Mahit wasn’t going to flinch. She wasn’t. She hadn’t been doing nothing. She’d been trying to recover her balance, her sense of herself, the shape of a life—any life—that could encompass both Lsel Station and Teixcalaan, two Yskandrs and one of her and whoever they were going to be. Admittedly she’d done a lot of that thinking while walking aimless loops around the Station, but she hadn’t come up with any better way of processing. Physical motion helped. That was right out of basic psychotherapeutic technique that every kid on Lsel knew.
She didn’t flinch. She said, “It’ll be Heritage who gets to see.”
An offer. If you do nothing, either of you, Aknel Amnardbat will take me apart and I will be useless to you.
<More like a plea.>
I’ve had luck with sanctuary before—
<This is not the City. Tarats is not Nineteen Adze.> The flash of memory, tangled: gin-blue, Nineteen Adze’s dark hands on her (his) cheeks, the texture of her lips, the taste of juniper. The scent of juniper, when Yskandr had learned that Tarats was willing to use Lsel as bait to lure Teixcalaan into war with some force larger than itself.
Onchu said, contemplatively, “For a while, I considered whether Heritage can legally commit imago-line sabotage at all. Considering that it’s their purview to manage our collective memories in the first place.”
Tarats nodded to her. “Your conclusions, Dekakel? Doubtless you have them.” He was ignoring Mahit, entirely. Gambit refused. She didn’t know why, either.
“Heritage can’t,” said Dekakel Onchu. “But an individual working for Heritage—even the Councilor for Heritage—absolutely can. Darj, someone should cut that woman’s imago-line loose into hard vacuum.”
On this, Mahit thoroughly agreed. Maybe Pilots would help her even if Miners wouldn’t—she just needed some way to be too useful to be sent into the careful surgical maw of Heritage’s analysts, who would know instantly that she’d had entirely unscheduled adjustments to her imago-machine. If they didn’t simply kill her outright, and cover up Amnardbat’s sabotage thereby.
“I don’t disagree,” Tarats said. “I knew her predecessor, and he would have done nothing of the kind; and that imago-line of Heritage councilmembers is six generations long. Something has slipped. This … business … with Dzmare is more of the same.”
“Personally,” Mahit said, as dry and unconcerned as she could manage, which wasn’t very, “I’d prefer not to be Heritage’s business at all.”
“You should have gone back to the Empire, then,” said Tarats, looking at her directly. Finally, looking at her directly.
“You spent such time trying to convince Yskandr to come home,” she replied. “Here I am.”
Here I am, you used to want this.
Upsettingly, Yskandr murmured, <He wanted me to come home. To control.> Mahit’s stomach felt like she’d drunk more vodka than she’d even been served: a slow and crawling nausea. It would be nice to have had the alcohol if she was going to feel the effects.
“Your imago knows me,” Tarats said, as if he could hear Yskandr as well as she could. “You say the sabotage you experienced was insufficient enough that you still have some continuity, even if it is out of date—I have what I wanted from him, thanks to your good work. If you’d stayed in the Empire, or if you’d come to me when you returned and been willing to go out again, perhaps I could have found a further use for you, too.”
She needed to hear him say it. Out loud, in this bar full of pilots, where he could be overheard. “What did you want from Yskandr?”
Darj Tarats’s eyes were the coldest brown Mahit could imagine; brown like dust, like rust in vacuum. “Teixcalaan’s gone to war,” he said. “Right over us; ships come through our gates all the time, and not a one stops here with legionary soldiers to annex this Station.”
“It won’t last,” Onchu muttered. “That not stopping.”
“It will,” said Tarats. “They’ve larger problems than us. It’s quite refreshing.”
Mahit thought, vicious and distant and cold, that Tarats was too satisfied with himself—too satisfied with what he’d helped her do, back in the City. He’d created this war between the Empire and some greater, worse thing beyond the Far Gate as a political pressure point, a fulcrum to turn a succession crisis on and simultaneously divert a war of conquest away from the Station. He’d done it all to benefit his desire to lure the Empire into a destructive conflict. He’d succeeded, and that was too pleasant a thought for him to let the possibility that Onchu was right—that no power, whether Teixcalaanli or alien, could leave resource-rich mining stations alone forever—ruin his sense of accomplishment.
“How will you know if they change their minds?” she asked, out of pure, apolitical—if anything could be said to lack politics that came out of her mouth now, what the Empire had done to her tongue was more than language—spite.
“I assume I’ll have about thirty minutes’ warning to scramble our pilots,” said Dekakel Onchu, “when the farther mining outposts start getting shot up.”
“Before Dzmare came back to us, we might have had a clearer view, even from the City,” Tarats said.
That was the crux of it. Why he wasn’t helping her, why he didn’t care if Amnardbat killed her or took her apart: he no longer had his window on the Emperor. Yskandr Aghavn was dead, and Mahit Dzmare returned home in what he considered to be a state of failure, sabotaged or not; what was the point of showing her some special treatment? Of offering a rescue?
“I am still Ambassador to Teixcalaan,” she said. She was. She hadn’t resigned. She’d taken—leave, really, an extended vacation. She’d tried to come home.
<No such thing.>
I know, I know, but I wanted—
Tarats shrugged, an infinitesimal, tired motion of his shoulders. “So you are, though I doubt that will last past Heritage’s examination.”
“And then you’ll have no eyes at all, no one who has met and knows the new Emperor—”
She sounded desperate even to herself. But Tarats was looking at her, quite directly, as if she was a piece of molybdenum ore, something to hold up to the light and watch for reflective facets in. She held still. Made herself be quiet.
“You’re not wrong,” he said, finally. “You’re quite like Yskandr, too. Maybe enough like Yskandr.” Another pause. Mahit found that she was holding her breath. “You do this, Mahit Dzmare: you go to your scheduled meeting with Amnardbat and her surgeons. But it won’t be her surgeons there. It’ll be mine.”
She didn’t breathe out. “Yours, and they’ll do what?”
“Strip you of your imago-machine,” said Darj Tarats, “and check it for sabotage, in truth; and if it is whole enough, put it into the brainstem of a new Ambassador to Teixcalaan. One I—and Dekakel, here, perhaps—have chosen. Some young person right out of the aptitudes. Clearly you are damaged, Dzmare, and you were Heritage’s choice to begin with. Best we start over.”
For a strange objective moment, it sounded like a good idea to Mahit. Go in to this scheduled checkup as if she had nothing to hide; let Tarats take her imago-machine, all of the memories of two Yskandrs and one Mahit, out of her. Relieve her of the responsibility, entirely, of being either Lsel’s representative in Teixcalaan or finding a way to love Teixcalaan while being a Stationer, and not suffocate of it. Be free.