The ezuazuacat’s offices—which Mahit suspected were also her apartments, if her own were any model for City architecture—began with a wide, bright room behind a code-locked door of that same rose-grey, which had slid open as soon as the Sunlit had announced that Mahit Dzmare was here for her meeting. Mahit didn’t miss the sarcastic twist of intonation. Her plan was quite transparent, really. Subtlety was for when you had more time to think. Beyond the door the floor was slate and there were enormous windows, rose-shaded to keep the sky from blazing too much across all the many holograph screens floating in a wide arc of a workspace that surrounded Nineteen Adze in a rough corona. She was still all in white, but her coat had been left somewhere and she’d rolled her sleeves halfway up her forearms. There were other Teixcalaanlitzlim in the room—her servants or assistants or functionaries—but she glowed in the middle of them, drawing the eye. Mahit wondered how young she’d been when she’d started to dress like that, thought to ask Three Seagrass, remembered that Three Seagrass was in a hospital somewhere in the City. Tried to draw herself up straight against the bruising ache where the restaurant wall had fallen on her hip.
Nineteen Adze banished three holographs with a flick of her wrist: two in text, one that might have been a scale model of Plaza Central Nine from above. Their afterimages glowed. “My thanks,” she said to the Sunlit, “for delivering Ambassador Dzmare safely to her meeting with me. Your platoon is to be commended; I’ll make sure of it. You’re dismissed.”
The Sunlit melted away back through the door without protest, and Mahit was alone inside the ezuazuacat’s territory. With grim professionalism she lifted her hands to greet her formally.
“Look at you,” Nineteen Adze said. “Still so correct after the morning you’ve had.”
Mahit discovered she was out of patience. “Would you prefer I be rude?”
“Of course not.” She left her displays and scrolling transparent windows of information to be fussed over by her assistants, and came over to Mahit. “Getting yourself here was well done. The first smart move you’ve made since you arrived.”
Mahit bristled, began, “I didn’t come here to be insulted—”
“Nothing of the kind is meant, Ambassador. And lest you worry, this is only the first time you’ve been smart; you’ve been clever quite a bit.”
The distinction in vocabulary was unkind; that word for “clever” was the one meant for con artists, hucksters, an animal sort of cunning. “Like any barbarian, I assume,” Mahit said.
“Not any barbarian,” Nineteen Adze said. “And better than some other young persons have done, when arriving at court at a particularly agitated moment. Relax, would you? I’m hardly inclined to interrogate you while you’re still wearing someone else’s body fluids, and besides, you’ve practically asked for sanctuary.”
“Not asked,” Mahit said.
“Found, if you’d like.” She twitched her eye behind the white-smoked glass of her cloudhook, summoning one of the assistants to materialize at her side. “Five Agate, if you’d show Ambassador Dzmare to a shower and provide her with some clothing appropriate to her height.”
“Of course, Your Excellency.”
What else was there to do but surrender? At least, Mahit thought, she’d be a clean hostage.
The shower was not palatial or ostentatious. It was tiled in soothing black and white, and had a wall caddy filled with hair products that Mahit didn’t touch—were they Nineteen Adze’s own? Or was this some sort of collective shower for all her assistants? She seemed the type to make them all live with her, but no, that was a literary trope, and Teixcalaanlitzlim were people no matter how hard they tried not to be—and the water was hot. Mahit stood under it and watched what remained of Fifteen Engine sluice down her arms and into the drain.
She reached for the soap—a cake of it rather than a liquid dispenser like station showers used—and in the moment when her hand entered her field of vision, fingers extended, a perfectly standard motion, her hand was not her hand, it was a rougher, larger hand, the nails flat and square and manicured, Yskandr’s hand reaching toward this soap, in this shower. The water hit lower on his shoulders than on hers—four inches in height would do that. The shape of his torso and his center of gravity, in the chest rather than the hips, overriding her sense of herself. She’d remembered like this when they had first been integrated, just briefly, the shape of his body rather than hers, superimposed—but why would he ever have been in the shower of the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze?
Yskandr? she tried, again. Silence. The ache of muscles that weren’t hers, a kind of exquisite tiredness.
And was herself, her own body, the doubled flash of memory gone: alone in the shower with only the bruised pain of her hip and none of that other body’s shape, thinking of how Nineteen Adze had said he was my friend, how she’d touched Yskandr’s dead face with such strange tenderness.
It would be exactly like Yskandr to have slept with a woman who called herself the Edgeshine of a Knife. That flashfire ambitious person who had been giving himself over to the new combination of him and Mahit Dzmare, a person who would say sedition, probably, when asked what he might have done wrong—it seemed the sort of thing he’d have done.
And it might explain Nineteen Adze’s willingness to offer sanctuary. Or Mahit might be superimposing a moment of neurological failure, some electric signal in her imago-machine flashing and telling her that her body was Yskandr’s body, onto the experience she was having right now. It was possible that she couldn’t trust anything the imago gave her right now—if she and he were damaged (sabotaged—she shuddered under the water).
Mahit scrubbed her arms with soap and rinsed them clean. The whole shower smelled of some dark wood, and roses, and she thought she knew that scent too, or at least remembered it.
Afterward she dressed in the clothes Five Agate had left her, all aside from the undergarments: she wasn’t about to wear someone else’s panties, the ones she’d come in with would suffice, and the bra they’d given her was sized for a woman with more need for bras than Mahit strictly had. The rest of the clothes were soft and white and well made, both pants and blouse. Mahit wished she could put her own jacket back on over them, but it was irreparably stained. She’d have to walk out, barefoot, in what she suspected were Nineteen Adze’s very own garments.
A hostage, but a clean one.
Someone had set out a tea service by the time she made her way back to the central office.
Nineteen Adze was immersed in her workspace, rearranging holographs and projections around her with a fluid rhythm, so Mahit sat down at the low table where the tea was and waited. It had a light scent, floral and faintly bitter. There were only two bowls, shallow ceramic, sized for cupped hands. Tea on Lsel Station was not nearly so formaclass="underline" tea drinkers had tea bags and mugs and microwaves to heat the water. Mahit drank coffee, when she drank stimulants at all, which was the same process except with freeze-dried coffee grounds instead of the tea bag.