“I asked,” Three Seagrass said, and she had asked, hadn’t she? She’d asked every time. She was almost sure she’d asked, she’d never given Mahit orders, she wouldn’t, the idea was absurd. But Mahit ignored her and kept going, like words were an infection she was squeezing from a wound.
“And you’d have liked it if I’d stayed with you in the palace, wouldn’t you have? You could’ve had me all this time to amuse you and not had to come all the way to a war—”
Before she could stop herself, Three Seagrass said, “Would that have been so awful? You staying with me.” Distantly, she thought it’d be absolutely terrible if she started crying. She’d never cried in arguments. Not since she had grown big enough to leave the crèche. Mahit did all sorts of things to her that she’d never expected, made her feel all sorts of new and complicated kinds of everything, including—apparently—hurt and miserable. All she’d done was suggest that a uniform might make things simpler, and now they were going to have this fight, which felt awful and unfixable and like Mahit had been saving it up, waiting for the inevitable point where she couldn’t stand Three Seagrass any longer and did this to whatever it was they had between them.
“No,” said Mahit. “It wouldn’t have been terrible to stay with you. Which is why I didn’t.”
“That makes no sense.”
Mahit had sat herself down at the central conference table, and now she put her face in her palms and hid her eyes from Three Seagrass. The last time they’d been around a conference room table, they’d stopped a usurpation with poetry. Now they couldn’t even write a message together, because they were having the most useless, incomprehensible, horrible argument Three Seagrass could remember having since her ex-girlfriend Nine Arch had broken up with her in the middle of exams during their second year of asekreta training.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Three Seagrass said again, louder. “It doesn’t. I’m sorry about the uniforms, and the jacket, and I won’t mention it again, but you aren’t being—”
“Explicable? Understandable? Civilized?”
“Fuck,” said Three Seagrass, hearing as she said it how her voice had gone narrow and high, uncontrolled. “If you didn’t want to come with me here, you didn’t have to.”
Mahit took her hands down and looked Three Seagrass straight in the face. It felt like her gaze had weight, weight and edges, a sudden revealed landscape of places to cut oneself open on. Again Three Seagrass found herself wondering what of this person was Mahit Dzmare and what was Yskandr Aghavn, and if all the ruinous confusion between them now was born of Mahit’s precious imago-technology—or if she’d never understood her. Not really. Only pretended to.
(Only pretended, like they were pretending they understood something of these aliens and their incomprehensible language that hurt humans to hear.)
Three Seagrass dropped her eyes first.
Mahit said, “Reed,” softly, and Three Seagrass looked up again, heliotropic, compelled.
“Yes?” she asked.
“When you figure out why I did have to come with you, we can talk again.”
“… again, at all?” There was something horrible in the idea: that she’d gone so far wrong that she wouldn’t even have a chance to keep going, keep trying. That there was some flaw in everything that was invisible to her. (She didn’t know why Mahit couldn’t have stayed on Lsel. Politics, of course, but there were other avenues than this mad gambit of a trip to the edge of a war to get out of politics. Mahit hadn’t told her why. She knew she hadn’t told her why, she’d avoided telling her quite deliberately, and now she was somehow supposed to figure it out—)
“We have work to do,” said Mahit, which wasn’t an answer at all. “We need to get one of these things to think this Fleet is worth talking to.”
They did have work to do. And less than six hours until the yaotlek would want that work. And yet Three Seagrass felt like she couldn’t think through the urge to cry, or grab Mahit by the arm and shake her until she explained. Until she stopped being—
Oh, say it, Reed. To yourself if no one else.
Uncivilized. Refusing to participate, like an animal or a child.
The silence between them dragged onward, endless and misshapen, as if gravity was off-kilter, the great engines of Weight for the Wheel shifted out of true, the universe undoing itself from its expected course. The room smelled of acidic vomit. Three Seagrass didn’t know what to say. Everything she’d said so far had made things worse.
She sat down at the table, two chairs away from where Mahit was. It was better than her other option, which was storming out of the room. She needed Mahit. And she needed to do the job she’d set herself when the request for a special envoy came in to the Information Ministry. She should never have been allowed to be here; almost everything about her being here was unauthorized. Aside from the fact that she was very, very good and that she’d found the smartest person she knew to help her with the linguistics and the culture shock of first contact, and that technically she had the requisite rank in the Ministry. But if she didn’t manage it—
If she didn’t manage it, she wouldn’t have a career. Also, probably, a whole lot of Teixcalaanlitzlim would die at the hands of these invaders, considering what they’d done on Peloa-2 and how the yaotlek was clearly having political problems with one of her Fleet Captains. Of which she had only five, hardly enough to prevent an alien attack force from spilling through the jumpgate and into Teixcalaanli space proper. A lot of dead people, if Three Seagrass didn’t figure out how to talk to aliens. Which was more important than her career. If less immediately stomach-churning.
And here was Mahit, waiting for her, or waiting for—something. The gulf of silence felt uncrossable.
She crossed it anyway. “Start with the third sound,” she said. “The one they make when they’re approached too closely. And combine it with—oh, the last one, the one that they made when they were chasing Knifepoint. I think that’s a victory sound.”
“Approach-danger plus hurrah-we-win,” Mahit said, dry as dust. “Could be worse. I hope we’re right about hurrah-we-win, otherwise we’re saying something like approach-danger and we’re-going-to-chase-you.”
“Do you have a better idea?” asked Three Seagrass, and was more gratified than she could bear to think about when Mahit nodded, and they began to get to work in earnest.
CHAPTER NINE
You’d like him. You’d be proud of him. And every time I see his face I think of yours, and your voice, and what I might have had to guide me. And every time I think of your voice I think of the monstrous creature that might have whispered to me with it—and if I had that creature I would have your ghost, and listen to it—so all in all I suspect I have done right, and my longings are my own to bear. But that’s being the Illuminate Majesty, isn’t it? You always said so. I wish you’d believed it.