“When can I expect to have access to my own suite again?” she inquired. Still trying for polite, if pointed: they were all on edge now, she and her liaison and the Sunlit.
One of the Sunlit shrugged, a remarkably expressive motion. Some neurological ghost of Yskandr flickered through the large muscles in Mahit’s own shoulders—he’d shrugged like that—that kind of shrug was performative, insouciant, done more with the outer arms (was he here or was he not, she wished she had even the slightest true idea).
“When we are done investigating,” said the Sunlit. “You are of course free to go. We understand the accidental nature of the man’s demise.”
So, not arrested for murder. Just exiled, again, this time from her own apartment, from Lsel diplomatic territory …
She had the imago-machine, safe inside her shirt, but what she didn’t have was the mail. And with the mail, any instructions that might have come to her from Lsel. Instructions for her, not for dead Yskandr being warned about her. Instructions that would take into account the problems of a live Lsel ambassador. She turned to Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea, shrugged herself—trying to keep the motion her own, not a Teixcalaanli imitation—and said, “Let’s get out of these officers’ way…”
If she could just pick up the basket of infofiche at the door. There was a communiqué from Lsel there, something printed on plastifilm, like orders always were back home, and then rolled into a tube as if the mail-delivery person had tried to make it look like an infofiche stick.
She swept her hand through the bowl as she walked out—caught the tube of paper in her palm.
“Ambassador,” one of the Sunlit said, reproving, as she reached. “Don’t worry, we will not open your mail. We don’t have that kind of access.”
But they would have, if they did, she was sure. Mahit left the actual infofiche sticks in the bowl, as if chastised, and smiled with all her teeth, not caring if it was rude. “See that you don’t,” she said, and then the door to what ought to have been safety was irising shut behind the three of them, and they were in the City, alone, with absolutely nowhere to go.
“I used to do this when I’d spent all night in the library and couldn’t go back home before the next lectures,” said Three Seagrass. She handed Mahit a small bowl of ice cream she’d bought from a proprietor who had set up their business in the shell of a motor vehicle under a spreading, red-leaved tree.
“Don’t believe her,” Twelve Azalea said. “Ice cream in the public gardens is what she used to do after she stayed out all night clubbing.”
“Oh really?” Mahit scooped up some of the ice cream on the disposable plastic spoon it’d come with—it was thick and smooth, made of cream that had come out of a mammal recently, and Mahit had no intention of asking what mammal. When she turned the spoon in the early morning light, the ice cream glinted pale gold-green. Feeling as if she was completing a ritual, she asked, “Is this going to poison me?”
“It’s made of green-stonefruit and cream and pressed oil and sugar,” Three Seagrass said, “the latter two of which I’m sure you have on Lsel, and the former of which, again, we feed to babies. Unless you’re allergic to lactose, I think you’ll be fine.”
Mahit’s primary experience with lactose had been in its powdered milk form, but it hadn’t done her any harm. She put the ice cream in her mouth. It was shock-sweet, dissolving to a complex flavor she’d expect to be savory—a green taste, rich, that coated the tongue. She picked up more, licked it off the back of the spoon. It was the first food she’d had since before she’d been nearly killed by the poison flower—the first murder attempt of last night, what was even happening to her—and she could feel her blood sugar struggling out of the hole she’d dropped it into. Being exiled into the City began to seem a little less insurmountable.
Three Seagrass led the three of them out onto the lawn, a manicured hill covered in a bluish-green grass that had no scent at all, and surrounded by more of the same red-leaved trees, their boughs nearly brushing the ground. It was like a tiny gemstone, one facet of the Jewel of the World, glimmering. Uncaring of her suit—it was wrinkled anyway; Mahit assumed that grass stains wouldn’t matter—Three Seagrass sat down, and began to consume her own ice cream with a deliberate and concentrated attitude.
“I don’t know why I’m even still with you,” Twelve Azalea said, flopped on his back in the grass. “I haven’t been kicked out of my apartment by the Sunlit.”
“Solidarity,” Three Seagrass said. “And your documented inability to leave well enough alone.”
“This is more trouble than we’ve ever been in, Reed.”
“Yes,” Three Seagrass said cheerfully.
“That was … that was odd, wasn’t it?” Mahit asked. She kept going over it in her mind. How easy it had been to persuade the Sunlit that she’d acted in self-defense. Their not-that-subtle threat implying that if she’d only gone over into One Lightning’s custody at the Ministry of War—the Six Outreaching Palms—none of this would be happening to her. “That they just … let us go. Exiled us from my apartment, and didn’t ask us to wait in some police station to be questioned. Despite the degree of trouble we are undoubtedly in.”
“It’s not unusual that they let us go, necessarily,” Three Seagrass said. “I don’t know how self-defense is adjudicated on your station, but we tend to allow a substantive benefit of the doubt in the favor of the person claiming it.”
“What’s odd was the part where the Sunlit suggested you wouldn’t have had to commit murder in self-defense if you’d only turned yourself over to the War Ministry,” Twelve Azalea added, with an expansive shrug. “Or why Reed here thought it was a good idea to threaten them right back.”
Mahit licked the back of her spoon, chasing that green taste. When it was clean, she asked, choosing the words deliberately, as careful as she’d ever been: “Who do the Sunlit serve?”
“The City,” Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea said, together and at once. Rote answer, memorized answer—the answer provided by Teixcalaanli narrative about how the world was.
“And who runs them?” Mahit went on.
“No one,” said Three Seagrass. “No one at all, that’s the point, they’re responsive to the City-AI, the central algorithm which keeps watch…”
“Like the subway,” Twelve Azalea added. “They’re the City, so they serve the Emperor first.”
Mahit paused, trying to find the edges of the question, the right way to ask it. “The subway’s algorithm was made by Ten Pearl,” she started, thinking of the flash of memory that her imago had given her, how Ten Pearl had won his ministry—an infallible algorithm.
“Ten Pearl doesn’t control the Sunlit,” Twelve Azalea said. “The Sunlit are people.”
“People who respond to the City’s needs,” Three Seagrass said, slow, testing the idea. “People who go where the City tells them they ought to go—and the central AI core is run by Science, I assume—”
Mahit interrupted her. “Who controls the Six Outreaching Palms?”
“The Minister of War is Nine Propulsion. She’s new—less than three years in the City—but her record in the fleet’s impeccable. Annoyingly so; I had to look her up in Information’s database once.”