“Mahit,” said Three Seagrass, quite intently.
“… Yes?”
“Hush.” She stepped close, close enough that Mahit was abruptly aware of the shape of her body, the space she took up in the air, the scent of her dried sweat. And then her hands were in Mahit’s hair, pulling her down in an arc to be kissed.
Mahit thought she made a sound—some noise that was a strangled word, half expressed—but Three Seagrass’s mouth was warm and open under hers, and she kissed like she meant it, not an offer or a question but a claim; all desire, not the coming-together of exhaustion and grief that their first and only prior kiss had been, deep under the City, waiting for Six Direction to die in a sun temple, sanctified in front of all of Teixcalaan. This was—
<This is how it is. How it was, for me. Yes.>
Her hands had found Three Seagrass’s shoulder blades, the curve of her waist, the ridge of her hipbone that fit exactly into Mahit’s palm. The precise way that Nineteen Adze’s larger hipbone had fit into Yskandr’s larger palm—the doubling was intense, almost violent, a surge of desire like a pulse or a punch between her thighs. Distantly, she wondered if sex would be different now that she had an imago with male-bodied memories—decided it didn’t matter, it was going to be good—and in deciding, realized that she’d already committed to whatever this was going to be. That she wasn’t offering or asking either, but saying yes. (Like Yskandr had said yes, first to the Emperor and then to Nineteen Adze—and look where that had gotten him—but oh—and it didn’t matter that they hadn’t talked about their argument, it didn’t matter at all, she wanted to never think of anything again, except for desire, except for triumph, except for being wanted—)
Distant, as desire-choked as she felt: <That’s the way we fall—being wanted.>
Yskandr was probably right, and Mahit didn’t care.
Three Seagrass broke the kiss with a slow sucking bite to Mahit’s lower lip, and Mahit caught her breath on a whine, all unintentional.
“I was going to ask if you actually liked people of my gender and sex,” Three Seagrass said, breathless, “but I don’t think I need to.”
Mahit shook her head. Her mouth was as dry as it had been on Peloa. She could feel her heartbeat between her legs, racing-hot.
“Good,” Three Seagrass said, and kissed her again—swarmed up against her, small breasts pressed into Mahit’s own, a thigh insinuated between her thighs. Mahit rocked against her, shifted, aligned her pelvis to shove her own hipbone against the seam of Three Seagrass’s trousers. Three Seagrass gasped and bit Mahit’s collarbone. She was hot through the fabric and Mahit was viciously, delightedly sure that when she got her hand between her legs she’d find her dripping wet.
“—Do you always get like this after you’ve won something?” she asked, and Three Seagrass bit her again, and laughed, and pushed against her hip in steady motions.
“Only when I’ve won something with someone like you,” she said.
Almost, Mahit asked, Only barbarians, then? Only sufficiently alien partners? Almost, but it was better—easier—to kiss her again, to feel the expanding, dizzying memory of Yskandr kissing someone as much smaller than him as Three Seagrass was to her, the Emperor who had opened up under his mouth like Three Seagrass was opening under hers—to feel that doubling and willingly allow it in. (Six Direction’s hair had been longer, and grey-silver, but the texture when Mahit wound her fingers into Three Seagrass’s queue and disarrayed it was completely the same.)
“Come on,” she said, when the kiss dissolved from lack of available oxygen, “come on, I’m not going to fuck you standing up—”
“That bed’s tiny.” One of Three Seagrass’s hands had gotten under her shirt, cupped her breast, teased expertly and distractingly at the nipple. “There’s a perfectly good floor right here…”
“I’m not that kind of barbarian,” Mahit said, and found herself laughing, too, and pulling away long enough to squirm out of her jacket, pull her shirt over her head. The air of their quarters on bare skin raised shivery gooseflesh down her arms, over her ribs. The air, and Three Seagrass’s eyes on her.
“You’re not,” Three Seagrass said, dark and intent, “but I am.”
And then she had dropped to her knees in front of Mahit, fluid and easy motion. She pressed her open mouth between Mahit’s legs. Wet heat through fabric, her tongue already mobile and seeking—Mahit thought, Blood and starlight, said, “Fuck, yes, please,” didn’t care that she’d cursed in Teixcalaanli, that she was only thinking in Teixcalaanli, that she and Yskandr were both explosively, devastatingly lost—sank a hand into Three Seagrass’s hair and pulled her in, tight.
INTERLUDE
IN all the vast reach of Teixcalaan, it is an honor for a young person sworn to the Six Outreaching Palms to be selected as a medical cadet for the Fleet: the Fifth Palm, medicine coupled close with research and development, is the second-most difficult placement to achieve within the Ministry of War. And thus it is a greater honor still to serve on an active battlefront before the completion of one’s mandatory years of training, and perhaps a further honor yet to be allowed, under no supervision but the watching eyes of Weight for the Wheel’s security cameras and biohazard containment detection algorithm, to clean up the remains of an alien autopsy.
Six Rainfall, two and a half indictions old, young enough to still have acne at his temples that he judiciously scrubs at with astringents each morning before putting on his uniform, is—by his own intimation but also by the evaluations submitted quarterly by his superior officers—quite good at his assigned tasks. He is the sort of soldier-to-be that might be headed for command of a medical bay of his own, in sufficient time. A person who takes both scientific and health-conscious initiative, his last supervisor had written—and that, amongst other factors, had put him here, transferred from one of the Tenth Legion’s smaller ships to the flagship itself.
Currently, he has set his cloudhook to talk to his audiophonic augments and is playing his favorite new album quite loudly into the bone-conduction points in his skull while he cleans the lab and carefully packs away various alien parts in cryostorage. He’s three months out of date on the shatterharmonic music scene, which is what he gets for signing up for a two-year stint with the Fleet without any ground postings, but he’d snagged this album off of an entertainment vendor at the last big jumpgate station they’d stopped at between Kauraan and this back-of-beyond killing field. It’s the latest release from All Points Collapse, who are, in Six Rainfall’s opinion, the shattermost of shatterharmonicists, and next time he takes leave, he’s going to make sure it’s on a planet where they’re touring live. The harmonies sing in triplicate in his skull, and he hums along with them as he packs alien bits into appropriately labeled containers and carries them into the cryostorage unit. He’s wearing latex gloves, of course. And a breathing-mask filter. That’s standard for disposing of any autopsy remnants, and alien autopsy remnants obviously require strict protocol adherence.
Six Rainfall is good at protocol adherence, except for his tendency to play music when he’s working.
The alien is disturbing. It has had its rib cage opened up like deeply unpleasant bloody wings, and its head nearly disarticulated from its overlong neck, all the vocal folds exposed and dissected. Six Rainfall has never seen a dead alien before. Or a live alien before. He peers at it, half to feel the squirming atavistic fascination of being disturbed, and half because he’s quite genuinely interested in it. He tilts its heavy skull back to get a good view of the dentition; the lolling blue-black tongue splotched with pink; the sporelike structures in the oral cavity, white fungal tendrils extending down from the soft palate—