking hurt, a bruised and insulted ache that spread from her hip across her lower belly. Three Seagrass went right up to the unfolded section of plaza, her nose inches from the glass, and said, “Three Seagrass, patrician second-class, asekreta. Request to transmit Information Ministry identification, City.”

A tiny section of the glass wall and her cloudhook both swarmed with words, reflecting one another. Communicating. Three Seagrass muttered something subvocal—Mahit thought it might be a string of numbers, but she wasn’t sure—and then the glass printed a word she could read quite clearly.

Granted, it said. Three Seagrass stuck out her hand and did exactly what she’d told Mahit not to do: she touched the wall, as if she expected it to part like a door in front of her. The gesture was so casual, so instinctively comfortable, that Mahit didn’t understand when Three Seagrass made a noise like she’d been punched, and fell backward, stiff-limbed. A line of blue fire connected her outstretched fingertips to the City.

Mahit caught her. She was very small. Teixcalaanlitzlim all were, but Three Seagrass was the size of a half-grown Stationer teenager, barely coming up to Mahit’s breastbone, and absurdly light for someone wearing as many layers of suiting as she was. Mahit sat on the ground. Three Seagrass fit in her lap, stunned and breathing in ugly gasps, her eyes rolled back in her skull. The crowd backed away from them both.

The City was still saying Granted, where the door wasn’t. Mahit entertained a vivid and horrific fantasy of the entire artificial intelligence that kept the Jewel of the World in operation, all the sewers and the elevators and every code-locked door, having been programmed by whomever Yskandr had so deeply offended for the specific purpose of killing her and anyone so unlucky as to be associated with her. The concept felt absurdist: she was one person, even if she was also the inheritor of all of Yskandr’s plans, and there were so many Teixcalaanlitzlim in the City to be accidentally hurt. So many citizens. Too many real people for the Empire to sacrifice for the sake of one barbarian. And yet she was entombed in glass, her cultural liaison electrocuted for performing a routine action. Absurd possibilities made too much sense, when so much had gone wrong so quickly.

“Do any of you have water? For her?” she asked, looking up. The faces of the Teixcalaanlitzlim surrounding her didn’t change: tear-streaked or burnt or untouched, none of them looked upset, not the way a Stationer would. Her own face felt like a mask, scrunched up with emotion. Abruptly she was afraid she had spoken the wrong language; she didn’t know what language she was thinking in. Either, or both. “Water,” she said again, helplessly.

A man took pity on her, or on Three Seagrass, still limp and unresponsive; he came forward and squatted down. His hair was coming undone from a thick braid, tendrils sticking sweatily to his forehead, and he wore a large, tacky shoulder pin shaped like a sprig of purple flowers on the left lapel of his suit. “Here,” he said, speaking both loudly and slowly as he held out a plastic bottle, “some water.”

Mahit took it. “I’m Mahit Dzmare,” she said, “I’m an ambassador—I don’t know what’s happening.” I am absolutely alone. She flipped open the top of the bottle, poured water into her cupped palm, and tried to decide if it would be better to throw it into Three Seagrass’s face or drip it into her mouth. “Thank you, sir. Can you inform the palace that one of the asekretim is hurt? Send a … a doctor vehicle.” There was a better word for that and she couldn’t find it.

“She’s an asekreta?” the man asked. “You should wait. The Sunlit will be here soon—the City will call them. It’s better if they take care of you.”

Mahit wondered if by take care of he meant finish murdering. She supposed it didn’t matter. She wasn’t about to run. There wasn’t anywhere to run to. “Thank you for the water,” she said.

“Where are you from?”

Mahit choked on a noise that wanted to be a laugh. “Space,” she said. “A station.”

“Really,” said the man. “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t worry. No one will think the bomb is your fault. This isn’t that kind of neighborhood.” He reached out to pat her on the forearm and she flinched away.

“Whose fault is it?” Mahit asked him.

She hadn’t expected him to answer. But he shrugged, and said, “Not everyone in the City loves the City,” and then stood up again, leaving her with the water bottle.

Not everyone in the City loves the City. Not everyone in the world loves the world, civilization is not coextensive with the known universe for someone, someone with a bomb who doesn’t care about civilian deaths …

The water dripped through her fingers and onto Three Seagrass’s mouth; it rolled down her cheek like Fifteen Engine’s blood had rolled down Mahit’s. Mahit couldn’t watch it. She handed the bottle back to its owner like she’d hand back a knife, handle-first, careful not to spill. Three Seagrass made a noise like a thin hum in the back of her throat, and Mahit decided it was a good sign: she wasn’t dead. She might not even die.

Surrounded by Teixcalaanlitzlim, Mahit felt nearly invisible. Not a one of them knew that she ought to have been more Yskandr, or what Yskandr might or might not have done. Not a one of them, unless one was the bomber—and there was nothing she could do about that, except to wait.

The Sunlit arrived like planetrise over the Station: slowly and then all at once, a distant intimation of gold shimmering through the occlusion of the City’s confining walls, which crept closer and closer before resolving into a platoon of imperial soldiers in gleaming body armor, a vision out of every Teixcalaanli epic Mahit had ever loved as a child and every dystopian Stationer novel about the horrors of the encroaching Empire. The wall which had shocked Three Seagrass came down for them, sinking back into the plaza seamlessly, and Mahit remembered the man with the water saying the City will call them.

Mahit got to her feet, Three Seagrass tucked under her arm and propped on her hip. Her head lolled back, semiconscious, against Mahit’s shoulder. Her hands came up to nearly press fingertip to fingertip, an automatic gesture that seemed to Mahit to be more instinctive or—if such a thing were possible—imago-supplied than something that originated in Three Seagrass’s own mind. Neurological puppetry.

The leader of the Sunlit returned that half-gestured greeting with perfect and unconcerned formality. Their face, like all the faces of the troop, was obscured by a cloudhook large enough to cover them from hairline to jaw, an opaque reflective gold shield. Mahit could make out no distinguishing features, which she suspected was the point.

“Are you Mahit Dzmare?” the Sunlit asked. Behind Mahit, the man who had given her water, and all of his companions, had vanished. Fleetingly she wondered if somehow they’d been responsible, and were now hiding from law enforcement. Not everyone in the City—

“Yes,” she said. “I am the Lsel Ambassador. My liaison is hurt and I would like to return to my chambers in the palace.”

If the Sunlit officer reacted, favorably or unfavorably, Mahit couldn’t tell. “On behalf of the Teixcalaanli Empire,” they said, “we regret the physical danger that you were subject to within our territory. We are sure you’ll be pleased to know that an investigation has begun into the origins and purposes of the explosive device.”

“Entirely,” Mahit said, “but I’d be more pleased with medical help and safe return to my diplomatic territory.”

The Sunlit went on as if Mahit hadn’t spoken. “For your own safety, Ambassador, we request that you come with us into the custody of the Six Outreaching Palms, where the Light-Emitting Starlike Emperor Six Direction’s yaotlek, One Lightning, and the Minister of War Nine Propulsion can provide you with adequate protection.”

The Six Outreaching Palms was the Teixcalaanli military establishment: fingers stretched out in every direction to grasp the known universe and reach its farthest edge. The name was mostly archaic; even Teixcalaanlitzlim talked about “the fleet” or named a particular regiment or division epitomized by the great deeds of its yaotlek, the supreme commander of a group of legions. That the Sunlit used it now made Mahit think she was being formally arrested; arrested with appropriate procedure applied. Arrested not just by the City and the Emperor, but by the Ministry of War.

Not arrested; taken into custody for her own protection.

And how different were these two descriptions? Not different enough, no matter who was arresting her.

She pulled the most formal modes of address out of the miserable culture-shocked sludge of her mind, and hoped she sounded vicious and in all of the control she wasn’t. “The custody of the esteemed yaotlek One Lightning is not Lsel diplomatic space. If I am in danger, I’m sure someone can be assigned to guard the door to my chambers.”

“We are no longer sure such measures are sufficient,” said the Sunlit, “considering the unfortunate accident which befell your predecessor. You’ll come with us.”

Mahit was almost sure that had been a threat. “Or?” she asked.

“You will come with us, Ambassador. Your liaison will be taken to a hospital to have her cloudhook adjusted after this regrettable interface with the City, of course. You shouldn’t worry.” The Sunlit took a step forward, and the rest of the troop followed, like an echo. There were ten of them, each indistinguishable from the others. Mahit stood her ground. She wished Three Seagrass was awake and coherent enough to maneuver them around this—to tell her if this One Lightning was a petty military bureaucrat or a political force, whether the Sunlit were usually in the employ of the Ministry of War or if they were making an exception for acts of terrorism in high-end restaurants.

She was spending so much time wishing her sources of information weren’t incapacitated. Wishing wasn’t helping. She didn’t know. She knew enough to be sure she didn’t want to be taken into custody. Knew enough about the Teixcalaanli military to know she couldn’t run. Knew enough about herself to know that she would have to abandon Three Seagrass if she tried and that she wasn’t willing to do that.

How else to stop them?

“I’m afraid I won’t be able to go with you,” she said, to buy time. Used the extra few seconds to remember her technical diplomatic vocabulary, the most official forms, and then prepared—feeling as if she was about to deliberately step outside an airlock without checking the oxygen volumes on her vacuum suit—to claim sanctuary. “I am compelled by prior agreement to keep my appointment with the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze, whose gracious presence illuminates the room like the edgeshine of a knife, this afternoon. I believe that she would be exceptionally displeased if I instead attended a meeting with the most respected and admired One Lightning without first fulfilling my obligation to her. The tragic situation in the restaurant should not be allowed to disturb the functioning of your government and its negotiations with mine.”

She hoped she’d gotten the damned epithet right.

The Sunlit officer said, “One moment, Ambassador,” and turned to the others. Their faceplate-cloudhooks glowed blue and white and red under the gold-tone reflective mirror surface that hid their faces from view as they talked to one another on some private channel.

One of them came back over to her. It wasn’t the same one who had been speaking before, Mahit was nearly sure. “We will be making contact with the ezuazuacat’s office. If you would be patient.”

“I can wait,” she said. “But I would appreciate if you would also make contact with an ambulance for my liaison.” Now she remembered the word. It was good to know that years of vocabulary drill and diplomatic training would kick in when she needed them, even if she was soot-stained and covered in mostly-dried blood. Now she just had to hope that Nineteen Adze wanted her—wanted Yskandr, more truthfully, wanted whatever Yskandr had promised her—enough to claim precedence over a military commander who could control the City’s police.

It was probably best not to think about whether Nineteen Adze had been the one to arrange for the bomb. Not yet. One problem at a time.

That second Sunlit slipped back into the whole group of them. Mahit lost which one it was—she concentrated on standing quite still, on holding up Three Seagrass, on keeping her face expressionless and displeased at once by remembering how Yskandr could transform her mouth into a withering sneer of imperial-style contempt just by shifting the wideness of her eyes. She waited, and imagined she was invincible, like the First Emperor clawing her way off-planet or Three Seagrass’s beloved Eleven Lathe, philosophizing amongst aliens—and wasn’t she just. Doing that. Right here. The minutes droned on. The Sunlit conversed with each other through their faceplates. Three Seagrass made a nearly intelligible what? sound and buried her face in Mahit’s shoulder, which was almost sweet.

The first Sunlit, or an indistinguishable Sunlit from that first, made a gesture to the others. They dispersed into the remains of the crowd, talking in low voices, taking statements from the bystanders. Mahit took it as a good sign: they weren’t going to subdue her by brute force.

“An ambulance has been called,” the Sunlit said.

“I will wait until it arrives before keeping my appointment with the ezuazuacat.”

There was a pause; Mahit imagined that the Sunlit’s expression under that faceplate was quite annoyed, and felt pleased at the imagining.

“You may wait,” the officer said, “and then we will escort you to the ezuazuacat’s office ourself. It would be inappropriate for you to use public transportation at this time. Many of the subways are in fact closed, and service has been suspended in this sextant during our investigation.”

“I do appreciate the investment of your personal time,” Mahit said.

“We do not have personal time. There’s no inconvenience.”

The Sunlit use of the first-person plural was unusual and slightly disconcerting. That last “we” ought to have grammatically been an “I,” with the singular form of the possessing verb. Someone could write a linguistics paper, for girls on stations to gush over late on sleepshift—

It didn’t matter. It wouldn’t happen. The ambulance was arriving, a sleek grey bubble of a vehicle, flashing with white lights and a sharp piercing high note, repeated as a siren. It disgorged medical ixplanatlim in their scarlet tunics. None of them were Yskandr’s morgue attendant, and Mahit was glad of it. They took Three Seagrass away from her with gentle hands and were reassuring about her recovery prospects. City-strikes happened all the time, they said. More now than a few years ago. It was just neurostunning, a mistake in the wiring, a fluctuation in the numbers of the enormous algorithmic AI that ran the City’s autonomic functions.

“Are you ready to go, Ambassador?” said her Sunlit.

Mahit wished she could get a message to Nineteen Adze: something along the lines of incoming with police escort, terribly sorry, hope you enjoy political mess, if I don’t show up I’ve been disappeared, but she couldn’t quite think of how she’d manage to do it.

“I wouldn’t want to be late,” she said.