Yes I do, Mahit thought, and didn’t know if it was Yskandr’s thought or her own.
“Yes,” Three Seagrass said, “we do. I have vital intelligence to report to my Ministry. Sir.”
The driver shrugged, expressively, as if to say, I’m just here to help. Through the opened window Mahit heard a low thump, as if somewhere, not very far away at all, someone had set off a bomb.
(—Fifteen Engine, studded with shrapnel, blood leaking from his mouth, his blood like tears running down Mahit’s face, and that noise, the hollow explosion-noise—)
She swallowed hard. The window rolled up. They kept moving. Inside the groundcar it was difficult to see what they were driving through; all sound was muffled and the windows were privacy-tinted dark. She kept thinking that she was hearing more of those sounds, the way that a bomb going off made a kind of collapse in the air.
“Did you know,” she found herself saying, right out loud, bright and brittle and uncontrolled, “that the worst thing on Lsel, the absolute worst thing, is fire—fire eats oxygen—fire rises—fire extinguisher drills are every other day, they start when we’re two or three years old, whenever we’re big enough to hold the extinguisher—fire is bad and explosives are worse.”
“I don’t know why there’d be bombings at all,” Twelve Azalea said. “This isn’t—no one wants to hurt the City, it’s about who gets to have the City, right?”
The groundcar slowed again, but there was no halt at any checkpoint. Just a crawl, like they’d hit traffic. “Make the windows transparent,” Mahit said. Nothing happened.
Three Seagrass’s teeth were gritted very tightly. Mahit could see the tension in her jaw. “Petal,” she said, “it’s the Fleet. Bombing massed civilian uprisings is how the Fleet works. You know that.” And to the driver, “Turn the opacity down, would you?”
This time, the driver did.
Through the groundcar’s windows—smoky glass, paling to clear—what Mahit saw at first made very little sense. People didn’t break things, on Lsel—not property, not with cavalier abandon. The shell of a station was fragile and if some part of the machinery of it snapped, people would die: of breathing vacuum, of icy chill, of the hydroponics system shutting down. Casual vandalism on Lsel was a matter of graffiti, elaborate hacks, blocking off hallways with the hull-breach-repair expanding foam canisters. But here in the streets of the City she was watching a Teixcalaanli woman, in a perfectly reasonable suit jacket and trousers, swing what looked like a metal pole into the window of a shop, and shatter the glass there. Do that, walk onward, and do it again.
Other people were running—they were in the streets, which was why the groundcar had slowed so much. Some of them had the purple larkspur pins, and some of them had no identificatory marks at all to show their loyalties, and some were Sunlit, gold and terrifying and moving in sharp little triads, like scout-ships diving gravityless through descending orbits. There was smoke in the air, drifting in from over one heartbreakingly lovely many-spired building. The groundcar’s driver had taken on an expression of grim and serene determination, pushing forward in spurts that made all of Mahit’s insides slosh against her abdominal wall with every jerk of acceleration.
“I don’t see legions,” Twelve Azalea said, leaden.
Three Seagrass had crawled out of the backseat and into the front, beside the driver. “We’re not close enough to the skyport. This is—spillover—”
They heard the shouting—two sets of shouting, back and forth, rhythmic and poetic like the beating of a heart but out of time, not together, a heart in fibrillation—before they managed to get much farther. It was a wave of sound, punctuated at unpredictable moments by the thump of another explosion. The driver, seeing some opening that Mahit couldn’t spot, floored the acceleration and shot the groundcar around a corner—Mahit was thrown half into Twelve Azalea’s lap—they raced down an alley—and then the street opened up, a blooming, easy roadway, into a plaza. And there they were: two massed groups of Teixcalaanlitzlim, screaming at one another. The car stopped. There wasn’t a way forward through that seething mass.
Where the two groups touched, violence erupted like fungal growths after a long, wet spring. Blood on the face of a woman with a larkspur pin tied to her arm like a mourning band, blood from how she’d been punched, and the woman who’d punched her—so close to the groundcar that Mahit could hear everything—shouted For the Emperor One Lightning! and smeared her bloodied hand across her forehead, like she was a person in a historical epic marking the sacrifice of her enemy.
They didn’t look like Teixcalaanlitzlim, Mahit thought. Drifting thought, absurd, disconnected. They looked like people. Just like people. Tearing each other apart.
There was another one of those terrible thuds of collapsing air, much closer this time. An answering bang from a group of Sunlit, who were abruptly surrounded by quick-spreading white smoke—the people fighting near them began to cough, ran away from the gas, uncaring which side of the street riot they were on. They ran right by the groundcar, eyes streaming, red. Some of the gas began to seep in through the sealed doors, the windows.
“Fuck,” said Three Seagrass. “Cover your mouth with your shirt—that’s crowd-dispersal gas—we can’t stay here—”
Mahit covered her mouth with her shirt. Her eyes burned. Her throat burned.
<You need to get out of the car,> Yskandr told her. She was suddenly calm—clear-calm, poised, everything slow. Yskandr doing something to her adrenal glands. <You need to get out of the car, and you need to go around this, and you need to do it now. Go, Mahit. I’ll show you the way.>
“We can’t stay here,” Mahit said out loud, and opened the door. The white gas billowed in. “Follow me.”
She couldn’t breathe—the first breath she took was fire, blazing in her lungs, and Yskandr said, <Just run, breathe later,> so she ran—not knowing how she was running, not knowing how it was possible for her body to run. Not knowing if anyone was following her at all. Yskandr seemed to know some secret path—some familiar pattern in the horrible swirl of blood and white smoke, and she saw for the first time a Fleet-uniformed legionnaire, grey and gold, a squadron of them—Yskandr spun her, rotated her from the hip, a pivot, and raced her away at an angle. There were footsteps behind her. Rapid ones, matching her pace. She looked back: Three Seagrass, and Twelve Azalea. The driver, too.
They skirted the edge of the plaza, raced down a street Mahit was sure she’d never seen. How many times did you come this way, she thought, through the pounding of her heart, the way she was gasping for air only when Yskandr thought she couldn’t bear not to gasp.
<Enough times. I lived here. This is my home—was—>
After another two minutes they slowed to a walk. Mahit was entirely sure she’d faint if Yskandr wasn’t making her keep going. No one spoke. The sounds of the riot receded to a dim roar. They reached the demarcation of the palace from the rest of the City—no one guarded the tiny pathway they followed inside, no Sunlit and no Mist and no legions. Yskandr led them all onward, following muscle memory years old and dead now.