“You owe me, Ambassador,” he said. “I have spent six hours being stalked, and then another three hiding in the bottom of a half-drained garden. This entire business was very entertaining while we were exchanging coded messages, but it is markedly less entertaining now. Not to mention the fact that you’ve come up with another corpse while I wasn’t paying attention—has anyone called for the Sunlit, are you just going to stand here?”
“Petal, we were going to,” Three Seagrass said, which was news to Mahit.
She unfolded the cloth. In the center was the small steel-and-ceramide net of Yskandr’s imago-machine. It had been excised very carefully with a scalpel, she thought: the feathered fractal edges of the net, where the machine interpenetrated with neurons, were delineated quite far, and then sharply cut off when the edge of the blade had become too unwieldy to keep going on a microscopic level. But Twelve Azalea hadn’t known how to decouple the fractal net—the portion of the machine which was like a shell, an interface—from the central core, which contained Yskandr. That was, she thought, still intact, unharmed by even the most delicate of scalpels. The machine might still be usable. (For what? To record someone else? Or to try to reach that Yskandr, the dead Ambassador? Whatever was left of him. She wondered, and decided to not mention the idea to anyone yet.)
Mahit took the machine from the sheet Twelve Azalea had disguised it in—it was no longer than the last joint of her thumb—and slipped it into the inside pocket of her jacket.
“I thought,” she said, “that we should wait for you to come and bring me the illegally acquired machinery I asked you to desecrate my predecessor’s corpse for, first. Before we called anyone.” If Three Seagrass was going to lie to her friend about calling the police, Mahit could help. It was probably easiest. It might even be easiest to call the Sunlit, to report the … incident—it was still a dizzying sort of horror to call it murder, to remember the feeling of Eleven Conifer turning into a corpse on top of her—report it exactly as it had happened. A man broke into the Ambassador’s apartments; they struggled; in the struggle the man was killed by his own weapon.
“Well, you have it now,” Twelve Azalea was saying, “and you can keep it—I was followed from the instant I left the Judiciary morgue, Ambassador. By the Judiciary’s own investigatory agents—the fucking Mist were after me, grey-suit ghosts. I thought I lost them when I spent an hour in a water feature, but maybe I didn’t—or maybe my message was intercepted, when I wrote to tell you I’d meet you here. Someone with very good intelligence has been keeping an eye on your predecessor’s body, and I had to use a public terminal to write my infofiche stick and send it.”
It could have been Nineteen Adze. Mahit remembered how quickly she had arrived in the morgue, just hours after Mahit had suggested burning Yskandr’s body in a proper Stationer funeral. But it could have just as easily been a multitude of other actors, most especially Eight Loop, if there was some kind of special Judiciary police force that was chasing Twelve Azalea. That was the problem with this entire mess—too many people interested in Yskandr. Too many more people interested in Mahit: she’d done that deliberately, she’d made herself an object of attention, in hopes of finding out who had murdered her predecessor, and now she couldn’t get away from it even if she tried.
Even if she’d done nothing but stay in her apartment and do the work she’d come here to do, people would have been too interested: Eight Loop had summoned a new Lsel ambassador deliberately. There wouldn’t have been a possibility of neutrality, no matter what she did.
“Are they still following you?” she asked.
Twelve Azalea sighed. “I don’t know. Practical espionage is not my rubric.”
“Only impractical,” Three Seagrass said. Twelve Azalea rolled his eyes at her, and she shrugged expressively, which seemed to reassure him.
“I guess we’ll find out,” said Mahit. “If someone tries to kill you, as well as someone trying to kill me.”
“Assassins and stalkers,” Twelve Azalea said. “Just what I needed. If I was a more judicious sort of man, Ambassador, I would not only call the Sunlit but imply that you’d blackmailed me into committing … oh, there’s got to be a crime for stealing from the dead. Is there a crime for that, Reed?”
“Plagiarism,” said Three Seagrass, “but it’d be a stretch in the courts.”
“It’s not funny.”
“It is, Petal, but only because it’s awful.”
Mahit envied them the facility of friendship. It would be so much easier …
Easier wasn’t what she had. What she had was Yskandr’s imago-machine, a corpse, and the Emperor’s offer hanging above her like a weight: turn over the imago technology, turn aside the fleet heading for Lsel, and betray to Teixcalaan everything that her Station had spent fourteen generations preserving. She thought of her younger brother, abruptly, imagined him denied whatever imago his aptitudes might have spelled for him to receive, imagined him taken away from the Station and raised on a Teixcalaanli planet—he was nine, he was too young to know anything but the romance of the idea—not that she was doing much better.
Why did you say yes, Yskandr? she asked: intimate-you, Stationer language, quiet in the hollow places inside her mind where she ought to have had his voice, the voice of the person they were meant to be becoming, all of his knowledge and all of her perspective.
<I have no idea,> Yskandr told her, bell-clear, <but I imagine I’d run out of better options.>
Prickles down all the nerves in her arms, up from the soles of her feet. Like the dead man had gotten her with his poison needle after all. Mahit sat down, hard, on the couch. If Yskandr was actually back—maybe all it took was life-threatening amounts of adrenaline to hook up whatever had gone wrong between them. That made no sense physiologically but it was the only thing she could think of.
<You’ve landed us in a truly remarkable amount of trouble, haven’t—> Then static. Cutoff. The sensation was like having her own brain provide an electrical short. And for all she tried to reach him, Yskandr was as gone now as he had been before he’d spoken, and Mahit was dizzy with the sensation of falling into a hole in her mind, the endless drop that was the gap between her and where her imago should be.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE GAME’S STILL ON!
Come see THE LABYRINTH of Belltown take on the South-Central VOLCANOES in the most hotly anticipated amalitzli match of the season! No subway closures can stop our players! Tickets still available via cloudhook or at the North Tlachtli Court Stadium. Come out for a good time!
[…] it has been another five years since you last returned to Lsel Station; not only would the Councilor for Heritage very much like to preserve and update to the current state your imago-line for future generations, I myself would like to hear from your own mouth the state of affairs in Teixcalaan; you’ve become admirably close-mouthed in the last half decade, Yskandr, and I can’t complain about your continued successes in the job I chose you for, but indulge my curiosity—come home to us, for a little while […]