You died there rather than coming back to share your plans with our Station, and you’d like to lecture me on silence? Mahit snapped, and felt her smallest fingers go to fizzing sparkles: neurological afterimages of sabotage. That side effect hadn’t stopped. It was more obvious when she stumbled into one of the places she and Yskandr hadn’t managed to integrate yet, at all. But her sense of his presence withdrew to a banked and observant simmer. She’d ended up next to one of the kiosks while she was too busy talking to her imago to notice where she was going. (Probably she should mind those slips more than she did. The slips where she wasn’t quite her, in her body.) Ended up next to a kiosk, and in a line for what it was selling.
Which seemed to be—handbound literature. The kiosk was labeled ADVENTURE/BLEAK PUBLISHING. Its display was full of graphic stories, drawn not on ever-changeable infofiche but on paper, made from flattened rag pulp. Mahit reached out and touched the cover of the nearest. It was rough under her fingertips.
“Hey,” said the kiosk manager. “You like that one? The Perilous Frontier!”
“The what?” Mahit asked her, suddenly feeling as adrift as she had the first time anyone had asked her a question in Teixcalaanli. Context failure: What frontier? Aren’t they all perilous?
“We’ve got all five volumes, if you’re into first-contact stuff; I love it, the artist on volume three draws Captain Cameron’s imago like Chadra Mav’s, only visible in reflective surfaces, and the linework—”
The manager couldn’t be more than seventeen, Mahit thought. Short tight-curled hair over a bright-toothed grin, eight hooped earrings up the side of one ear. That was new fashion. When Mahit was that age, everyone had been into long earrings. I’m old, she thought, with a peculiar delight.
<Ancient,> Yskandr agreed, dust-dry and amused. He was years older.
I’m old, and I have no idea what kids on Lsel like to read. Even when I was a kid on Lsel, I didn’t know, really. It hadn’t seemed important, before her aptitudes—why bother, when there was so much Teixcalaanli literature to drown herself in? To learn to speak in poetry for?
“I haven’t read them yet,” Mahit told the manager. “Can I have the first one?”
“Sure,” she replied—ducked down underneath the counter and produced one. Mahit handed over her credit chip, and the manager swiped it. “They’re drawn right here on this deck,” she said. “If you like it, come back on second-shift two days from now and you can meet the artist, we’re having a signing.”
“Thanks. If I have time—”
<You have ten minutes before Councilor Amnardbat wants to feed you dinner.>
“Yeah.” The manager grinned, as if to say, Adults, seriously, what can you do. “If you have time.”
Mahit waved, went on. Walked a little faster. The Perilous Frontier! fit in her inside jacket pocket like it was a political pamphlet. Exactly the same size. That was interesting, in and of itself. Even if it turned out to be a horribly dull story, that was interesting.
The Heritage offices were a neatly labeled warren, seven or so doors on either side of the deck corridor, which had narrowed from the wide residential space to something more like a road. Behind those doors, all the extra space would be full of the offices of people assigned to jobs in Heritage: analysts, mostly. Analysts of historical precedent, of the health of art production and education, of the number of imago-matches in one sector of the population or another. Analysts and propaganda writers.
How Teixcalaan had changed her, and how quickly. The last time Mahit had come to the Heritage offices, for her final confirmation interview before she received both her imago and her assignment as ambassador, she’d have never thought about Heritage as being in the business of propaganda. But what else were they doing, when they adjusted educational materials for one age group or another, trying to have the aptitudes in five years spit out more pilots or more medical personnel? Changing how children wanted to be.
She was hesitating, poised outside the middlemost door with its neatly signed (in the new font, and when will I get to stop noticing the fucking new font, Yskandr, it isn’t actually a new font, it’s only a new font for you) nameplate reading AKNEL AMNARDBAT, COUNCILOR FOR HERITAGE. Hesitating because she hadn’t seen Councilor Amnardbat since that last confirmation interview, and hesitating because she still couldn’t understand why the woman she’d met then would have wanted to sabotage Mahit’s imago-machine. Ruin her before she could even attempt to do right by the imago-line she was part of. If Amnardbat had even been responsible—Mahit only had the word of a different Councilor, Dekakel Onchu, Councilor for the Pilots, on that. And Mahit had that word because she’d received letters, while embedded in the Teixcalaanli court, which Onchu had meant for Yskandr.
She missed, with an ugly and sudden abrupt spike of feeling, Three Seagrass, her former cultural liaison, the woman who was supposed to make incongruous experiences make more sense to the poor barbarian in her charge. Three Seagrass would have just opened the door.
Mahit lifted her hand, and knocked. Called out her own name—“Mahit Dzmare!”—a Lsel-style appointment-keeping: no cloudhooks here, to open doors with micromovements of an eye. Just herself, announcing herself.
<You aren’t alone,> Yskandr said, a murmur in her mind, ghost thought: almost her own thought.
No, I’m not. And Amnardbat doesn’t know there are two of you—three of us—which is its own problem—
The door opened, so Mahit stopped thinking about dangerous lies she had told. Not thinking about them made them easier to hide. She’d learned that somewhere in the Empire, too.
Councilor Amnardbat was still slim and middle-aged, her hair worn in a spacer’s cut of silvering ringlets, narrow and long grey eyes in a wide-cheekboned face that always looked like she’d been exposed to too much solar radiation—chapped, but in a rugged sort of way. She smiled when Mahit came in, and that smile was welcoming and warm. If she’d been working with her staff before Mahit’s arrival, they weren’t immediately visible. Heritage was a small operation, anyway. Councilor Amnardbat had a secretary, who wrote her correspondence—he’d been the one to send Mahit this invitation through the intra-Station electronic mail—but Mahit saw no one in the office at all. Just chairs, and a desk with infopaper piled all over it, and a screen on the wall showing some camera’s view of what was outside Lsel just now. A slow rotation of stars.
“Welcome home,” said Councilor Amnardbat.
<One month she’s been waiting to tell you that?>
It’s a gambit, Mahit thought. She felt Yskandr subside into a watchful, attentive hum. More awake than he’d been in a long time. She felt that way, too. More awake, more present. Having a dangerous conversation with a powerful person in their office. Just like she was supposed to do, on Teixcalaan.
“I’m glad to be here,” said Mahit. “What can I do for you, Councilor?”
“I did promise to have a meal with you,” Amnardbat said, still smiling, and Mahit felt an echo of Yskandr’s flinch, his remembered fear: the Minister of Science in Teixcalaan, offering him food as a pretext to poison. She shoved it back. Not her endocrine trauma response. (She wished that she trusted Lsel’s integration therapists with the secret of what she’d done when she’d overlaid two imago-Yskandrs. Mahit didn’t have memory-linked trauma responses—probably—but Mahit and Yskandr were blurred, blurring more all the time, and she didn’t know what to do with his.)