CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

[…] military applications seem a logical extension of algorithmic information-sharing processes already in use in law enforcement. While the interface for a pilot is necessarily more limited than what is available to one of the Sunlit (allowing for flexibility in time-of-use instead of relying on always-on algorithms), initial tests of shared proprioception are promising. Given the processing capabilities of Shard interface, Science strongly believes that Shards would be a first wide-deployment location for this new technology […]

—from “Report on Human-Algorithmic Interfaces: Military Applications,” prepared by the ixplanatl team of Two Kyanite (Principal Investigator), Fifteen Ton, and Sixteen Felt, submitted to and approved by Science Minister Ten Pearl

The statistical chance of imago-integration failure leading to irreversible psychological and/or neurological damage is 0.03%, or three instances in every ten thousand. Heritage and Life Support both consider this level of risk acceptable.

—from Imago Surgery: What to Expect, pamphlet distributed as part of routine medical evaluation before implantation of an imago-machine

EIGHT Antidote lost twenty minutes trying to find a Shard berthed somewhere in Nasturtium Terminal. There was nothing that looked like the sliver of tumbling sharp-edged glass that he thought a Shard should be, based on all of the specs he’d seen in the Ministry of War, the shape of glitter-point single-pilot fighters scattered over the black of a cartograph table. Twenty minutes before he remembered that almost all Shards would be inside a larger Fleet ship, hanging in berths.

He didn’t need a Shard, exactly. He needed a Shard pilot, who would let him into a Shard.

That was worse, because how was he going to find a pilot—he couldn’t go into a bar, he couldn’t call up the Ministry and ask—and he was losing time every moment. Every minute he stood lost in the chaos of Nasturtium Terminal, Nineteen Adze’s order to commit the Fleet to the total destruction of a whole planet got closer and closer to reaching the yaotlek. His own order was so far behind.

Eventually he found himself lurking behind the Information mail kiosk again, out of eyeshot of the asekretim, trying to imagine how he could get onto a Fleet ship. Maybe he could enlist? He wasn’t old enough, but he could pretend to be … until someone looked up his genetic print and found out that he was the imperial heir and returned him to Palace-Earth like a lost kitten. That wouldn’t work. He could maybe—climb into a crate being loaded onto a Fleet ship? Stow away?

All of his ideas were out of the stupidest episodes of holodramas, the ones he always turned off.

And then, as if he’d made them up, two Fleet soldiers walked right around the Information kiosk and straight toward him. They were both tall and had long dark hair in military-style tight queues, and the one on the left had, right below the patch on her sleeve with the emblem of the Second Legion—that binary star-system in mutual orbit was one of the easiest to recognize—a metallic triangle, all of its lines curved as if it was in motion. She was a Shard pilot. Right here. It seemed impossible. He needed one, and one appeared—except. Except it was the Shards which took the mail on fastest-courier override through the jumpgate mail-system, when the destination was the Fleet.

He had made this soldier up, in a way.

He’d made her come to the kiosk to take his message to the Fleet, and she’d just picked it up.

Eight Antidote swallowed. Straightened up to his full height, and wished he could be dressed like the imperial heir Eight Antidote, and not the errand runner Eight Antidote. But he didn’t have anything but himself. He intercepted the soldiers on an angle, and stopped directly in front of them, making himself a nuisance that would either be tripped over or paused for.

“Honorable pilots,” he said, not quite knowing whether honorable was the right respectful honorific, but he was about to demand a favor from them so he figured it would do. “I am the imperial associate His Excellency Eight Antidote, and I would be very grateful if you would allow me access to your ship for a short moment.”

The two soldiers glanced at each other, and back at him. One of them—not the pilot, her friend—said, “You’re who, kid?”

Eight Antidote gritted his teeth. “I am Eight Antidote. Heir to the sun-spear throne and the rule of all Teixcalaan. If you’d like, I’m sure your cloudhook will show you holos of me, for a visual comparison. I need access to your ship … Well. Her ship.” He pointed with his chin at the Shard pilot. “I need a Shard.”

“This is definitely the weirdest thing that’s happened to me since we got drunk on Kumquat at that really horrible bar on Xelka Station,” said the soldier. Eight Antidote really didn’t want to know what Kumquat was, aside from a fruit. Or whether it could be an alcoholic fruit.

“What do you need a Shard for?” asked the Shard pilot, which was a lot better than anecdotes about getting drunk. Eight Antidote hoped that she’d told her friend about the Shard trick, because otherwise her friend was going to find out right now, in the middle of Inmost Province Spaceport.

“I know,” he said, “that Shard pilots can feel each other when you’re inside your ships. Feel, and talk maybe. Over impossible distances. Over jumpgates.”

The pilot’s face had gone statue-still, like a mask. “How did you come by this information?” she said.

Eight Antidote told the truth. It seemed the most effective method. “From the Minister of War Three Azimuth, in private conference.” Not in private conference with him, but it was close enough.

“… If you are really that Eight Antidote,” the Shard pilot said, slowly, consideringly—and her friend interrupted her.

“Four Crocus, I am sure the kid who’s the imperial heir is, like, one indiction old. If that. This guy’s too old.”

“Look it up,” Eight Antidote said, pleading. If they wouldn’t believe him—if he was stopped now, he was never going to get a chance like this again, and half-done interstellar mail fraud was far worse than successful interstellar mail fraud. “Please. I need this. I’ll order you as the heir to the Teixcalaanli Empire if I have to, honorable pilots, but I don’t want to have to. Please.”

The pilot Four Crocus did something with her cloudhook, her eyes moving very fast, shuddering in their sockets. Rapid-search.

“… He looks right,” she said. “And. And you don’t know what it’s been like, Thirteen Muon, in the Shard-sight these past few days. If he wants to see it—if the Minister sent him to see it—I have to get this message out, but I’ll show him a Shard.”

“It’s on your head,” said Thirteen Muon. “But you know I don’t stop you, I never stop you, we’d never have any fun if I did.”

“This way, Your Excellency,” said Four Crocus, and Eight Antidote followed her and her fellow soldier back into the maze of Nasturtium Terminal’s ships.


The Shard was smaller than he’d imagined it would be. It wasn’t inside a Fleet ship after all—Four Crocus was on mail-courier duty, some complex sort of punishment or possibly reward that Eight Antidote couldn’t understand from her conversations with Thirteen Muon while they walked, and thus she and her ship were right in the spaceport, not hanging in a Shard-berth inside her usual ship. That ship was the Exultation-class medium cruiser Mad With Horizons of the Second Legion, and it was waiting for her three jumpgate-trips away from the Jewel of the World, and from what it sounded like, she couldn’t wait to get back and was worried about going back at the same time.

But for now her Shard nestled in Nasturtium Terminal like a splinter of glass stuck in a palm, ready to be caught up in one of the spaceport’s skynets and launched orbitward. It was big enough for one grown person to fit in, if they didn’t move too much. Eight Antidote touched its side. The metal was cool and smooth. He knew that the little ship could orient itself in any direction, on any axis, and the pilot would hang in the center, in her capsule, gravityless and free.

“Wait with him,” said Four Crocus to Thirteen Muon. “Ten minutes, no more. I need to ask a favor from whoever else is on mail duty—this message is really urgent, and I don’t know how long His Excellency is going to want to experience Shard-sight—so the next ship in line can take it through the jumpgate.”

Eight Antidote was glad that Four Crocus took her job so seriously. He wished he could do something like—give her a commendation. Maybe he could, when he was Emperor, if she remembered him. That message—his order—needed to leave now. Even if it meant he had to spend an excruciating ten minutes under the supervision of Thirteen Muon, who clearly hadn’t encountered a child since they’d been one themselves, and thought all children were interested mostly in star handball players (Eight Antidote didn’t care) or star musicians that sold out enormous concert venues and made kids scream a lot (Eight Antidote really didn’t care).

Eventually, out of agonized frustration at waiting, sure that at any moment someone would either set off an incendiary device or come to collect him and throw him back into his rooms in the palace like they were a jail, he asked what Thirteen Muon did in the Second Legion. This seemed to be a relief to both of them: Thirteen Muon was an engineering specialist who spent most of their time working on better ways to repair starship hulls, and Eight Antidote knew absolutely nothing about handheld microthrusters for close navigation in zero gravity, which meant he could actually concentrate without vibrating out of his skin with impatience, because he had to pay attention if he wanted to understand anything Thirteen Muon was saying.

Even so, when Four Crocus finally came back, he cut Thirteen Muon off directly. “I need to go inside,” he said to her. “I need to be inside Shard-sight, Pilot Four Crocus.” And then, feeling himself blush with frustration at needing to ask for everything, “I need you to show me how.”

Four Crocus glanced at Thirteen Muon, and then back to him. “Are you sure?” she asked. “It’s a lot easier than you think. It’s a lot worse than you think.”

“He’s a kid, Four Crocus, even if he actually is who he says he is—you came down to the Jewel of the World on leave and called me up to go get smashed because of what you said happened to you the last time you were in Shard-sight, and you’re going to put a kid through that?” asked Thirteen Muon, and Eight Antidote really, really didn’t have time for some kind of adult argument about whether this would be good for him or not, or whatever else their argument was about. He didn’t understand it, and he didn’t want to.

“Show me,” he repeated. “Now. It’s an order, Pilot.”

“You’ll need my cloudhook, Your Excellency,” Four Crocus said. “And you’ll need to be inside the Shard—Shard-sight works off of any cloudhook with the programming, but the Shard trick—I can’t believe they’re calling it that, it sounds like we’re doing it on purpose—the Shard trick takes too much processing power for a little thing like a cloudhook. Or a mind. You need the ship.” Her hand was on the hull of her Shard, stroking it like she would stroke a pet that needed to be quieted. “She’s a good ship,” she went on. “My Shard.”

Very seriously, Eight Antidote said, “I believe you,” because Four Crocus seemed to need to hear it.

She took a deep breath, like an orator about to begin a poem at court. “All right. Let’s—get this over with. Fuck, but I really hope you’re who you seem to be, because otherwise this is absolutely going to get me kicked out of the Shard corps—”

Inside, there was hardly space for one person, let alone two. Four Crocus showed him where to sit. Where to put his hands to call up the Shard’s engine and onboard targeting AI without actually triggering a takeoff sequence. And then she settled her cloudhook over his left eye. It was too big, of course—he had to tilt his head to keep it exactly settled—but it worked just like his own. The interface was the same, except overlaid with a hundred commands and programs he’d never seen. Fleet hardware with Fleet programming. It was terrifying. All of this was. But he’d left being scared somewhere outside the Shard, somewhere in the boredom of waiting for Four Crocus to come back. All he had left was being cold. He thought he might be shivering.

“It’s like a kaleidoscope,” Four Crocus murmured. “You might throw up at first. People do. I did. But you’ll see. You’ll see what’s happening to us. Ready?”

He nodded. He realized, for the first time in his life, that he had no idea what was about to happen to him.

“Wake up the ship, then,” Four Crocus said, “and when the programming comes up, say yes to everything.”

She got out of her Shard, and the shipglass hood of the pilot’s chamber clicked shut behind her. Eight Antidote was alone. His hands on the controls—

He executed the sequence. Felt the ship come awake under him, a thrum, an impatience. Half his vision went black with starfields—the cloudhook coming online, some version of Shard-sight—there was a flicker of a prompt in the corner of that field, a yes? And he said yes, one blink—

And fell into the void, tumbling, thrown from himself as far as he had ever been. Into the void, and into how it was screaming.


“What good would that do?” asked Nine Hibiscus. “Even if you lived through it, which fuck knows if you would—”

“It’s a system,” said the static-distorted voice of Twenty Cicada. “It’s a distributed system, and it’s out of balance because they don’t understand how we can be people and not be part of it. It’d do—a lot of good, Mallow. To have a—foreign graft.”

Mahit watched the yaotlek’s face as she grappled with the basic Teixcalaanli horror of artificial augmentation of the mind. It was the one thing she never had quite understood—the depth of their cultural taboo, the central reason behind why Yskandr-the-man had died: he’d offered Emperor Six Direction the imago-technology, and neither the Ministry of Science nor Nineteen Adze could countenance what they seemed to understand as a fundamental corruption of the self.

Yskandr murmured in the back of her mind. else.>

Isn’t that what they say about us? she asked him. That we aren’t human, really, us barbarians with our mind-sharing technology—

Yskandr said, and he was all the old Yskandr, the one who had seduced an Emperor with the promise of continuity of memory.

Nine Hibiscus said, “Swarm. Your religion doesn’t require you to balance the entire starfucked universe all by yourself.”

“Who else would try?” said Twenty Cicada, and Mahit shivered, a violent little shudder of the muscles in her back.

“Do you think he’s right?” Three Seagrass said to her, almost too low to hear. “They’re a collective? Is it like—you?”

“Stationers are chains,” Mahit said, “lines, not—he’s describing a fractal web of minds, that’s nothing like—yes, I think he could be right, it would make sense with how they always seem to know where their other ships are, with no lag over time. He could be.”

Three Seagrass reached for Mahit’s hand, caught it in hers. Mahit hadn’t expected it—hadn’t expected Three Seagrass to touch her at all, in public. But she didn’t pull away. No one was paying attention to them right now. Not when they could be listening to the yaotlek and her adjutant argue about whether he should functionally join the enemy forces, biochemically, mentally, entirely, in hopes of being able to stop a war. And Three Seagrass’s fingers were warm and tight on hers, like an anchor in a spinning world.

“If he does it,” Three Seagrass said, “and he’s right, and he lives—then he’ll have achieved a kind of first-contact negotiation no Teixcalaanlitzlim has ever managed.”

“… Are you jealous?” Mahit found herself asking.

“I’m not brave enough to be jealous,” said Three Seagrass, and looked away.


He died twice before he learned to talk. The worst experiences were the loudest, the strongest: they drew Shard-pilot minds like a black hole draws mass. A Shard dissolving from outside in, all of its shipglass coated with black squirming oil, liquid, thick, the ship-AI alarms all screaming at once and then silenced, and then the pilot himself screaming and screaming and silenced—and even before Eight Antidote could think, could stop tumbling end over end, made of a thousand minds and two thousand eyes, gyroscopic, ever-shifting

(how did anyone survive this, how did anyone learn to be this kind of pilot, to feel everyone near them—)

before he could find himself in the midst of the cacophony, he was spinning in a rictus of fear, engines cut, some other Shard-pilot’s blanked-out panic in his throat as her Shard was struck by the edge of a three-ringed, slick-grey spinning wheel of a ship and she saw the flat pockmarked side of the asteroid coming up fast and faster and faster and I love you I’ve always loved you remember me and nothing. An afterimage of fire.

Two deaths, and almost a third—the spiral-caught tug of horror, a near miss of energy cannon, friendly fire in all its blue death right in front of his face—but that one wasn’t a death, and Eight Antidote somehow found enough of himself to scream in words.

To weep and scream and say, Stop, stop, whoever is carrying a courier message from Three Azimuth, stop, please, wait.

And from a thousand minds and two thousand eyes: What? Who are…? Where? Some attention, a scattering. Not all of them were falling apart. Not all of them were dying: some of them were just—flying, or fighting, or being together, and the nearer ones to him—in his own sector of space, he thought, snatch of coherency, It’s only the worst things that go all the way through accidentally—heard him, and knew he wasn’t Four Crocus, and wanted to know why.

Please, he said. He didn’t know if he was speaking out loud or if he was thinking. I’m Eight Antidote—the old Emperor’s ninety-percent clone—I need to stop that message. It’s wrong. It’s false.

And he tried, as hard as he could, not to think, But you’re dying, and it’s horrible, and what if Three Azimuth and Nineteen Adze were right, and that genocide order is the only way to stop it?

Because if he thought that, they’d never believe him.


Nine Hibiscus was pacing the bridge, back and forth, as if some internal mechanism inside the massive curves of her could not be still and talk to her adjutant at the same time. Mahit couldn’t quite believe the degree to which the conversation they were having was public, where she and Three Seagrass and half the officers on the bridge could all hear how it flitted back and forth through the long shape of friendship, trust, arguments they’d clearly had a hundred times before, but were no longer theoretical, no longer abstract. But how could it be private, when Twenty Cicada was down in a killing-desert and Nine Hibiscus was where she belonged, on the bridge of the ship he had kept running for her? Mahit imagined him with the tendrils of white fungus in their plastic cube, balanced on his palm. The sun would be finally beginning to set on Peloa-2 by now. She wondered if the aliens had claws to his throat or if they’d gone back to their own ship to wait, or retreat, or be smug (if they were capable of smugness) at having convinced a Teixcalaanlitzlim to ingest a poison deliberately.

She imagined how he would open the box, and put the fungus on his tongue, and be prepared to die, or to solve the problem, exactly as he had in the medbay of Weight for the Wheel. Imagined that, and found that Yskandr was thinking of Six Direction—or she was thinking of Six Direction—fever-flushed, worn to bones and eyes by age and illness. Prepared to die, or solve the problem, even if it meant he was not himself any longer by making use of a Lsel imago-machine.

Is it good to know that he wasn’t the only Teixcalaanlitzlim who would make an attempt like this? she asked, forming the question deliberately in the empty mirrored room of their mind.

Yskandr told her, which was a sideways answer. The rush of grief and longing and pride was clearer—Yes, he was saying, but he never would have been in a situation like this one, so who knows.

Nine Hibiscus was a shadow passing in front of the shipglass forward viewports, her silhouette hiding and revealing the still-present shape of that alien ship that had brought the negotiators down to Peloa-2. It hovered and spun, and she paced. Argued.

When Darj Tarats emerged from the little room he’d been taken off to, accompanied by one of the other bridge officers—Mahit thought that was the navigation officer, but she couldn’t remember his name or what exactly he did—she was almost as surprised as she’d been by his presence at all. It was so much easier to not think of him. To not feel Yskandr recoil—to recoil herself, ashamed and angry and afraid.

“Councilor,” she said, trying to let everyone know he was present. All of the Teixcalaanlitzlim on the bridge turned to look at him, and at her—all except Nine Hibiscus. She had better things to think about, clearly.

“Dzmare,” he said to her, and approached. She found that she was standing up, as if she was going to back away—found that her hand was still in Three Seagrass’s hand and saw Tarats’s eyes go to that link, a diving glance that seemed to fundamentally satisfy him; his mouth curved into a brittle and vicious smile. In their own language, he said, “I see, now, what you have been doing. Why you were so willing to go with this woman—she offered you more than just a respite from Aknel Amnardbat and her covetousness of your imago-machine, didn’t she? Something nicer.”

Yskandr said—and Mahit did. She was too angry to do anything but acquiesce. It felt like falling away into herself; her center of gravity shifted, the angle of her head changed. But fractionally. Less than before. They were closer together now. The trick of slipping in and out of Yskandr Aghavn or Mahit Dzmare wouldn’t work, eventually. They’d be past it.

“And how many times,” she said—Yskandr said, the faint drawl to his voice, the flattened Stationer consonants that came from utter confidence and too long speaking Teixcalaanli—“did you tell my predecessor that the seduction of empire could go both ways?”

Oh, she hoped no one else on this ship spoke enough Stationer to notice her playing games with Tarats—throwing all that long epistolary history between him and Yskandr back at him, to see if he’d flinch—and making herself seem like a spy with no loyalties to anyone at all, not Lsel and not Teixcalaan, while she did it. (She hoped Three Seagrass knew as little Stationer as she claimed to. That was the core of it. She didn’t want to break whatever it was that they had managed to salvage between them. Not for Darj Tarats.)

“Look where it got him,” spat Tarats, and gestured at Mahit as if she was the affront to all his sensibilities. “Look where it’s getting you.”

“And where is that?” Yskandr said, with her mouth. “Where exactly are we, that you are not? Dependent on the actions of Teixcalaan to save or destroy us—how has anything changed?”

She’d never had the continuation of an argument that she’d not been present for, before. Her hands ached, prickled. Burned. Careful, she thought, but she didn’t exactly want him to be careful. Didn’t want, herself, to be careful. Only to win. She wished she knew what winning would look like—

“All of your line,” said Tarats, vicious, “have no core of loyalty to rely on—if one of you ever did, the rest of the line would expose it to vacuum and wither it. Perhaps Amnardbat had the right idea after all.”

Mahit—her, not Yskandr, Yskandr was a glimmer of horror and fascination—lifted her burning, insensible hand to slap him across the face.


Shard-sight was a cacophony; it was the chaos and movement and noise of Inmost Province Spaceport magnified by orders of magnitude, and Eight Antidote barely felt like he existed in the huge flow of it. The single point of him—where he was, his body, his life and what he knew—he kept losing track. He died again, caught in someone’s firefight with a spinning ship, a burst of savage triumph as that pilot threw themselves into the enemy, becoming a spear, a piece of shrapnel caught in the heart of those whirling rings, an explosion. It hurt. It hurt every time.

And he kept saying, Please. Listen to me. I need you to stop that message. One of you has it—one of you is carrying it through a jumpgate, one of you is about to carry it—and it’s worse. It’s worse than this. It’s false and wrong and I am the heir to Teixcalaan and I am telling you if you let that message reach the battlefront all of this death will be a prelude—

It wasn’t words, exactly. It was feeling. Thinking at, or through, the whirl of eyes.

And at last, coming back to him: a singular voice, a person, his Shard on direct vector toward a jumpgate discontinuity, far (Still far! Still perhaps far enough!) from the dying of his fellow pilots. A voice unused to hesitance, and hesitant now, asking him, If you’re Eight Antidote, if you’re that kid from the holovids and the newsfeeds, if you’re the kid who was covered in our Emperor’s blood when he died for us, then promise me you mean it. Promise me that if I lose this message, the way we are dying will stop.

A silence, in the kaleidoscope. Another scream, stifled; Eight Antidote couldn’t think of where his eyes were, or what eyes really were, if they did not feel everything at once. A waiting silence.

I promise, he said, meaning it, and not knowing if his promise was a lie.


Tarats’s cheek was a stinging red where Mahit had slapped it. He lunged for her, a forward motion that seemed to be all teeth, his hands still restrained at the wrist. She darted backward, and Three Seagrass—amazed and horrified and utterly delighted, all at once, which was pretty much how Mahit doing anything made her feel, really—stepped in front of her. The Councilor from Lsel towered over her by a foot and a half. His chest was very narrow. Three Seagrass was narrow herself, but she was also a good forty years younger than Darj Tarats, and she figured if she had to, she could probably knock him over. It would be an enormous diplomatic faux pas, but what wasn’t, currently? Everything about this bridge right now was a complete mess. All protocol dissolved! There wasn’t an iota of Information Ministry training that covered tripartite negotiations from the bridge of a Fleet flagship, where one of the negotiating parties wasn’t even human and one of the others wasn’t Teixcalaanli, and none of the parties were Information agents except the negotiator. She should write a procedure manual.

If she lived long enough to be that bored.

Tarats backed off. Ah, so he was willing to attack Mahit, but not some Teixcalaanlitzlim. That was useful to know.

Yaotlek,” said Two Foam—the comms officer sounded agonized, having to interrupt her commander again, especially while she was still talking to Twenty Cicada down on Peloa-2. Three Seagrass turned to see what had caught Two Foam’s attention now, and was entirely surprised by the person who had entered the bridge: a soldier with the bright pointed triangle of a Shard pilot on his sleeve, who was openly weeping.

She’d wept, of course. In public, even. And been embarrassed and horrified by it, or else felt entirely appropriate, because she’d been in mourning. But she’d never once wept like this man was weeping, endlessly and continuously, and come to report to her superior while she was doing it.

Nine Hibiscus turned to see the soldier, and Three Seagrass watched her face go grey under the space-kissed bronze of her cheeks. “Hold on,” she said, still to Twenty Cicada. “Don’t do anything while I’m not paying attention, Swarm, that’s an order—Pilot. Pilot, what’s your name? What’s wrong?”

She came toward him, and he turned his face up to her like he was a flower planted too deep in the shade, reaching for sunlight. “Shard Pilot Fifteen Calcite, yaotlek,” he said, without ceasing to cry. It seemed to be something that was happening to him, an autonomic process which did not deter him from attempting to report to his superior. The degree of loyalty Nine Hibiscus commanded was intense. Radiant.

He went on: “Shard-sight is—corrupted, or too intense, or—we don’t know what’s happening to us exactly, yaotlek, but it’s not like Shard-sight was when you were a Shard pilot, it’s the new programming, the collective proprioception—we keep feeling each other die, and there are so many, and I’ve turned off all my programming but I can’t stop thinking about it. You need to know that there’s a threshold—a threshold for trauma experience, I think—where the proprioception starts a feedback loop. I’m not the only one who can’t stop crying, yaotlek. I’m so sorry. I don’t mean to insult you like this.”

Nine Hibiscus shook her head. “I am the farthest thing from insulted, Pilot Fifteen Calcite. Tell me a little more, if you can. I know about the—afterimages, in Shard-sight. I was one of you, not so long ago. But this—when did this start? Are the Shards still operational?”

“—When more than three or four of us died near each other, and all of the casualties were running the Shard trick—I mean, the proprioception upgrade.”

Three Seagrass knew she shouldn’t interrupt this—but she wasn’t Fleet, bound by protocol, and she had never heard about this technology. “The Shard trick?” she asked, loud enough to cut through the heavy silence surrounding Nine Hibiscus and her soldier, the rest of the bridge quiet save for the static of the open channel down to Peloa-2, and Twenty Cicada listening.

Every head turned to look at her. She repeated herself. “The Shard trick?”

Two Foam, behind and to her left, murmuring in what Three Seagrass suspected was the hope of getting her to shut up, “New technology from the Ministry of Science—it lets Shard pilots feel where each of the others are in space, and eliminates a lot of navigational lag—it’s based off the algorithm for the Sunlit—”

Three Seagrass was absolutely sure she—and all of the Information Ministry—were not supposed to know about this particular technology. War and Science again, working together and not letting Information in on the game—let alone the Emperor and her staff—just like it had been during the near-insurrection two months ago. The same pattern of influence. She said, much louder than Two Foam had, “The Fleet is using a mind-sharing technology for navigational purposes?”

And heard Mahit laugh, a brittle fast noise. “… See, Three Seagrass?” she said, “it’s not so far a step from what Teixcalaan does already to what we Stationers have done with imago-lines for generations. Except we don’t let anyone go in unprepared, like this pilot has—”

And cut herself off, realizing what she’d said.

Realizing, almost certainly, that she’d admitted the existence of imago-machines without any of Yskandr Aghavn’s careful dance of secrecy.

But it was too late. Councilor Tarats, all his teeth bared—she was never going to understand how Stationers smiled, and what the expression beyond smiling was, and where the edges could be—leaned right over Three Seagrass to snap something nasty and fast in Stationer. Three Seagrass caught imago-machine and could guess the rest: traitor, betrayer, exposer of our proprietary secret incredibly immoral technology, fuck you and everything you stand for. Obvious, really. Obvious, from how Mahit reacted, too—how she blanched and then shoved Three Seagrass gently out of the way to meet Tarats head-on. (Everyone on the bridge was looking at them now. Even the weeping Shard pilot, who had mostly devolved to sniffling.)

Mahit started whatever she was saying in Stationer—one long sentence, a snarl of consonants—and then switched, fluid and easy, to Teixcalaanli. “And, Councilor—do you really think I am the first to trade our technology for our continued existence? Twenty years you wrote to Yskandr, and he fooled you the entire time.” Her voice was silk, slick, sliding in and out of the tonality Three Seagrass was familiar with, and she knew that she was listening in part to Yskandr Aghavn (who was—so very like Mahit, but not at all her, and—oh, there’d either be time for Three Seagrass to panic about which one of them she’d slept with and trusted or there wouldn’t be time for anything, so that didn’t matter now).

Tarats said—in perfectly understandable language, he was capable, obviously—“If you are saying that Aghavn created some kind of—collective mind, that’s not imago-technology, Dzmare. That’s an aberration. A Teixcalaanli corruption, if it exists at all.”

Mahit threw her head back and laughed. “Tarats. Oh, my friend, my predecessor’s friend, my patron and foil—no, why would we do that? When all we had to do was what you asked, and let Teixcalaan fall in love with us, and promise the Empire memory eternal in exchange for our freedom?”

“What you’re doing is sick,” Darj Tarats said, “a perversion of imago-integration—you’re not Yskandr. The pretense is vulgar.”

“No,” Mahit said. “I’m not Yskandr. I would never have offered the Emperor Six Direction an imago-machine, and I would never have died for it. I would have done something else you’d despise. Teixcalaan doesn’t let us stay clean. Not you, not me, not Yskandr. I’m him enough to be sure of that. I remember what I am. What you helped make him, and what he has made me.”

The low static of the open channel that Twenty Cicada was listening through crackled. Hissed. Resolved into his voice, serene and strange. “Ah, Mallow,” he said, and Nine Hibiscus spun like she’d been stung, stared at the starfields outside the bridge like they would resolve into her adjutant’s face. “I won’t even be the first, it seems. Lsel is far ahead of us, aren’t they? But we’re catching up.”

“Don’t,” said Nine Hibiscus. But she didn’t say I order you not to. Nor did she say please. Three Seagrass thought the two might have been equivalent.

“It has been the deepest honor of my life to serve with you, my dear,” said Twenty Cicada. “Wish me luck.”

And then that open-channel static cut off to silence. Circuit closed.

Somewhere down on Peloa-2 a man who believed that waste was the worst thing that could happen to a society was letting himself be devoured.


Even after he’d promised, even after he knew he’d—succeeded, if success meant feeling some Shard pilot far distant from anywhere he’d ever been take a War Ministry–sealed infofiche stick and crush it, stamp it under his heel against the side of his cockpit—smash the battle-flag sigil, the sun all gone to spears, nothing left of illumination except the gold sealing wax—the splintered pieces floating up from around his boot, gravityless, sparkling—even after all of that, Eight Antidote couldn’t quite stop being in Shard-sight. He was spread out so far. There were so many Shards, and he didn’t know which way was up, or if up had meaning, or if he had meaning, really: he was only himself, and there wasn’t a lot of himself compared to dying and desperation and the endless shifting overwhelming beauty of stars and void and moving all together, like a murmuration of birds.

He was scared, and proud. Those things were his, he was sure. But they were the Shard pilots’, too, and it wasn’t enough to be scared and proud. He felt like he was dissolving. Salt dropped in water.

Death and pain drew Shard-sight, but so did a sufficient number of Shards together: and there was one of those now, a center-point of a swarm, a group that knew one another even without the collective feeling that made the Shard trick work over impossible boundaries, impossible distances. That group hung suspended like a scatter of stars themselves, all around a flagship, all moving together, a shifting shield that kept the behemoth of their flagship-home hidden from easy view, easy comprehension. He caught the very edge of a name: that ship was the Parabolic Compression. That ship was the pride of the Twenty-Fourth Legion.

And it, and its Shards, were already—already, without ever being ordered, heedless of anything Eight Antidote had done or learned or promised—approaching the inhabited planetary system of the alien enemy, and they were aflame with triumph and vicious anticipation: they were going to end this all, now, together, at last—

No, Eight Antidote thought, but the word was gone, gone inside the wide stretch of linked-up minds. Too soft to hear. He wasn’t enough of anything, anymore, to reach so far.

Please, no! One voice in a cacophony, in a choir of other negations, worse ones: no, don’t let me die—no, I can’t do this, I am afraid—no, no, no, this cannot be happening—

And the Shards of the Twenty-Fourth pressed forward, unafraid; unconvinced, if they’d even heard him at all.

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