A Memory Called Empire

by Arkady Martine

  “She went … out,” Twelve Azalea said, “about an hour back; but you were only in the surgical suite for three, maybe four hours.”

  “We weren’t entirely sure you’d wake,” Three Seagrass said, all too evenly. Mahit could hear the remnants of distress in her voice, and she wondered again about how badly hurt Three Seagrass had been, when she’d been hospitalized after the City’s electric-strike. “Five Portico was the opposite of reassuring.”

  “I don’t think I was being very reassuring myself,” Mahit said. “Is there … could I have some water?” Her throat was still dry enough to hurt when she talked, and she didn’t expect to stop talking as long as Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea were awake to talk back to her.

  “Of course,” said Twelve Azalea, “there’s got to be a kitchen in this apartment somewhere.” He levered himself off the couch, with the effort of someone who had been sitting in the same place for a very long time—Mahit felt a little guilty, but not much—and disappeared around a corner.

  She and Three Seagrass were alone. The silence between them felt strange, charged again like it had been in the restaurant: until Three Seagrass asked, quietly, “Are you still you? I … can I talk to him? Is that a possible thing?”

  “I’m me,” Mahit said. “I’ve got continuity of memory and continuity of endocrine response, so I’m as me as I am going to get. It’s not—a second person, inside me. It’s me, with adjustments.”

  Yskandr whispered inside her skull.

  We are talking to her, Yskandr.

  “All right,” Three Seagrass said. “I think the entire process is terrifying, Mahit, and I also think you ought to know that, but I intend to treat you exactly as I did before, until you behave differently.”

  Mahit suspected Three Seagrass was trying to say, I trust you still, and not quite managing to get there. She smiled at her, Lsel-smile, even though it hurt, and got a wide-eyed Teixcalaanli smile back.

  Before she could say anything else, there was a commotion of voices from the direction Twelve Azalea had gone—Five Portico, returning, and with company.

  “Who is he? Five Portico, you didn’t say you had clients.” A woman’s voice, pointed.

  “He’s not the client, Two Lemon, he’s the client’s contact. Come in, he’s not the only one.”

  “This is not the time for clients,” said Two Lemon, “the yaotlek’s just landed a military force at the port—” and then the whole lot of them poured into the room where Mahit was sitting. There were five, mixed in genders and in age; none of them wore cloudhooks. (None of them wanted to be watched by the City and its algorithmic heart.) Twelve Azalea, water glass clutched in one hand, was swept along in the middle of them.

  “That’s a barbarian,” said one of the newcomers.

  “A foreigner,” another one said, as if making a weary correction he’d made a hundred times.

  “Foreigner, barbarian, I don’t care,” said Two Lemon— a plump woman with a straight spine and steel-grey hair in a perfect queue—“what’s next to her is a spy. Five Portico, why is there Information Ministry here?”

  Three Seagrass had become very still, poised and frozen at once. Mahit wondered if they needed to run. She wasn’t sure she could.

  “She came with the barbarian, and when the barbarian arrived,” said Five Portico, and no one bothered to correct her on the use of the word, “they had an interesting problem and were willing to pay for it to be solved. Two Lemon, you know very well that I deal with who I want to deal with.”

  “You could have warned us before we came to your house,” said one of Two Lemon’s companions, the one who was so interested in foreigners, “to have an emergency planning meeting for actions tomorrow—”

  Two Lemon affixed him with a flat stare. “Not in front of the spy.”

  “I am not a spy,” said Three Seagrass, faintly indignant, “and I do not care what you are planning, or who you are. My assignment in the Ministry has nothing to do with any of you.”

  “Oh, but you are a spy, asekreta,” Five Portico said, “though I think you might get better, with proper treatment.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  Mahit put her hand on Three Seagrass’s arm. “The asekreta is here with me,” she said, “and I claim her for Lsel Station. She is my responsibility.”

  Yskandr said admiringly.

  Yes, and they don’t know that.

  Two Lemon peered at Mahit down the slope of her nose. “You’re the Lsel Ambassador, aren’t you.”

  “I am.”

  “The newsfeeds from the Judiciary do not like you,” Two Lemon said, with very grudging admiration.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Mahit told her, “I was unconscious most of the day. Ask Five Portico.” Under her hand, Three Seagrass trembled faintly, all adrenaline.

  Five Portico snickered, and shrugged when Two Lemon looked at her. “The Ambassador isn’t wrong.”

  “Is she going to die if she isn’t under medical supervision?” Two Lemon asked.

  Mahit thought this was a very good question, and that she’d like to know the answer herself, and had to clamp down on the urge to giggle inappropriately.

  “Eventually,” said Five Portico. “But not because of anything I did.”

  Yskandr noted.

  “I want her out of here, Five Portico, and her Information Ministry with her,” Two Lemon went on. A brief, pleased murmur emerged from her companions, and was shut down with a glance. “We have actual work to do.”

  So do I, thought Mahit. Though I wish … I wish I knew more about the work being done here. And whether these are the same people who set bombs in restaurants and in theaters, or if they have other methods—are these the people for whom the City is not the City?

  Yskandr murmured,

  If we get through this, I will remember Two Lemon, though I suspect that’s the last thing she wants from me.

  “We’ll leave,” Mahit said, cutting off further speculation. “I do wish you luck. With whatever actions you are planning.” She got to her feet, and didn’t even stagger. She might make it back to the train station before she fell over, if someone would actually give her water, instead of standing there with the glass like Twelve Azalea was doing, helpless in the middle of the group of … whatever they were. Resistance leaders. (Resistance to what? To the Empire, to Six Direction specifically? Were they the people who put up the posters in the subway stations in support of the Odile System’s breakaway attempt, or were they concerned with some policy choice that Mahit had no idea about and never would? To the presence of One Lightning, or any yaotlek, on the City’s soil?)

  “I’d go fast,” said Five Portico, “One Lightning has legions in the streets already.”

  Three Seagrass cursed, a sharp single word that Mahit had never heard her use before. Then she said, “All right, thank you. Come on,” and stood to leave, taking Mahit’s elbow as she did.

  “Give me five minutes with my client,” Five Portico said pointedly. “I try to make sure of my work, and last I saw her she was quite thoroughly unconscious.”

  Mahit nodded. “In private,” she said. “Five minutes in private.” Gently she detached Three Seagrass from her arm, and walked—trying not to stagger or shake or reveal anything of how sick her headache was making her feel—back into the room where she’d woken up.

  Five Portico followed her, and shut the door behind them. “That bad, mm?” she asked. “You don’t want your friends to know?”

  “It could be worse,” said Mahit. “I seem to have most of my neurological function intact. I want to know what you found. On the old machine. Was it damaged?”

  “A few of the nanocircuits were blown out,” Five Portico said. “On first glance. They looked weak to begin with. It’s a very fragile thing—just touching the circuits
could have introduced a short. I’d have to take it apart to know more. A process I am very much looking forward to.”

  “That’s interesting,” Mahit managed. It was … something. Maybe sabotage. Or maybe just mechanical failure.

  “Very. Now let me look at you.”

  Mahit stood still, and let Five Portico peer thoughtfully at the surgical site; followed her directions through a basic neurological examination, no different from the ones she’d had on Lsel. It took less than five minutes. Closer to three.

  “I’d tell you to rest, but there’s no point,” Five Portico said when she was finished. “Go get out of my house. Thank you for the fascinating experience.”

  “Not every day you operate on barbarians?”

  “Not every day a barbarian leaves me with barbarian technology.”

  Yskandr said in the back of her mind, and she could not tell if he was angry or impressed at what she’d done, in giving away what he’d used to buy an emperor’s favor.

  * * *

  A short while later the three of them were huddled in the shadow of Five Portico’s building, exiled from even that limited safety. Mahit leaned on Three Seagrass, and wished she’d gotten to actually drink the water before they’d left. Her throat ached with dryness. Belltown Six in the small hours between midnight and dawn was simultaneously silent and raucous: the distant sounds of shrieky laughter, breaking glass—a shout, quickly muffled—drifted over the buildings, but the street they stood on was entirely empty, and lit only by the faint neon tracery of the building numbers, written in a glyph font that even Mahit found old-fashioned. New fifty years ago, and not vintage yet.

  “When, Petal,” Three Seagrass asked, her voice a narrow, tight murmur, “were you going to tell us that your unlicensed ixplanatl was involved with anti-imperial activists?”

  Twelve Azalea had no expression on his face; an insistent, deliberate blankness. A hurt. “She’s an unlicensed ixplanatl in Belltown Six. I don’t know why you thought she wouldn’t be. You’re Information Ministry, Reed, act like it.”

  “I am acting like it,” Three Seagrass spat. “I’m questioning the connections of and influences on my own dear friend, is what I’m doing—”

  “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.”

  Yskandr added, a nagging whisper inside Mahit’s mind.

  I don’t have many allies, Yskandr.

 

  Not enough. But I’m one of them.

 

  “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.

  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

  —public newsfeeds, 251.3.11-6D

  * * *

  … as I am, as you said, quite occupied with the business of keeping our Station valuable but not too valu
able 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 …

  —from a letter written from Ambassador Yskandr Aghavn to Darj Tarats, Councilor for the Miners, received on Lsel Station 203.1.10-6D

  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.”

  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—)