“You’re hurt,” she said, taking both of Five Agate’s hands in hers.
“—a little,” Five Agate said, and Mahit could see in her face: she would have walked right back into Six Helicopter’s line of fire, for just this moment with the ezuazuacat she served. “It doesn’t matter, really. I lost Twenty-Two Graphite—”
“You both volunteered. He knew as well as you what might happen. Go into the back,” Nineteen Adze said, with that same stunning, strange gentleness she had turned on Mahit in the bathroom after the incident with the flower. “You’ve done so well. You did what I asked. Sit down, drink water, we’ll get the ixplanatl in to look at your arm.”
You’ve done so well. Even in the face of losing one of her people, Nineteen Adze could provide comfort to the remaining ones. The ache in Mahit’s throat couldn’t be hers alone. Yskandr would have wanted to hear that, wouldn’t he? Especially from her— (a sharp flicker of what Nineteen Adze had looked like naked, ten years ago, and Mahit didn’t even feel lust so much as desire, wanting to touch, to be with).
<No,> Yskandr told her. <I wanted her to agree with me. You want her to look at you like you’ve been righteous.>
“… what a prize you are, Mahit Dzmare,” said Nineteen Adze then. “What a price I am apparently willing to pay for you. Did you write that poem all by yourself?”
“Three Seagrass wrote most of it,” Mahit said. She was still holding Three Seagrass’s hand, and now, her liaison squeezed her fingers.
“My dear asekreta. Eloquent as always.”
Three Seagrass made a terrible choked little noise, and said, “Your Excellency, please do not call me eloquent when I am covered in snot.”
Nineteen Adze looked like she was trying to laugh and had forgotten how; mirth had abandoned her entirely. Instead she shrugged, with a peculiar half smile, and said, “Released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun. It’s catchy. Go sit down, will you? I have to decide what to do with you.”
“I need to speak to His Brilliance,” Mahit said. “That’s what you should do with me. After that you can do whatever you want.”
She walked over to the couch—the same one she had sat on the first time she’d been interrogated by Nineteen Adze. Thought again, Ring composition. Her legs felt like water. They spilled her down onto the cushions. Three Seagrass came with her, a satellite in orbit; when she sat next to Mahit, their thighs touched. Mahit wished she had a handkerchief to offer her, to clean up her face, get some of the tears gone. Give her back some modicum of dignity, which was in fairly short supply just now.
Nineteen Adze watched them go; watched them sit. She seemed, for a long and awful moment, rudderless—all of her direction and drive sapped. Then she straightened from the top of her head, her spine a long arc, and strode across the office to stand in front of them both.
“I can’t just walk you in to him,” she said. “He’s under guard. And he’s not well. You know that, Mahit.”
“He hasn’t been well for a long time,” Mahit said. “Which you know. And he knows, and Yskandr knows.”
“Knows?” asked Nineteen Adze, tilting her head fractionally to the side.
“Knew. It’s … complicated. More so now. I—Nineteen Adze, Your Excellency, the last time I was here I told you truly that you could not speak to him, since he was gone, no matter what he or my government had intended; now I can just as truly say differently. I’ve—we’re—it’s a long story and involved surgical intervention and I have the worst headache of my life and hello—I’ve missed you—”
Stepping back; letting that part of her that was Yskandr take, for just a moment, the muscles of her face, shape them to his broader smile, the way his eyes had crinkled up at the corners in smile-lines that her younger skin hadn’t had time to develop.
A mobile flush swept across Nineteen Adze’s face, like forged metal glowing and going out again.
“Why would I believe you now?” she said, but Mahit already knew she did.
“You killed me,” she said, Yskandr said. They said. “Or you let Ten Pearl do it and didn’t stop him, and that’s much the same. But I miss you anyway.”
The breath Nineteen Adze took was huge, dragged through her lungs, a resettling gasp barely controlled. She sat down on the opposite couch, carefully, folding like she thought she might fall if she didn’t. “I assume you want to talk about it—you always did want to talk about decisions—”
“Maybe,” said Yskandr in Mahit’s mouth, and she had not known he could be so gentle, “after this is over. We hardly have time, do we, my dear?”
“We do not,” said Nineteen Adze. She took another one of those enormous breaths. “Be Mahit again; I had not quite imagined how disturbing this would be. Your expressions. You’re like a ghost.”
“Really it’s the wrong analogy,” Mahit said, “ghosts—”
<Hush,> Yskandr told her. <She doesn’t need that right now.>
And you were accusing me of flirting—
<We have an empire to preserve, Mahit.>
Oh, is that what we’re doing? I thought we were saving our Station from being annexed—
This kind of back-and-forth talk wasn’t good for them, Mahit knew. She felt nauseated, the headache gathering in her temples, and both Nineteen Adze and Three Seagrass were looking at her like she had quite gently slipped off an edge into a great pool of insanity.
“I have information,” she said, trying to pull herself together, be Mahit-who-was-once-Yskandr and not a terrible hybrid of both of them, “which I have obtained at great personal cost to myself and possibly to my people on Lsel Station, which needs the ear of His Brilliance right now. I have been trying to get back to him. I’ve been detained, my friend has been shot and is probably dead, I have had to negotiate with Sunlit—you seemed like my only possibility of getting close—”
Nineteen Adze cursed softly. “Please accept my deep condolences about your friend. I hope he is in better shape than you fear.”
Mahit remembered the spreading pool of blood around Twelve Azalea, how much of it there had been, how arterial-bright, and thought: Hope is insufficient.
“So do I,” she said. “He is … he has been more generous to me than a barbarian would expect of anyone.”
Three Seagrass made a peculiar noise, something caught between a snicker and a sob. “What he’s done is got himself killed for you, Mahit,” she said. “If he hadn’t been my friend he’d never have gotten himself into this mess at all.”
With the wave of a hand, Nineteen Adze summoned one of her aides; the young man materialized by the couches as if he himself was a hologram. (He was not Seven Scale, who had disposed of the poison flower. Who might have brought the poison flower. Mahit needed to ask about him, about everything that had happened that night, about why Nineteen Adze had tried so hard to save her life.)