THE City was alien in the dark. Not so much silent as haunted: the boulevards and deep-sunk flower pools in Palace-Earth were vaster without the sun, the shape of all the buildings uncannily organic, like they might breathe or bloom. What few Teixcalaanlitzlim were still abroad in the streets met no one’s eyes—they moved like shadows, operating on some palace business of their own, unspeaking. Mahit followed Three Seagrass and kept her head down. She felt sickly tired, and everything hurt: her hip and her hand and her head, aching with what was almost certainly a tension headache and not an incipient neurological event. Almost certainly.
Their steps echoed on the marble. On Lsel there was never an inescapable dark, aside from space itself: someone was awake and on shift, always. The public spaces were no different at any point in a person’s own individual sleep/wake cycle. If you wanted darkness you went back to your room and turned down the ambient lighting.
This entire half a planet was sunless, and would be for four more hours. Mahit hadn’t minded the diurnal cycling when she’d been inside for most of the dark swing. Being out in it was different. The heavy, dim sky felt pressurized, pushing down on the back of her neck, making the headache worse. It was as if darkness conducted sound, dimmed and distorted it, something she knew was impossible.
The golden tracery of the City’s self-protective AI was the only thing that was more visible at this hour of the night than it was during the day. It ran under their feet in loops and whorls, crept up the foundations of some of the buildings as high as the second story, like some fungal infiltrate, and shimmered in the dimness. Three Seagrass walked across it with such deliberation that Mahit began to suspect she was afraid.
She wasn’t wearing her cloudhook. She’d taken it off as they’d emerged from the imperial apartments, stowed it away inside her jacket. We’re not anywhere, she’d said, and Mahit had taken that to mean that they were going to traverse the City without leaving electronic traces of Three Seagrass’s official presence. Now, following her into the widening dark, Mahit wondered if she was putting off some confrontation with the City that had, inexplicably, refused to behave as she’d demanded.
That had set her alight with blue fire instead, like she wasn’t even a citizen. Like the perfect algorithm that Ten Pearl had been so proud of had designated her something foreign, something that needed to be kept out. An infection, to be burned out with that selfsame blue fire.
It was only that they were sneaking into Palace-East in the middle of the night that was making Mahit come up with imagery like that; Three Seagrass would probably laugh at her if she explained it. It was all of a piece with how unsettled she felt about her meeting with Six Direction—hidden tensions, bubbling to the surface.
Civil war. The City, at war with itself.
And had he been right, to want to use an imago-machine to prevent this great devouring animal, this empire, from setting its jaws upon its own flesh?
Palace-East was brighter than Palace-Earth, but no less uncanny: the brightness came from burning neon tubes, red and blue and orange, that lit up pathways across the plazas, glowing guides to one government building or another. Three Seagrass hesitated at a junction where the AI-tracery had condensed itself into a knot—visibly set her shoulders—and turned away from it to hurry down an orange-lit avenue, waving Mahit after her. The white flowers that lined its sidewalks looked as if they had been dipped in flames.
Mahit had been awake too long, clearly, if she was seeing fire in flower arrangements. That was the problem. Not at all that she was hallucinating—she was almost sure she wasn’t—but that she hadn’t slept and all the adrenaline from the incident with the poison flower and the meeting with Six Direction was draining out of her.
Nevertheless, she asked quietly, “Are you avoiding the City?”
Three Seagrass didn’t stop walking. “No,” she said. “I’m not taking chances, that’s all.”
They hadn’t talked about what had happened to her in Plaza Central Nine. There hadn’t been time, in Nineteen Adze’s apartments. Or it hadn’t seemed right, to talk about it under the all-observing eyes of the ezuazuacat’s recording equipment. Now, in the dark, Mahit felt either brave or unmoored, or some tongue-untying combination of both. “It’s never done that to you before, has it,” she said. “Thought you were someone it was allowed to discipline.”
“Of course not.”
“Patrician second-class, immune from petty justice.”
“Law-abiding citizen of Teixcalaan, Ambassador.”
Mahit winced. She reached out and brushed Three Seagrass’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Why?”
“I can’t be sorry for impugning your moral authority?”
“You can,” said Three Seagrass, “but it’s hardly practical as a use of your time, I’d think. The City … I was surprised.”
“You were having a seizure, not being surprised.”
Three Seagrass stopped short, turned around, and looked up at Mahit. “Afterward I was surprised,” she said, with an air of resolute authority. “Afterward I had a lot of time to be surprised. There’s nothing to do in hospitals, Mahit, once you’re finished reciting the hardest political acrostics you know in order to make sure your City hasn’t wrecked your long-term memory.”
“I shouldn’t have brought it up,” Mahit said.
“I’m not fragile,” said Three Seagrass. “I can handle my barbarian wondering if civilization is going to electrocute me again.”
“Is that really what you think I’m wondering?”
“It’s what I would wonder.” In the dark, Mahit thought Three Seagrass’s eyes looked like black stones, pupilless, as alien as the sky. “Oh, and whether accidents like that have happened to other people, and under what circumstances. I might wonder that, too.”
“Have they?” Mahit asked.
“More than I’d guessed. Eight, in the past six months. Two of the others died.”
Mahit didn’t know what to say—I’m sorry hadn’t worked, and is it my fault was blatantly begging for reassurance she knew she didn’t deserve: it was probably her fault. Or Yskandr’s fault. Or the fault of that civil unrest that Yskandr had somehow been tied up with. The impending collapse of order.
“I told you I was surprised,” Three Seagrass said, quite gently. “Come on, Mahit. It’s another twenty minutes on foot to your apartments.”
All the way there, Mahit felt like the City was watching them, even without cloudhooks to mark electronic traces of their presence; felt it, and told herself she was over-reading again. It was a problem—that the City was killing or hurting citizens—but it might not be her problem. It might not be her fault at all. Surely not everything could be. She could get far enough away from the narrative tendency of Teixcalaanli thought to believe that. She could.