“And what then?” asked the engineer.
“And then you drop me with your cargo, on Lsel Station.”
“And you will tell the customs agents what? I think no. I think this is a bad idea, for you, and also for us.”
Three Seagrass knew how to do this conversation as an Information agent; she knew how to do this conversation back on Esker-1, where she’d just been City Teixcalaanli and thus mysterious and interesting. The first one was the exercise of social power, and the second one was grift: being too compelling to ignore, and too slippery to hang on to. Neither was going to work here. (She’d always liked aliens. But there was a difference between liking and knowing how to talk to—and this was why she needed Mahit—)
She had one option left, though less of it than she’d had before she’d acquired the ridiculous jumpsuit.
She blinked, micromovements of one eye behind her cloudhook, and projected a shimmering, twisting hologram of a very large number onto the table between her and the engineer. “I think this is a less bad idea than you do,” she said, “and all I need is the address of your barge’s financial institution to show you how … Perhaps you have some debts, some refurbishing costs, that you would like not to worry about?”
The engineer’s face moved for the first time. She wrinkled her nose. Three Seagrass wasn’t sure if that was distaste or interest. The silence went endlessly on. Three Seagrass suspected the engineer was talking over a private subvocal line to her captain, checking whether the amount was enough. It had better be; after this Three Seagrass was broke, and writing to the Ministry for more discretionary funds was very unlikely to produce them. Certainly not in time for it to matter. Maybe she’d be stuck on this nowhere planet forever. She’d have to improve her Verashk. Or possibly her Talay. Immersion would help—
“We won’t be responsible for you on the Station,” the engineer said at last. “And you pay before you board. You pay right now.”
Darj Tarats had beaten her to the best seat at the bar. Seeing him—aged and cadaverous to Yskandr’s eyes, familiarly skeletal to her own memory, the burnt-clean shell of a man who’d spent the decades of his early working life in an asteroid mine, and then had become a politician, who had been a philosopher of ruining-empire and quiet revolution all that time—made Mahit’s stomach flip over, a quick nauseating spike, and then settle into shimmering alert. Alive to the possibility of disaster.
She was beginning to think this was the most comfortable state for her to function in, and wasn’t that just delightful.
She sounded like Yskandr to her own self, sometimes. More lately.
Darj Tarats was sitting next to Dekakel Onchu, and they were both on their second-at-least glasses of vodka. Mahit was, clearly, late.
Late, and surprised: she’d expected to find only Onchu here, at the same pilots’ bar as their first meeting; the Councilor’s suggestion, when she’d sent an electronic note saying that she had, indeed, asked her imago about Darj Tarats. Darj Tarats, who wanted the war now being raged all around, but not in, Stationer space, and was content to use Lsel as bait to draw Teixcalaan out. Darj Tarats, who Yskandr trusted more than she did, even though she’d done what he’d wanted and Yskandr never had. Mahit resolved to ignore all of the signals her endocrine system would send her for the duration of this conversation, knowing even as she made the decision that it was both impractical and likely physically impossible to accomplish.
“Councilors,” she said, and took the seat on the other side of Onchu. “There are twice as many of you as I expected.”
“Dekakel has predictable drinking habits, Dzmare,” said Darj Tarats. “This is the bar to find her in, if a man wanted to catch up with his friend in a less formal setting than the Council chambers. As I see you have noticed.”
It was an obvious power play—so obvious that Mahit was briefly annoyed she didn’t rate a better one. Use Dekakel Onchu’s first name, intimate the longstanding friendship between the two of them, and then call Mahit by her surname without the title she still owned by rights. There was no Ambassador to Teixcalaan save her. She was the imago-line.
<So much for ignoring your endocrine reactions.>
Shut up, would you? she told Yskandr, and waved the bartender over.
“What the Councilors are having,” she said, and then turned to Tarats and smiled, taking a certain vicious joy in how baring her teeth would always feel like a threat now, how smiling this brightly even on Lsel was a kind of threat. “Councilor Onchu was kind enough to introduce me to the best vodka on-Station, yes,” she told him. “It’s a pleasure to drink with you as well, Councilor.”
He was unreadable. It was going to drive her crazy (no, that was Yskandr, Yskandr’s twenty years of pent-up frustration and competition with this man). He didn’t return the smile. “You came back home from the Empire,” he said. They were talking right through Onchu, and she was letting them, sitting a little back on her bar stool. “That’s unusual for your imago-line.”
<I stayed on Teixcalaan so that you wouldn’t know—>
That you were committing treason, yes, shut up, I need to talk and if I say what you’re thinking, we’re both fucked, all right?
Prickles up and down her spine, chiding. But Yskandr backed off, retreated—for a moment Mahit felt dizzyingly alone. Dizzyingly herself, which was a very naked thing to be.
“Haven’t you heard?” she said, still smiling. “I was sabotaged. Who knows what I’ll do? Heritage certainly doesn’t.”
Dekakel Onchu laughed, and shoved her lowball glass, half finished, the ice floating and clinking and turning the vodka cloudy white, over to Mahit. “Have the rest,” she said. “Tarats owes me another—he bet you’d go all Yskandr Aghavn at us, superior and elusive. I told you, Darj, this one is direct when forced. And I was right about the sabotage.”
Mahit took it. Drank it. All of it, including the ice chips, fast enough that the alcohol burned and she had to work not to cough. When it was empty, she put it down on the counter, upside down, with a sharp click, loud enough to make her feel brave—floating. Flying. “Councilor,” she said, when she had her breath back. “Your compatriot for the Pilots told me to consult with my imago about you before I came back to her. So I have. Here I am. Heritage probably would prefer I wasn’t. Or at least she’d like to see inside my skull a bit. How about you?”
The bartender approached with Mahit’s drink, and she waved it over to Onchu instead. Playing musical drinks; playing who has power here. She didn’t, she knew that; she was having this drink at all because she was in the sort of trouble with Heritage she didn’t know how to get out of, but—
<Oh, but we play anyway,> Yskandr murmured, and she agreed. Onchu accepted the glass without the slightest bit of comment.
Tarats extended a grey-brown hand, tilted it side to side. “On balance,” he said, “I’d also like to see inside your skull. If I could see my own reports on your imago-integration, as opposed to Heritage’s, of course. Interesting, that you came back. Interesting, that you retain enough of your imago-line despite putative sabotage to consult with it. Interesting, that you spent the time since you returned doing absolutely nothing instead of informing someone about all of these intriguing facts.”