“She has a very distinctive face,” said Five Filament. He shoved a knife into his boot. “I’ve never stolen anything from a space station before. This is going to be fun.”
Top panels, three across page. First paneclass="underline" Captain Cameron’s ship approaches the underside of the Teixcalaanli warship we saw on the previous splashpage; it is so big it doesn’t look real. Second paneclass="underline" close-up of Cameron’s hands on the navigation controls, with the glowing echo of Chadra Mav helping him steer; through the cockpit window the warship has turned into a metal backdrop, super decorative with way too many flourishes, and also energy cannons like black eyes. Third paneclass="underline" Cameron and Chadra Mav have slipped past the ship and into the black. It recedes into the distance. They are unnoticed.
CAMERON (thought bubble on third panel): There’s better stars out here than the ones the Empire sees or the Station’s ever thought to look for.
EIGHT Antidote didn’t dream, and was glad of it. He didn’t remember falling asleep; only remembered waking. It wasn’t dawn yet. He’d slept in his clothes, at his desk, his face pillowed on his hands, and woken himself up an hour or so later. He’d been thinking, when he fell asleep, having said good night to Five Agate and the Emperor Herself and gone back to his rooms. He’d tried watching holoproj shows, but he couldn’t concentrate on any of them. He felt full up with ideas, with concepts, with horror; like he was a supersaturated solution and at any moment he’d crystallize and suddenly understand. He almost did. He kept coming back to I think they might be a kind of person, in Mahit Dzmare’s voice. To they don’t care about death the way we do, but they do understand death.
To what Three Seagrass had said. They talk.
And that had been obvious. Of course they’d talk, they had spaceships and weapons and a society—of course they talked. Maybe the important part wasn’t that they talked, but that they talked back.
Maybe they thought humans might be a kind of person, too.
He’d been thinking that when he fell asleep, probably. And now it was still full dark and he was wide awake and the only things that were illuminated in his room were the camera-eyes, how they glinted in moonlight. The City, watching him. Keeping track. Like the Sunlit kept track. How the whole of the City knew where he was, even if where he was was (in a horrible subway derailment that wasn’t supposed to be able to happen) (that might have been his own fault, meant for him, meant to—hurt—him) in his own room in Palace-Earth.
The idea was already all through him, like he’d dreamed himself full of it, without knowing or remembering the dream. It was exactly how he’d woken up understanding how the Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus had won the battle at Kauraan.
The idea was: they might be a kind of person. The idea was, Eight Antidote thought he might know what kind of person.
Start with the Sunlit and the way they could see through all the camera-eyes of the City. The Sunlit were a complicated kind of person, all together. They were Teixcalaanlitzlim, of course they were, as human as Eight Antidote, but they moved together, they reacted together, they all saw through the same eyes that weren’t human eyes but machine eyes, and that was why they moved and reacted together. They used the same algorithm process as the subway did, except they were people instead of a scheduling AI. They had become as good at it as they were when the new algorithmic principles were rolled out across Teixcalaan under Science Minister Ten Pearl. Everyone knew that: that now the Sunlit could see through the camera eyes, all together, like one mind made of a thousand observing pieces.
And if there was a human kind of person who could do that, could have many eyes and move all together easily and simply, it was easy to imagine other kinds of persons, who’d be better at it than the Sunlit ever had been. (Almost, Eight Antidote lost the shape of the idea, distracted by the vivid and surprising realization that he didn’t know how a person became one of the Sunlit, not at all—but he made himself not think about it. Not right now.) If there was a human kind of person who could share vision and intention, and there could be other kinds of persons who would be better at it, who weren’t human at all, then … then, they could be so much better at it that they wouldn’t care about just one of them dying. Like Envoy Three Seagrass had said: they’d know about dying, but not care the same way.
If he was right—if he was right even as much as he’d been right about Kauraan, almost right with one piece missing—if he was right, he had to tell someone. The enemy moved the way they did, destroyed supply lines the way they did, showed up in unexpected locations too fast the way they did in all of those strategy-room simulations because they had only one mind. If he was right. And he thought he was.
The person he had to tell was the Minister of War. Because if the enemy thought all together, like one giant extra-powerful group of Sunlit, then that was why Three Azimuth and all the generals of the Fleet couldn’t figure out how to go around them. He had to tell her right now.
So what if it was hours before dawn? He knew what the Ministry of War was like at the moment. He’d shadowed Three Azimuth for two whole days. If she was asleep, he’d eat a whole reflecting-pool’s worth of lotuses.
Mahit and Three Seagrass stood on the bridge in front of Nine Hibiscus, still trying—or at least Mahit was trying, who knew what Three Seagrass was thinking, hearing a yaotlek of the Teixcalaanli Fleet say such poetic words as I am prepared to sink my hands into their heart and rip it out, a statement out of an epic conquest poem, said so casually and easily, the absolute weight of Teixcalaan’s narratives settling over Mahit like a shroud she’d never really taken off—to figure out what to say. There was no immediate word from Twenty Cicada, down on Peloa-2 with his precious, absurd box of fungus, trying to take what she and Three Seagrass had established with the aliens about maybe killing us isn’t all right, at least not indiscriminately, and link it up to whatever he wanted to explain about the fungal infiltrate. There was no message at all, and Mahit could see how the lack of one made Nine Hibiscus brittle and sharp, willing to contemplate the total destruction of a planetary system.
Have we ever loved someone like that, she thought. Not quite a question. Enough to want to kill a planet in revenge for them.
<Not a whole planet,> Yskandr said, and she rather wished she hadn’t asked. What counted as killing a planet, anyway? Was it the deathfire of Fleet bombs, or was it also the gentle, wide, killing-strong jaws of Teixcalaan, wrapped around her own heart where Lsel should be?
She said, “Yaotlek, I do think we were making some kind of progress. Another few hours, or days, and—maybe.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt you, Ambassador,” Nine Hibiscus told her. “But you’re not one of my soldiers, are you? I don’t expect you to understand. Eventually there are points where we in command ask our soldiers to trust us, not only with their lives but with their decisions. The Tenth has been waiting a long time.”