The man inside Mahit’s ambassadorial apartments was a dissolved silhouette between the tall windows: dark clothes, dark hair, invisible in the dimness before he moved. Mahit saw him first as a flash, some instrument in his hand reflecting the hallway light with white fire, and then as a rush of motion toward her. She had come two steps inside through the irised frame of the doorway. Three Seagrass had put her cloudhook back on to talk to the door, was standing to her left, out of the way—
Terror felt like a kick in the sternum. A sensible person would have run. Mahit had always expected that she’d run, faced with direct physical threat—she’d washed out of the combat-oriented aptitudes early, on Lsel, too much self-preservation instinct and too much flinch. The man—there was something horribly familiar about his face, now that he’d moved into the spilling light from the hall—came at her with the sharp thing in his left hand. It resolved into a needle, thick as a thorn, dull-glinting with some slick fluid on the tip, and Mahit thought Poison, it’s covered in poison as she twisted away from it, backward, lost her balance and fell to the floor, landing on the heel of her bandaged hand. The shock of pain was bad enough that at first she thought he’d hit her. Still flinching after all.
“The fuck—” said Three Seagrass, in the doorway.
Mahit saw the man look up, freeze in evaluation—and in this freezing, she knew him, she recognized how he looked when he was surprised and distressed, she’d seen him look that way when Thirty Larkspur had pulled him off of her in the hallways of Palace-Earth. She couldn’t remember his name. He’d tried to recruit her for One Lightning, and Thirty Larkspur had threatened him and—and now he was in her apartments and lifting his terrible needle to point directly at Three Seagrass. Mahit thought of the xauitl, contact poison, and then or injectable, racing through all the neurotoxins she knew, all of them bad—her assailant was fast—there was no way Three Seagrass, still damaged from the electrical shock of the City, would escape unscathed if he hit her with that.
Mahit rolled, slammed her shoulder into the side of his knee with as much of her weight as she could leverage. Caught at his ankle, yanked it up off the floor, both her hands wrapped around the leather of his boot, and felt spectacular pain—the blisters under the bandage on her hand must have split. Everything below her elbow had gone to liquid fire, molten and dripping. He fell. She felt savage, still terrified, adrenaline like whiteout, a strange sort of bliss—clawed her way on top of him, used all of her barbaric height and the reach of her un-Teixcalaanli limbs.
He cursed and flipped her—strong, he’d said he’d served in the Fleet, in One Lightning’s own Eighteenth Legion, he would be strong—but she had her good hand in the collar of his shirt, an ankle hooked around his thigh, and he flipped with her, landed on top of her. The tip of the needle approached her neck. It was going to touch her, going to fill her up with paralysis and suffocation, spill into her brain and dissolve her and Yskandr and everything they were together. She made a desperate grab for the man’s wrist with the hand that was still wrapped in bandages. Held on, even through the scream of pain, blisters bursting.
“You weren’t supposed to fight back,” he spat, “filthy barbarian—”
He hadn’t cared very much about whether she was a barbarian when he’d wanted her to join a Teixcalaanli legion, had he.
Mahit bent his wrist back, as hard as she could, shoving his hand toward his neck. The edge of his needle scraped his throat, left a long line there, beaded red—swelling up immediately—going purple, fuck, what was in that toxin? The man made a guttural strangled noise. She could feel his body stiffen—spasm—begin to jitter, a meaningless, horrible thrashing. The needle fell from his nerveless fingers and landed on the floor by Mahit’s head.
Mahit shoved him away, scuttled backward on her ass and elbows. She should have screamed a while back. It was very quiet now; just the harsh scrape of her breathing.
After what felt like the longest minute of her life, she heard the door to the suite hiss shut, and the overhead lighting clicked on. Then Three Seagrass came to sit beside her. Both of their backs were pressed against the wall. In the perfectly normal ambient lighting, the body of the man who’d attacked her looked small, incongruous, not at all like something that had moved and breathed and might have killed her. The needle lay beside him like a quiescent snake. His name came back to her along with the slowing of her breath. Eleven Conifer. A person. A dead person, now.
“Well,” said Three Seagrass shakily, “this is definitely a new kind of trouble to be in. Are you all right?”
“I’m not hurt,” Mahit said. It seemed wisest to stop there.
Three Seagrass nodded; Mahit could see the motion out of the corner of her eye. She couldn’t look away from the body. “Mm,” Three Seagrass said. “Good. Have you ever … done that before?”
“What, murder someone?” said Mahit, and oh, that was what she had just done, wasn’t it. She was going to be sick.
“There’s a fair argument for self-defense, but sure, if you like. Have you?”
“No.”
Three Seagrass reached over and patted Mahit gently on the shoulder, a hesitant feather-pressure. “Somewhat of a relief, really; I was wondering if Stationers were primed for explosive violence as well as carrying around dead people inside their heads…”
“Just once,” Mahit said, with a sort of desperate and useless frustration, “I’d like you to imagine I might do something because it’s what a person does.”
“Mahit, most people don’t—”
“Get ambushed by strangers with terrifying weapons in their own apartments while evading their only political ally in order to have a secret meeting on a foreign planet? No. I assume that doesn’t happen to Teixcalaanlitzlim.”
“That doesn’t happen to anyone,” Three Seagrass said. “Not as a rule.”
Mahit dropped her head into her hands, and then jerked away when her damaged palm brushed against her cheek. She wanted, abruptly and with an absurd intensity, to be asleep. Asleep inside the narrow, secure walls of a room on Lsel, preferably, but mostly asleep. She ground her teeth together, bit the side of her tongue. It might have helped. She wasn’t sure.
“Mahit,” Three Seagrass said again, softer. Then she reached into Mahit’s lap and caught her good hand in hers, lacing their fingers together. Her skin was dry and cool. Mahit turned to stare at her.
Three Seagrass shrugged, and didn’t let go.
“It happens in histories,” Mahit said inanely, like she was trying to make a gift of it: an allusion for a Teixcalaanlitzlim. For the sort of woman who would take her hand for no reason at all. “Pseudo-Thirteen River. Not exactly, but this sort of thing. When the yaotlek Nine Crimson is ambushed on the edge of known space—”
“It’s not that bad,” Three Seagrass said, but she swept her thumb over Mahit’s knuckles. “You only killed one person, and he’s definitely not secretly your clonesib defected to the wrong faction of the Empire. Histories are always worse by the time they get written down.”
Mahit smiled despite herself, despite the corpse lying across from her, slowly swelling up, purple-red and bloated. She asked, “Do they teach you that, when they teach you to remember them?”