“It isn’t that I don’t appreciate that,” Mahit said, “but I am sure you’re busy enough to not just want to share some food with a returned Ambassador.”
Councilor Amnardbat’s expression didn’t change. She radiated pleasant, brusque good cheer, laced with an almost-parental concern. “Come sit down, Ambassador Dzmare. We’ll talk. I have spiced fish cakes and flatbread—I figured you’d missed Lsel food.”
Mahit had, but she’d fixed that the first week back, gone to one of her old haunts and eaten hydroponic-raised flaky white fish stew until she’d ached from it and, feeling entirely ill, fled the place before any of her friends could show up accidentally and welcome her back with their questions. Something about Councilor Amnardbat’s emotional timeline was skewed. Perhaps skewed on purpose. (And what purpose would it serve? Checking for some Teixcalaanli-derived corruption of taste? And what if Mahit had been one of those Stationers who hated fish cakes, it was a preference—)
“It’s very kind of you to have it brought,” she said, sitting down at the conference table across from the Councilor’s desk and tamping back (again) on her imago’s frisson of adrenaline signaling. The danger here wasn’t going to come from the food. In fact, it smelled good enough to make Mahit’s mouth water: the flaky fish spiced with red peppers, the carbon-scent of slightly charred flatbread, made from real wheat and precious thereby. Amnardbat sat across from her, and for a good two minutes they were just Stationers together: rolling flatbread around fish, devouring the first one and making another to be eaten more slowly.
The Councilor swallowed the last bite of the first flatbread she’d rolled. “Let’s get the awkward question out of the way, Mahit,” she said. Mahit attempted to not let her eyebrows climb up to her hairline and mostly succeeded. “Why did you return so soon? I’m asking this in my capacity as the Councilor for Heritage—I want to know if we didn’t give you something you needed, out in the Empire. I know the process of integration was foreshortened…”
<Also you sabotaged me,> Yskandr said, and Mahit was worriedly glad that he was inaudible unless she let him be audible. Or slipped.
Possibly she sabotaged us, she reminded him. If we believe Onchu. Who we also haven’t spoken with—
She’d been too afraid to. Too afraid of Onchu being right, or Onchu being wrong, and too exhausted by the sudden and irrevocable strangeness of what had been home to get around that being-afraid.
“No,” she said, out loud. “There wasn’t anything I needed that Lsel didn’t try to give me. Of course I’d have liked more time with Yskandr before we went out, but what happened to me wasn’t the shortest integration period in our history, I’m sure.”
“Then why?” asked Amnardbat, and took another bite of fish. Question over, time to eat, time to listen.
Mahit sighed. Shrugged, rueful and aiming for self-deprecation, some echo of how uncomfortable she imagined Heritage would like a Stationer to be with things Teixcalaanli. “I was involved in a riot and a succession crisis, Councilor. It was violent and difficult—personally, professionally—and after I secured promises from the new Emperor as to our continued independence, I wanted to rest. Just for a while.”
“So you came home.”
“So I came home.” While I still wanted to.
“You’ve been here for a month. And yet you haven’t had yourself uploaded into a new imago-machine for your successor, Ambassador. Even though you know quite well that our last recording is extremely out of date, and we don’t have one of you at all.”
Fuck. So that’s what she wants. To know if the sabotage worked—
<So you do believe she sabotaged us.>
… At the moment I do.
“It didn’t occur to me,” said Mahit. “It hasn’t even been a year—forgive me, this is my first year having an imago at all. I thought there was a schedule? With appointment reminders?”
Refuge in bureaucratic ignorance. Which would also act as a shield—however temporary, however flimsy—against Amnardbat finding out that she had two imagos. Uploading would make short shrift of that little deception. And Mahit had no idea what policy there was on Lsel about doing something like what she’d done. Or if there even was any policy. She expected there wasn’t. It was so clearly a bad idea. It had certainly given her enough squirming, revulsive qualms, before she’d done it.
<Do you regret—>
No. I needed you. I still need—us.
“Oh, of course there’s a schedule,” Amnardbat said. “But we in Heritage—well, I specifically, but I do speak for everyone here—have a policy of encouraging people who experience significant events or accomplishments to update their imago records more often than the automated calendar suggests.”
Politely, Mahit took another bite of her flatbread wrap. Chewed and swallowed past the psychosomatic tightening of her throat. “Councilor,” she said, “of course I can make an appointment with the machinists, now that I know about your policies. Is that really all? It’s a kindness, to have this much fish cooked for us, and real flatbread, just to ask for an administrative favor that you could have written to me about.”
Let her deal with the suggestion that she was being profligate with food resources. Heritage Councilors had been removed for lesser corruptions, generations ago. That imago-line wasn’t given to new Heritage Councilors any longer. Mothballed, preserved somewhere in the banks of recorded memories, deemed unsuitable: anyone who would serve their own needs before the long-remembered needs of the Station shouldn’t be influencing the one Councilor devoted to preserving the continuity of that Station.
<You are annoyingly clever.>
Some very nice Teixcalaanlitzlim and my imago have conspired to teach me to weaponize references.
But Amnardbat was saying, “It’s not a favor,” and as she said it, Mahit realized that she’d underestimated the Councilor, was underestimating the reasons for her behavior, expecting that she could be manipulated like a Teixcalaanlitzlim could be, with allusion and narrative. “It’s an order, Ambassador. We need a copy of your memory. To make sure that whatever it was that made Yskandr Aghavn stay away so long from the uploading process hasn’t spread to you, too.”
Fascinating, really, how she felt so cold. So cold, her fingers gone to ice-electric prickling, no sensation around how she held the remains of her flatbread. So cold, and yet: hummingly focused. Afraid. Alive. “Spread?” she asked.
<Aren’t we poisoned?> Yskandr whispered, and Mahit ignored him.
“It is a terrible thing, to lose a citizen to Teixcalaan,” Amnardbat said. “To worry that there is something in the Empire that steals our best. The machinists and I will be expecting you this week, Mahit.”
When she smiled again, Mahit thought she understood what made the Teixcalaanlitzlim so nervous about bared teeth.
Knifepoint was in visual range when Nine Hibiscus made it back to the bridge, briefly out of breath from the speed of that short transit. She took deep inhalations like she was an orator, settled her lungs, tried to keep any adrenaline response limited. It was her bridge now, her bridge and her command. All her officers rotated toward her as if they were flowers and she was a welcome sunrise. For a moment everything felt correct. And then she noticed how quickly Knifepoint was approaching the rest of the Fleet, growing in size even as she watched through the viewports. They had to be burning the engines at absolute maximum to be coming in this hot. Knifepoint was a scout—it could hit that speed, but not maintain it for very long; it was too small and would run out of fuel—and if its pilot had decided to run as fast as possible, then they were absolutely being chased.