“It’s blue!”
“That’s the City noticing—”
A section of the restaurant’s roof shuddered and fell, ear-shatteringly loud. Three Seagrass and Mahit ducked simultaneously, pressed forehead to shoulder.
“We have to get out of here,” Mahit said. “That might not have been the only bomb.” The word was easy to say, round on her lips. She wondered if Yskandr had ever said it.
Three Seagrass pulled her to her feet. “Has this happened to you before?”
“No!” Mahit said. “Never.” The last time there had been a bomb on Lsel was before she was born. The saboteurs—revolutionaries, they’d called themselves, but they’d been saboteurs—had brought the vacuum in when their incendiaries exploded. They’d been spaced, afterward, and the whole line of their imagos cut off: thirteen generations of engineering knowledge lost with the oldest of them. The Station didn’t keep people who were willing to expose innocents to space. If an imago-line could be corrupted like that, it wasn’t worth preserving.
It was different on a planet. The blue air was breathable, even if it tasted like smoke. Three Seagrass had hold of her elbow and they were walking out into Plaza Central Nine, where the sky was still the same impossible color, as if nothing had gone wrong. A stream of Teixcalaanlitzlim fled across the square toward the safety of other buildings or the dark shelter of the subway.
“Is it possible,” Three Seagrass asked, “that Fifteen Engine brought the bomb with him? Did you see—”
“He’s dead,” Mahit interrupted. “Are you suggesting he was some kind of—self-sacrifice?”
“Badly managed, if he was. You’re not dead. Neither am I. And nothing about Fifteen Engine’s record, ties to Odile or no ties to Odile, suggests he’d be in with domestic terrorists or suicide bombers or the kind of activists for whom posters are definitely not enough—”
“What would be the point of killing us? He wanted to talk to me—well, to Yskandr—and you’re the one who asked him to breakfast for me in the first place.”
“I’m trying,” said Three Seagrass, “to figure out just how badly I have misread the situation and determine how much danger you’re actually in—or if this is just terrible luck—or if something’s set off another rash of bombings—”
“Another?” Mahit asked, and instead of answering, Three Seagrass stopped walking. Froze, her hand on Mahit’s elbow, jerking her to a standstill.
The center of the plaza unfolded in front of them. What Mahit had thought were tiles and metal inlay when she’d walked across them were instead some kind of armature, emerging from the ground and corralling the crowd inside walls of gold and glass, crackling with that same blue light. Words scrolled up their transparent sides as they drew closer, pinning Mahit and Three Seagrass in the center of a little group of smoke-stained, shocked Teixcalaanlitzlim. The words were printed in the same graphic glyphs as the street signs and subway maps. A four-line quatrain, repeating over and over. Stillness and patience create safety, Mahit read, the Jewel of the World preserves itself.
“Don’t touch the City,” Three Seagrass said. “It’s keeping us confined until the Sunlit get here. The Emperor’s police.” The corners of her mouth curved down. “It shouldn’t be holding me—I’m a patrician—but it probably hasn’t noticed yet.”
Mahit didn’t move. The walls crawled with gold poetry and blue shimmering light.
“What happens to people who can’t read?” she said.
Three Seagrass said, “Every citizen can read, Mahit,” as if Mahit had said something incomprehensible. She reached up to her cloudhook, tapping the frame of it where it rested over her left eye, adjusting. The thin pane of transparent plastic that covered her eye socket lit up red and grey and gold, like an echo of the patrician colors on her sleeves. “Hang on,” she said. “That should do it.”
She shoved her way to the front of the crowd. Mahit followed in her wake. Walking hurt, a bruised and insulted ache that spread from her hip across her lower belly. Three Seagrass went right up to the unfolded section of plaza, her nose inches from the glass, and said, “Three Seagrass, patrician second-class, asekreta. Request to transmit Information Ministry identification, City.”
A tiny section of the glass wall and her cloudhook both swarmed with words, reflecting one another. Communicating. Three Seagrass muttered something subvocal—Mahit thought it might be a string of numbers, but she wasn’t sure—and then the glass printed a word she could read quite clearly.
Granted, it said. Three Seagrass stuck out her hand and did exactly what she’d told Mahit not to do: she touched the wall, as if she expected it to part like a door in front of her. The gesture was so casual, so instinctively comfortable, that Mahit didn’t understand when Three Seagrass made a noise like she’d been punched, and fell backward, stiff-limbed. A line of blue fire connected her outstretched fingertips to the City.
Mahit caught her. She was very small. Teixcalaanlitzlim all were, but Three Seagrass was the size of a half-grown Stationer teenager, barely coming up to Mahit’s breastbone, and absurdly light for someone wearing as many layers of suiting as she was. Mahit sat on the ground. Three Seagrass fit in her lap, stunned and breathing in ugly gasps, her eyes rolled back in her skull. The crowd backed away from them both.
The City was still saying Granted, where the door wasn’t. Mahit entertained a vivid and horrific fantasy of the entire artificial intelligence that kept the Jewel of the World in operation, all the sewers and the elevators and every code-locked door, having been programmed by whomever Yskandr had so deeply offended for the specific purpose of killing her and anyone so unlucky as to be associated with her. The concept felt absurdist: she was one person, even if she was also the inheritor of all of Yskandr’s plans, and there were so many Teixcalaanlitzlim in the City to be accidentally hurt. So many citizens. Too many real people for the Empire to sacrifice for the sake of one barbarian. And yet she was entombed in glass, her cultural liaison electrocuted for performing a routine action. Absurd possibilities made too much sense, when so much had gone wrong so quickly.
“Do any of you have water? For her?” she asked, looking up. The faces of the Teixcalaanlitzlim surrounding her didn’t change: tear-streaked or burnt or untouched, none of them looked upset, not the way a Stationer would. Her own face felt like a mask, scrunched up with emotion. Abruptly she was afraid she had spoken the wrong language; she didn’t know what language she was thinking in. Either, or both. “Water,” she said again, helplessly.
A man took pity on her, or on Three Seagrass, still limp and unresponsive; he came forward and squatted down. His hair was coming undone from a thick braid, tendrils sticking sweatily to his forehead, and he wore a large, tacky shoulder pin shaped like a sprig of purple flowers on the left lapel of his suit. “Here,” he said, speaking both loudly and slowly as he held out a plastic bottle, “some water.”
Mahit took it. “I’m Mahit Dzmare,” she said, “I’m an ambassador—I don’t know what’s happening.” I am absolutely alone. She flipped open the top of the bottle, poured water into her cupped palm, and tried to decide if it would be better to throw it into Three Seagrass’s face or drip it into her mouth. “Thank you, sir. Can you inform the palace that one of the asekretim is hurt? Send a … a doctor vehicle.” There was a better word for that and she couldn’t find it.