“I’m sure she does,” Mahit said. “But what you have, sir, is me. I suggest you use your surveillance camera-eyes and your cloudhook’s search algorithms to find the envoy—try bars, or some sort of park or recreation area with flowers, if a ship like this has them—she likes those—while I put on clothing that is appropriate for the bridge. I’ll be a moment.” She took a step backward into the room, and the door, no longer commanded to remain open by her proximity, slid shut in the soldier’s face.
<Bars and recreation areas with flowers?> Yskandr asked, mildly incredulous.
Mahit remembered deliberately, which was a skill she’d only really understood since acquiring an imago, even though all Lsel children were trained in the basics of how to do it, in anticipation of future need: to recall, very specifically, an event from one’s own life which was the automatic reference point for a present action or feeling. To show, in such recall, how you thought, the patterns of your mind, so that your imago could learn them and follow them and engrave them deeper with their own overlays. A pathway to joint neuroplasticity. Mahit called up the gardens of Plaza Central Four, the taste of green-colored ice cream, the scent of crushed grass under Three Seagrass’s folded and napping arms. Called up, too, Twelve Azalea telling her that this sort of trouble was exactly like the trouble Three Seagrass had always gotten into, when they’d been trainees together. Slumming in garden parks, ice cream for breakfast after terrible, dangerous, interpersonal adventures.
<You miss her,> Yskandr murmured.
Mahit did. Mahit did, hugely, and wished she didn’t.
<That soldier won’t wait for you forever,> Yskandr went on, taking in whatever Mahit’s missing of Three Seagrass meant for him, for them, and placing it aside while there were more immediate problems. Like he’d placed aside the question of exile. They were getting good at compartmentalizing. <He’ll find her, too. They’ve got cameras in every corner. Get dressed. Put on whatever you have which is—sharp. Pointed. Clean lines. I know you have that sort of outfit.>
I have a formal dress that is that outfit. She’d brought one, and only one—a long black thing, architectural in design, a dress that was all angles and no drape, collarbone-exposing, with sleeves to the wrists. She’d brought it to the City, too, and had never worn it there. She’d never worn it at all.
<Not that. Something more—practical.>
Yskandr, do you even know what clothing types for female-bodied people are?
<You know, so I know. Or I know what you know, and also something about slightly out-of-date court fashion in the City.>
Both of them were better with Teixcalaanli style, then. On Lsel Mahit wore what everyone wore, which was trousers and jackets and various undershirts or undertunics, mostly grey and black and white.
<White,> Yskandr told her. <All white, if you can.>
Like Nineteen Adze.
Well, she could do worse.
<Much worse.>
When Mahit opened the door again, in white trousers and asymmetric draped shirt and a short, Lsel-style cropped jacket (she’d had to leave The Perilous Frontier! in the other one, there wasn’t room for it in this iteration), the soldier was still there, exactly as he had been. He blinked at her for a very long moment. She wondered if he was thinking of Nineteen Adze, the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze, in her pristine white suits, before she’d been soaked in blood and rendered suitable for the sun-spear throne.
“Have you located the envoy?” Mahit asked him, lightly.
“Not personally,” said the soldier. “The ship has. Are you ready now, Ambassador, or is there anything else you need to do?”
If he was thinking of Nineteen Adze, thinking so wasn’t making it difficult to be snide and impatient toward the barbarian.
“Show me,” Mahit said. “Quickly. I imagine the aliens won’t wait for very long before they decide we don’t know how to say more than hello.”
Walking onto the bridge, Three Seagrass experienced a moment of debilitating psychological vertigo: standing next to the yaotlek, right behind the comms officer’s station, was a tall woman all in white with short dark hair, poised and utterly in control of herself. She was aware of the process of understanding what she was seeing: not, of course not, the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze, her once-possibly-patron and definitely-now-Emperor. Impossible, for three reasons. The Emperor couldn’t have gotten here from the City so quickly (Three Seagrass was intimately acquainted with the fastest route by now, and really, what a mess it would have been to get an imperial vessel through some of those ports!); no one was deferring to this woman, as they all would be if she was the Emperor; and, well. She was Mahit Dzmare, not Nineteen Adze at all.
The curls of her hair just brushing the collar of her white jacket. That was Mahit, entirely.
And yet Three Seagrass felt as if she had been punched in the solar plexus, breathless and knocked back with superposition of imagery. Whatever game Mahit was playing, it was one with high stakes—
Why, for the sake of every sun and every bleeding star, had she had that stupid fight with Mahit? And not come back to their quarters? She wanted to be in on this. She should have been in on this. Instead, here she was, late to what might be the most important act of communication in her life, in yesterday’s uniform, which had both Kauraanian kitten hairs and hydroponic waterstains on one sleeve. Having stayed up through a sleep shift talking to Tenth Legion soldiers and avoiding everything else but fried noodle cakes until an on-duty member of the Fleet had come to fetch her posthaste to the bridge.
Looking at her Ambassador, already here and at work, dressed in perfectly designed white—it made her chest ache. Which was inconvenient. At best.
“Yaotlek,” she called across the bridge, pitched to carry and to be as respectful as possible. “I apologize for my tardiness—there was an episode with a kitten—but I see you are already in the Ambassador’s capable hands.”
There. That was an opening. It was even possible that Mahit might forgive her, a little, if she kept positioning them both as absolute equals. That seemed to be the crux of the whole miserable mess.
Nine Hibiscus turned toward her, but Mahit did not—Mahit bent her head close to that of the comms officer (Three Seagrass consulted her cloudhook, and pulled up the officer’s name, Two Foam, ikantlos first-class, and a whole string of service records which she really didn’t need right now, the War Ministry’s internal user interface for personnel lookup was utterly clunky compared to Information’s, but at least she’d gotten access to the ship’s network at all), and made a quick gesture in the air, as if she was drawing an orbital arc with her fingertips. Two Foam nodded to her.
“Behold your handiwork,” said the yaotlek, and Three Seagrass left off staring uselessly at Mahit and looked instead at her very first glimpse of their live enemy.
Or at least their enemy’s ships, presumably with live enemies inside them, rotating slowly at the edge of Weight for the Wheel’s visual range, rings on rings. A small ship and a large one. Three Seagrass thought they were peculiarly beautiful. Like the ringed mouths of cave-dwelling fish. An inhuman, somewhat disturbing beauty, but beautiful in symmetry at least. And if they liked symmetry, and were mammals, and had decided to talk back—well, then, she’d manage this, wouldn’t she. Of course she would.