“The war is ending right now, and that planetary system remains intact,” said Nineteen Adze. “I expect you were part of that. What you did inside that Shard…”
The war is ending, she’d said, but not how, or why, and Eight Antidote realized he was shaking hard enough that tea spilled over his knuckles. The Emperor took the bowl away from him. Held it for him. “It’s called the Shard trick,” he started. “They can all do it. Not just me.”
“Pilot Four Crocus explained in detail,” said Nineteen Adze. She didn’t sound pleased. It wasn’t really the sort of thing a person was pleased about, Eight Antidote guessed. Technology like that. Like the Sunlit, but more. (He wasn’t going to tell her that it was still going on inside his mind. He wasn’t. He didn’t know what she’d do. To him or in general.)
“Eleven Laurel didn’t want you to know,” he said instead.
“—Ah,” Nineteen Adze said, like he’d given her something she needed. A last part of a pattern, slotting into place. “That’s useful, Eight Antidote. Thank you for that. I wasn’t sure which one of them—the Minister or the Undersecretary—was responsible.”
“Are you going to…” He didn’t even know how to ask the question.
The Emperor shook her head. “No,” she said. “I can watch him much more closely inside the Ministry of War than I’d ever be able to if I let him out unsupervised into the Fleet.”
“And me?”
“Am I going to do something to you?”
He nodded.
She sighed. “I wish, you know, that you could trust me. But you wouldn’t be you, if you did. No, Eight Antidote. No, I’m not going to do anything to you, except wait for you to grow up and take this job out of my hands.”
It was only in the quiet afterward, when he’d gone back to his own room, and crawled into his bed, that he remembered what Nineteen Adze had said about Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus and why she’d made her yaotlek after what she’d done on Kauraan: not because I thought she was too dangerous to keep alive, little spy. Because I thought she might just be dangerous enough to stay alive.
Remembered that, and couldn’t fall asleep at all.
Everything on the hydroponics deck of Weight for the Wheel was green. The air felt luxurious, almost too thick for Mahit to breathe. There were flowers—lotuses, lilies—all through the rice and the vegetable gardens, mixed in like they were as necessary as calories. Probably they had been, to Twenty Cicada. This had been his kingdom. Three Seagrass had told her so, told her all about the conversation they’d had, here, when she’d been convinced that the last thing Twenty Cicada would ever do would be to let Teixcalaan allow a species as wantonly and uncaringly destructive as the aliens had seemed, to exist.
The two of them were leaning on the decorative railing. Mahit wondered who was standing where: Was she where Twenty Cicada had been, or was Three Seagrass? Whose narrative was going around again?
<Ring composition,> Yskandr told her, and she said, Overdetermined, back at him. Call and response.
Without prompting or preamble, only taking enough time to set her shoulders and lift her chin, like Mahit was a problem that needed as much of her headlong determination as any of the negotiation she’d done on the bridge, Three Seagrass asked her, “Do you want to come back with me?”
At least she hadn’t said, Do you want to come home with me?
“No,” Mahit told her. She couldn’t look at her while she did it. “No, but—where’s back?”
“The Jewel of the World,” said Three Seagrass, which—of course. There was no other real place for a Teixcalaanlitzlim, was there. “I mean. I have a flat. I have to—do the dishes. Probably talk to the Emperor Herself, too. But—if it’s the City you don’t want, I could—I mean, there’s got to be some system out there which needs an overqualified asekreta and has a halfway decent poetry salon—I could get transferred. Is what. I’m saying.”
“Reed,” Mahit said, soft, and Three Seagrass stopped talking, turned to her, tipped her head up. Her eyes were very dark and very wide. She was still so small. Mahit forgot, most of the time.
She bent down, and kissed her mouth. Not for long. Not long enough to be yes.
“Don’t do that for me,” she said. “Don’t leave the City. Go home. Do your dishes. Talk to the Emperor, if there’s time after doing the dishes.”
Three Seagrass snickered. It was a wet sound; the sound a person made when they were laughing but had meant to cry. “Dishes, then Her Brilliance the Edgeshine of a Knife, in that order, yes. Fine. And where will you go?”
“I don’t know,” Mahit said. It was true. There were no places left: there was no such thing as home, not for her, not anymore. Darj Tarats had taken his flitter-ship back through the Anhamemat Gate. The ceasefire Twenty Cicada had brokered extended throughout the entirety of the alien fleet, whether its prey had been Teixcalaanli warships or Lsel itself. All humans were one thing, to them: one sacrifice had, for now, bought a collective peace. Lsel had not even been touched—Mahit had heard the transmissions from Teixcalaanli supply ships passing by that proved it. And yet she believed what Tarats had told her on the bridge: if she came back to Lsel Station while he and Aknel Amnardbat were in power, she would die under their hands. One, or the other. Heritage or Miners. All safety torn up, tossed away. And for what?
Now we are exiles truly, she thought, and couldn’t even muster up an internal tone of recrimination: she’d been right, all along, and Yskandr hadn’t. But Yskandr would have followed Three Seagrass back to her flat with its undone dishes, its promise of poetry salons—Yskandr would have taken that offer the first time she made it, three months and a war ago.
“It doesn’t have to be with me,” said Three Seagrass. “If that’s your problem with going back to the City—that I’d—I still don’t understand why you feel half the ways you do about how much I like you, but I promise I’m perfectly capable of pretending we don’t know each other or never kissing you again, and you’re still the Ambassador if the Emperor says you are, so there’s work…”
Mahit cut her off, a hand on her shoulder, gentle as she could. “No. It’s not you. I— Reed, I don’t understand why I feel half the ways I do about how much I like you, either. But I like you a great deal.”
<You could keep explaining,> Yskandr murmured. <Sometimes even Teixcalaanlitzlim learn to see us.>
I want, Mahit thought, and with that phrase felt all the tumbling headlong desire to fall, and be subsumed, and be—oh, the Teixcalaanlitzlim she’d imagined herself in all those long-ago language instruction classes when she’d called herself Nine Orchid and thought poetry would be enough to make her the kind of person that a Teixcalaanlitzlim would automatically think of as a person.
“If it’s not me,” Three Seagrass asked, “then—what? If you tell me you’re planning to join the fungal hive mind, I’m going to be angry and also not believe you. You’re enough people already, and you like being a person, not a—that.”
“I’m just Mahit Dzmare,” Mahit said, wry. “Imago and all. Just one person.”
I want, she thought again, and Yskandr finished for her. <To go home.>
No such place.
She tried again. “Three Seagrass, I want—work, and I want—things I can’t have, that don’t exist or never did, and I want—I want, if you ask me to come to the City with you a third time, I want to be able to say yes and mean it.”