“There isn’t time,” Five Agate repeated, and now Mahit understood: Twelve Azalea in the pool of spreading blood. Twelve Azalea, her friend. Three Seagrass’s friend.
Her chest felt narrow and hot, as if it was her who had been hit by a projectile weapon; like she was a projectile, about to shatter apart.
“I don’t care about time,” Three Seagrass said.
“And I don’t know how many other projectile-spewing illegal weapons are inside the Ministry,” Five Agate spat—Mahit could hardly reconcile this woman with the efficient, quiet aide-de-camp from Nineteen Adze’s office. “Nor how many of Thirty Larkspur’s partisan hacks were also waiting for the moment they could happily shoot someone—fuck my shoulder hurts and I’m sorry about your friend—I’m sorrier about Twenty-Two Graphite, fucking starlight I’m sorry—but you called for help—they’re singing that goddamn verse in the street—so come on and let’s get out of here like you wanted.”
“They’re singing?” Mahit asked helplessly.
“The ones who aren’t shouting UP ONE LIGHTNING at the top of their lungs, yes,” Five Agate said, and stalked down the plaza.
Mahit took Three Seagrass’s hand in hers. The palm was slick and clammy with sweat. They followed. Five Agate moved at a rapid clip, her shoulder stiff and held high, not even trying to disguise the active bleeding. There didn’t seem to be immediate pursuit—perhaps Six Helicopter was dying on the ground next to Twelve Azalea, and oh, that hurt to think, Twelve Azalea deserved better than this—to distract herself, Mahit tried to track where they were headed. She thought she knew the way to Nineteen Adze’s offices but everything looked different in the full light of day, and the last time she’d come, she’d come in a groundcar escorted by the Sunlit.
The sky was that impossible blue again. An endlessness, bound only by the faint strictures of buildings marring the horizon. Mahit could fall right off the face of the planet. She squeezed Three Seagrass’s hand. There wasn’t any response.
As they turned the corner, heading away from the central plaza of Palace-East and toward the series of buildings that Mahit thought probably contained Nineteen Adze’s offices—the flicker of rose-colored marble was surely where they needed to be—they nearly ran into a platoon of Sunlit. They had appeared like an eclipse: there, abruptly, blocking out the light, twenty faceless people in gold helmets.
“Hold there,” said one of them. She wasn’t sure which. They all had the same voice. Five Agate drew to a halt. Her chest was heaving.
“You are injured,” said a different Sunlit; one of the closer ones, from the volume of their voice. “It is dangerous to be outside; the Emperor has called for a curfew of citizens. Are you attempting to reach a hospital?”
“I—” Five Agate began, “I am attempting to return home—I work for the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze—”
“It is imperative that you not be in the streets,” said a third Sunlit.
“The curfew is enforceable by whatever means we deem appropriate,” a fourth added—and all twenty Sunlit moved forward toward them together, like automata.
Is personal or institutional violence more threatening?
And then: Can I fool the algorithm?
She took a step forward. Voice shaking, she broke in: “We have been shot at.” She tried for hysteria—and relied on Yskandr’s inherent knowledge to pitch her voice to accentless Teixcalaanli. Just for this one moment, let her not be an obvious barbarian. “We were in the Information Ministry—it’s been taken over, by mad people—we—it’s horrible, my friend is probably dead—”
On cue, Three Seagrass burst into tears. They looked genuine to Mahit. They probably were genuine—just held in abeyance until this moment, when they would be useful.
The Sunlit closest to them spoke again, a little softer. “What sort of mad people?” they asked. “Please, citizens, give us information.”
“The man who shot my friend,” Three Seagrass said, through the tears running down her face, “worked for Thirty Larkspur—he said they’d taken the Ministry because the Minister was compromised—” She wiped at her nose, her eyes. “Forgive me, I’m not like this normally. I’m really not.”
“Compromised how?” inquired two Sunlit at once; and then a third, repeating it, like an echo rippling through an AI, the algorithm adjusting itself: “Compromised how?”
“I don’t know,” Mahit said, lying through her teeth. “Just—compromised—maybe the Minister liked the yaotlek’s policies? It’s so confusing—and they shot at us—”
The whole platoon seemed to turn at once toward them, focusing down: a drift of iron filings drawn into formation by a passing magnet. All their hands were still on their shocksticks. Mahit waited for the blow; for the inevitable weight of institutional violence in the form of electricity, the mobile part of the City’s grid attacking her like the still part had attacked Three Seagrass days ago—but if this worked, if they could send this platoon away from them to intercept whatever might come out of the Information Ministry in pursuit—then it would be worth the risk.
“Can we go inside?” Five Agate said. “I don’t want to disobey an imperial curfew. My son is inside—I just want to go home—it’s right over there.” She gestured with her good arm toward the building Mahit assumed was where Nineteen Adze’s offices were, or close enough to it.
That, at last, seemed to be enough. One of the Sunlit on the edge of the platoon detached themselves, took a few steps away from the rest. “Go,” they said. “We will investigate the situation at the Ministry. One of us will escort you.” Once separated from the group, the individual Sunlit almost seemed like a person. Mahit wanted so badly to know how a Teixcalaanlitzlim became one of them.
<If you find out,> Yskandr told her, <you’d be doing one better than I ever did.>
The rest of the platoon moved fluidly along the path that the three of them had taken out of the plaza. Mahit imagined, vividly, that they were following the scent of Five Agate’s spilled blood, a hunt in reverse.
The remaining Sunlit waved one hand, and the three of them—Mahit still holding Three Seagrass’s hand, Three Seagrass still weeping uncontrollably—followed that gesture onward: and in this fashion Mahit came to the door of Nineteen Adze’s offices under police escort a second time.
Ring composition, she thought. Around we go. And came back once again to that improbable piece of information: they were singing her verses in the streets?
<Nothing is untouched,> Yskandr murmured—the young Yskandr, hers, that familiar flickering static-bright voice. <Nothing you make is unmarked by Teixcalaan. Even I learned that.>
Nineteen Adze had turned her front office into a war room. She stood—as she had before—in the center of a vast sea of holograph projections, arcs upon arcs of them; but what had been an orderly information-gathering enterprise was now populated by a group of exhausted-looking young men and women, trading images back and forth with gestures, writing—by hand, on paper—notes, talking in rapid low voices through their cloudhooks to people somewhere else.
In the middle of the chaos, Nineteen Adze was a pillar of white, still immaculate, though the dark skin of her cheeks had gone grey under the eyes, and the eyes themselves were reddened. Mahit’s first thought was that she had been crying, and hadn’t slept at all—wondered how much of the rush of concerned sympathy was hers and how much was Yskandr’s. Decided that didn’t matter, just as Nineteen Adze caught sight of them, dismissed the cloud of projections around her head with one sharp gesture, and went right to Five Agate.