“Stop it,” Mahit said. Talking hurt. Talking was going to hurt more, every time she did it, unless she could keep quiet for a while. “Tear each other to pieces somewhere else, sometime else. How are we going to get back to the palace?”
In the pause after her question, she could hear nothing but the two sets of breathing next to her, and how they blurred into each other.
Then Three Seagrass said, “We can’t take the train; there won’t be trains until the morning. The commuter lines don’t run at this hour.”
“And if One Lightning is actually landing troops off the carriers at the port, there won’t be trains at all by morning,” Twelve Azalea added.
Mahit nodded. “There. Look at you both being useful.” She sounded exactly like Yskandr would have. Whether that was a problem or not wasn’t something she felt particularly capable of dealing with at the moment. “If we can’t get back the same way we got out, what else can we do? Can we walk?”
“In a strictly technical sense, we can,” said Twelve Azalea, “though it would take a whole day to get back to the Central provinces.”
“We can,” Three Seagrass said, correcting him. “Mahit, on the contrary, is like as not to fall over before we have been walking an hour.”
Mahit had to admit to herself that this was true. “My state of health notwithstanding,” she said, “a whole day is too long. I need to see the Emperor tonight. Before dawn, if we can figure out a way.” She was shivering. She didn’t know when that had started. It wasn’t cold, exactly—and she had her jacket—she drew her arms tightly around her chest.
Three Seagrass exhaled, slowly, a hiss through her teeth. “I have an idea,” she said, “but Petal will not like it.”
“Tell me first,” said Twelve Azalea, “before you make more judgments about what I will and will not like.”
“I call our superiors at the Information Ministry, and I inform them that we are stranded whilst engaged in recognizance on those anti-imperial activists, and request a pickup and retrieval,” she said. “If you like, I can call them from somewhere not near this address. As a courtesy toward Five Portico not killing my Ambassador.”
“You’re right,” Twelve Azalea said, “I don’t like it. You’re burning my contacts.”
<Consider what reasons she will provide to explain your presence here,> Yskandr added, a nagging whisper inside Mahit’s mind.
I don’t have many allies, Yskandr.
<How many allies does your liaison have?>
Not enough. But I’m one of them.
<So far.>
“We’re standing on the street,” Mahit said. “I would rather be picked up by the Information Ministry than either wait for Twelve Azalea’s Judiciary stalkers to find us again or try to make our way back inside the Inmost Province during an attempted military coup.”
Three Seagrass winced. “It’s not a coup yet. Though it might be by the morning—I don’t know how this happened so fast.”
“Come on, then,” Mahit told them both. “Let’s walk to the train station, and call from there.”
The walk was bad. There were more people on the street, even in the dark; gathering on corners, talking in low voices. Once she thought she saw a brandished knife, a curved and ugly thing, shown off between a group of young men in shirts emblazoned with that graffiti-art of the Teixcalaanli battle flag defaced. They were laughing. She put her head down and watched Three Seagrass’s heels move step by step and kept walking. By the time they reached the station, Mahit’s headache felt large enough to devour small spacecraft that had flown too close to its center of mass. She sat on one of the benches outside of the locked doors and drew her knees up to her chest, resting her forehead on them. The pressure helped, a little—it distracted, while Three Seagrass made her call, murmuring subvocalizations into her cloudhook.
Twelve Azalea sat next to her, and didn’t touch her, and she wanted—oh, she wanted the easy comfort of Three Seagrass’s attention, and that was the most useless desire she’d had in hours. Days, even.
<Breathe,> said Yskandr, and she tried. Even breaths; counting to a slow five on the inhalation, a slow five on the exhalation.
Three Seagrass finished her call, said, “Someone will be here in fifteen minutes,” and sat on Mahit’s other side. And didn’t touch her either. Mahit kept breathing. The headache backed off a little, enough for her to raise her head when she heard the sound of the approaching groundcar’s engine, and to not have the world spin too badly.
It was a very standard groundcar: black, not ostentatious. The person who got out of it was a young man in Information Ministry suiting, orange cuffs and all; he bowed over his fingertips, and asked, “Asekreta? Are these all your companions?”
“Yes,” said Three Seagrass, “this is all of us.”
“Please get in. We’ll have you back in the City proper before you know it.”
It all seemed far too easy. Mahit suspected it was; and she also knew she couldn’t do much else but allow it to happen. The backseat of the groundcar was blissfully dark, and smelled of cleaning products and upholstery. The three of them fit in it thigh to thigh, and Three Seagrass patted Mahit’s knee, just once, as they began to drive away; and that small, kind touch she took with her into helpless and exhausted sleep, lulled by the motion of the wheels.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ALL CIVILIAN OFF-PLANET TRANSPORT CANCELED—INMOST-PROVINCE SPACEPORT CLOSED—SOUTH POPLAR SPACEPORT OPERATING AT EMERGENCY/CARGO CAPACITIES ONLY—MAKE ALTERNATE TRAVEL ARRANGEMENTS—THIS MESSAGE REPEATS
… as I am, as you said, quite occupied with the business of keeping our Station valuable but not too valuable to a vast and mostly heartless Imperium, you will have to continue excusing my absence; when it is more settled here I will certainly enjoy taking a long and deserved vacation back home, but the point at which I could leave the constant development of political action at the Teixcalaanli court alone for four months at least is relatively unimaginable just now. Forgive me for staying away. Do recall that if you need to contact me you yourself provided private means …
THE first checkpoint between Belltown Six and the Information Ministry’s building in Palace-East woke Mahit from that state just beyond consciousness. All she wanted in the world was to sink back into the grey silence behind her eyelids, and until now—a perfect fifteen, twenty minutes—no one, not Three Seagrass nor the driver nor even Yskandr in her mind, had pushed her awake. The voices and the lights at the checkpoint changed all of that.
Blinking, she sat up. The groundcar had slowed to a stop, and the driver had peeled down one of the windows. Outside the air was lightening to dawn, a smear of grey-pink—and something smelled of smoke, acrid—
Low voices. The driver did something with his cloudhook, projected an identification sequence. Whoever was on the other side said, “We can let you through on that permit, but you don’t want to go. They’re marching from the skyport, and the citizenry is marching to meet them. You really don’t want to do this.”