ASIDE from sterile cleanliness, Five Portico’s surgery bore no resemblance to the white plastic suites Mahit remembered from Lsel. It consisted of a polished-steel table on an adjustable platform, surrounded by a forest of mobile instrumentation arms and complicated restraints. She felt dreamlike, entirely unreal as she stripped out of her jacket. She left her shirt on, with her Lsel secrets still bound to her ribs underneath it. Five Portico did not seem to care; she briskly guided Mahit to lie on her belly on the table and secured her head with a cage of padded bars and straps. This was absurd. She was going to let a stranger rip her imago-machine out of her in a back room of an apartment complex on another planet. She had said yes, over and over.
Yskandr, she thought, one last desperate reaching-out, forgive me. I’m sorry—come back, please—
Still silence. Nothing but that nerve-damage flicker down her arms to her outermost fingers.
Five Portico came at her with a needle, the tip beading with anesthetic. The iris of her artificial eye yawned, a shutter-spin of metal expanding outward; the needle’s sting in Mahit’s upper arm was a sharp afterthought in the face of the white-laser heart of that eye.
She was dizzy. Five Portico’s hands were on her arms. She could feel all of her bones where they pressed against the steel. That laser eye slipped wider—she could feel its heat—was she going to use the eye to cut—
Blank. Slow decay, a winding-down wound backward, wound up again, the memory of a closing dark, descent, and then—he woke to un-startled flesh, a flicker of oxygen drawn easily, slowly through the throat—relief, first, dizzying profound relief, breathing, the intense joy of lungs perfused with air where no air had been able to come—
(he had been on the floor, on the floor and choking, the carpet-pile pressed into his cheek, and now his cheek was on something cold)
A breath, slower still, drugged-slow—
(—not his cheek, the lungs too small, the body narrow and brittle-bright with youth and exhaustion easily mixed and had he ever been this young, not for decades—other-body, a new small self, he was dead, wasn’t he—dead and an imago, in a new body—)
His mouth was making keening, absurd sounds. He couldn’t figure out why.
It didn’t matter. He was breathing. He sank back into blackness.
Sunrise on Lsel Station happens four times in a twenty-four-hour cycle. Sunrise across the backs of his (unlined, square-nailed) hands, resting on tempered grey steel, cold. His fingers prickle with adrenaline like stinging needles. Across from him is Darj Tarats, (from somewhere distant, a voice he doesn’t recognize: this Darj Tarats is absurdly young, he looks more like a person than the mobile cadaver that someone else is remembering him looking like) grave-faced under the tight speckled-grey curls of his hair, saying, “We are going to send you to Teixcalaan, Mr. Aghavn, if you’re willing to go.”
He says <as he remembered himself saying> (as she had said), “I want to. I have always—”
And the rush of bright desire, the naked shameful want for the thing that was not his by right. Was this the first time he felt it?
(Of course not. It hadn’t been the first time for her either.)
“Your wanting to is not why you are being sent,” says Darj Tarats. “Though it might mean the Imperium finds more flesh on your body to feast on, and doesn’t spit you back out at us for a while. We need influence in Teixcalaan, Mr. Aghavn. We need you to get in as far as you can go, and be indispensable.”
He says, “I will be,” with all the arrogance of his youth, and only then does he ask, “Why now?”
Darj Tarats pushes a star-chart across the steel table. It is fine and precise, and Yskandr knows these stars: they are the stars of his childhood. At one edge of the chart there are a series of black spots, marked-out coordinates. Places where something has happened.
“Because we may have to ask Teixcalaan to preserve us from something worse than Teixcalaan,” he says. “And when we ask, we want them to love us. Need us. Make them love you, Yskandr.”
“What happened at these places?” Yskandr asks, one uncalloused fingertip resting on those spreading black spots.
“We are not alone out here,” says Darj Tarats. “And what else is out here is hungry, and nothing else but hungry. They have only been quiescent thus far, but … that might change. At any moment. When it does, I want you to be ready to ask Teixcalaan to intervene. At least a human empire only eats a person from the heart outward.”
Yskandr shudders, angry and afraid at once: pushes back the anger, the insult, the feeling of what you love makes you despicable in favor of asking a useful question. “We’ve met aliens before—why is this different?”
Darj Tarats’s face is serene and composed and utterly cold. Yskandr will dream of it, in bad moments (knows he will, remembering forward), will dream of him saying this: “They do not think, Yskandr. They aren’t persons. We don’t understand them and they don’t understand us. There is no reasoning or negotiation to be had.”
Dream it, and wake the kind of cold no heavy blanket or warm-fleshed bedmate can dispel. And think, to himself: Why didn’t Tarats tell the Council? Why was I his weapon of choice? What does he want for Lsel Station to become, to risk this danger for some unknown stretch (<twenty years,> someone murmurs) of time?
He’d known, even then, that Tarats wanted something larger than the military protection of Teixcalaan, but then he’d been on the City, at court, and it hadn’t—mattered—
I am remembering this for the second time.
<I am remembering this for the second time.>
(I am remembering what I have never seen–)
I’ve seen this. I am this. Who are you?
(An inward turn, searching, to find that foreign voice—to look at her, inside themselves. A turning-in, and in turning they see one another, doubled—)
<I’m Yskandr Aghavn,> says Yskandr Aghavn.
Yskandr Aghavn is twenty-six years old and has been in Teixcalaanli territory for just over thirty-two months. Yskandr Aghavn is <dead! dead, I saw you dead on a plinth in a basement! I’m dead because you’re dead!> forty, almost forty-one, and knows the minor inevitable physical tragedy of middle age, the sag around the middle and the jawline.
I’m Yskandr Aghavn, says Yskandr Aghavn, and you are an imago I sent back to Lsel fifteen years ago. Who the fuck was stupid enough to put an imago of me into me?
That would be me.
(Again that turning-inward, turning sideways, and seeing: high-cheekboned woman, short-cropped hair, tall and narrow with a sharp prow of a nose and grey-green eyes, bloodshot exhausted.)
I’m Mahit Dzmare, says Mahit Dzmare, and I am both of you now.
Blood and starlight, says Yskandr, each of him, both of him, exactly the same tone on the Teixcalaanli curse, why did you do that?