That depends, Mahit thought at him. Did she sabotage us the first time, and if so, why did she? You knew her, Yskandr, you have more—time, more years than I do.
<In her office you were sure she’d done the sabotage.>
In her office I was scared. There was a waiting sort of silence, an abeyance that wasn’t acknowledgment as much as it was frustration, and Mahit was so tired of not thinking half of her own thoughts. Are you happy now, Yskandr? I was frightened, and you were spilling trauma reaction all over my endocrine system, of course I was sure Amnardbat had sabotaged us right then. And now I’m alone and I can think, and I can’t just work with I was scared, I have to—
<Mahit,> Yskandr said, very gentle in her mind. <We were scared together. It’s all right. Breathe.>
She took a breath; it came short, and she realized she’d been breathing in little fast useless inhalations for at least a minute and hadn’t really noticed when she’d started. She took another, and it was still so hard, to breathe like her lungs weren’t going to seize up, like she wasn’t trapped—she was trapped, even in the safety of her private pod, she was absolutely trapped, the Councilor for Heritage wanted to carve her open and she still—months later, and she still didn’t understand why Amnardbat would have tried to sabotage her, or how, or anything, and—
She breathed, deep, a circular breath through the nostrils and the mouth; it wasn’t her choice, but she knew (or Yskandr knew) the pattern of it, the calming way of breathing. He took over their body entirely so rarely. Only when he needed to. The last time—the last real time—he’d run them through a riot unscathed, with all of the City in conflagration around them.
<There,> Yskandr said, and then, <Really, oxygen is helpful for clarity of thought,> a snatch of that bright rag of a man, the remains of her first imago, the sabotaged-Yskandr who never remembered his own dying, who only remembered decades of anticipated life in Teixcalaan to come, and a vast ambition, and a cleverness Mahit wanted to own, to inhabit, to allow into herself.
Thank you.
Warmth—all the little hairs on her arms and legs standing up and lying down again in a shivery wave, like her own neurology was touching her gently. This, too, was in none of the imago-training, none of the expectations for what would happen after a person received a live memory and a line of experience to be part of. Nothing in Mahit’s education had told her about the strange kindnesses of living in a body with a—friend.
<Sentimentality is not helpful for clarity of thought,> said Yskandr.
An intensely annoying friend.
Electric laughter, and that vicious spike of ulnar-nerve pain; it wasn’t always a shimmer now. Sometimes it just hurt.
<So. We’re scared and we’re trapped and since you’re not planning on abandoning station like the hero of some graphic story like the one you bought—what are we going to do, Mahit?>
She sat up. Pressed her spine against the comforting inward curve of her pod. What we should have done when we first got back, Yskandr. I think we should tell Dekakel Onchu that her messages for you didn’t go unread entirely.
Again she felt alive—awake in a way she hadn’t seemed to be ever since she’d come back to Lsel. Awake was close to frightened, and exhilarating. There were remarkable similarities between how her aptitudes and Yskandr’s had spelled for risk-seeking; she’d always assumed that had been a necessary precondition for the sort of xenophilia that made a person fall in love with a culture that was slowly eating her own, but perhaps it was something simpler, something gut-deep: I can’t leave anything well enough alone.
<Ah, so you’ve decided to be political after all,> said Yskandr, so close in tone to her own thoughts that there was hardly any space between imago and inheritor, an intimation of future blur—one of her own memories being echoed, Twelve Azalea in her ambassadorial apartment back in the City, before anything had begun to go truly wrong, before she’d gotten him killed. Saying to her, So you’ve decided to be political after all.
Petal, she thought, with fond grief—not what she’d called him, that had been Three Seagrass’s pet name for a man named for a pink extravagance of a flower. Yes, I guess I have.
It wasn’t language. Knifepoint’s captain had been right about that much. The recording they’d made from the intercepted enemy-ship transmissions could have just been bad static feedback, cosmic radiation interference jacked up into a sharp crackle, at least to Nine Hibiscus’s inexperienced ears. A sharp, ugly noise with the intimation of a headache inside it, that ended in a scream that had taste—a foul, oilslick, tongue-coating taste that made her nauseated. Synesthesia wasn’t in Nine Hibiscus’s usual suite of neurological oddities, and sound that made humans crosswire to taste was at best unpleasant and at worst actively harmful.
Nevertheless she listened to it twice, confirming for herself that Knifepoint had been right about the pauses in the crackling: even if this wasn’t language, it was responsive to what Knifepoint had done. So it was communication. Of one sort or another. She made Twenty Cicada join her for the third time through. When the noise skittered higher and louder, he winced and put his hand over his mouth, swallowing a gag. He’d always been more sensitive than Nine Hibiscus was to local environments. She wished, abrupt and useless, that she hadn’t made him hear this.
“—I can’t,” he said, once he’d gotten control of himself again, “imagine that their mouths are very pleasantly shaped, if they talk like that.”
Nine Hibiscus shrugged, one shoulder up and down again. “They could be using a distorter. Or this is machine communication, one ship to another—”
“Or they could be machines communicating.”
She wondered if Twenty Cicada would find that comforting: machines that accidentally talked in a way that disturbed human homeostasis, rather than something organic that could hurt other organic things by speaking. If she wasn’t so short on time—shorter now, with Sixteen Moonrise due in an hour for a strategic defusing of politics over dinner—she’d ask him about it. “I doubt it,” she said instead. “The spit that ate the Shard—See? I’m already calling it spit. Too organic. They’re not machines.”
Twenty Cicada said, “You don’t know that,” and she nodded.
“I don’t know anything. We need a linguist. Who have we got on board for translation?”
Twenty Cicada leaned back in his chair, laced his hands behind the smooth dome of his head, and dipped his eyelids shut, consulting with the internal lexicon of personnel he seemed to always have easy memory of. “Cuecuelihui Fourteen Spike—that’s who was on Knifepoint—but she is a translator, not a linguist. Outer Rim languages. One of your spy-types, she was on the ground team at Kauraan. Clever but better with humans than whatever this is, I think.”
“Not her,” Nine Hibiscus said. “I need someone without any preconceptions, who hasn’t heard the transmission before.” Fourteen Spike was one of her “spy-types”—not spies, she didn’t have spies unless Swarm himself counted. Third Palmers—political officers, in common parlance, the Ministry of War’s intelligence branch—weren’t the sort of people that a Fleet Captain kept around on purpose. Fourteen Spike was just one of her soldiers who she’d picked out for quiet charisma, language skills, the ability to become indispensable to anyone they were near. Usually someone of cuecuelihui rank, not command-track but the highest level of nonofficer specialist soldier. Someone flexible enough for independent work, strong enough to keep their loyalties regardless, like a metal that didn’t go brittle when bent. Sometimes people like that could talk to barbarians so well that the barbarians forgot they were Teixcalaanlitzlim until it was too late for the barbarians. Fourteen Spike was for barbarians. Not aliens. Not something that not only wasn’t civilized but wasn’t even human. “Who else?”