And then, like a curtain parting, they turned one last corner and Mahit found herself in front of the Information Ministry, which looked entirely unscathed. A clean thing, out of a former world.
<There,> Yskandr said. <Go in. Sit down before you fall down.>
Everything looked so familiar—two minutes of walking would get her to the entrance of the building containing her ambassadorial apartment (that is, if she could go there at all without the interference of the Sunlit and their investigation). But all the tracery of the City’s vast AI was lit up under the plaza tilework, as if the entire palace was a curled beast, preparing to strike.
“I don’t know how you did that,” Three Seagrass said to Mahit. “When we got into the car you could hardly walk.”
“I didn’t,” Mahit said. “Not just me. Not exactly. Are we going to go in?” Her voice was a rag. Now that Yskandr wasn’t controlling her breathing she felt like she couldn’t get enough air. Her chest heaved with each breath.
Three Seagrass looked at their driver, who wore an expression of utter shock: a man undone, a man in a world which no longer made sense. “Are we?” she asked.
“… yes?” he said, and started for the door.
Neither Mahit nor Three Seagrass put their feet on the traces on their way into the Ministry building, even when it made walking awkward and strange.
Inside, there was nothing but the clean and lovely spaces of a Teixcalaanli ministry early in the morning. No sign of distress. Nothing amiss. Mahit found herself on the verge of tears and didn’t know why. Three Seagrass’s driver led them all into an innocuous beige-shaded conference room, complete with a U-shaped table surrounding an infofiche projector, fluorescent lighting, and a plethora of moderately uncomfortable chairs. It was the least Teixcalaanli room Mahit could remember being in since she’d arrived, but she assumed that places where interminable everyday meetings occurred were much the same throughout the entire galaxy. She’d sat in rooms like this on Lsel, in school and at government functions. She sat in this one now. Dimly—so very dimly, through the thick Ministry walls—she heard another explosion. And then silence. Perhaps the riot had been dispersed. The legions were massing elsewhere. Closer to the skyport.
The arrival of a carafe of coffee and a basket of some kind of bread rolls was not standard practice for conference rooms, but perhaps Three Seagrass had pulled some strings for them. The coffee was shockingly, blisteringly good: hot but not hot enough to scald, the paper cup warm in Mahit’s palms. It had a rich, earthy taste that wasn’t anything like the instant coffee on Lsel, and in some better moment Mahit thought she’d really like to drink it slowly enough to think about all the different qualities of the flavor—
<There are varieties,> Yskandr said, <and they all taste different. It’s fantastic. But the important part is the caffeine.>
He was right. Even in the few minutes Mahit had been drinking the coffee, she felt more present, more acute, conscious of a faint thrumming in her skin.
<Slow down a little. I may have exhausted your adrenal glands, just then.> It was close to being an apology.
Twelve Azalea was on his second cup. “Now what?” he asked Three Seagrass pointedly. “We wait for a debriefing? I thought we needed to be getting the Ambassador to the Emperor immediately, if that’s even possible considering what’s happening to the City outside.”
We. It hadn’t been very long since she’d asked Twelve Azalea to help her steal Yskandr’s imago-machine from his corpse, and yet after only such a little bit of time, here he was committed to at least a semblance of ideological unity with a barbarian. Then again, he had known where to find Five Portico and her anti-imperial activist friends—ideological unity was flexible. Mutable, under stress. Mahit looked at Three Seagrass, who was as under stress as she had ever seen her: grey at the temples, a raw place on the side of her lip where she must have gnawed it open.
“We do,” she said. “But I owe the Ministry some courtesy, since they came to get us.”
They came to get us. They drove us through a riot. They brought us coffee and breakfast. The world functions as it ought to, and if I keep behaving as if it will continue to, nothing will go wrong. Mahit knew that line of thinking. She knew it intimately and horribly, and she sympathized (she sympathized too much, this was her essential problem, wasn’t it?), and Three Seagrass was still wrong.
Mahit said, “I don’t think we have any time at all—the whole City is going to go up like an oxygen chamber with a spark fault.”
Three Seagrass made a noise surprisingly akin to a hissing steam valve, put her head in her hands, and said, “Just give me one minute to think, all right?”
Mahit figured one minute was within parameters. Probably. Maybe. Everything was very shimmery and surreal. She wondered what level of sleep debt she’d actually reached. There had been the thirty-six hours before she’d slept at Twelve Azalea’s apartment—and possibly being unconscious after brain surgery counted—
<It doesn’t,> said Yskandr, and that was all her Yskandr, the light, quick, bitter amusement of him. <Especially after getting through a riot like that.>
“All right,” Three Seagrass said, so Mahit looked at her, keeping her face perfectly Teixcalaanli-neutral, trying not to visibly need her liaison’s support as much as she actually did.
Three Seagrass spread her hands, a helpless little gesture. “I’m going to go ask to report directly to the Minister for Information—and she is undoubtedly exceptionally busy just now, so we’ll have an appointment—and we’ll come back when that appointment is scheduled.” She got to her feet. “Don’t go anywhere. Central Desk is just down the hall, on this floor, I’ll be five minutes.”
It was an incredibly transparent ruse. But transparency had worked for them before; transparency seemed to have its own gravity when placed alongside the Teixcalaanli overcommitment to narrative. It bent the light. Mahit nodded to Three Seagrass, said, “Try it,” and followed that with “And don’t worry about us going anywhere. Where would we go?”
Twelve Azalea and Yskandr laughed, in simultaneous eerie echo, and then Three Seagrass was gone, slipped out the door like a seed-skiff squirted from the side of a cruiser.
They waited. Mahit felt naked without Three Seagrass, alone. More and more exposed, the longer she was gone—especially as the time stretched from two minutes to five, to ten. She could hardly feel anything but the low, anxious thrumming of her own heart, transmitted through her chest to weigh heavy on the spot just between the arcs of her ribs. Most of the peripheral neuropathy was gone—just the occasional shimmer in her fingertips, and she had suspicions that might be permanent. She didn’t know how that made her feel. So far she could still hold a stylus, even if she couldn’t necessarily feel the pressure of it. If it got worse again—
Later.
When the door to the conference room reopened, and Three Seagrass was there behind it, the release of tension was like being kicked—and then Mahit saw that she was not alone, and the person with her was not wearing Information Ministry white-and-orange at all, but had a spray of purple flowers pinned to the collar of his deep blue jacket. It was fresh; live flowers, cut within the last day. When all of Thirty Larkspur’s supporters had been wearing these at the oration contest, they had been fashion, amusements, Teixcalaanli political signaling on symbolic channels. When they had been wearing them in the streets it was a way to take sides in a war. Now this one looked like a badge of office, or of party loyalty.