“Pay more attention, then,” said Eleven Laurel. “You’re easy to spot, right out in the open like this, and you’re not watching your blind spots. Do they not teach you anything in Palace-Earth about your own defense?”
“I’m eleven,” Eight Antidote said. “I know how to kick a male-bodied person between the legs and bend anybody’s arm back far enough so that they scream, but I don’t have much body mass or height leverage, and also the entire City watches me. Haven’t you seen the camera-eyes? If I get kidnapped, the Sunlit will kidnap me right back.”
“I certainly hope they would,” Eleven Laurel said, and came around the bench to sit next to Eight Antidote. All of his very long limbs folded up too much; the bench was too high for Eight Antidote and too low for him. His knees stuck up. “It would be a bad time in Teixcalaan indeed if the Sunlit let the imperial heir stay kidnapped.”
Eight Antidote wondered if that was some kind of threat. It felt like it might be, but he didn’t understand the shape of it, or why he was being threatened right now, in this way. Was Eleven Laurel implying the Sunlit were currently not trustworthy, or that they could become so, if Eight Antidote continued to be disappointing? Either version was bad. Either version was frightening.
He asked, “Why have I disappointed you?”
Eleven Laurel sighed, a long, deliberate release of breath. “When a person—young or old, seasoned or brand-new—is brought into the sort of meeting like the one you were party to, Cure, a meeting in which one Ministry is suspicious of the motivations of another one—and then that person chooses to go directly from the Ministry that had hosted them to the Ministry under suspicion, direct and brazen—well, that person must either be very young, very stupid, or very untrustworthy. Or all three. I am hoping that it isn’t all three, in your case.”
“You followed me.”
“As I was saying, you’re not watching your blind spots very well. You’re a fair sneak, Your Excellency, but you light up the entire Palace when you walk in a Ministry front door in broad daylight. Especially the Information Ministry.”
Eight Antidote liked being called Cure a lot better than Your Excellency, but maybe he didn’t deserve an affectionate use-name right now. He’d made a dumb mistake—apparently—the worst kind of mistake, the kind you don’t know is a mistake that you could make, so you can’t avoid it. He said, “I guess you wouldn’t have liked it better if I wriggled in through the Information air ducts instead.”
Eleven Laurel cleared his throat like he was pushing away a laugh. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t have liked that any better. I’d have liked that worse—then I’d know you were trying to be surreptitious. You’ve at least managed the benefit of my doubts by being obvious. Now. What did you tell Information about what you heard at War, Your Excellency?”
“Nothing,” Eight Antidote said, and tried to make himself sound offended, insulted, and not let his voice go high and whiny like a baby’s. “I cross-checked, Undersecretary, to improve my understanding of communication over interstellar distances. So I could better understand what I heard at War.”
“That does sound plausible,” Eleven Laurel said, and then said nothing more.
Eight Antidote knew this trick; knew it from Nineteen Adze, knew it from his tutors, knew it from how he’d tried to use it himself on One Cyclamen just an hour ago. It was the trick where he was being invited to get himself in trouble by continuing to talk, by explaining more, to make how uncomfortable this conversation was go away. He wasn’t going to fall for it. Not this time. (And if he was actually really upset that Eleven Laurel was manipulating him like this, like he was an asset and not a person, well, he never should have expected otherwise; people like him didn’t have friends, even grown-up friends, and also he wasn’t going to cry. Or even sniffle like crying was a possibility.)
“Are there any other ways I’ve disappointed you?” he asked, instead.
Eleven Laurel patted him on the shoulder, a brief touch that almost felt parental. “Not yet. Try to watch your blind spots, would you? It’d be nice to see you live to be Emperor.”
And then he stood up, brushed his trousers clear of dust with his hands, straightened his already-straight cuffs, and strode off through the gardens. Eight Antidote was about to call after him, That’s not the way out, but thought better of it. Either Eleven Laurel wanted to wander through the lily-maze, or he didn’t, and Eight Antidote didn’t owe him any help. He got up himself—kicked a clod of dirt into the pool, which he knew was self-indulgent and environmentally irresponsible, and he didn’t care one bit—and headed, finally, to talk to Her Brilliance the Emperor. If he was going to get accused of spying by someone he thought had liked him, he should actually do some spying. And he was sure Nineteen Adze would want to know about the Lsel Ambassador appearing, suddenly, on the site of the battlefront.
And maybe about Eleven Laurel implying to Minister Three Azimuth that the Emperor Herself didn’t trust the Ministry of War. Telling her that would serve him right.
INTERLUDE
DEKAKEL Onchu is not the sort of person who stands on ceremony, or bothers with channels of communication when she could achieve the same results by simply taking advantage of her own authority. She is the Councilor for the Pilots; her imago-line is the oldest imago-line on Lsel Station. Sometimes, if she is tired enough, she dreams fourteen generations back: the great calculations for maneuvering what had been a ship-world to a point where it could forever be still, a home for all its travelers at last. She never remembers the numbers when she wakes, but she remembers being someone who knew how to find them.
That is all the authority she will ever need to walk directly into Aknel Amnardbat’s office without appointment or announcement. She has questions she wants answered, and she will have her answers now. There will be no further slippery avoidance regarding sabotage. There will be no further waiting for semidisgraced ambassadors to decide to finally admit what Dekakel had suspected to be true all along. And there will be no chance for Councilor Amnardbat to neatly slip away and refuse to talk to her fellow Councilor, like she had in the cargo bay when Mahit Dzmare had so unceremoniously been allowed to be nigh-on kidnapped by a Teixcalaanli envoy.
Amnardbat is behind her desk. She has the grace to not look surprised when Dekakel walks through her door; perhaps her secretary managed to send her a warning message. Dekakel does not sit down, even when Amnardbat gestures at the chair opposite her own. Sitting down would imply a certain equality between the two of them that Dekakel no longer feels.
“Councilor,” says Amnardbat. “How can I help you?”
“You can tell me why you let Dzmare get onto that shuttle when you’d convinced her you wanted her here badly enough that she came to me for rescue. Let’s start there. Councilor.”
Aknel Amnardbat has a face that settles easily into serene and confident distaste; the bubbles of her curls and the pleasant high arches of her cheekbones are accustomed to the look she gives Dekakel now. “I don’t care what happens to Dzmare,” she said, “as long as she isn’t on this Station. I don’t care one bit, as long as that imago-line isn’t here, twisting whatever it touches. If that Teixcalaanlitzlim wants her, she can have her.”