<Eventually,> Yskandr murmured, whisper-thin, <we fall. It doesn’t hurt, really. The falling.>
Only the sudden stop at the end?
Electric laughter, and more of that hideous, grief-stricken hollowness flooding her chest. Her hands hurt so badly.
“If I was,” she began, shutting her eyes and turning her head away from Three Seagrass so that there was nothing but that gentle touch and the hot darkness behind her eyelids, “if I was being the sort of agent of Lsel that I ought to be, considering how I managed to arrange to let you steal me at all, I should be trying very hard to not do well at talking to the aliens.”
Three Seagrass made a clicking noise with her tongue. “Lsel Station would prefer an endless war?”
Mahit sighed. “No,” she said. “Darj Tarats would like Teixcalaan to waste itself to exhaustion against … whoever these people are. What Lsel Station entire wants is a much more complicated political analysis, and we’re certainly not happy with all of these beautiful warships going over our heads in a continuous stream. But Darj Tarats is who I am supposed to be working for, when I’m not working for you.”
Honesty was awful, and it was an intense, full-body relief at the same time—a tension released. I guess we’re both compromised now, for good.
<You’re out on the edges of the world,> Yskandr murmured. <Maybe it’s—maybe it’s the right place to be compromised.>
Three Seagrass kissed her cheek, a quick and sharp brush of lips. “You are fascinating, Mahit. Someday I want to know why you decided to tell me that. I’m good in bed, but I’m not that good.”
Mahit found herself laughing, despite all her better instincts. “Because, Three Seagrass, I don’t think I’m going to do what Darj Tarats wants me to. And—someone should know. That I thought about it first.”
“That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I’ll think about it,” Three Seagrass told her, and disentangled them enough to sit up. “Come on. Let’s get breakfast and get ready to go down to Peloa-2 again. Since you’ve apparently decided to not commit sabotage?”
“Apparently,” Mahit said, and reached for her discarded bra, which had ended up tangled in the springs of the upper bunk sometime in the previous evening’s scramble.
“Excellent,” said Three Seagrass. “Also, you’re really pretty naked. Just so you know, before you put your underwear on again.”
Mahit stared at her while she grinned a creditable Lsel-style grin, and then got up, stretching her hands above her head and arching her back, giving Mahit an excellent view of all of the muscles in her shoulders, the curve of her spine, the fall of her hair unbound. She was still staring when Three Seagrass picked up, with that same covetous curiosity that she’d had when stripping Mahit out of her clothes, the slim volume of The Perilous Frontier! that Mahit had left on the fold-out desk in her hurry to get dressed for their first trip down to Peloa-2.
“… It’s Lsel literature,” she found herself saying, and hated that she sounded apologetic about it.
Still naked, Three Seagrass sat down at the desk and opened it up. “Who drew it?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Mahit said. She’d pulled the covers up over herself, wrapped her arms around her knees. She felt like she was preparing to be hit, and she didn’t even know why. She hadn’t drawn it. “A teenager. I bought it from a kiosk on one of our residential decks—”
“You have lots of kiosks,” Three Seagrass said, absently, turning the pages. She read fast. “One of them tried to sell me kelp beer. It was horrible.”
Kelp beer was horrible. “Some people like it,” Mahit said. When had Three Seagrass found time to be accosted by a kelp beer salesman? Before or after she’d run into Aknel Amnardbat?
“Mm. I’d rather this—the line art is really very well done, and this Esharakir character—”
“What about her?”
“She reminds me a little of you. I think. I have to read the rest, to decide.”
“We have time,” Mahit found herself saying. “It’s not long. Come back here, if you’re going to read it? The bed’s more comfortable than the chair.”
The dreams started with the twisted, melted flesh of the Minister of War’s ear, except it wasn’t the Minister of War, it was Mahit Dzmare in the gardens, and it was all of her face. All of her face, and the tiny beaks of the palace-hummers dipping into the wet, twisted ruin of it, drinking. Like a person who had been exposed to a nuclear shatterbomb strike and was melting of poison. Was poisoning everything she touched.
In the dream she said his own words back to him. He remembered that part. She said, They don’t even have to touch you to do it, and was covered with birds, and burnt and slippery with lymph, and then she wasn’t Mahit Dzmare at all but one of their enemy, one of the aliens, long neck and strange spotted skin and predator’s teeth—and not burnt. Not at all.
Not burnt, just very carefully holding one of the palace-hummers in its long-fingered hand, delicate except for the claws, and in the dream Eight Antidote remembered thinking that surely it would eat the bird, remembered being killing-afraid, panicked-afraid, and trying to ask it not to while it preened the tiny feathers with the crystalline-laced clawtip of its index finger.
There were worse things after that, but he couldn’t remember them right. Just the sense that he had done something terrible, and knowing it was something that he’d done in the dream.
He got up. Showered—facing away from the cameras, as usual—dressed. One of his spywork outfits: grey on grey. He almost looked like a normal kid. Almost. Kids maybe wore colors. He didn’t really know. He pulled his hair back, combed it straight and even, and tied it with a silver and leather cord. If he didn’t look like a kid, maybe he should just look like a spy. He had a grey jacket, a long one with layered lapels, a grown person’s jacket, and it matched well enough.
He was going somewhere. He realized that in the middle of pulling the jacket on, and decided to sit down and decide where, before he left. It wasn’t going to be the Ministry of War. He thought he might scream if he did that again, and that was both babyish and not helpful.
He knew a little bit about Mahit Dzmare. Not very much. But a little bit. And he had watched her speech on the newsfeeds, the one that happened right before his ancestor-the-Emperor had died, the one that had started the war. He’d watched that a lot of times. And he had—oh, he had disruptive person rattling around in his skull, making him feel strange and a little sick. (Was he a disruptive person? Could a person become an Emperor without being a disruptive person?)
But Mahit Dzmare wasn’t alone, when she’d been here in the City—and she wasn’t alone now, when she was out conducting first-contact negotiations on a Fleet warship. She was with the same person both places. And that person was the Third Undersecretary for Information, Three Seagrass. Or—Special Envoy Three Seagrass. Same person. And Eight Antidote didn’t know much about her, at all. And she was a lot easier to think about than a planetary first strike.
The rumor was she’d written the song the rioters who were still loyal to Emperor Six Direction sang during the attempted usurpation. The one that went released, we are a spear in the hands of the sun. The one that got stuck in Eight Antidote’s head all the time, and probably in the heads of a lot of other people too.