Three Seagrass shrugged expressively. “The sun temples aren’t going anywhere. There are litanies at every hour. More, if you’re going out-of-City or joining the military, and you want to shore up your luck and earn the favor of the stars. But the restaurant’s just over there, if you can bear to stop standing in the exact middle of Central Nine.” She pointed, straight-armed.
The restaurant in question was open and bright, with shallow bowls of water glistening with floating many-petaled pale blue flowers set as centerpieces on each white-stone tabletop. Mahit found it terribly ostentatious, and suspected that Three Seagrass didn’t realize that that much wasted water was even something to remark on.
Fifteen Engine was waiting for them at a corner table. He was middle-aged, broad shoulders over a high barrel of a stomach, steel-grey hair combed back from an aristocratically low hairline and tied in a tail bound with a metal ring. His cloudhook was exactly as she’d remembered it—as Yskandr had remembered it—an oversized bronze structure that ate up his left eye socket, cheekbone to browbone. She felt an echo of the flash of emotional intensity she’d gotten off of just Three Seagrass saying his name: distant fondness, distant frustration. But shadowed, half remembered. Perhaps she hadn’t felt them at all. Ghost memory, not the imago giving her anything useful.
Mahit realized she’d thought Fifteen Engine would be younger, someone only five or ten years her senior. But he’d been Yskandr’s cultural liaison when Yskandr had arrived, twenty years ago, and only for a brief time: her imago might be young, but her imago was also fifteen years out of date, and whatever Fifteen Engine knew of him would be similarly aged.
Mahit lifted her hands to greet him, nevertheless. The pressure between her fingertips felt electrical, like she could feel all the nerves in her arms, an echo of all the times Yskandr had done this motion. Almost as if he was back with her.
When Fifteen Engine lowered his palms, he looked her over and said, wryly, “Stars, Yskandr, she’s a quarter of your age. What does that feel like?”
“I knew it!” Three Seagrass said, shoving Mahit in the shoulder. “You’ve got one of those machines, and of course you’d have the brain of your predecessor stuck in your head—”
“Hush,” Mahit said, and sat down. She did it like she’d sat when she was eighteen: awkward, girlish, too-long limbs folding into her chair, and she watched Fifteen Engine’s hopeful expression change to wariness.
“Yskandr may have somewhat exaggerated the degree of carryover,” she said, clipped.
“But you are in there—”
“Not at the moment he isn’t,” Mahit said, and hoped that Three Seagrass would understand that statement as something that intentionally happened with imago-machinery, not as a fundamental error. “In addition, I am fascinated to know that my predecessor was so profligate with sharing what is proprietary technology.”
“I see it’s taken your liaison approximately thirty-six hours to get the same information out of you,” Fifteen Engine said.
“Extenuating circumstances, patrician, considering that Yskandr is dead.”
“Is he,” Fifteen Engine said, dust-dry.
“The man you knew, yes.”
“I have no reason to be speaking with you, then,” Fifteen Engine said. “I have been out of interstellar politics for the better part of two decades. I resigned from the Information Ministry more than ten years ago. I live quietly and pursue my own work away from the vicissitudes of the central government.” He gathered himself to stand, pushing back his chair from the table. The bowl of flowers and water shook; some of the water slopped over the side and ran across the stone to drip onto the restaurant floor.
Transfixed by the waste, Mahit said, “He must have trusted you,” trying to salvage something of the meeting, but Fifteen Engine took a step back, avoiding the puddle adroitly—and the world flashed white and roared.
She was lying on the ground, her cheek wet in the spilled water. The air roiled with thick, acrid smoke and shouting in Teixcalaanli. Part of the table—or part of the wall, some heavy immobilizing marble—had come down on her hip and pinned her with a radiating spike of pain when she tried to move. She could only see a partial visual arc—there were chair legs and debris blocking her—but in that arc was fire.
She knew the Teixcalaanli word for “explosion,” a centerpiece of military poetry, usually adorned with adjectives like “shattering” or “fire-flowered,” but now she learned, by extrapolation from the shouting, the one for “bomb.” It was a short word. You could scream it very loudly. She figured it out because it was the word people were screaming when they weren’t screaming “help.”
She couldn’t see Three Seagrass anywhere.
Wetness dripped onto her face, as wet as the spilled water but from the other side. Dripped and collected and spilled over the hollow of her temple and across her cheek and her eye and was red, was blood. Mahit turned her head, arched her neck. The blood flowed downward, toward her mouth, and she clamped her lips shut.
It was coming from Fifteen Engine, collapsed back into his chair, the front of his shirt—the front of his torso—torn open and away, his throat studded with shrapnel. His face was pristine, the eyes open and glassily staring. The bomb must have been close. To his right, from the angle of the pieces she could see.
Yskandr, I’m sorry, she thought. No matter how much she disliked Fifteen Engine—and she had been developing a very direct and powerful dislike, just a moment ago—he was someone who had been Yskandr’s. She was Yskandr enough to feel a displaced sort of grief. A missed opportunity. Something she hadn’t safeguarded well enough.
A pair of knees in smoke-scorched cream trousers appeared in front of her nose, and then Three Seagrass was wiping the blood off her face with her palms.
“I would really like you to be alive,” Three Seagrass said. It was hard for Mahit to hear her over the shouting, and even the shouting was being drowned out by a rising electric hum, like the air itself was being ionized.
“You’re in luck,” Mahit said. Her voice worked fine. Her jaw worked fine. There was blood in her mouth now, despite Three Seagrass’s efforts to smear it away.
“Great,” said Three Seagrass. “Fantastic! Reporting your death to the Emperor would be incredibly embarrassing and possibly end my career and also I think I’d be upset—are you going to die if I move the piece of the wall that’s fallen on you, I am not an ixplanatl, I don’t understand anything about non-ritual exsanguination except not to pull arrows out of people’s veins and I learned that from a really bad theatrical adaptation of The Secret History of the Emperors—”
“Three Seagrass, you’re hysterical.”
“Yes,” said Three Seagrass, “I know,” and shoved whatever was pinning Mahit to the ground off of her hip. The release of pressure was a new kind of pain. The hum in the air was growing louder, the space between Three Seagrass’s body and her own beginning to shade a delicate and terrifying blue, like twilight approaching. The marble restaurant floor had lit up with a tracery of aware circuits, all blue, all glowing, coloring the air with light. Mahit thought of nuclear core spills, how they flashed blue as they cooked flesh; thought of what she’d read of lightning cascading out of the sky. If it was ionized air they were already dead. She struggled up on her elbows, lunged for Three Seagrass’s arm, and catching it, hauled herself to sitting.
“What’s wrong with the air?”
“A bomb went off,” Three Seagrass said. “The restaurant is on fire, what do you think is wrong with the air?”