“That was more exciting than I strictly expected,” said Mahit, out of not knowing what else to say. Now that it was … not over, but paused, she was exquisitely aware of just how much she hurt. Not the best shape to undergo experimental surgery in.
“That could describe my entire week since you arrived, Mahit,” Three Seagrass said, and handed her a ticket. Mahit choked a little, trying not to laugh.
“So,” Three Seagrass went on, blithe and determined, “how far out are we going? And does this person we are going to see have a name, or are we continuing the amateur spies theme and loitering on a street corner with a pass-phrase?”
“She goes by Five Portico, and we’re going to Belltown Six,” said Twelve Azalea, and Three Seagrass hissed a bit through her teeth.
“Six, really,” she said. Outside the train windows the City rushed by in a glowing mess of steel and gold and wire. Mahit stared at it, and listened without listening too hard—the sort of casual cultural immersion which she knew from all of her Lsel psychotherapeutic training was one of her best traits. To let go—to float in the newness, absorb it, internalize when necessary. She needed the rest. She needed to be as calm as she could.
“Yes, Belltown Six, she’s an unlicensed ixplanatl, where do you think she’d live? Somewhere with good property values?” Twelve Azalea said. He sounded defensive.
“If I wanted to get plastic surgery I could find an unlicensed ixplanatl in your neighborhood without going halfway across the province.”
“It’s a little trickier to find someone who will carve open the Ambassador’s skull, thanks.”
A little pause. The train made a soft thrumming noise as it ran, a comforting sort of repeated ka-thnk, just on the edge of Mahit’s hearing.
“I do appreciate you, Petal,” Three Seagrass said, sighing. “You know that, right? It’s merely … it’s been a week. Thank you.”
Twelve Azalea shrugged, his shoulder moving against Mahit’s. “You’re going to buy me drinks for about a year. But it’s all right. You’re welcome.”
After nearly an hour, the train exited Inmost Province—the heart of the City, the only place Mahit had expected to go for at least the first three months of her tenure as Ambassador (tourism was for once she was settled, she thought, a distant sentiment from some other Mahit Dzmare, in some other, more hospitable universe)—and entered Belltown Province. At first there was hardly any noticeable change, aside from in the composition of passengers: a slight difference in ethnic group, Mahit thought, a little taller in general, a little paler than Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea. But slowly the composition of architecture changed as well, as they passed through Belltown One and Three and into Belltown Four, outward in an expanding fan shape of districts—the buildings were no lower but they were darker, less airy—the constant motif of flowers and light, the gossamer webwork of the Central City all replaced by tall oppressive spears of buildings, swarming with identical windows. They blocked most of the light.
To Mahit’s eyes, used to the narrow corridors of Lsel Station, the lack of blue sky-vault felt strangely comforting, like she could stop keeping track of some small nagging task, and set it down; not having to think about the sheer size of the sky. She wondered what the Teixcalaanli thought of it. It was probably a sign of urban blight, all these people close together, blocking out the sun.
Belltown Six was closer-packed still, a spear-garden of buildings in grey concrete—dim from the moment they stepped out of the train station. The sky above was a bluish sliver. Three Seagrass had her shoulders up by her ears, hunched against a nonexistent chill, and that right there explained most of what Central City denizens thought of this province.
“How did you find this Five Portico?” Mahit asked Twelve Azalea as he led them down the narrow streets.
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Reed knows this already—she used to tease me—but I tried for Science before I tried for Information, and didn’t make the cut on the entrance exams. There’s always groups of disaffected students, after an exam cycle. Angry people talking in cafés, on semi-legal cloudhook message nets—I still keep in touch with a couple of them.”
“You have—unexpected depths,” said Mahit.
Three Seagrass snickered, a sharp little noise. “Don’t underestimate him because he’s pretty,” she said. “He didn’t get Science because he scored too damn high on Information to go anywhere else.”
“Regardless of that,” Twelve Azalea said, “one of my old friends knows Five Portico and I trust her to not send us to a complete charlatan. All right?”
“Only a partial charlatan for us,” said Three Seagrass, and then Twelve Azalea was stopping them at the central doorway of one of those enormous spear-buildings. It didn’t have a cloudhook interface, like the doors in Central City and the palace—it had a push-button dialpad.
He leaned on one of the lower buttons with his thumb. It made a whining, blatting sound like a tiny alarm.
“Does she know we’re coming?” Three Seagrass asked, just in time for the huge door to click and swing open.
“That’d be a yes,” Mahit said, and walked in like she wasn’t even the slightest bit afraid.
Five Portico’s apartment was on the ground floor, the only open door in the entirety of the corridor: a deep-grey slice of dimness. The woman herself stood in it and watched them come down the hall with no expression on her face save a patient sort of evaluation. Up close, she looked very little like how Mahit had imagined an unlicensed ixplanatl would look. She was spare and of middle height, with the Teixcalaanli high cheekbones pressing tight against bronze skin gone ashy with middle age and lack of vitamin D. She looked, in fact, like someone’s eldest sib, the sort who neglected to fill out their reproductive quota forms and didn’t have the genetics to make the Station’s population board annoy her into doing so.
Except: one of her eyes wasn’t an eye at all.
It might have been a cloudhook, a very long time ago. Now it was a metal and plastic section of her skull, the edges of it obscured with long-healed twisted skin, and in the center, where the eyeball should have been, was a telescoping lens. It glowed faintly red. As Mahit came closer, the aperture widened.
“You must be the Ambassador,” Five Portico said. Her voice matched neither the middle-aged normalcy nor the artificial eye. It was mellifluous, lovely, like she’d been a singer in some other life. “Come in and shut the door.”
Five Portico’s household was not given to the rituals of courtesy. No one made Mahit and her companions overdetermined cups of tea—she thought of Nineteen Adze, and fleetingly regretted the absence of even a prisoner’s sense of sanctuary—nor were they invited to sit down, despite the presence of a couch, upholstered in threadbare turquoise brocade. Instead, Five Portico paced a quick circle around Mahit, as if inspecting her general health, and stopped in front of her, square-shouldered, her head tilted up to look her in the face. The technology where her skull should have been glittered where it wasn’t transparent, and in the transparent parts Mahit could see through to the yellowish bone and the bright red-pink of blood vessels, sealed away from the air.
“Where’s the machine you want installed in you?” she asked.