She’d meant, When you understand that when the Empire commands, I can’t say no. She’d meant, When you understand that there’s no room for me to mean yes, even if I want to. She’d meant, You don’t understand that there’s no such thing as being free. Free to choose, or free otherwise.
So all she said out loud was, “Good. Until then, Three Seagrass.”
Three Seagrass didn’t reply. She slipped out the door of the communications workroom like she couldn’t wait to be gone, and left Mahit alone to try to do something about the remains of the vomit and find her way back to the quarters they were supposed to share. All those corridors between her and that limited safety, and her here without the benefit of a uniformed Teixcalaanli liaison to open all the doors, dispatch all the guardians. She’d crippled herself, on this Fleet flagship, farther away from anything she could have ever called home than she’d ever been, for the sake of—what, exactly? For wanting an understanding that she—or at least the part of her that was Yskandr, and it was hard to tell the difference between them now, about this—wasn’t even sure Three Seagrass was capable of comprehending, let alone having?
What was the point of this?
Mahit had thought she’d known, but now she wasn’t sure.
The adjutant ikantlos-prime Twenty Cicada, Three Seagrass discovered, was ubiquitous. She hadn’t gone much farther into the deep corridors of Weight for the Wheel—aiming, by cloudhook map, away from the audio processing room and toward the general area of the bridge in hopes of encountering either the yaotlek or someone who knew where to fetch her from—when he simply materialized out of a three-way passage nexus, like the ship itself had manifested him.
There’s never been a ship AI that took human form, Three Seagrass reminded herself. That’s a holodrama plot. And besides, he’s touched physical objects where I could see him do it. He is definitely a real person. Nevertheless she felt sufficiently—oh, sufficiently a lot of things, but mostly exhausted and unhappy and brittle-bright, ready to snap—that being surprised by Twenty Cicada was downright spooky. Then she remembered that Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise had called him Swarm, which was a fascinatingly nasty nickname for someone who had a fascinatingly untoward name: an insect for his noun signifier. Swarm, though …
“You’re everywhere at once,” she said to him. “Aren’t you.”
The light in the corridors of Weight for the Wheel was directionless; it made Twenty Cicada’s shaved head gleam, olive-gold like patina on old coins. He seemed to consider this statement, tilting his head ever so slightly, like he was calculating a vector of attack. Three Seagrass was going to have to look him up when she had access to the Information network again; she wanted to know everything about his military record. Had he flown Shards? Been in hand-to-hand combat? Or had he always been a logistics and operations officer, arranging the movement of ships and supply lines across jumpgates under the peculiar spiritual guidance of his balance-obsessed religion?
“I’m where I should be,” he said.
“I have the message we prepared for the yaotlek to broadcast,” Three Seagrass told him, trying not to wince over the we; she needed to not think about Mahit right now. She’d been doing so well! Not thinking about her. She wasn’t going to start now. She needed to pay attention to what was happening right in front of her. “Is she on the bridge?”
Twenty Cicada made a gesture with one hand that could mean certainly and could mean I assume, if you like. It showed off the edges of his homeostat-cult tattoos, slipping out from the cuffs of his uniform in pale green fractal shapes. He was frustratingly difficult to read; too strange and too exactly-Teixcalaanli-soldier at the same time.
“Walk with me,” he said, instead of giving her a proper answer, and Three Seagrass decided that she would.
They did not turn toward the bridge. Three Seagrass dismissed her cloudhook’s navigational function with a blink; it kept sending her small alerts at the corner of her vision that she really ought to have turned left, and now it had to recalculate her route, and she could do without that sort of petty annoyance. She set it to record her movements and build a new area map instead—as she had not done on Lsel Station, and what did it mean that she was willing to conduct surveillance mapping of one of the Empire’s flagships and not a foreign sovereign state?
It says, she thought, deliberately, like pressing on a bruise, that you trusted Mahit Dzmare too much.
Twenty Cicada led her down two levels of the ship. He was not talkative, exactly. He asked questions, but not like an interrogator or an asekreta would. She couldn’t put her hands on his goals. They were slippery.
“Have you seen what these aliens do to human beings?” he asked. “I believe Nine Hibiscus sent along some of the holorecordings of what we found on Peloa-2.”
She had. Three Seagrass had glanced through them and felt nothing: Oh, look, another war. Someone else’s atrocity, far away on the edges of the known world. But she was very close to those edges now. “They like evisceration,” she told Twenty Cicada. “An interesting preference for mass casualties. Messy.”
“Wasteful,” he said, correcting her.
“What, because it takes too much effort to pull out the entrails on every single human being? You saw the claws the dead one has; it can’t be that inefficient for them to do.”
Twenty Cicada said, “The dead creature was a scavenger, or its presentient ancestors were—that mouth, the eyes on the front of the skull—and yet it left all those guts to rot. That’s wasteful.”
They’d come to a heavily sealed door, airtight enough that Three Seagrass wondered for a moment if she was about to be unceremoniously spaced through an airlock. Twenty Cicada stepped close to it, let it read his cloudhook: the clear glass over one eye flowing full of tiny grey-gold glyphs, like a storm boiling up over the City. It opened—and behind it was heat, and warm wet air, and the scents of soil and growth and flowers. A hydroponics deck. Three Seagrass followed him inside with a gratitude she had not expected to feeclass="underline" her skin drank the moisture, starved for nonprocessed air. She wanted to luxuriate in it. A place on this ship that felt like—like Teixcalaan, like the Jewel of the World. A garden heart. She took deep breaths. The drag of humidity in her lungs was delicious.
Twenty Cicada had much the same expression as she did, she suspected: a blissed relaxation of all the tension in his face. This was a place he loved—of course he did, how could he not—which meant, of course, that he’d brought her here to use it as a setting, a frame for the argument he was making to her. A place powerful enough to be worth a detour, rather than bringing her and her work straight to the yaotlek who had ordered it done. This argument must be deeply important to him.
She’d listen. She’d rather have the second-in-command of a Fleet flagship try to manipulate her with humidity and the amazing scent of rice, sorrel, and lotuses growing in hydroponic pools than think about Mahit Dzmare.