<You’re projecting, Mahit. Also wallowing.>
It is very late at night, and I am on a Teixcalaanli warship, and I have fought so badly with my friend that she won’t come back to a room I am in. Also I am an exile twice over, once from my home and once from Teixcalaan, which could never have been my home. And my hands hurt. I have every right to wallow.
<You’re not an exile,> Yskandr said, and there was a chilled finality to the way he said it that made Mahit want to press him further, like she’d press on a bruise.
How are we not?
<You bought us Lsel, with what you promised Tarats. And if you make up with your friend, you have Teixcalaan—anywhere in all of Teixcalaan.>
Anywhere in all the world, in the language they both so habitually spoke in the privacy of their mind—the language which was neither of their own, but was the Empire’s. Mahit couldn’t seem to find a way to stop. It was the language they both thought in best.
I didn’t buy us anything. I made myself a spy, that’s all. Someone else has my eyes: Darj Tarats sees through me. No promises of any reward. And he’ll want worse than spywork if I tell him about the conflict between the yaotlek and Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise. There’s his sabotage. Turn them against each other fully, paralyze this Fleet, make Nineteen Adze have to commit more legions to the war, ones that aren’t at each other’s throats. It wouldn’t be that difficult. Sixteen Moonrise is looking for levers, and I’m a likely one. She left the rest of it alone: she didn’t want to talk about Three Seagrass with Yskandr any more than she wanted to talk about Three Seagrass with Sixteen Moonrise. Which probably meant she didn’t want to think about Three Seagrass, considering that Yskandr was right here inside her head with her.
<I can hear you,> he said, dry and distant. <And you’re not anyone’s eyes until you report back. Not anyone’s eyes and not anyone’s saboteur.>
Is that how you justified not returning to Lsel? If you couldn’t report, you remained your own person? How fragile a peace that is, Yskandr. And here you said we weren’t in exile.
<Exile isn’t something self-imposed.>
He was wrong about that, Mahit thought, exile happened in the heart and the mind long before it happened to the body that moved in space, across borders—and thinking this, thinking no, felt the neuropathic pain spike in her hands, right down the ulnar nerve through the elbow, like a punishment. Except it hurt him, too, it hurt them, they were one person, and the neurological damage from Aknel Amnardbat’s sabotage was neither of their faults. Even if it spiked when she found one of the jagged edges between their integration.
As if I knew how to send a message to Tarats from the heart of the Teixcalaanli flagship anyhow, she said, which was a sort of apology. An offer: can we put this away, for now, given all the rest of the circumstances we find ourselves in?
And a response—a flush of warmth all through her, a sense that perhaps she could sleep. A gentle sort of tiredness, like a gift from her own endocrine system. She shut her eyes. Curled on her side, facing the wall, her hands folded tight against her chest, protective. Breathed out.
And was startled to full, adrenaline-sharp consciousness when there was a loud banging on the door.
Her first thought was that Three Seagrass had come back after all—but she’d left the plastifilm VOID password-note on the door’s touchpad, and she hadn’t changed the password itself yet. Three Seagrass could have let herself in. This was someone else. Mahit swung herself off the edge of the bunk, finding the lower bed with her toes and stepping lightly down onto the floor. She wasn’t dressed for this—the loose culottes and tank of her pajamas were not in any sense official, nor in any sense Teixcalaanli—
<Put on a jacket, yours is still over the back of the chair,> Yskandr told her, and she was utterly grateful. The jacket helped. It had some structure to it. The Perilous Frontier! was a weight against her ribs.
Whoever it was hammered on the door again. Shouted—muffled through the airtight metal—something that sounded like Envoy! Ambassador!
There was absolutely no point in pretending she wasn’t here, and opening the door wouldn’t make her any less safe than keeping it closed: this was not the Jewel of the World, or Lsel, or anywhere else Mahit had ever been. This was a Teixcalaanli warship, and there was nothing outside it but airless void, far closer than it was on a Station. Ships were smaller. Ships weren’t peoples, even if they were societies. There was no disappearing into a ship, even a ship carrying five thousand. (Especially a Teixcalaanli ship: Mahit hadn’t found the camera-eyes yet, but she knew they were here, watching—even without Sunlit behind them to analyze and follow and adjust.)
She opened the door. There was a soldier there, a man of medium height and a fashionable Teixcalaanli military haircut—low hairline accentuated by the sharpness of how he’d pulled his hair back into its queue, the tight fishtail braiding. “Ambassador,” he said. “The yaotlek wants you and the envoy on the bridge immediately. I am to tell you that your message worked, and she needs another one right away.”
The thrill that spun up her, thighs to vagus nerve to throat, was victory, as sharp and sweet as anything she could remember: it had worked, they had figured it out, the aliens were talking back. Mahit knew she was grinning, Stationer-smile, all teeth—knew it by the way that the soldier recoiled slightly, and didn’t care. She deserved this. She and Three Seagrass had established first contact, and everything else—their fight, Sixteen Moonrise, Darj Tarats, the whole war—didn’t matter at all. Not this minute. “That’s fantastic,” she said. “That’s—brilliant, really.”
It might be the most significant thing she’d done in her entire life. The list of people who had established a communicative relationship with a previously uncontacted spaceflight-capable alien species was now, in total, the Emperor Two Sunspot (and whatever aides she’d had, of course), Three Seagrass, and Mahit Dzmare. It was terrifying. It was amazing. She felt on the verge of hysterical, delighted laughter, or tears, or—she’d never dreamed of this, astrobiology hadn’t been an aptitude she’d even tested for, and linguistics had always been about human beings, but—oh. It had worked.
“Where is the envoy?” the soldier asked, interrupting Mahit’s excess of internal delight and sending her just as easily crashing down into the humdrum, miserable reality of having driven off her only friend (if friends were even a category that Teixcalaanlitzlim could fit into, and that was the horrible crux of everything, wasn’t it).
She shrugged.
“Wasn’t she also assigned to these quarters?” the soldier continued, obviously checking some kind of manifest on his cloudhook.
“Yes,” said Mahit. “But she is out, currently.”
“It’s 0200 hours,” said the soldier, puzzled, and then lifted one shoulder and put it down again, as if implying that, well, Information agents must keep very peculiar hours to go along with the rest of their very extensive peculiarities. “… Um. Do you know when she’ll be back? The yaotlek wants you both. Immediately.”