We would not be in this sort of trouble had you not gotten us into it in the first place, she said. And now I need your help. And we need to … figure out who we’re going to be. My priorities are not yours—
A flash, an emotional spike just below her sternum, of how she’d felt while talking to the Emperor. <Aren’t they?>
No, she repeated. And stay out of my nervous system, I told you. You’re dead. You’re my imago, my living memory, and we are the Lsel Ambassador—
<I do like you,> said Yskandr. <I always have.>
Flickers, in the interstices, of the version she knew. Nevertheless she felt invaded, heavy with the unfamiliar mental weight of someone else, someone who had more life than her, had seen more than her, who knew Teixcalaan better—she thought, helpless and sudden, of how that ninety-percent clone would feel if he ever had all of Six Direction stuffed into his ten-year-old head, and ached with sympathy.
The Yskandr-sense—heavy weight and bright rag both—backed off. That might be some kind of apology.
Mahit mustered her courage, braced for the inevitable physical consequences, and opened her eyes. The headache spiked immediately along with the light, as she’d expected it would, but she didn’t vomit and she didn’t have another convulsion or experience any immediate visual distortions. Could be worse.
She was lying on a turquoise couch, just like the other turquoise couch Five Portico owned, the one in her front room. The fabric under her cheek was upholstery fabric. Maybe Five Portico had an entire set of turquoise furniture. Maybe she’d bought them all on sale. The last time Mahit had woken up from brain surgery she’d been in the medical center on Lsel, in a sterile and soothing silver-grey room. This was … different.
<Quite,> said Yskandr, bone dry. Mahit snickered, which did hurt.
Moving carefully, and feeling like every part of her body had been desiccated in vacuum, she sat up. Neither Five Portico nor Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea were in visual range. That gave her a long moment to brace herself for the nauseating process of standing up and walking toward the only visible door. Her ribs felt constricted when she tried to take a full breath—oh, that was the sport bandage, still wrapped around her lower floating ribs exactly where it had been before the surgery had begun.
It was strange, the things which could make you trust someone: Mahit felt profoundly grateful to Five Portico for not having done more to her than she’d asked for. Only the requested violation, thank you: she still had the letter from Darj Tarats, and now, with Yskandr’s help, she could read it.
If the others were outside that door, waiting for her to wake up—probably wondering if she’d wake up—this might be the best time to decrypt it, while she was alone.
As alone as she was ever going to be again.
<We’ll get used to it,> said Yskandr. <We were getting used to it before.>
And then you vanished on me, Mahit told him. All right. Show me how to read this, if you can.
She lifted her shirt and unwound the wrapping. The communiqué was wrinkled from how she must have rolled on it, curved to the shape of her ribs, but still whole and still entirely readable with her own book cipher, except for the encrypted section at the bottom. It says you have the encryption key. Or you did, fifteen years ago.
<I still do,> Yskandr told her, and she knew he felt the wash of relief that spilled over her as strongly as she did. <It’s the one Darj Tarats gave me, in secret, right before I got onto the transport ship to come here. If it’s in his cipher, the message is from his hand directly.>
Show me, said Mahit.
Yskandr did.
Sharing skill with an imago felt like discovering an unexpected and enormous talent; like she had sat down to do the Station’s orbital calculations and suddenly realized she had been studying mathematics for decades, all the correct formulas and the experience to use them arrayed at her fingertips; or being asked to dance in zero-g, and automatically knowing how her body should feel, how to move in space. The cipher was mathematical—which must have been Darj Tarats’s preference, as Mahit was aware that Yskandr had had to learn to do the matrix algebra which formed the basis of generating the one-time decryption key. She was glad she wasn’t learning it, just feeling it unfold inside her like a blooming flower.
<It’s easier with paper,> Yskandr said, <and a pencil.>
Mahit laughed a little, gingerly—laughing hurt her throat and her head. She reached up to touch the back of her neck. There was a bandage there, covering the surgical site. By touch she guessed the wound was as long as her thumb, and tried to imagine what the scar would look like. Then, still careful, she pushed herself up to her feet and tottered toward anything that might contain a writing implement. Five Portico was just anti-establishment enough that she might have actual pens on her desk, not just holographic infofiche-manipulators.
There weren’t pens, but there was a drafting pencil resting on top of a bunch of mechanical sketches. Mahit didn’t flip through them—Five Portico hadn’t removed her shirt, she wasn’t going to look through her papers—but even a cursory glance at the top sketch was enough for her to recognize it as a schematic for a prosthetic hand.
And why would a person have to come all the way out here for a prosthesis?
<It’s Teixcalaan,> said Yskandr, <neurological fixes aren’t the only adjustments of the body which are unfair.>
She wished she could tell whether he was being dryly sarcastic or expressing a genuinely held opinion—but that wasn’t new. That confusion was inherent to every Yskandr, from the first moment she’d had him in her head, back on Lsel.
Here’s a pencil, she thought at him. Teach me how to read what Tarats wants me to do about having an annexation force pointed at our station.
They—she, she with Yskandr’s prior knowledge flooding her, opening unexpected windows in her mind—decrypted the message, letter by letter, through the sequential matrix transform that Yskandr had memorized twenty years ago, on his way into Teixcalaan: how he’d spent those long weeks in transit. She caught a flash of memory, a spinning scrap—Yskandr on his first night in her (his) ambassadorial apartment, burning the piece of paper Tarats had handed him, that he’d learned from.
Mahit was working so hard on the process of decryption that she hardly paid attention to the contents of the message until the entire thing existed in plaintext. It wasn’t long. She’d known that, before this entire terrible adventure—it couldn’t be long, there weren’t enough characters, there wouldn’t be the sort of elaborate instructions that she wanted. No one would tell her how to get out of what was happening. There would only be advice.
What advice there was terrified her.
Demand re-route of annexation force; claim certain provable knowledge of new-discovered nonhumans plotting invasion at points as given below; withhold coordinates until confirmation given.
<Can you memorize numbers, Mahit Dzmare?>
She felt a little like Yskandr was the only thing holding her up. Her head ached viciously. Yes, she thought. I know all of Pseudo-Thirteen River, I can memorize a coordinate string.