Mahit left Three Seagrass in the rent-an-office to arrange for their passage off-Station and into the war. Left her there because she needed to think, needed to breathe for a moment without looking at her, without looking at the impossibility of her presence on Lsel. She leaned her back against the metal corridor a few turns of the deck away, eyes shut, trying not to shake.
<You have good luck,> Yskandr whispered to her. <Good luck and good friends.>
I don’t know if we’re friends. She—needs me, or thinks she does.
<That’s enough to get you away from Amnardbat.>
Briefly. And if I go, we are never going to be able to come home—no one here will protect us, you heard Tarats’s offer—
<Make him a better one. You can now.> She was walking, without meaning to be walking. Following Yskandr’s memory like a thread, a path he used to take: up four decks and into the vast and bustling offices of the Miners’ Coalition, the engine of economic policy for Lsel. Slipping past desks and busy Stationers working at them, all the way to the Councilor’s office door. Yskandr leading her. She was letting him. They were doing this, and if how it was happening was the integration she had been waiting to experience, it was both wrong (she was never supposed to give up this much control to her imago, to ride inside his judgment and his momentum, to let go of her own volition so easily) and a profound relief.
Tarats’s secretary, a tall woman whose name Yskandr couldn’t remember and Mahit had never known, took her name and disappeared into his office. She was only gone for a few minutes.
“The Councilor will see you,” she said. “He said to tell you he was expecting you.”
Mahit nodded, thanked her, and strode through the door when the secretary held it open. She wasn’t even moving like herself; Yskandr’s center of gravity was higher. He led with the chest, like a male-bodied person would. She should stop, right now. She should pull back, right now.
<Let me get us out of here,> Yskandr said to her. <And then I’ll apologize and we can get back to work at being an us.>
Out loud, she—they—said, “Councilor Tarats,” and even shook his cadaverous, arthritis-twisted hand when he came around his desk to offer it. No bowing over fingertips here on Lsel. The old-fashioned way of greeting, instead. Hand to hand. The continuity of the flesh.
“What have you done with our Teixcalaanli visitor?” Tarats asked her. “Did you stash her somewhere, or did you space her?”
“Stashed,” said Mahit, and then—oh, because she did, horribly, trust Yskandr to get her through this after all—grinned, his grin, too wide for her face, and knew her eyes were bright and gleaming-conspiratorial. “Why would I space an asset, Tarats?”
Unspoken: I wouldn’t. Are you going to? Even if that asset is me?
And, an echo: <When I was you, Mahit, he could never look away from an opportunity. Let me make us one for him.>
“Sit down, Dzmare,” said Darj Tarats. “Let’s have ourselves a discussion about what you plan to do with the envoy if it isn’t consignment to the void.”
“Go with her, of course,” Mahit said. Yskandr had a blitheness to him, an inexorability, which she thought he’d learned from Nineteen Adze: not her own headlong momentum but a calculating belief in his inevitable success. She borrowed it now. “You engineered a war to entrap Teixcalaan, Councilor Tarats. You and my predecessor, though he didn’t want it. And the war is happening, right over our Station’s head, right through our sector. And you have no eyes, Councilor, on that war.”
“You mean to say, I have no eyes yet.”
<He’s unshockable,> said Yskandr in her mind. <Acknowledge him and keep going.>
“I mean precisely that,” Mahit told Tarats, firm, serene. Relying on Yskandr to be serene for her, to keep her heart from racing, her throat from locking up. “I’ll go with this envoy to her war, and I will be your eyes. I’ll be Lsel’s eyes, as I couldn’t be in the City.”
A long time ago Tarats’s voice might have been silky, but all the weft had worn away, and the warp of the sound was harsh. “If you mean to do this for me, Dzmare, I will not have you hide from me like Yskandr did.”
“My predecessor and I are in agreement on this course of action,” said Mahit, which was true enough for the moment. She grinned another Yskandr-grin. The stretch was getting more comfortable. “A full and accurate account of Teixcalaan’s military activities, Councilor, to the best of my knowledge and analysis. Everything.”
Let me be useful again, so that I’m worth protecting.
“That’s the beginning of a promise.” His hands were mobile, punctuation for the shape of his words: inelegant with arthritis and elegant regardless as they gestured. “All your eyes can see and your analytic mind can interpret: good. But why would I want to watch a war, as you say, of entrapment? I’m not a sadist, Dzmare. I don’t have any interest in the detail of Teixcalaanli failure.”
She tried to not to feel Yskandr’s spike of anger. Tried not to think of the scent of juniper gin, of draw a monstrous thing to its death. “And yet you took this meeting with me,” she said. It was a gambit: if Tarats didn’t want her eyes, what did he want?
“I did,” said the Councilor for the Miners. “What else would you do for me, Mahit Dzmare, out amongst the Teixcalaanli warships? I wonder. You were very good at arraying all of the politics on the Jewel of the World to our advantage, when you had to.”
Wary, Mahit asked, “What is more to our advantage than what is happening now, Councilor?”
Tarats smiled, a brief unpleasant flash. “Nothing. Nothing at all. Go to war, Dzmare. Go to war and—if there is an appropriate opportunity, of course—array the politics of the Fleet to ensure that Teixcalaan remains at war. Unable to win. Unable to retreat.”
“How,” Mahit began, because it was easier to ask how than why, than to acknowledge out loud that if she wanted to escape Heritage’s surgeons, she would have to render herself into that hook that was meant to draw Teixcalaan to attrition and death—
<Or at least convince Tarats we will be,> Yskandr told her, vicious. Her hands spiked to invisible neuropathic fire. <I convinced him for ten years that I was still his agent entire. You’re no less capable.>
Tarats was saying, “You have a little experience of sabotage yourself, do you not? I think you’ll find a way.” Mahit wondered what he’d do if she vomited on his desk. She felt as if she might.
“When have the Ambassadors to Teixcalaan not looked out for Lsel Station’s best interests?” she managed, and thought she sounded like she was agreeing.
“Mmm.” Tarats paused, like he was weighing her against Yskandr, measuring the depth of their integration, the degree to which he could trust her, given those twenty years of correspondence with her imago. She stayed still. Met his eyes and didn’t drop hers.
Finally, he said, “Keep it that way. Don’t you have a shuttle to catch, Ambassador?” he added, and Mahit felt the peculiar, disorienting surge of someone else’s triumph running through her sympathetic nervous system while she herself was horrified; Yskandr, satisfied that they’d gotten away, willing to make this promise and break it.
She wasn’t so sure she’d be able to. Not very sure at all.
Aknel Amnardbat walked Three Seagrass all the way back to the hangar she’d arrived in. It was still full of crates being unloaded, though the crates were mostly coming off different cargo barges than the one she rode in with. She’d only been on Lsel Station for five hours. Flying visit. (She could imagine herself saying that to Mahit: Last time was only a flying visit, won’t you show me around properly? Wouldn’t Councilor Amnardbat be scandalized. A Teixcalaanlitzlim, being shown around all of Lsel’s secrets.) Said Councilor had kept up a perfect, even, impenetrable tour-guide’s patter about the Station as she’d firmly and thoroughly guided Three Seagrass away from anything a tour guide would actually point out. It was masterful. Three Seagrass took internal notes, for the next time she needed to bore someone to death who was genuinely interested in the subject being used as the murder weapon.