Instead of him, too. He didn’t want to think about that.
(Sometimes, when he felt really awful and interested at the same time, when he was already nauseous and unhappy, he would pull up the newsfeeds from the day of the riots and look at pictures of Six Direction dying. He always wondered if he’d look like that, when he was old, when he was dying. That same expression. Probably. It was like seeing the future.)
Next time he went to see Eleven Laurel, he decided, he was going to find out how the war was going, for real.
It wasn’t, Three Seagrass thought, the worst place she and Mahit had sat down together. That was probably the bunker underneath the palace, where they’d watched Six Direction die on live newsfeed. (Or maybe not: that had also been when they’d ended up kissing. Even if Three Seagrass had been about to cry the whole time that had been happening, and had almost certainly ruined the whole experience because of it. It had only been that one time. If Mahit wasn’t going to mention that kissing had happened, she certainly wasn’t either.)
Mahit hadn’t mentioned much, yet. Just extracted her from both the utter disaster of Lsel Station customs and the clutches of not one, but two high government officials, after she’d gone and demanded Mahit come with her. So far, she’d come with Mahit instead. They’d walked through the hangar and out into the deck—so many Stationers, it was fascinating, and most of them ignoring her very pointedly—and Mahit had unerringly steered her through a maze of corridors until they’d arrived at a tiny room. A pod, really, hanging in a rack like a two-person-sized seed, the only thing that could grow from a metal world like this Station—with curved walls and curved couches inside to match. Mahit had keyed it open with her infopad, and it had descended from its row of other, identical pods and opened up for them. Three Seagrass had looked over Mahit’s shoulder while she was calling it (they kept standing close to each other, Three Seagrass was just used to it from back in the City, or at least she had been, and it was simple to pick up the habit again, stand at Mahit’s left shoulder like she belonged there), and thought that the transaction was a financial one.
“You have rent-an-offices on the Station?” she asked, brightly, when they were inside. The couches were a pale grey-blue, one on each wall. There was a table between them. Three Seagrass rested her elbows on it—cold metal—and wished for her Information Ministry jackets, still safely folded inside her luggage.
“They’re efficient,” Mahit told her, “and use-fungible. Also I can’t take you off this deck. You’re not really here.”
“I really did come to get you, though. I’m here enough for that.”
Mahit looked at her for a moment, sufficiently long to make Three Seagrass want to turn away. Instead she widened her eyes and propped her chin in her hands and made herself wait.
Finally, Mahit said, “Did you come? Or did Nineteen Adze send you?”
Her barbarian always did ask the clever questions.
“I came,” Three Seagrass said. “I’m really not meant to be here at all. But it’s on the way to where I’m going, and I did come here for you. Her Brilliance—well, I imagine she knows exactly where I ended up, but it was my idea.”
“She knows where most people end up,” Mahit said.
“She’s the Emperor,” Three Seagrass agreed. “And also she’s herself, so, yes. I should tell you, she sent Five Agate to bother me in a spaceport bar before I left, and I hadn’t filed a single travel plan with the City. She found me anyhow.”
“Five Agate, really. I’m trying to imagine her in a spaceport bar.”
“She wanted me to swear a blood oath that I wasn’t suborned by one of the Undersecretaries of the War Ministry, it wasn’t incongruous at all, she sort of—slots into whatever setting—”
Mahit had reached across the table, and now her fingertips were touching the skin just above Three Seagrass’s right elbow. Warm fingertips. “Reed,” she said—and Three Seagrass felt like a spike had gone right through her throat, no one called her that anymore, Mahit never had before now, but oh, oh—“Reed, are you in the sort of trouble you had to run away from?”
She wished she was. If she was, the next part of this story would be where the imperial agent and the barbarian stole a small fighter-ship and went off through the nearest jumpgate into the black, together. She’d always liked those sorts of poems, even if they invariably ended in tragedy.
She covered Mahit’s hand with her own. “No. I’m fine. I don’t even know Undersecretary Eleven Laurel. I’m supposed to go to war, that’s all. And talk to aliens. Come with me. You’re the best at talking to aliens of anyone I know.”
“That’s because you Teixcalaanlitzlim insist on thinking that I’m the alien,” Mahit said, but so very gently. Three Seagrass didn’t think she was behaving in a way that would need gentleness, not from Mahit Dzmare, but quite honestly she couldn’t be sure; Mahit surprised her all the time, which was also why she wanted to take her to the front.
“You’re only almost an alien,” she told her, firmly. “Wouldn’t you like to meet some real ones? And try to understand them faster than the Ministry of War can shoot them down?”
Mahit didn’t answer her questions, or say yes—or even say no. She said, “First explain why it’s you going to war. And wearing that.”
At least she hadn’t moved her hand from under Three Seagrass’s. “… It’s a very expensive jumpsuit,” she said.
“Are you in disguise?”
“Not currently!”
Mahit actually laughed, and Three Seagrass found herself smirking at her. This, this was what she had missed. The dizzying speed of events, the hilarious and absurd questions that nevertheless needed to be asked. She would never have had this in her office in the Ministry.
“I needed to get here fast, that’s all,” she explained. “That’s why I came through the wrong gate. And several of the stops along the way were—easier if I wasn’t me. Briefly. But you should see my special envoy uniforms. I could have one made up for you, if you weren’t so tall.” She paused. Squeezed Mahit’s hand, knowing very well that she was structuring this conversation, offering and enticing, the sort of manipulation she really oughtn’t be doing to someone she wanted to trust and be trusted by in turn. But she also wanted her to say yes. Needed her to, now that she’d come all this way. “I mean. If you’re willing to serve as Ambassador again. Ambassador, and special political agent seconded to the Tenth Legion, via the Information Ministry.”
Mahit said, “You are in trouble, aren’t you. Or the Empire is. It’s a bad war.”
“How wide,” said Three Seagrass, “is Lsel’s definition of ‘you’?” Unspoken, but entirely acknowledged: Yes, it’s a bad war. We don’t know the nature of the enemy, we’ve lost multiple resource-extraction colonies, you yourself told us how bad it will be if we let these all-devouring aliens move farther into our territory. Why would the Fleet want a diplomat, when they already have warships, if this wasn’t a bad war?