Mahit smiled Yskandr’s smile. “Hello, Councilor Onchu. I hope you don’t mind if I have a drink.”
“It’s a pilots’ bar, but we don’t check your imago at the door for membership,” said Onchu. “What’s your poison?”
<Ahachotiya.>
We are not drinking fermented fruit, ever again, and also we are on Lsel, and also I wanted you to say hello, not to play Teixcalaanlitzlim for effect—
<Order a drink. She’s watching us.>
“Vodka,” Mahit said. “Chilled, straight up.”
Onchu gestured to the bartender, a familiar hand flip, and he fetched down a chilled shot glass and a bottle of vodka so cold it poured thick and viscous. “As poisons go, I might like you,” she said.
“Only as poisons go?”
Onchu grinned, white teeth bright against the dark red stain on her lips. “The rest, I’ll see. It’s funny, Dzmare, I thought you might show up a lot earlier than now. Or else not at all.”
Mahit shrugged, the motion still more Yskandr’s than her own. “Didn’t mean to keep you waiting, Councilor.”
“I wasn’t waiting.”
Talking to Dekakel Onchu was like trying to fix a target on a fast-rotating ship; she looked like she was right there, but she kept showing new faces, shifting too fast. Mahit thought (flood of memory, as sharp as scent, as the taste of Teixcalaanli tea, the light in Nineteen Adze’s old offices), Be a mirror, and went on. “You sent me—well, not me. You sent several messages to the Lsel Ambassador. I regret to note that they reached the current one, not the former one.”
The expression that crossed Onchu’s face—a thinning of the mouth, one side of the lips curling up in a swift, barely visible smile, chagrin or pleasure, too fast to tell—made Mahit think of how she herself had felt, every time the world (the Empire—it was proving impossible to lose the valence of the Teixcalaanli fusion of the two words, even thinking in Stationer language)—shifted around her, reframed itself. Some new piece of information with its load of clarifying horror, slotting into place. Her upsurge of sympathy wasn’t going to be useful here, she knew, but it was real nonetheless.
Onchu drank some of her beer, a swallow neither too large nor too small, a perfectly normal movement (and oh, fuck, how had one meeting with Heritage dropped Mahit right back into the kind of vigilant observation which had kept her alive in the City and which she had been trying so diligently to unlearn enough to imagine she had really come home), and nodded. “Interesting,” she said. “From your behavior up until now, I would never have expected those went anywhere but a dead-letter office.”
“I read them,” Mahit told her. “I—at the time when I read them, I was very glad to have some external confirmation of what I myself was noticing.”
“Drink your vodka,” Onchu told her. “We’re going to take a walk.”
<Oh, she’s interested in you,> Yskandr murmured.
Good, Mahit told him, and then—because he heard everything she thought anyway, because she was never alone again, Let’s see if interested means “would like me safely dead,” as usual.
The warm prickles of imago-laughter made the vodka shot burn sharper as she took it. “Where to, Councilor?”
“Think I’ll show you around,” said Onchu. “I’m due to inspect the hangar this shift. Come along. It’ll be an education.”
Mahit had been in Lsel Station’s hangar before, but always as a passenger leaving the Station or on the yearly evacuation-safety-training days required for every Station resident. Walking into that cavernous space—cacophonous with talking, the thump and whine of maintenance machinery, the huge hum of cooling fans—next to the Councilor for the Pilots herself was a rather different experience. No one told Dekakel Onchu where to go: she walked amongst her people as if she had never quite wanted to be possessed of an office and a legislative responsibility. Mahit followed at her shoulder, feeling acutely ungrubby and uncalloused. There were so many parts of a spacecraft, and all of them were everywhere, being worked on by Stationers who understood them as intimately as Mahit understood the cadence of Teixcalaanli poetry.
“So,” said Onchu, just loud enough for Mahit to hear over the roar of the fans, “you read my letters, and you thought what?”
“That you must have had real reasons for sending a warning like that,” Mahit said. “An unauthorized communiqué, that—if it had ever reached Ambassador Aghavn—would have meant that our Station’s official ambassador was a danger to him.”
“I knew what I had done,” said Onchu. “You don’t need to prove that you’re competent enough to figure that out.” They were walking in a slow zigzag, tracking back and forth across the hangar floor. Half of Lsel Station’s short-range transports were docked in here, being loaded or unloaded—the usual minerals and refined molybdenum, more unusual (to Mahit’s eyes, at least, and she knew she was less informed than she’d like to be on Lsel’s standard set of exports) pallets of compressed kelp, dried fish, rice … and most of those pallets were stamped with Teixcalaanli import papers. It looked very like Lsel was feeding the Teixcalaanli warships passing through Bardzravand Sector, the ones which were on the way to the war that had begun almost as soon as Mahit had come back to the Station.
<The war that we started,> Yskandr murmured.
The war that Councilor Tarats started, to preserve us, Mahit thought at him—and then stopped thinking, because Dekakel Onchu was watching her, watching every shift of her body language. Watching for Yskandr, or not-Yskandr. (For evidence of sabotage.) And even as she watched Mahit, she was moving amongst her people, stopping every so often to comment on a piece of work being done, or merely say hello to the pilot or maintenance engineer in question.
Some emperors are emperors of very narrow spaces, just enough to fill entirely with themselves, Mahit thought. When they were passing by a particularly noisy hull repair job, she asked as directly as she could, “What made you suspect Heritage?”
Onchu snorted. “Because it wasn’t Tarats, and the others on the Council had neither access nor motive. Who else but the person who has control over all of our memories, whose responsibility is keeping us safe and cohesive?”
“Culturally safe,” Mahit said.
“Amnardbat is a patriot,” said Dekakel Onchu, who had flown ships in combat for the sake of Lsel Station, who Mahit thought would have given her life for her fellow pilots, and thus for the Station as a whole. She waited to see if the Councilor had anything more to add. In the silence between them the sound of metal banging on metal filled the whole world.
“And so am I, it turns out,” Onchu went on, with an infinitesimal shrug of one shoulder. “Heritage should not be making such unilateral decisions about diplomacy. We’re a council of six, and Miners breaks the ties, not Heritage.”
“What did Councilor Amnardbat do to me?” Mahit asked, and let herself be as miserably upset about the question as she wanted. Which was a great deal.
“Ah,” said Onchu, “then she did succeed,” and Mahit had to stop herself from breaking into snickering, helpless and horrified—Onchu hadn’t even been sure, she’d guessed at the sabotage, and thought it was worth warning the dead Yskandr about regardless.
“Someone did,” she managed, just on the edge of that hysteria. “Quite effectively, really. I thought it was my fault—neurological failure, there are cases where an imago doesn’t take—”