He wanted to go home.
He didn’t know how to get home if he didn’t have the subway. He was miles from Palace-Central, and he didn’t know what kind of neighborhoods were between here and there anyway, if he decided to walk. His cloudhook would show him a path, but it was such a very long way, and he really never should have tried to be a grown person out in the City. And if he couldn’t do this, how could he ever think he could be Emperor? Or even be a soldier in the Fleet? He was sure Fleet soldiers didn’t panic when they couldn’t use the subway. Or want to go home to someplace that they understood the rules of.
He promised himself he wasn’t going to cry right before he started crying. Which meant he was crying and embarrassed about crying at the same time.
When he managed to unscrew his eyes and wipe his nose with the back of his sleeve (he was being such a baby), and look up at all, there was a person in white crouched in front of him.
“Hi, Your Excellency,” said Five Agate, the Emperor’s ezuazuacat. “How are you doing?”
If he’d been two years younger—if he’d been two weeks younger, maybe—Eight Antidote would have dived into her arms and hung on tight. But he was too embarrassed. Too ashamed.
“Fine,” he said, snot-choked.
“Okay,” said Five Agate, and sat down on the garden curb next to him. “How about we rest here for a minute so that the Sunlit can finish securing the area, and then I take you back to Palace-East?”
That sounded incredibly nice. That sounded easy. Eight Antidote didn’t trust it. Right now he suspected he didn’t trust anything. That was awful. He wanted to trust the Emperor’s sworn right hand. He always had before.
“What happened?” he asked.
“A lot of things,” said Five Agate. “Which do you want to hear about?”
He swallowed. Found himself asking, pathetically, “… Is it my fault?”
Five Agate patted his back, just once. “No,” she said. “Well. Nothing’s your fault aside from how Nineteen Adze asked me to go fetch you myself, and I was fairly busy at the time. But you did a fine job being findable—stayed on camera, stayed still. I only lost you for a few minutes.”
He’d never really been alone at all, had he. Later, he might mind that. Not right now. The City had seen him and sent him Five Agate. Or Nineteen Adze had. Same thing, maybe. It was hard to tell, sometimes, where the City started and the Emperor stopped. “Sorry,” Eight Antidote said. “For making you come out here.”
“I accept your apology.”
“Um. What—else happened? I saw smoke in the subway. Was there—” He didn’t want to ask, Was there a bomb? Asking felt like it would make it real.
“A train derailed,” Five Agate said. “Which is—a very complicated problem. A surprising problem. We haven’t had a train derailment since before you were born.”
“Not since the new algorithms, right?”
“Right.” She didn’t seem surprised that he knew about those. That he’d draw those conclusions. Eight Antidote remembered she had a kid, too. A little kid, but maybe he was a smart little kid and Five Agate was good at trusting kids when they were right. That would make sense. (He really wanted things to make sense right now.)
“Did people die?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Five Agate said, after blinking through some data on her cloudhook. “Some people are being taken to the hospital, but no one has died.”
“Good.” He took a deep breath. “Did I— Did the train I was supposed to be on derail?”
Five Agate made a considering noise. “Maybe,” she said. “It’d help if we knew exactly how the derailment happened. And also—what were you planning on doing, coming out here?”
Being a spy, Eight Antidote thought. Finding things out on my own. But that maybe was rattling around in his throat, awful enough to choke on. So he told the truth. Maybe if he told the truth he’d get to go home and stop being a spy for a little while. He said, “I wanted to ask someone who didn’t work for Information or War about Envoy Three Seagrass.”
“… And you thought you’d find someone like that at the spaceport?”
“Um. She left on the Flower Weave, and—”
“Oh, clever,” said Five Agate. Eight Antidote expected the praise to make him feel good, feel proud, like when Eleven Laurel or Three Azimuth had told him he’d done something right. Instead he just felt tired. There was a long pause, a quiet contemplative space. He sniffled. He had a headache from crying, which was also embarrassing.
Finally, Five Agate stood up. Her white trousers had planter-dirt on them, and she didn’t seem to care. “Let’s go home, Your Excellency,” she said. “The Judiciary and the Sunlit have the scene locked down. There’s no point in hanging around waiting to see if it was a signal problem or an incendiary device.”
An incendiary device. Like the one the ixplanatlim had been talking about in the throne room, days and days ago. A bomb. In the subway. That would be awful. That would be worse than a derailment. Especially if it was Eight Antidote’s fault.
“Do you think,” he tried, willing his voice to be even, “it was an incendiary device?”
“I think,” said Five Agate, “that you and I both will be better off waiting for the Judiciary report on the incident before we start worrying about that. Wait for the real problem, Your Excellency. Don’t borrow trouble that doesn’t come to you on its own.” She paused, and smiled, a quick there-and-gone expression. “Besides, I think I can do better than bringing you the captain of the Flower Weave. How would you like to talk to the envoy herself?”
The shuttle went down to the Peloa System with Swarm on it. Nine Hibiscus watched that shuttle’s engines burn bright fuel and vanish into the atmosphere of Peloa-2 from the bridge, with Sixteen Moonrise right beside her where her adjutant should have been—the worst possible replacement for Swarm that she could imagine. There went Swarm, the envoy, the Ambassador, and her same four escort soldiers as the last time—all of them smelling harshly of chlorine and disinfectants even through fresh uniforms. Down to meet the enemy face-to-face, and the medical deck was still sealed off to all but emergency personnel. Sixteen Moonrise claimed that she’d been appeased sufficiently: there wasn’t going to be an immediate outbreak of fungal-driven anaphylaxis, not just yet, but naturally a Fleet Captain (let alone a yaotlek) shouldn’t take any chances. And of course, of course Sixteen Moonrise refused to return to the Parabolic Compression while there was any chance that she herself could be a vector. How noble. How convenient for her. How easy it was going to be for her to find out about the enemy planetary system before Nine Hibiscus was ready for her to know.
Nine Hibiscus wanted to hurt something. To shoot something. To have a target to unleash all of Weight for the Wheel’s energy cannons on, a conflagration to create. Nothing was making sense any longer. She’d understood Kauraan. She’d understood how to make her enemies trust her, how to give her soldiers strength in their loyalty—she’d always understood that—and here she was, paralyzed, waiting, with a dead cadet next to a dead alien in the autopsy cold-room. All of the power of the Fleet, all of the power of Teixcalaan behind it, all of her own skill and hard-won patience—and yet Swarm had gone down on that star-cursed shuttle to drown in desert heat and ask aliens questions. This had all been her idea, originally, and she wished she could take it back—if taking it back meant she’d have something to do. Something to give her people to do, aside from wait, and die in flashfire bursts when they were caught unawares by the sudden appearing of the enemy ships, peeling out of the void-dark of space.