She looked up at Nineteen Adze’s face. Nineteen Adze, who had decided—perhaps at the last possible moment—not to let her die. She was watching her, blank and unreadable. Mahit’s hand hurt, a low sick pain, and she thought of freefall, of tumbling undirected through space, and then of steering, attitudinal compensation, vernier thrusters. She took a large breath. It didn’t hurt to breathe, at least.
“Your Excellency,” Mahit said, “since you knew about imago-machines—I do know you knew, you practically told me—what were you trying to do when we first met? In the Judiciary morgue. What did you intend for my predecessor’s body?”
Nineteen Adze quirked up one side of her mouth, fractional wry motion. “I keep underestimating you,” she said. “Or estimating you differently than you end up being. Here you are, nearly poisoned, in a bathroom, and you take this opportunity to ask me about my motivations.”
“Well,” Mahit said. “We’re alone.” As if it was an answer. It was, in a way. She wasn’t sure she’d have this chance again. (She wasn’t sure if she’d have another opportunity to catch Nineteen Adze even this much off-balance. When had she decided to save her life? Was she regretting it, even now?)
“So we are. All right, Ambassador Dzmare. Perhaps you’ve earned a little clarity. I wanted the machine, of course. But you already had guessed that.”
Mahit nodded. “It’s what made sense. I arrive, I plan a funeral—if you wanted it, you couldn’t wait any longer.”
“Yes.” Nineteen Adze sat back on her heels, composed and patient.
Mahit asked the next question. “What did you want it for?”
“When I saw you in the morgue? Then, I wanted a bargaining chip, Mahit. There are many interests at court who might want to control that machine—and control you, through the release or withholding of it.”
“Then.”
“I hardly need that now, do I?” Nineteen Adze gestured at the bathroom—at the two of them, sitting in it. Mahit nodded, wryly acknowledging. Having the Lsel Ambassador was much better than having the means to buy the Lsel Ambassador’s attention and influence. And Nineteen Adze had a live imago-machine now, the one inside Mahit’s skull. Though she’d have to cut her open to get it, and it was malfunctioning badly.
“I imagine,” she said, “that I am of less use to you in the current circumstances than you expected I’d be.”
Nineteen Adze shook her head. Reached out and patted Mahit’s knee, familiar and too, too kind. “If you weren’t useful you wouldn’t be here. Besides, how often does a barbarian challenge my decisions in my own bathroom? If nothing else, you enliven the experience of daily living. Which is exactly like your predecessor. I am finding the similarities very funny, especially after you went to such trouble to inform me of the disambiguation.”
Mahit considered what Yskandr would have done; remembered, imago-echo that wasn’t hers and wasn’t really anyone’s now, how easy he’d been in his body. How he’d moved hers in fluid, expansive gesture. He’d cover Nineteen Adze’s hand on her knee with his, now. Or reach out—
(his hand flat against her cheek, the skin cool and smooth, she laughs and turns her face inward, her lips against his palm)
The memory-flash receded. Mahit could repeat the echo, she had her suspicions about the nature of the friendship Nineteen Adze claimed with her predecessor, she could reach out and touch her cheek—
Ring composition. Overdetermined.
Instead she met Nineteen Adze’s eyes, held them a beat too long, and asked, “What did Yskandr promise you, to keep you this interested in us?”
“Not me,” said Nineteen Adze. “His Imperial Majesty.”
She rocked back on her heels, gathered her feet under her, and stood up, as if she was giving Mahit time to process the unfolding revelation. To remember the sick heat of Six Direction’s hands on her wrists, the terrible fragility of him, as if he was being ravaged by some fast-moving disease.
Held out her forearm, so that Mahit was obliged to touch her—to accept the help in standing up, even as she was thinking: Yskandr, you bastard, you convinced the Emperor of Teixcalaan he would never die.
CHAPTER TEN
There is no star-chart
unwatched by her
sleepless eyes, or unguided by
her spear-calloused hand, and thus
she falls, a captain in truth.
Like an emperor she falls, her blood painting the bridge
Where shift after shift she had stood.
[…] we have always been between powers, in this sector—I cannot imagine that our predecessors intended to place us in such a way so that we are required to bend first this way toward Teixcalaan, then that way toward the systems of Svava or Petrichor-5 or Nguyen, depending on who is most ascendant on our borders—but we hold the only access to our jumpgates, and we are thus a narrow and significant road that all these powers must travel upon. Nevertheless I cannot help imagining a more indigenous sovereignty for us, where Stationer power belongs to Stationers and is not in service to our survival […]
WEARING a pair of disposable gloves, the sort Mahit would have used to handle refuse back on the Station, Seven Scale disposed of the xauitl while Mahit watched. He’d been waiting for her when she came back to the door of her room—approaching the bowl of infofiche sticks again as if nothing of the last hour had happened, the only difference being her bandaged hand and the blazing realization of what Yskandr had sold to the Empire. Hardly any visible difference.
Seven Scale put the xauitl inside a plastic bag, paused to consider, and then added the bowl itself.
“I’m not sure I know how to wash it correctly,” he said, apologetic.
“What about the infofiche sticks?” Mahit asked. “Can you wash them?” She wasn’t about to lose access to the scraps of information she’d managed to get the City to give her.
“Probably not? But if you wore gloves, you could break them open and read them before I put them through the disposal with the autoclave and the furnace.”
As opposed to the regular disposal, Mahit assumed, grimly amused. “Give me yours,” she said. “And wait outside, I’ll only be a moment.”
Seven Scale stripped the gloves off and held them out, pinched gingerly between his fingertips. “There are more in the kitchens,” he offered uncertainly.
Mahit took the contaminated ones, and then the infofiche sticks. “These are fine. I’ll be one minute. Stay.”
He stayed. It was a little terrifying; did Nineteen Adze keep him around for unquestioning obedience? (Did he, ubiquitous, carry in the flower he was now so assiduously disposing of? It’d have been simple. No one would notice Seven Scale carrying flowers. He probably did it all the time.)