The part of the City which contained the imperial government was enormous and old, shaped like a six-pointed star: sectors for East, West, North, and South, and two more: Sky, extending out between North and East, and Earth, pointing out from the middle of South and West. Each sector was composed of needle-sharp towers jammed full of archives and offices, tied together by multilevel bridges and archways. Stacked courtyards hung in midair between the more populated towers, their floors translucent or inset with sandstone and gold. At the center of each was a hydroponic garden, with photosynthesizing plant life floating in standing water. The unbelievable luxuries of a planet. The flowers in the hydroponic gardens seemed to be color-coded; as they moved closer to the Judiciary, their petals shaded redder and redder, until the center of each courtyard looked like a pool of iridescent blood, and Mahit caught sight of the building that had been her first destination, a practically unthinkable number of hours earlier that morning.
Twelve Azalea brushed a burnished green-metal plate next to the door with his index finger, tracing a sweeping figure that Mahit thought might have been a calligraphic signature—she caught the glyph for “flower” hidden in the middle of it, and his name written out would have “flower” along with one of the glyphs for “twelve” and some adjustment for the type of flower. The doors to the Judiciary hissed open. When Three Seagrass raised her hand to touch the plate too, Twelve Azalea caught her around the wrist.
“Just come inside,” he said under his breath, shooing them both through and letting the doors seal shut behind them. “You’d think you’d never snuck in anywhere before…”
“We have legal access,” Three Seagrass hissed. “And besides, we’re on the City’s visual record—”
“Which our host doesn’t want us to associate with his access,” Mahit said pointedly, just loud enough to be heard.
“Exactly,” said Twelve Azalea, “and if we get to the point that someone is scraping City audiovisual for ‘who went into the Judiciary today,’ we have such bigger problems, Reed.”
Mahit sighed. “Get on with it; take us to my predecessor.”
Three Seagrass’s mouth compressed into a thin, considering line, and she slipped back to walk at Mahit’s left shoulder while Twelve Azalea led them underground.
The morgue looked the same. The air was chill and smelled forcibly clean, like it was being churned through purifiers. The ixplanatl—or Twelve Azalea, after he was done investigating—had covered Yskandr’s corpse with the sheet. Mahit was abruptly consumed with crawling dread: the last time she’d stood here, her imago had sent up terrible flares of emotion and endocrine-system hormones and then vanished. And she’d come back anyway. A nasty flicker of sabotage reoccurred: Was this room somehow inimical? (Did she want the room to be inimical, so that the sabotage could not be either her own failure or from someone on Lsel?)
Twelve Azalea peeled the sheet down again, revealing the dead face of Yskandr Aghavn. Mahit came close. She tried to see the corpse as a material shell; a physical problem of the present world, instead of something which had housed a person like she housed a person. The same person.
Twelve Azalea pulled on a pair of sterile surgical gloves and gently lifted the corpse’s head, turning it in his hands so the back of its neck faced Mahit, hiding the largest of the preservative injection sites, the one in the great veins of the throat. The corpse moved like something fresher than three months dead: supple and floppy.
“It’s quite difficult to see—a very small scar,” he said, “but if you press down at the top of the cervical spine, I’m sure you’ll feel the aberration.”
Mahit reached out and pressed her thumb into the hollow of Yskandr’s skull, directly between the tendons. His skin was rubbery. Too much give, and the wrong kind. The small imago-scar was a tiny irregularity under the pad of her thumb; beneath it was the unfolded architecture of the imago-machine, a firmness as familiar as the skull bones themselves. Her own was identical. She used to rub her thumb against it while she was studying. She hadn’t done that since the imago-machine containing five years of Yskandr’s experience had been surgically installed inside her. It wasn’t one of his habitual gestures, and it was a tell, outside of the Station, and so she’d let it dissolve into the new combined person they were supposed to be becoming.
“Yes,” she said. “I feel it.”
“Well then.” Twelve Azalea smiled. “What do you think it is?”
She could tell him. If he had been Three Seagrass, she might have—an impulse she knew was dangerous even as she felt it; there was no appreciable safety in confession to one Teixcalaanlitzlim over another, not after a single day—but she was desperately alone, without Yskandr, and she wanted.
“It’s certainly not organic,” she said. “But he’s had it for a long time.” A sidestep. She needed to get through this unwise bit of corpse-handling and back to her rooms and shut a door and deal with wanting … friends. A person wasn’t friends with Teixcalaanli citizens. A person especially wasn’t friends with asekretim, the both of them were Information Ministry—
“I never heard of him having spinal surgery,” said Three Seagrass. “Not in all the time he was here. Not for epilepsy or anything else.”
“Would you have noticed?” asked Mahit.
“With the amount of time he spent at court? He was very visible, your predecessor. If he disappeared for a week someone would have commented that His Majesty must be missing him—”
“Really,” said Mahit.
“I did mention he was a political man,” Twelve Azalea said. “So you’d say the metal was, perhaps, inserted before he became Ambassador.”
“And what does it do?” Three Seagrass said. “I am far more intrigued by that possibility than when it was installed, Petal.”
“Does the Ambassador know such technical matters?” Twelve Azalea said, lightly. Teasingly, Mahit thought. Perhaps even insultingly. He was baiting her.
“The Ambassador,” she said, gesturing to herself, “is not a medical practitioner nor an ixplanatl, and could not possibly explain the neurological effects of such a device in any detail.”
“But it is neurological,” said Three Seagrass.
Twelve Azalea said, “It’s in his brainstem,” as if that was a sufficient answer. “And it is certainly not Teixcalaanli; no ixplanatl would adjust the functioning of a person’s mind in such a way.”
“Don’t be insulting,” said Three Seagrass. “If noncitizens want to stuff their skulls with metal it is their own business, unless they plan to become citizens—”
“The Ambassador was certainly involved with the functioning of Teixcalaan, Reed, you know that, it’s practically why you applied to be this new one’s liaison—so it does matter that he had some kind of neurological enhancement—”
“I am entirely fascinated by this information,” Mahit said pointedly, and then cut herself off as both Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea abruptly straightened and composed their faces to formal stillness. Behind Mahit the morgue door opened with a shallow hiss. She turned around.
Coming toward them was a Teixcalaanli woman dressed entirely in bone-white: trousers and many-layered blouse and a long asymmetrical jacket. The planes of her face were dark bronze, her cheekbones wide, her nose knifelike over a wide and narrow-lipped mouth. Her soft leather boots were soundless on the floor. Mahit thought she was the most beautiful Teixcalaanli woman she’d ever seen, which likely meant that she was mediocre to ugly by local standards. Too slight, too tall, all dimension in the face in the nose, and difficult to look away from.