A Memory Called Empire

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE first checkpoint between Belltown Six and the Information Ministry’s building in Palace-East woke Mahit from that state just beyond consciousness. All she wanted in the world was to sink back into the grey silence behind her eyelids, and until now—a perfect fifteen, twenty minutes—no one, not Three Seagrass nor the driver nor even Yskandr in her mind, had pushed her awake. The voices and the lights at the checkpoint changed all of that.

Blinking, she sat up. The groundcar had slowed to a stop, and the driver had peeled down one of the windows. Outside the air was lightening to dawn, a smear of grey-pink—and something smelled of smoke, acrid—

Low voices. The driver did something with his cloudhook, projected an identification sequence. Whoever was on the other side said, “We can let you through on that permit, but you don’t want to go. They’re marching from the skyport, and the citizenry is marching to meet them. You really don’t want to do this.”

Yes I do, Mahit thought, and didn’t know if it was Yskandr’s thought or her own.

“Yes,” Three Seagrass said, “we do. I have vital intelligence to report to my Ministry. Sir.”

The driver shrugged, expressively, as if to say, I’m just here to help. Through the opened window Mahit heard a low thump, as if somewhere, not very far away at all, someone had set off a bomb.

(—Fifteen Engine, studded with shrapnel, blood leaking from his mouth, his blood like tears running down Mahit’s face, and that noise, the hollow explosion-noise—)

She swallowed hard. The window rolled up. They kept moving. Inside the groundcar it was difficult to see what they were driving through; all sound was muffled and the windows were privacy-tinted dark. She kept thinking that she was hearing more of those sounds, the way that a bomb going off made a kind of collapse in the air.

“Did you know,” she found herself saying, right out loud, bright and brittle and uncontrolled, “that the worst thing on Lsel, the absolute worst thing, is fire—fire eats oxygen—fire rises—fire extinguisher drills are every other day, they start when we’re two or three years old, whenever we’re big enough to hold the extinguisher—fire is bad and explosives are worse.”

“I don’t know why there’d be bombings at all,” Twelve Azalea said. “This isn’t—no one wants to hurt the City, it’s about who gets to have the City, right?”

The groundcar slowed again, but there was no halt at any checkpoint. Just a crawl, like they’d hit traffic. “Make the windows transparent,” Mahit said. Nothing happened.

Three Seagrass’s teeth were gritted very tightly. Mahit could see the tension in her jaw. “Petal,” she said, “it’s the Fleet. Bombing massed civilian uprisings is how the Fleet works. You know that.” And to the driver, “Turn the opacity down, would you?”

This time, the driver did.

Through the groundcar’s windows—smoky glass, paling to clear—what Mahit saw at first made very little sense. People didn’t break things, on Lsel—not property, not with cavalier abandon. The shell of a station was fragile and if some part of the machinery of it snapped, people would die: of breathing vacuum, of icy chill, of the hydroponics system shutting down. Casual vandalism on Lsel was a matter of graffiti, elaborate hacks, blocking off hallways with the hull-breach-repair expanding foam canisters. But here in the streets of the City she was watching a Teixcalaanli woman, in a perfectly reasonable suit jacket and trousers, swing what looked like a metal pole into the window of a shop, and shatter the glass there. Do that, walk onward, and do it again.

Other people were running—they were in the streets, which was why the groundcar had slowed so much. Some of them had the purple larkspur pins, and some of them had no identificatory marks at all to show their loyalties, and some were Sunlit, gold and terrifying and moving in sharp little triads, like scout-ships diving gravityless through descending orbits. There was smoke in the air, drifting in from over one heartbreakingly lovely many-spired building. The groundcar’s driver had taken on an expression of grim and serene determination, pushing forward in spurts that made all of Mahit’s insides slosh against her abdominal wall with every jerk of acceleration.

“I don’t see legions,” Twelve Azalea said, leaden.

Three Seagrass had crawled out of the backseat and into the front, beside the driver. “We’re not close enough to the skyport. This is—spillover—”

They heard the shouting—two sets of shouting, back and forth, rhythmic and poetic like the beating of a heart but out of time, not together, a heart in fibrillation—before they managed to get much farther. It was a wave of sound, punctuated at unpredictable moments by the thump of another explosion. The driver, seeing some opening that Mahit couldn’t spot, floored the acceleration and shot the groundcar around a corner—Mahit was thrown half into Twelve Azalea’s lap—they raced down an alley—and then the street opened up, a blooming, easy roadway, into a plaza. And there they were: two massed groups of Teixcalaanlitzlim, screaming at one another. The car stopped. There wasn’t a way forward through that seething mass.

Where the two groups touched, violence erupted like fungal growths after a long, wet spring. Blood on the face of a woman with a larkspur pin tied to her arm like a mourning band, blood from how she’d been punched, and the woman who’d punched her—so close to the groundcar that Mahit could hear everything—shouted For the Emperor One Lightning! and smeared her bloodied hand across her forehead, like she was a person in a historical epic marking the sacrifice of her enemy.

They didn’t look like Teixcalaanlitzlim, Mahit thought. Drifting thought, absurd, disconnected. They looked like people. Just like people. Tearing each other apart.

There was another one of those terrible thuds of collapsing air, much closer this time. An answering bang from a group of Sunlit, who were abruptly surrounded by quick-spreading white smoke—the people fighting near them began to cough, ran away from the gas, uncaring which side of the street riot they were on. They ran right by the groundcar, eyes streaming, red. Some of the gas began to seep in through the sealed doors, the windows.

“Fuck,” said Three Seagrass. “Cover your mouth with your shirt—that’s crowd-dispersal gas—we can’t stay here—”

Mahit covered her mouth with her shirt. Her eyes burned. Her throat burned.

Yskandr told her. She was suddenly calm—clear-calm, poised, everything slow. Yskandr doing something to her adrenal glands.

“We can’t stay here,” Mahit said out loud, and opened the door. The white gas billowed in. “Follow me.”

She couldn’t breathe—the first breath she took was fire, blazing in her lungs, and Yskandr said, so she ran—not knowing how she was running, not knowing how it was possible for her body to run. Not knowing if anyone was following her at all. Yskandr seemed to know some secret path—some familiar pattern in the horrible swirl of blood and white smoke, and she saw for the first time a Fleet-uniformed legionnaire, grey and gold, a squadron of them—Yskandr spun her, rotated her from the hip, a pivot, and raced her away at an angle. There were footsteps behind her. Rapid ones, matching her pace. She looked back: Three Seagrass, and Twelve Azalea. The driver, too.

They skirted the edge of the plaza, raced down a street Mahit was sure she’d never seen. How many times did you come this way, she thought, through the pounding of her heart, the way she was gasping for air only when Yskandr thought she couldn’t bear not to gasp.

lived here. This is my home—was—>

After another two minutes they slowed to a walk. Mahit was entirely sure she’d faint if Yskandr wasn’t making her keep going. No one spoke. The sounds of the riot receded to a dim roar. They reached the demarcation of the palace from the rest of the City—no one guarded the tiny pathway they followed inside, no Sunlit and no Mist and no legions. Yskandr led them all onward, following muscle memory years old and dead now.

And then, like a curtain parting, they turned one last corner and Mahit found herself in front of the Information Ministry, which looked entirely unscathed. A clean thing, out of a former world.

Yskandr said.

Everything looked so familiar—two minutes of walking would get her to the entrance of the building containing her ambassadorial apartment (that is, if she could go there at all without the interference of the Sunlit and their investigation). But all the tracery of the City’s vast AI was lit up under the plaza tilework, as if the entire palace was a curled beast, preparing to strike.

“I don’t know how you did that,” Three Seagrass said to Mahit. “When we got into the car you could hardly walk.”

“I didn’t,” Mahit said. “Not just me. Not exactly. Are we going to go in?” Her voice was a rag. Now that Yskandr wasn’t controlling her breathing she felt like she couldn’t get enough air. Her chest heaved with each breath.

Three Seagrass looked at their driver, who wore an expression of utter shock: a man undone, a man in a world which no longer made sense. “Are we?” she asked.

“… yes?” he said, and started for the door.

Neither Mahit nor Three Seagrass put their feet on the traces on their way into the Ministry building, even when it made walking awkward and strange.

Inside, there was nothing but the clean and lovely spaces of a Teixcalaanli ministry early in the morning. No sign of distress. Nothing amiss. Mahit found herself on the verge of tears and didn’t know why. Three Seagrass’s driver led them all into an innocuous beige-shaded conference room, complete with a U-shaped table surrounding an infofiche projector, fluorescent lighting, and a plethora of moderately uncomfortable chairs. It was the least Teixcalaanli room Mahit could remember being in since she’d arrived, but she assumed that places where interminable everyday meetings occurred were much the same throughout the entire galaxy. She’d sat in rooms like this on Lsel, in school and at government functions. She sat in this one now. Dimly—so very dimly, through the thick Ministry walls—she heard another explosion. And then silence. Perhaps the riot had been dispersed. The legions were massing elsewhere. Closer to the skyport.

The arrival of a carafe of coffee and a basket of some kind of bread rolls was not standard practice for conference rooms, but perhaps Three Seagrass had pulled some strings for them. The coffee was shockingly, blisteringly good: hot but not hot enough to scald, the paper cup warm in Mahit’s palms. It had a rich, earthy taste that wasn’t anything like the instant coffee on Lsel, and in some better moment Mahit thought she’d really like to drink it slowly enough to think about all the different qualities of the flavor—

varieties,> Yskandr said,

He was right. Even in the few minutes Mahit had been drinking the coffee, she felt more present, more acute, conscious of a faint thrumming in her skin.

It was close to being an apology.

Twelve Azalea was on his second cup. “Now what?” he asked Three Seagrass pointedly. “We wait for a debriefing? I thought we needed to be getting the Ambassador to the Emperor immediately, if that’s even possible considering what’s happening to the City outside.”

We. It hadn’t been very long since she’d asked Twelve Azalea to help her steal Yskandr’s imago-machine from his corpse, and yet after only such a little bit of time, here he was committed to at least a semblance of ideological unity with a barbarian. Then again, he had known where to find Five Portico and her anti-imperial activist friends—ideological unity was flexible. Mutable, under stress. Mahit looked at Three Seagrass, who was as under stress as she had ever seen her: grey at the temples, a raw place on the side of her lip where she must have gnawed it open.

“We do,” she said. “But I owe the Ministry some courtesy, since they came to get us.”

They came to get us. They drove us through a riot. They brought us coffee and breakfast. The world functions as it ought to, and if I keep behaving as if it will continue to, nothing will go wrong. Mahit knew that line of thinking. She knew it intimately and horribly, and she sympathized (she sympathized too much, this was her essential problem, wasn’t it?), and Three Seagrass was still wrong.

Mahit said, “I don’t think we have any time at all—the whole City is going to go up like an oxygen chamber with a spark fault.”

Three Seagrass made a noise surprisingly akin to a hissing steam valve, put her head in her hands, and said, “Just give me one minute to think, all right?”

Mahit figured one minute was within parameters. Probably. Maybe. Everything was very shimmery and surreal. She wondered what level of sleep debt she’d actually reached. There had been the thirty-six hours before she’d slept at Twelve Azalea’s apartment—and possibly being unconscious after brain surgery counted—

said Yskandr, and that was all her Yskandr, the light, quick, bitter amusement of him.

“All right,” Three Seagrass said, so Mahit looked at her, keeping her face perfectly Teixcalaanli-neutral, trying not to visibly need her liaison’s support as much as she actually did.

Three Seagrass spread her hands, a helpless little gesture. “I’m going to go ask to report directly to the Minister for Information—and she is undoubtedly exceptionally busy just now, so we’ll have an appointment—and we’ll come back when that appointment is scheduled.” She got to her feet. “Don’t go anywhere. Central Desk is just down the hall, on this floor, I’ll be five minutes.”

It was an incredibly transparent ruse. But transparency had worked for them before; transparency seemed to have its own gravity when placed alongside the Teixcalaanli overcommitment to narrative. It bent the light. Mahit nodded to Three Seagrass, said, “Try it,” and followed that with “And don’t worry about us going anywhere. Where would we go?”

Twelve Azalea and Yskandr laughed, in simultaneous eerie echo, and then Three Seagrass was gone, slipped out the door like a seed-skiff squirted from the side of a cruiser.

They waited. Mahit felt naked without Three Seagrass, alone. More and more exposed, the longer she was gone—especially as the time stretched from two minutes to five, to ten. She could hardly feel anything but the low, anxious thrumming of her own heart, transmitted through her chest to weigh heavy on the spot just between the arcs of her ribs. Most of the peripheral neuropathy was gone—just the occasional shimmer in her fingertips, and she had suspicions that might be permanent. She didn’t know how that made her feel. So far she could still hold a stylus, even if she couldn’t necessarily feel the pressure of it. If it got worse again—

Later.

When the door to the conference room reopened, and Three Seagrass was there behind it, the release of tension was like being kicked—and then Mahit saw that she was not alone, and the person with her was not wearing Information Ministry white-and-orange at all, but had a spray of purple flowers pinned to the collar of his deep blue jacket. It was fresh; live flowers, cut within the last day. When all of Thirty Larkspur’s supporters had been wearing these at the oration contest, they had been fashion, amusements, Teixcalaanli political signaling on symbolic channels. When they had been wearing them in the streets it was a way to take sides in a war. Now this one looked like a badge of office, or of party loyalty.

“Sit down,” said the newcomer to Three Seagrass, and gave her a push. Mahit was half out of her seat immediately, angry, gathering her breath to speak—but Three Seagrass sat down as she’d been told to. She was flushed across the face, furious, but she waved a hand at Mahit to subside, and she did.

“Ambassador,” said their visitor, “asekretim. I’m obliged to tell you that you will not be permitted to leave the Ministry building at this time.”

“Are we being arrested?” Twelve Azalea asked.

“Certainly not. You are being detained for your own safety.”

“I want,” Twelve Azalea went on, strident, and Mahit was proud of him, sickeningly so, “to speak to Minister Two Rosewood herself about this. Right now. And who are you, anyway?”

“Two Rosewood is no longer the Minister for Information,” said this person, ignoring Twelve Azalea’s request for his name or affiliation. “She has been relieved of her duties during the current crisis by the ezuazuacat Thirty Larkspur. I can convey to him your desire to speak to him, if you like. I’m sure he’ll get to you as his time allows.”

“What?” said Mahit.

“Do you have trouble with your hearing, Ambassador?”

“With my credulity,” said Mahit.

“There is nothing to be overly concerned about—”

“You have just told us we cannot leave and that the Minister has been deposed—”

“There were questions as to her loyalties,” said Thirty Larkspur’s man, and he shrugged. “Thirty Larkspur intends to keep the Empire in safe and steady hands. There are legions in our streets, Ambassador, it is very dangerous to move about just now. Sit tight. Thirty Larkspur will take care of this, and it will all blow over within the week.”

Mahit had her doubts. Mahit had more doubts than she precisely knew what to do with: a proliferation of uncertainty, a sweeping tide of being sure that she’d missed something. Thirty Larkspur was executing … what, a coup in advance of One Lightning’s coup? It was possible she was already too late to do anything to turn the annexation force away from Lsel, whether she had tradeable knowledge of impending external threat to Teixcalaan or not. At the oration contest it had been Thirty Larkspur himself—resplendent in blue and lilac, perfectly serene—who had told her that the deal was off. If he had gained control of the civil service—he who was apparently willing to dismiss Lsel the instant it wasn’t useful to his plans—

“We cannot,” said Twelve Azalea, and Mahit was very grateful to him for saying anything that would get her out of her own mind, “stay in a conference room for a week. And I still don’t know who you are. Sir.”

“I am Six Helicopter,” said the man—Mahit stared at him, and wondered when he’d learned to say his name with not only a straight face but with that degree of smugness—“and of course you won’t be spending a week in a conference room, asekretim. Ambassador. You’ll be moved to a safe and well-appointed location, just as soon as we have got one to put you in.”

“And that will be when?” Twelve Azalea went on. He had perfected a sort of incredulous, high-pitched stridency: the voice of a person who was being inconvenienced and was going to make a scene about it. Distantly, Mahit found it admirable. Strategic. She didn’t interrupt him. “By whose definition of safe? You’re implying that there is an attempted usurpation occurring as we speak!”

“The yaotlek’s little adventure will be over long before you could call this unpleasantness an usurpation,” said Six Helicopter. “I have a great deal of work to do—I’ll make sure someone brings you three more coffee. Please don’t try to leave. You will be stopped at the door—this really is a safe place right now. Don’t worry.”

And with that, he left. The door to the conference room clicked innocuously behind him. Three Seagrass promptly, and disturbingly, broke into laughter.

“Did that actually just happen?” she asked. “Did some jumped-up bureaucrat without an inch of training in protocol just tell us that the Information Ministry is under the control of the ezuazuacatlim? Because I think that was what just happened, and I am at a complete loss; do forgive me, Mahit, this is not within my fucking portfolio of plausible scenarios that I might encounter while acting as cultural liaison to a foreign ambassador.”

“If it helps,” said Mahit, “it isn’t in my portfolio of plausible scenarios I might encounter as a foreign ambassador, either.”

Three Seagrass pressed her palm over her face and exhaled, deliberate and forced. Stifled snickering still escaped from between her fingers. “… no,” she said, “I can’t imagine it would be.”

“If we can’t leave,” Twelve Azalea said, “how are we going to get the Ambassador to the Emperor? Even just across the palace grounds, even if that riot doesn’t spill over. In the best-case scenario.”

And will there still be an emperor for me to get to, once we’re there? Mahit thought, and then had to bite the inside of her cheek against a rush of grief that mostly wasn’t hers; it was Yskandr who felt that impending loss like heartbreak, not her. Not—entirely her. (And yet she remembered the pressure of Six Direction’s hands across her wrists and hoped—useless, biochemical ache in her sternum—that His Brilliance would somehow survive this insurrection, even if he wouldn’t survive much longer than it.)

But who else could she bargain with?

“What if we aren’t trying to get to His Brilliance,” she said. “What if we were trying to get the attention of someone who could get us to him?”

“From inside this conference room,” said Twelve Azalea skeptically, gesturing toward the carafe of coffee. “You know they’re monitoring our cloudhooks, and you don’t even have one—”

“Yes,” Mahit snapped, “I am still aware that I am not a citizen of Teixcalaan, I have not forgotten even once, you don’t have to remind me.”

“That wasn’t what I meant—”

Mahit exhaled hard enough that she could feel it in her surgical site. “No. But it is what you said.”

Three Seagrass had taken her hands away from her face, and the expression which was growing there was one that Mahit had seen before: it was Three Seagrass focusing inward, preparing to bend the universe around her will, because all other options were untenable. It was the expression she’d worn when they’d eaten ice cream in the park, before invading the Judiciary. The expression she’d worn in Nineteen Adze’s front office, determined to walk off physical insult and trauma.

“There are all kinds of things a person can do with a cloudhook, no matter how monitored,” she said. “Mahit—whose attention do you want?”

There was really only one answer to that question. “Her Excellency the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze,” said Mahit. “Her rank is the same as Thirty Larkspur’s, which means that she probably can walk right in here the same as he did—and I think she still likes me.”

Yskandr murmured.

She liked you very much, and she saved my life, Mahit thought. Let’s find out why, shall we?

“All right. Nineteen Adze, she who terrifies me even after all of the other terrifying events currently taking place,” said Three Seagrass. She’d become very cheerful, in the time between having had an idea—whatever that idea would turn out to be—and announcing it. Mahit understood that, too. The power of having any sort of plan, no matter how absurd or impossible. And weren’t all three of them rather emotionally labile, just recently? “For Her Excellency—Mahit, how do you feel about writing some very pointed poetic verse? And posting it on the open newsfeeds.”

“And you said I read too many political romances,” Twelve Azalea muttered.

“I’m not going to leaflet Palace-East to announce my endless love for the Third Judiciary Under-Minister,” Three Seagrass said, her eyes sparkling. “That would be a political romance. This is a known poet posting her newest work in response to current events. With an encoded statement in it.”

“Do you often post poems on open newsfeeds?” Mahit asked, fascinated.

“It’s a little gauche,” said Three Seagrass, “but these are difficult times, and that exquisitely boring Fourteen Spire won the imperial oration contest last week. Clearly anyone can be gauche, and be feted in public.”

“And you think that Nineteen Adze will, what, come get us, if we appeal to her in verse?” It was too clever to be practical; it was all Teixcalaanli symbolic logic and Mahit didn’t trust it.

“I don’t know what she’ll do,” said Three Seagrass. “But I know she’ll read it, and then she’ll know where we are, and what we need. You saw how her staff monitors the newsfeeds—Nineteen Adze pays attention, that’s the first thing in her Ministry briefing file.”

Mahit caught her eyes, shoving away an entirely inappropriate impulse to reach out for her. “Three Seagrass,” she said, knowing she needed to find out how far Three Seagrass was prepared to go for her, if they set out down this trajectory, “how wide is the Teixcalaanli definition of ‘we’? You don’t even know what I need to tell His Brilliance. Are we a ‘we,’ here?”

“I’m your liaison, Mahit,” Three Seagrass said. She almost sounded hurt. “Haven’t I made that clear enough?”

“This is more than you opening doors for me,” Mahit told her. “This is my goals in your words, on the public newsfeeds, in the public memory of Teixcalaan, forever.”

“Sometimes I swear you could be one of us,” Three Seagrass said, quite softly. She smiled a tremulous but creditable Stationer-smile, all her teeth visible. “Now, help me write this, won’t you? I know you have at least a rudimentary sense of scansion, and we need to get this done before Thirty Larkspur’s man-on-the-spot remembers we have cloudhooks.” Then she did reach out to touch Mahit, her fingertips like a ghost, brushing over her cheekbone. Mahit shivered helplessly, and went very still: like she was waiting for a blow.

“Reed,” Twelve Azalea said, theatrically scandalized, “flirt on your own time.”

Mahit wished she wasn’t pale enough that blushing was visible on her cheeks; telltale scarlet flushes, and the heat burning there. “We’re not,” she said. “Flirting. We’re discussing strategies—”

Yskandr commented, and Mahit wished profoundly that she could get him to shut up. At least when he’d been defective he hadn’t been able to be so … revelatory, in his commentary.

“We’re writing poetry,” Three Seagrass said, and managed, by maintaining an expression of perfect serenity, to make the activity sound profoundly intimate.

Yskandr went on.

Mahit had written poetry in Teixcalaanli before: she’d written it alone in her capsule room on Lsel, scribbling in notebooks at age seventeen, pretending she could imitate Pseudo-Thirteen River or One Skyhook or any of the other great poets; framing her own unformed ideas in language that didn’t belong to her twice over: she was too barbarian, and too young. Now, sitting with her head bent next to Three Seagrass’s, adjusting scansion and carefully selecting which classical allusions to foreground, she thought: Poetry is for the desperate, and for people who have grown old enough to have something to say.

Grown old enough, or lived through enough incomprehensible experiences. Perhaps she was old enough for poetry now: she had three lives inside her, and a death. When she wasn’t careful she remembered that death too much, her breath coming shorter and shorter until she reminded Yskandr that he was neither dying now nor in charge of her autonomic nervous system.

Three Seagrass, for her part, composed verse like putting on a tailored suit jacket—a process she knew how to make look good, that made her look good in return. Her mental library of glyphs and allusions was vast, and Mahit envied it viciously: if only she’d been raised here, had spent her whole life immersed, she could turn phrases from pedestrian to resonant in a minute’s work, too.

The poem they’d come up with was not long. It couldn’t be—it needed to move quickly through the open newsfeeds, be quotable and express itself clearly: clearly to the populace, and then in a more nuanced, layered fashion to Nineteen Adze and her staff. Mahit had begun it with an image she knew Five Agate would recognize: Five Agate had been there. And Five Agate, clever and loyal and trained in interpretation, would know how desperate Mahit truly was—and tell her ezuazuacat everything.

In the soft hands of a child

even a map of the stars can withstand

forces that pull and crack. Gravity persists.

Continuity persists: uncalloused fingers walk orbital paths, but I am drowning

in a sea of flowers; in violet foam, in the fog of war—

Two Cartograph, in the library at dawn with his mother, playing with a map of a star system. The first signal: You know who I am, Five Agate: I am Mahit Dzmare, who understood your love for your son, and for your mistress. The second: I am under threat, and the threat is from Thirty Larkspur: flowers, violet foam.

“Fog of war” was hardly an allusion. That was more of an inevitable and presently occurring truth, and besides, it fit Three Seagrass’s scansion scheme.

The rest of it was brief: an ekphrasis of the Information Ministry building, all of its architecture described in detail, imagined with garlands of larkspurs thrown over it like a funeral—that was an allusion to a section of The Buildings—to tell Nineteen Adze where they were; and then a promise, in a single couplet:

Released, my tongue will speak visions.

Released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun.

Come rescue us, Nineteen Adze. Come rescue us, and help us preserve the sun-spear throne in its correct and proper orbit.

Mahit looked over the poem one last time. It wasn’t bad. To her eyes—and she knew she was untrained—it looked good, looked effective and elegant. “Send it,” she said to Three Seagrass. “I don’t think we’re going to do better in this limited amount of time.”

“I’d send it now,” Twelve Azalea added. “I’ve been watching the newsfeeds while you’ve been working. This is getting very bad, very quickly—One Lightning’s legions are shooting at the customs officials, claiming that the people need them in the City proper, to quell the rioting. I don’t know who is going to stop them—how do we stop a legion? Our legions are unstoppable.”

“It’s sent,” Three Seagrass said. “Under my byline, on every open feed I can find, and a few of the closed ones—the poetry circles, one of the Information Ministry internal memo feeds—”

“Is that a good idea?” Mahit asked. “Thirty Larkspur’s people are reading that one, I’m almost sure.”

“Thirty Larkspur’s people will be monitoring our cloudhooks for any messages, if they’re even the slightest bit good at their jobs,” Three Seagrass said. “I would have confiscated them first thing.”

“How useful that you’re on our side and not theirs, then,” Mahit told her, and found herself smiling despite everything.

“How long do you think we have?” Twelve Azalea asked.

“Before the legions storm the palace or before we no longer have a broadcast platform?” Three Seagrass inquired, all too cheerfully. “Stop watching the news, Petal, and come see how this poem spreads while I’ve still got access.”

She unhooked her cloudhook from its customary position over her right eye and put it on the conference table in front of them, changing its settings so that it acted as a very small infoscreen projector. Mahit watched the poem they’d written spread through the information network of Teixcalaan—shared from cloudhook to cloudhook, reposted and recontextualized, like watching ink spreading in water.

“How much longer?” she asked softly.

“I’d guess three minutes—this is moving quickly—” Three Seagrass said, and then the door of the conference room flew open with a bang. Six Helicopter stood there, and behind him were two more people—but his companions were dressed in Information Ministry cream and orange. Three Seagrass bowed over her fingertips at them.

“How lovely to see you, Three Lamplight, Eight Penknife,” she said. “How is your afternoon of being suborned by a non-ministry politician going?”

Helplessly, Mahit broke into laughter, even as Three Lamplight and Eight Penknife wordlessly took both Twelve Azalea’s and Three Seagrass’s cloudhooks and handed them to Six Helicopter.

“You realize,” he was saying, “that what you just did—sending unauthorized political poetry on the public feeds—might be construed as treasonous? Particularly considering where you were picked up and how Belltown Six is full of anti-imperial protestors this morning, not to mention the rest of the mess in the City?”

“Take it up with the Judiciary,” said Twelve Azalea. Mahit was proud of him. They were all going to die, or … something and yet—they were a we. By whatever language’s definition.

“I have written political poetry appropriate to the current moment of my experience,” said Three Seagrass. “If that’s treason, take it up with our two thousand years of canon. I’m sure you’ll find more treason there.”

Six Helicopter tried not to sputter; failed. With his hands full of cloudhooks, he couldn’t gesture properly, but Mahit could see in the tension of his shoulders and his jaw how much he wanted to wave his hands, or shake Three Seagrass, who sat serene, with her chin cupped in her palms, elbows on the table.

“I am arresting you,” he said finally. “I am … directing these Information Ministry officials to detain you, as acting representative of acting Minister Thirty Larkspur.”

“Bloody stars,” Twelve Azalea said, ignoring Six Helicopter in favor of Three Lamplight, who had visibly winced. “Are you two really going to do that?”

“If you attempt to leave you’ll be stopped,” Three Lamplight said. “That much I guarantee.”

Eight Penknife added, “And your privileges as asekretim are revoked until they might be reviewed by whoever becomes Minister next—”

“I’m terribly disappointed in you, Eight Penknife,” said Three Seagrass with an exquisite little sigh. “You were always such a partisan of Two Rosewood’s policies—”

“Enough,” Six Helicopter snapped. “We have work to do. You do not. Asekretim. Ambassador.” He turned smartly on his heel and left, his Information Ministry loyalists following at his heels. They were alone in the conference room again, with nothing to do, nothing to see—blinded without the cloudhooks and their newsfeeds, confined in windowless fluorescent lighting. Even the carafe of coffee was empty.

Mahit looked at Three Seagrass, and at Twelve Azalea, one on either side of her. “And now,” she said, with far more confidence than she felt, “we wait.”

The waiting was not pleasant. Mahit had the sense of being inside a sealed capsule, protected from radiation and decay, but tumbling over and over in free space—with no guarantee that there would be an outside world to come back to once the capsule was cracked open. There was nothing to see in the Information Ministry’s conference room; no noise from outside, no shouting of soldiers or marching of booted legionary feet. No flooded City streets glittering with the helmets of the Sunlit or a carpet of purple flowers …

Three Seagrass had put her head down on the folded platform of her forearms on the table. Mahit didn’t know if she was napping, or just trying to not think. Either way, she envied her. Not thinking was the province of other people. Not thinking was impossible, and she rather wanted to claw her own skin off. She kept imagining all of the reasons that Nineteen Adze, ezuazuacat or not, wouldn’t challenge Thirty Larkspur for the sake of one Lsel ambassador. The worst of those possibilities was that she and Thirty Larkspur were already allies and she’d merely go along with his decisions about the Information Ministry. The second worst would be if Nineteen Adze had weighed the balance of power, seen that challenging Thirty Larkspur had no chance of success, and opted to stay quiet and ride out the coup, no matter who won …

She probably wouldn’t do that second thing. It didn’t seem like her. That certainty bubbled up in Mahit like a warm tide: not entirely hers, but a composite of Yskandr’s memories and her own, making an evaluation.

“I feel like someone’s cut off my hands,” Twelve Azalea said, into the dull silence. “I keep reaching for the newsfeeds and they’re not there, there’s only me, not the whole Empire ready at a touch.”

Yskandr whispered to Mahit.

We’re never alone, Mahit thought. You and I. Never again in this life.

If there’s a Teixcalaanli ambassador after me.

Mahit hoped, a small leaden heated ball in the pit of her stomach, that it would be. That something of this week, of her, of her and Yskandr together, would not go to waste. That what she knew, now—the external threat to Teixcalaan that she carried in her mind like her very own poison flower, the coordinates of massing alien ships—enough of an external threat to cancel any war of annexation—that it would not die with her and Yskandr. Be silenced with her and Yskandr.

Nevertheless she hated the waiting. She could so easily imagine what was going on outside—a hundred different versions of it, assembled from epic poetry and terrible film and the contraband documentary footage of Teixcalaanli annexation wars on planets on the edge of known space. It wouldn’t be different here in the heart of the Empire, once they started shooting. It wouldn’t be different at all. That was the problem. Empire was empire—the part that seduced and the part that clamped down, jaws like a vise, and shook a planet until its neck was broken and it died.

The first Mahit knew of the end of that long terrible abeyance of time, drifting formless in the blank, unchanging light of the conference room, was a commotion down the hallway—shouting voices, the sound of a door slamming. A pause, and then a great clatter, as if everything on a desk had been swept onto the floor.

“—do you think?” Three Seagrass was saying, getting to her feet.

“Even if it’s not for us, it’s something,” Mahit said. “Something is better than waiting. Let’s go see.”

“We’re arrested,” Twelve Azalea mentioned, off-hand reminder. “But—fuck it. Let’s unarrest ourselves.”

Mahit laughed. Inside her skull, behind the endless ache of the surgical site and the pulse of her blood in her damaged hand, the shimmer of damaged nerves and the endless sour ache in her hip, she almost felt good.

hell of a drug, Mahit,> Yskandr said.

Outside the conference room—they hadn’t even locked it, which felt simultaneously insulting and like Mahit had been a willing participant in her own incarceration, a tiny flare of guilt—and halfway down the hallway leading to the exit, there was a central information desk, staffed by what looked like Three Lamplight, by the height and the haircut. It was this desk whose contents had just been pitched onto the floor, a scatter of infofiche sticks and office paraphernalia, and the destroyer of this small harmony—resplendent in white, and oh, Mahit would never get over how much she loved the symbolic valence of everything the Teixcalaanlitzlim did, however utterly contrived, white because it was Nineteen Adze’s signature—was Five Agate, Nineteen Adze’s best aide and favored student. Her plain face was serene and cold, and she carried in her hand a shockstick: a slim metal rod, crackling with electric energy. Behind her was another Teixcalaanlitzlim in pure white who Mahit had not seen before, and he carried the same weaponry.

It was a cavalry, of sorts. A cavalry in livery, not a single purple spray of flowers amongst them. And it was specifically Five Agate come to find them, which meant that Nineteen Adze might have understood what Mahit and Three Seagrass had been trying to say with their poetry—

“I see them now,” Five Agate said, her voice sharp and ringing. “Those three. Come over here, Ambassador—the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze recognizes that your claim of sanctuary with her has not ended.”

“They never claimed formal sanctuary,” Three Lamplight began, “that won’t stand up for a moment in the Judiciary.”

“Neither will Thirty Larkspur’s palace intrigue,” Five Agate snapped, “so we’re even. I don’t want to cause an incident. Let them come here.”

Mahit began walking down the corridor, Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea flanking her. For a moment she thought that they would make it, that they would be safe in Five Agate’s hands with absolutely no problems, Nineteen Adze’s soft power unsheathed—

—and then Six Helicopter burst out of an office behind them, farther down the hall back the way they’d come. Mahit stopped dead, turned to stare at him. Instead of a shockstick like Five Agate’s, in his hand was what Mahit recognized, with icy horror, as a projectile weapon—outlawed on Lsel, those things could cause hull-breach—and he was shouting. Mahit froze, trapped between Six Helicopter and Five Agate, mid-escape.

“Don’t you fucking dare—like fuck you jumped-up demagogues are going to get to do whatever you want, there’s legions in the streets, you can’t do this anymore—you have got to listen to law and order!”

Inside the horror, Mahit almost found it ridiculous: this petty little man, so angry at losing what little power he’d managed to acquire.

Calmly, Five Agate raised her shockstick, blue-green energy crackling at its end, and began to walk toward Six Helicopter.

The report of the projectile weapon going off was louder than any noise Mahit could remember. There was a scream to her left, short and sharp—and then more bangs, a series of them in a row. She was running down the hallway toward Five Agate without having decided to run, all of her paralysis broken. Three Lamplight had ducked out of view behind the desk, and Five Agate’s support staff was advancing past it, his shockstick glittering.

Another shot, and a bloom of red on Five Agate’s upper arm, spreading in threads, the red pooling in the white of her tunic, her face gone ice-pale. The sound of her shockstick hitting the floor, crackling electricity. Mahit kept running. She reached where Five Agate was—still standing in perfect serenity, as if in shock—grabbed for her other arm, the one that wasn’t bleeding, and pulled her after her.

How many projectiles are in that thing?

Yskandr, in her mind, a tight presence.

Mahit looked back.

Three Seagrass was on her heels, right at her shoulder as she always was, but Twelve Azalea was not—was a tumbled pile in the hallway, unmoving, bright blood pooling around him.

Five Agate’s white-clad attendant shoved his shockstick directly against Six Helicopter’s open mouth. Blue fire went through his skull. There was another report from the projectile weapon—a hole opened up in the attendant’s gut like the staring eye of a singularity—

“Run!” Three Seagrass screamed, and so Mahit did. She ran, one hand clenched around Five Agate’s arm, until she had run right out of the Information Ministry and into the street.