Mahit looked at Three Seagrass and shrugged as if to say, Now what?
Three Seagrass caught her eyes. Held them with her own: a wild intensity, a semihysteric giddiness. Mahit remembered it from how she’d looked right after the first time someone tried to kill Mahit in front of her, back in the Ambassadorial apartment in Palace-East, so very far away. A sense of watch me—here we go.
Three Seagrass took a breath, the kind that expanded all of her narrow chest and belly: breathed not only for oratory but for something even louder. And, exhaling, began to sing.
“Within each cell is a bloom of chemical fire,” she sang, bell-clear alto, a voice for calling lost people home, a carrying voice, meant for distance. “Committed to the earth, we shall burst into a thousand flowers—as many as our breaths in life—and we shall recall our names—our names and the names of our ancestors—and in those names blood blooms also from our palms…”
It was the Teixcalaanli funeral poem. The one Mahit had heard arranged in a hundred different ways, spoken or sung—the one she’d read the first time in a textbook in a classroom on the Station, marveling at chemical fire and the idea of flowers made of blood. But she’d never heard it like this. Three Seagrass had made it sound like a war chant. A promise. You spilled our blood, and we will rise.
Also it was fucking clever. Not the alien sort of resonant vibrations, but a very human version.
<Showing them that we can talk, too, and have language,> Yskandr murmured. <She’s more than clever. That was masterful. I see why she’s worth how upset you are.>
Three Seagrass was gesturing with one hand, beckoning Mahit forward. She went, as if pulled—the heat still made her dizzy, and she wondered if the aliens felt it, or cared, and what their home planet was like climatewise—and took up the position that still felt exactly correct: Three Seagrass at her left. The two of them arrayed in front of an insolvable political problem. (The two of them, and the ghost of Twelve Azalea like an echo, an imago who would never exist. That thought was like a fishhook through her lip, a sudden and capturing pain.)
“You know the song?” Three Seagrass murmured. Mahit nodded. She knew it well enough. “Good,” said Three Seagrass. “Let’s see if we make them get sick when we make resonant sound waves, too.”
Mahit hadn’t sung with another person in years. Poetry was different. She could recite, she could declaim—but singing wasn’t something she did, by habit or inclination. It had a strange intimacy to it that she hadn’t expected. They had to breathe together. They had to pitch together. And all the while the aliens stared at them, blank and evaluating, with their killing claws peacefully at their sides. They didn’t vomit. Mahit was glad; she didn’t want to get possibly toxic alien on her skin, and she was so close to them. They smelled like—animal, and something else, a dry herbal scent she’d never smelled before.
It wasn’t a long song, the funeral poem. Mahit was still gasping after it was finished. The heat lived inside her lungs now, and her throat felt raw. She swallowed, but there was no saliva to wet her mouth with.
The left-side alien made a low, crooning noise that Mahit had never heard before. The sound was metallic, machine-liquid like a synthesizer, but clearly, clearly organic. It made her ache just behind her sternum, as if her heart was racing out of control. The right-side alien came two loping steps closer, and now she knew her heart was racing, familiar adrenaline-spike of visceral fear. She was going to faint, or scream. Three Seagrass’s shoulder brushed her shoulder. They were both shaking.
<Stop it. Hush. If you’re going to die, you’ll die because this thing ripped out your organs, and not for any other reason.> Yskandr was a balm, a clear secure place in her mind, something hers—as was the sudden rush of shivery warmth that ran through her, her imago playing games with her endocrine response again, but oh, right now she was grateful for any feeling that wasn’t externally induced.
The alien pressed one of its claws to its chest, as Three Seagrass had done. And it gestured behind itself, even though there was nothing behind it to gesture at, no canopy and no escort of soldiers. And then it made sounds. Almost reasonable sounds. Almost, Mahit thought, words. A spitting, consonant-heavy, pitched syllable sequence, but one she thought she could imitate. Even though she was going to have to sing to do it.
I should have taken lessons in holding pitch, she thought. And tried, like she’d tried the very first time she’d been in a Teixcalaanli language class, to make the unfamiliar sounds she’d heard with her own mouth.
Nine Hibiscus had never been very good at waiting. It was why she’d been a Shard pilot, back at the beginning of her service in the Fleet: Shard pilots tumbled out of warships like glittering knife-sharp glass, unhesitant, and most of the time they didn’t know they were going to be deployed until right before it happened. No delays, no effort to make herself hold still, to stay in calculating abeyance until the right moment to strike. That skill, she’d had to learn. She’d learned it well enough to be captain, then Fleet Captain, and now yaotlek—but that didn’t mean she liked it.
Down on Peloa-2, four of her people—plus an Information agent and a barbarian diplomat, but four of her people, first and foremost—were either being dismembered by aliens (worst case) or being subject to heatstroke-inducing temperatures while waiting for negotiations to proceed (best case). And she could do nothing but wait—wait, like she was waiting for her scout-ships to find some base the aliens were using, off to the left where Forty Oxide’s people were being picked off, little by little, death after death and funeral after funeral; wait, like a just-graduated cadet expecting word about their first posting in the mail—wait and watch the larger of the two three-ringed ships spin menacingly at the very limits of her visual field on the bridge. The smaller had gone into the Peloa System, just like her own shuttle had. They were experimenting with parity, as if this was a negotiation between two groups of humans and not an attempt at communicating with a species which seemed to be driven only to devour or despoil, one or the other … but which still had technological capabilities as good as or better than any Teixcalaanli warship.
Nine Hibiscus hated waiting, in situations like this. So she did exactly what she’d always done, from the time when she’d been a cadet: she made sure that there was nothing on fire on the bridge, literally or metaphorically, and likely wouldn’t be during the next two hours—and went to invade Swarm’s personal space, so that they could wait together.
On Weight for the Wheel his personal space was the adjutant’s suite, two rooms on the exact opposite side of the ship from her own: the idea being that, if some enemy weapon took out the captain in her quarters, her adjutant might survive to act in her stead. Nine Hibiscus knew the way there as well as she knew the way to any place in the galaxy. Furthermore, she had the door codes, unless Twenty Cicada had changed them again—
He hadn’t. His door opened up for her like he and she were precisely the same person, and Nine Hibiscus was hit in the sinuses with the scent of green. That very particular smelclass="underline" the richness of plant life, alienated from flowers: vines and succulents and anything else Twenty Cicada could convince to grow with next to no help from water. He used his own water-ration for his garden. That, too, he’d been doing since they were cadets together. No waste; no excess. Not for her Swarm.