“—do you think?” Three Seagrass was saying, getting to her feet.
“Even if it’s not for us, it’s something,” Mahit said. “Something is better than waiting. Let’s go see.”
“We’re arrested,” Twelve Azalea mentioned, off-hand reminder. “But—fuck it. Let’s unarrest ourselves.”
Mahit laughed. Inside her skull, behind the endless ache of the surgical site and the pulse of her blood in her damaged hand, the shimmer of damaged nerves and the endless sour ache in her hip, she almost felt good.
Outside the conference room—they hadn’t even locked it, which felt simultaneously insulting and like Mahit had been a willing participant in her own incarceration, a tiny flare of guilt—and halfway down the hallway leading to the exit, there was a central information desk, staffed by what looked like Three Lamplight, by the height and the haircut. It was this desk whose contents had just been pitched onto the floor, a scatter of infofiche sticks and office paraphernalia, and the destroyer of this small harmony—resplendent in white, and oh, Mahit would never get over how much she loved the symbolic valence of everything the Teixcalaanlitzlim did, however utterly contrived, white because it was Nineteen Adze’s signature—was Five Agate, Nineteen Adze’s best aide and favored student. Her plain face was serene and cold, and she carried in her hand a shockstick: a slim metal rod, crackling with electric energy. Behind her was another Teixcalaanlitzlim in pure white who Mahit had not seen before, and he carried the same weaponry.
It was a cavalry, of sorts. A cavalry in livery, not a single purple spray of flowers amongst them. And it was specifically Five Agate come to find them, which meant that Nineteen Adze might have understood what Mahit and Three Seagrass had been trying to say with their poetry—
“I see them now,” Five Agate said, her voice sharp and ringing. “Those three. Come over here, Ambassador—the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze recognizes that your claim of sanctuary with her has not ended.”
“They never claimed formal sanctuary,” Three Lamplight began, “that won’t stand up for a moment in the Judiciary.”
“Neither will Thirty Larkspur’s palace intrigue,” Five Agate snapped, “so we’re even. I don’t want to cause an incident. Let them come here.”
Mahit began walking down the corridor, Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea flanking her. For a moment she thought that they would make it, that they would be safe in Five Agate’s hands with absolutely no problems, Nineteen Adze’s soft power unsheathed—
—and then Six Helicopter burst out of an office behind them, farther down the hall back the way they’d come. Mahit stopped dead, turned to stare at him. Instead of a shockstick like Five Agate’s, in his hand was what Mahit recognized, with icy horror, as a projectile weapon—outlawed on Lsel, those things could cause hull-breach—and he was shouting. Mahit froze, trapped between Six Helicopter and Five Agate, mid-escape.
“Don’t you fucking dare—like fuck you jumped-up demagogues are going to get to do whatever you want, there’s legions in the streets, you can’t do this anymore—you have got to listen to law and order!”
Inside the horror, Mahit almost found it ridiculous: this petty little man, so angry at losing what little power he’d managed to acquire.
Calmly, Five Agate raised her shockstick, blue-green energy crackling at its end, and began to walk toward Six Helicopter.
The report of the projectile weapon going off was louder than any noise Mahit could remember. There was a scream to her left, short and sharp—and then more bangs, a series of them in a row. She was running down the hallway toward Five Agate without having decided to run, all of her paralysis broken. Three Lamplight had ducked out of view behind the desk, and Five Agate’s support staff was advancing past it, his shockstick glittering.
Another shot, and a bloom of red on Five Agate’s upper arm, spreading in threads, the red pooling in the white of her tunic, her face gone ice-pale. The sound of her shockstick hitting the floor, crackling electricity. Mahit kept running. She reached where Five Agate was—still standing in perfect serenity, as if in shock—grabbed for her other arm, the one that wasn’t bleeding, and pulled her after her.
How many projectiles are in that thing?
Mahit looked back.
Three Seagrass was on her heels, right at her shoulder as she always was, but Twelve Azalea was not—was a tumbled pile in the hallway, unmoving, bright blood pooling around him.
Five Agate’s white-clad attendant shoved his shockstick directly against Six Helicopter’s open mouth. Blue fire went through his skull. There was another report from the projectile weapon—a hole opened up in the attendant’s gut like the staring eye of a singularity—
“Run!” Three Seagrass screamed, and so Mahit did. She ran, one hand clenched around Five Agate’s arm, until she had run right out of the Information Ministry and into the street.
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
Stillness and patience create safety
the Jewel of the World preserves itself.
Torn-up flowers die in unskilled hands
and perverse gardeners flourish
exclaiming on the merits of barren pools.
—poem attributed to Five Diadem, later in use as a public safety message throughout the Imperium
* * *
If these legionary warships destroy us, I will have you unseated in whatever government replaces the fifteen generations of our Council. You and Amnardbat both. The appeaser and the isolationist. I will have you unseated and your imago-lines destroyed.
—note signed D.O., hand-delivered to the offices of Darj Tarats, 251.3.11-6D
FIVE Agate shook Mahit’s hand off her, shook her whole body in a sharp shudder of adjustment. The blood from her shoulder was still spreading, red tendrils down her white sleeve. “There isn’t time,” she said, which didn’t make much sense to Mahit. Nothing was making a great deal of sense.
“—I have to go get him,” Three Seagrass was saying, “he’s dying in there—”
“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 imp
ossible 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.
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?
* * *
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.
“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).
“… 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. T
hought 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.
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