<Do it. And then destroy the plaintext.>
How?
<Eat it. It’s paper.>
Mahit stared at the coordinate string for a full minute—set it to rhythm and meter in her head, held it like she’d hold a poem. And then she tore the strip of paper she’d written the plaintext on off the original communiqué and stuffed it in her mouth, thinking the whole time: We eat the best parts of our dead. Whose ashes am I consuming now?
She had to chew to get the paper to go down, and chewing hurt the surgical site. She did it anyway. It was something to do, while she considered her options.
Who was she supposed to demand this of? The Emperor?
<Yes.>
You’re biased, Yskandr.
<Biased, but right.>
Maybe he was. Maybe what she should do was exactly what Yskandr would have done if he wasn’t dead, and march into Palace-Earth with these coordinates on her tongue like a string of pearls to trade for peace.
When she finally made her way into the front room of Five Portico’s apartment—giving the surgery door a wide berth—both Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea were sitting, side by side like children in a waiting room, on the other turquoise couch, and Five Portico was nowhere to be seen. Three Seagrass was on her feet the instant Mahit came through the door. She ran to her and threw her arms around Mahit in a tight hug that broke every personal-space taboo held by Lsel or Teixcalaan. Mahit could feel the racing of her heart through the wall of her ribs.
“You’re alive!” Three Seagrass said, and then “—oh fuck did I hurt you?” before letting Mahit go with nearly the same degree of force as she’d embraced her. “Are you—you?”
“… yes, not any more than I hurt already, and that still depends on the Teixcalaanli definition of you, Three Seagrass,” Mahit told her. Smiling also hurt the surgical site, but not as much as chewing.
“And you can talk,” Three Seagrass went on. Mahit wanted to stroke her hair back behind her ears; she hadn’t put it back up in its queue since they’d run away from the Judiciary officials, not even during the time between when Mahit had gone into the surgery and now—whenever now was, Mahit wasn’t sure of the hour—and with it loose Three Seagrass looked devastatingly young.
“I think I retained most of my higher faculties,” she said to her, as neutral-Teixcalaanli as possible.
Three Seagrass blinked several times, and then laughed.
“I’m glad,” said Twelve Azalea from the couch. “But did it … work?”
<You have made fascinating friends.>
“Yes,” Mahit said, out loud and internally at once. “At least it worked enough. I decrypted the message.”
“What does it feel like?” Twelve Azalea asked, just as Three Seagrass said, “Good. Given that, what would you like to do next?”
Mahit would have liked to sit down, if she had a preference. Possibly to sleep until everything was over, and there was a new emperor, and the universe returned to normal. If she slept that long she would probably be dead. Sitting down, though, that she could do, at least for a moment. She made her way to the couch, Three Seagrass at her elbow—keeping a decorous foot of distance now, which Mahit vaguely regretted—and sat.
“I need,” she said, “to get back to Palace-Earth and speak with His Brilliance Six Direction.”
<Thank you,> Yskandr said, a whisper like fire behind her eyes.
“Must have been some message,” Twelve Azalea said.
Mahit very gingerly put her head in her hands. “An annexation force is headed for my home, the Empire is on the verge of civil war, and I requested immediate guidance from my superiors in government, did you expect a neutral statement of affirmation?”
“I’m not an idiot,” said Twelve Azalea. “I got you here, didn’t I?”
“You did,” Mahit said. “Forgive me. I’ve been mostly unconscious for … I don’t know how long, what time is it?”
Three Seagrass patted her lightly on the back, once. “Eleven hours. It’s around one in the morning.”
No wonder Mahit felt this ill. She’d been under anesthetic for a long while. “How much of that was surgery? And where is Five Portico? I’d like to thank her, I think.”
“She went … out,” Twelve Azalea said, “about an hour back; but you were only in the surgical suite for three, maybe four hours.”
“We weren’t entirely sure you’d wake,” Three Seagrass said, all too evenly. Mahit could hear the remnants of distress in her voice, and she wondered again about how badly hurt Three Seagrass had been, when she’d been hospitalized after the City’s electric-strike. “Five Portico was the opposite of reassuring.”
“I don’t think I was being very reassuring myself,” Mahit said. “Is there … could I have some water?” Her throat was still dry enough to hurt when she talked, and she didn’t expect to stop talking as long as Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea were awake to talk back to her.
“Of course,” said Twelve Azalea, “there’s got to be a kitchen in this apartment somewhere.” He levered himself off the couch, with the effort of someone who had been sitting in the same place for a very long time—Mahit felt a little guilty, but not much—and disappeared around a corner.
She and Three Seagrass were alone. The silence between them felt strange, charged again like it had been in the restaurant: until Three Seagrass asked, quietly, “Are you still you? I … can I talk to him? Is that a possible thing?”
“I’m me,” Mahit said. “I’ve got continuity of memory and continuity of endocrine response, so I’m as me as I am going to get. It’s not—a second person, inside me. It’s me, with adjustments.”
<We can talk to her if you’d like,> Yskandr whispered inside her skull.
We are talking to her, Yskandr.
“All right,” Three Seagrass said. “I think the entire process is terrifying, Mahit, and I also think you ought to know that, but I intend to treat you exactly as I did before, until you behave differently.”
Mahit suspected Three Seagrass was trying to say, I trust you still, and not quite managing to get there. She smiled at her, Lsel-smile, even though it hurt, and got a wide-eyed Teixcalaanli smile back.
Before she could say anything else, there was a commotion of voices from the direction Twelve Azalea had gone—Five Portico, returning, and with company.
“Who is he? Five Portico, you didn’t say you had clients.” A woman’s voice, pointed.
“He’s not the client, Two Lemon, he’s the client’s contact. Come in, he’s not the only one.”
“This is not the time for clients,” said Two Lemon, “the yaotlek’s just landed a military force at the port—” and then the whole lot of them poured into the room where Mahit was sitting. There were five, mixed in genders and in age; none of them wore cloudhooks. (None of them wanted to be watched by the City and its algorithmic heart.) Twelve Azalea, water glass clutched in one hand, was swept along in the middle of them.
“That’s a barbarian,” said one of the newcomers.
“A foreigner,” another one said, as if making a weary correction he’d made a hundred times.
“Foreigner, barbarian, I don’t care,” said Two Lemon— a plump woman with a straight spine and steel-grey hair in a perfect queue—“what’s next to her is a spy. Five Portico, why is there Information Ministry here?”