“Let’s go around back,” Three Seagrass said. “As if we have no idea what’s going on here. Be easy. Match the pace of everyone else.”
It was very like being in a bad spies-and-intrigue holovision show. Strange people loitering in a transportation center, and Mahit and Three Seagrass trying to be unobtrusive—how could a barbarian and an asekreta, still in cream-and-flame court dress, be unobtrusive—but perhaps they were simply trying to look unconnected from the very person they were trying to locate. That might be manageable.
Twelve Azalea wasn’t behind the statue of One Telescope. Three Seagrass leaned against its base, perfectly nonchalant, so Mahit leaned as well—leaned, and waited. Tried to see if she could find any visual trace of him in the sea of moving Teixcalaanlitzlim. She couldn’t. There were too many, and too many of them looked like Twelve Azalea: short, broad-shouldered, dark-haired and brown-skinned men dressed in multilayered suiting.
“Don’t react when I move,” Three Seagrass murmured. “I see him. Follow me on a thirty-second count; he’s in the shadow by the food kiosk, two gates over—between gates 14 and 15.” She gestured with her chin, and then set off, wandering with apparent aimlessness toward the kiosk. It was gleefully, loudly, holographically advertising SNACK CAKES: LYCHEE FLAVOR! as well as SQUID STICKS: JUST IMPORTED! Mahit couldn’t imagine wanting to eat either of those. Three Seagrass bought something from the kiosk, and vanished into the shadows beside it just as Mahit counted thirty and began to make her own way over. She avoided the kiosk entirely and skirted around its back, where the holographic advertisements provided substantial visual distraction.
Twelve Azalea was dressed in the most casual clothes Mahit had ever seen him in: a long jacket over a shirt and trousers, all in shades of pink and green. His face was pinched, distracted. The Mist were after him, then, or at least they were following him. They didn’t seem terribly inclined to arrest him, at the moment.
“Pity there isn’t another water garden for us to hide in,” Three Seagrass was saying, soft under the chatter of the SNACK CAKES jingle. “I assume these are your stalkers?”
“My stalkers multiplied,” Twelve Azalea replied. “There was only one before, when I snuck out of the Judiciary.”
“They must have been watching your flat,” Mahit said. “We think they followed us too, when we left, but they gave up when we didn’t do anything peculiar.”
Twelve Azalea laughed, a nasty choked noise, rapidly over. “You must have leashed Reed very tight, Ambassador, to not have done anything peculiar. It’s been hours and hours.”
“Do you think they spotted you?” Three Seagrass asked, graciously ignoring everything else he’d said.
“Yes—but they don’t get close. They’re not trying to catch me, they want to know where I’m going, and follow us out to—”
To the unlicensed neurosurgeon. If they were tracked all the way out there, Mahit was sure, the entire plan would collapse under a pile of Teixcalaanli legalities and arrests.
“—and they’re between us and the kiosk. I can’t let them see me buy the tickets,” Twelve Azalea finished.
Three Seagrass was utterly calm, completely focused: that shimmering crisis-energy and determination that Mahit found so frustratingly admirable about her. “I’ll get the tickets. No one is watching me. You and Mahit meet me over at gate 26, two minutes. Let her walk in front of you, she’s much more visible, even if you are stupidly pretty and wearing bright colors.”
“I didn’t dress for practical spywork,” Twelve Azalea muttered, “I dressed for going out-province.”
Three Seagrass shrugged, gave him and Mahit both a dazzling Teixcalaanli-style grin, her eyes huge in her thin face, and shrugged out of her asekreta’s jacket. She turned it inside out, revealing the orange-red lining, shook her hair out of its queue to hang in a curtain around her shoulders, and flung the now-red jacket over one arm. “Be right back,” she said.
“She seems equipped for practical spywork,” Mahit said dryly.
“Reed might be a conservative at heart,” Twelve Azalea said, not unadmiringly, “but her conservatism extends as far as thinking about the Information Ministry as an infiltration and extraction unit, like it was before it was a ministry.”
Mahit began walking, slowly. Ambling, really, making herself noticeable. A tall barbarian, in barbarian clothing. She made herself move like a Stationer, like someone used to less gravity than this planet: someone slowed down, and felt an echo of Yskandr’s own time getting used to the pull of the earth, like a reassuring muscular ache. “What was Information before it was a ministry, specifically?” she asked, keeping her eyes on the grey-clad Judiciary officials. They weren’t looking at her. They were looking for Twelve Azalea, who was hidden behind her taller shadow. She wasn’t important. Not here. Not now.
“The intelligence and analysis arm of the Six Outreaching Palms,” Twelve Azalea explained, under his breath. “But that was hundreds of years ago. We’re civilians now. We serve the Emperor, not any one yaotlek. It helps to reduce the number of usurpation attempts…”
Gate 26 announced a departure of a commuter train from Inmost Province to Poplar Bridge, calling at Belltown One, Belltown Four, Belltown Six, the Economicum, and Poplar Bridge. Mahit and Twelve Azalea stood at the side of the gate. Twelve Azalea was pressed against the wall, Mahit standing in front of him, facing him, hiding him as best as she could from view. The gate announced the departure of the train in two minutes. She could feel the eyes of the Judiciary people pass over her—heard approaching, directed footsteps, chanced a look over one shoulder. There was Three Seagrass, looking entirely like a young woman off home to an outer province from university and not like herself, coming toward them—and a set of the grey-clad Judiciary investigators, converging on them in the other direction.
When Mahit made the decision, she made it all at once. She was getting on this train, she was going to find Twelve Azalea’s secret neurosurgeon, she was not going to be denied access to her predecessor’s memory and ability if she could have it at all. And those Mist agents might know what train they were going to get on, but they absolutely weren’t going to know where they’d get off.
“Run,” she said, “run now,” and grabbed Twelve Azalea’s sleeve, pulling him through the gate and toward the waiting sleek black-and-gold capsule of the commuter maglev. She had to trust Three Seagrass to run after her—fuck her hip hurt when she did this, it still hadn’t healed properly—
The doors of the train irised open for them, easily; irised closed behind them. “Up,” Mahit said, and Twelve Azalea followed her to the second level of the capsule. A moment later she heard the first announcement of impending departure—doors will be closing, please stand clear—and hoped that Three Seagrass had made it on, and that the Judiciary agents hadn’t and—
—and was gasping with exertion still when the capsule began to move, a graceful soundless shift, frictionless, and Three Seagrass came up the stairs.
“They didn’t make it, they didn’t have tickets,” she said, “look, they’re on the platform,” and fell into a seat, her chest heaving. Mahit looked. There were two men in grey, there, rapidly decreasing in size as the maglev accelerated away.