Last chance, Three Seagrass thought to herself, last chance to have second thoughts. Last chance to not set yourself up for an intensely boring disciplinary meeting when you get back.
And blinked a reply affirmative before she could stop herself, feeling shimmering, feeling like she was already weightless and off-planet and terrified, feeling real. She thought of Eleven Lathe, her poetic model, her hero, writing Dispatches from the Numinous Frontier out alone amongst his aliens, the Ebrekti. Could she do worse? Certainly, but perhaps not much worse—and then, gleeful and bitter, she thought, Fuck you, watch me try, in Twelve Azalea’s eternally silenced voice. That had been the first-stupidest idea of Three Seagrass’s career: believing, wholeheartedly and entire, that the Ministry she and Twelve Azalea had served would protect them both from senselessness, even in the face of imminent civil war. Oh, how very stupid a decision that belief had engendered. And she hadn’t been the one to die for it.
Not her, and not Mahit Dzmare. Mahit, who had kissed Three Seagrass once, in the middle of going more native than Three Seagrass had ever seen a barbarian go, and before she’d run away from the whole concept of Teixcalaan. She missed her, Three Seagrass decided. Maybe she should fix that, while she was exploding her nascent political career for the sake of the Empire.
The last time Mahit had gotten herself involved with court politics—and wouldn’t the Lsel Council absolutely hate being compared to the Teixcalaanli imperial court, that pit of internecine intrigue and backstabbing, villain of every faintly anti-imperial holoproj drama—she hadn’t been consciously aware of the clock. This time—walking soundless on soft-soled shoes through the decks of the Station, wending a deliberately random path toward the central ship-hangar—she could almost hear the seconds counting down. She had at absolute most six days before Councilor Amnardbat wanted her in the neurological suite, six days before (in the best case) everyone on Lsel knew that she had not one, but two imago-versions of Yskandr Aghavn in her mind.
<What’s the worst case?>
We die on the table. Carved open, a Heritage neurosurgeon’s scalpel slipping just enough to accidentally (surely accidentally) sever her spinal cord. The surgical scar from where Five Portico had inserted the dead-Yskandr’s imago-machine into Mahit’s skull ached. She’d grown her hair out to cover it; the tight curls were longer than they’d been in years.
<I can think of worse than that,> Yskandr said, with too much brittle cheer.
Don’t.
The clock had existed in the City too. She’d started it running the instant she’d begun to investigate her predecessor’s death—or Yskandr had started it a long time previously, when he’d promised a dying, brilliant Emperor an imago-machine and eternal life. Like priming the detonator on an explosive. But Mahit hadn’t noticed the acceleration of time, the reduction of options, until she’d been on Teixcalaan for days. At least this time she could see the flat blank wall of the deadline coming for her. She wouldn’t be surprised.
<Councilor Onchu doesn’t keep an office,> Yskandr murmured to her as the Station’s hangar opened up in front of them, a busy cavern studded with ships, <or she didn’t when I knew her. She likes being with her people. There won’t be a central location you can walk up to—>
I don’t want a meeting, Yskandr, I want a conversation. We’re going to a bar.
Mahit still felt his laughter as an electric shimmer down her nerves, like she always had; it was only that now it shaded into the neuropathic ulnar pain when it reached her smallest fingers. She’d gotten used to it, somewhat. As much as she could manage to get used to it. As long as it didn’t spread, or turn to numbness, she’d be fine. It wasn’t an obvious tell. So very few people knew what had happened to her and Yskandr in Teixcalaan, and all of them were either—well, either her-and-Yskandr, or the entire person they sometimes managed to be, or back in Teixcalaan.
The bar she’d chosen wasn’t one she’d been to before. She hadn’t made a habit of hanging around pilots’ bars as a young person or a student; her aptitudes in spatial mathematics had ruled out pilot-imagos as feasible matches early on, and she’d never quite stopped feeling like they’d all know she wasn’t quite good enough to join them. Now that emotion felt like a vestige of another Mahit entirely, a child-Mahit with a child’s fears and desires. The Mahit she was now wanted a drink, and she wanted a drink with Dekakel Onchu, the sort of Councilor who liked to socialize with her people. And this was Onchu’s drinking establishment of choice—there were publicity holos of her coming out of it on more than one of Lsel’s internal newsfeeds.
Finding her wasn’t difficult. The publicity holos hadn’t lied. She was at the bar: a dulled chrome expanse well scratched by glasses, graffiti, the remains of the original inlaid design, diamond hatching around curved fan-shapes. Mahit thought, What sort of flower is that? Thought it in Teixcalaanli, and had Yskandr chide her with a memory; how popular this particular pattern had been in pilot-deck décor back when he’d been a teenager taking his own aptitudes right here on Lsel. Mahit paused just to the left of the doorway, let the door swing closed behind her and leave her in shadows when an actual set of pilots walked in after. Onchu wasn’t dressed like a Councilor; she was dressed like a spacer, scalp shaved to stubble, bright paint on her mouth and on the rim of her glass, deep lines around her eyes like solar rays. She wasn’t in conversation. She was drinking companionably with the man to her right, a peaceful mutual silence, and there was an open stool on her other side.
<How do you want to play this?>
I think, Mahit said inside her mind, in the strange-echoing place where she was sometimes herself and sometimes a herself who was also Yskandr Aghavn, that I want you to say hello.
He didn’t take her body, like he had in Teixcalaan or to calm her out of useless panic in her residence pod—Yskandr slipped forward, helped her muscles remember a walk they’d never used, a center of gravity they did not have. A smile wider than Mahit’s own, and a way of leaning on one elbow when she’d arrived at the bar and sat down beside Councilor Onchu.
“Councilor,” Yskandr said—Mahit said, the space between them hardly a space, thought and action fractionally separated—“it’s been a long time. Sixteen years now?”
Onchu blinked. Blinked again, a slow narrowing and release of eyelids, an entirely evaluatory expression. “There are several people you might have been, with that sort of introduction,” she said, “but only one who would be quite as audaciously rude as to make it. Hello, Mahit Dzmare.”