THE Sunlit arrived quite quickly once they had been summoned: three of them in their identical golden helmets, faceless and efficient. Three Seagrass had done the summoning, setting up some communion between her cloudhook and the door’s alarm system and then executing a credible impression of tremulous, infuriated surprise—an emotion which Mahit suspected was fairly close to how she actually felt, just expressed, for a purpose. Whatever vast reservoir of emotions Three Seagrass might possess seemed only to be expressed for purpose, or outgassed in vivid bright hysteria. The kind of control she had over herself made Mahit tired to think about.
She could also be tired because she’d been awake for nearly thirty-two hours. Sleep was an unimaginable territory, reserved for people who didn’t have dead bodies in their apartments. At least she was unlikely to get herself arrested. The Sunlit seemed collectively distracted, or else they simply believed her: she’d come back to her apartment and been set upon by the dead man, and in the ensuing struggle he had been killed by his own weapon. No, Mahit had never seen a weapon like the thick needle before. No, she didn’t know how the man had gotten in. No, she didn’t know who had sent him, but in this time of unrest, there were surely a multitude of possibilities.
She hadn’t lied once. And yet they were trusting her.
Yskandr was gone again, but gone differently; all through the questioning Mahit’s palms and the soles of her feet had been alive with prickles, as if her extremities had been rendered out of flesh and into shimmering electric fire—not quite numbness. The same feeling she’d been having right before the flashes of imago-memory, but continuous now, and without the accompanying visions. Peripheral nerve damage, except she hadn’t damaged anything. Unless the imago-machine in the base of her skull was damaging her right now as she answered questions in Teixcalaanli, expressionless, calm. The place Yskandr should be felt like a hollow bubble, a missing tooth. A cavity she could tongue inside her mind. If she pressed too hard on it the sweeping vertigo came back. She tried to stop doing it. Fainting right now wouldn’t help at all.
“Patrician first-class Twelve Azalea,” said one of the Sunlit, turning toward him like a gyre on ball bearings, machine-smooth, “what brings you to Ambassador Dzmare’s apartments so early in the morning?”
Ah. Perhaps they hadn’t believed her after all; perhaps they were being subtle. They’d use Twelve Azalea to crack open her story like the vacuum seal on a seed-skiff, and bleed all the protecting atmosphere away.
“The Ambassador asked to meet with me,” said Twelve Azalea, and that was not going to help at all.
“I did,” Mahit interjected. “I was looking forward to a meeting over breakfast with Twelve Azalea to discuss…” She cast around for something they could be discussing that was not suspicious in any way. There wasn’t much. “… requests made to the Information Ministry by Lsel citizens during the period within which there was no acting ambassador.” There.
If a golden face-shield could express all the skepticism of a raised eyebrow, this one was. “That sounds like an extremely urgent matter, that must be addressed before business hours.”
“Both the patrician and I have very busy schedules. Breakfast suited us. Or it did, before I was set upon by the intruder,” Mahit said pointedly. She felt as if she was about to vibrate out of her skin. Neurological fire and the effervescent distant shivering of sleep deprivation. She smiled, Stationer-style, and wondered if the Sunlit had flinched under the shield. All her teeth were exposed. Like a skeleton.
One of the other Sunlit asked silkily, “What happened to your suit, Twelve Azalea? You seem to have encountered a water feature.”
Mahit had seen Teixcalaanlitzlim blush before, but never someone employ it as masterfully as Twelve Azalea did then: a spreading embarrassed dull red under the smooth brown of his cheeks. “It’s very … I’ve been a little worried, what with the demonstrations … I tripped,” he said. “I fell in a garden, like I was drunk; and it was too late to go home, I’d have missed my appointment…”
“Are you quite all right?” the Sunlit inquired.
“Aside from the injury to my dignity—”
“Of course.”
Three Seagrass, curled in the corner of the couch with her feet drawn up under her, said, “Will you be removing the body? It is quite hard to look at.” She still sounded tremulous and barely controlled; Mahit wondered if she had slept, aside from the brief moment when she’d found her napping outside the Emperor’s audience chamber. Probably not.
One week since she’d arrived in the City, and hadn’t she been quite the agent of destruction. For Three Seagrass at least. (For Fifteen Engine—Yskandr—) She wanted to do something. Push something until it broke in her favor, for once.
“This is the second time in a week we have been in personal danger,” Mahit said. “After the bombing, and the general condition of your City in preparation for the war…” She sighed, deliberate. So distasteful, political unrest. “I thought it would be best to have a meeting in my own apartments rather than anywhere we would have the misfortune of being disturbed, and yet this has happened.”
All three Sunlit looked at her. She stared back at their blank false faces, jaw set.
“We would like to remind the Ambassador,” they said—all three at once, a strange choir, and were they the City, were they the same AI that ran the walls and the lights and the doors, were they subsumed in the Science Ministry’s algorithm too—“that the yaotlek One Lightning did offer his personal protection to you. And you declined.”
“Are you insinuating that this unpleasantness would not have happened if the Ambassador had agreed?” Three Seagrass broke in. “Because that is a fascinating conjecture, coming from the Empire’s very own police.”
They rotated, a slick, frictionless shift, to focus on Three Seagrass. She lifted her eyebrows, widened her eyes to show the whites—daring them to do something about her.
“There are procedures,” said one of them, perfectly even, “for making formal accusations of that nature, asekreta Three Seagrass. Would you like to avail yourself of them? We are at your service, as we are at the service of any of the Empire’s citizens.”
That was, Mahit thought, a threat of its own; less direct but not even a little less predatory.
“Perhaps I will make an appointment at the Judiciary,” Three Seagrass said. Her expression changed not a bit. “Are we done here? Will you be removing this unfortunate man from the Ambassador’s rug?”
“It is an active crime scene,” the Sunlit said. “The entire apartment complex. We suggest that the Ambassador make arrangements for alternative accommodations during our investigation. We are sure, given this morning’s newsfeeds, that she has many options.”
Mahit glanced at Twelve Azalea over the Sunlit’s shoulder—he was the only one of them who might have seen a newsfeed this morning—but he just shrugged. She didn’t know what she had missed. Maybe it was merely an exposé on the Lsel Ambassador’s unseemly attachment to the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze.