“Three Seagrass,” Mahit said, “could the Minister of War change what is meant by the City’s needs? For … any reason at all, really.”
“What a deliciously awful suggestion, Mahit,” Three Seagrass said with an exhausted silkiness. “Are you proposing a conspiracy between two of our Illuminate Emperor’s ministries to subvert the police?”
“I don’t know,” Mahit said. “But it’d be one plausible explanation for this morning.”
“Plausible doesn’t mean likely,” Twelve Azalea said. He sounded offended. Disturbed by the idea. It was a disturbing idea. Mahit didn’t blame him. She couldn’t think of why War would do such a thing, even if it was possible. And she didn’t much want it to be possible.
How many eyes does the City have on us right now?
Three Seagrass said, “Talk it over with the Ambassador, Petal, I’m taking a nap.”
“You are?” Mahit said, incredulous.
Three Seagrass, having finished her ice cream, took off her jacket, lay down on her belly in the grass as if making a point, and dropped her forehead into her crossed arms. Muffled, she said, “I’ve been awake for thirty-nine hours. My judgment is entirely impaired and so is yours. I have no idea what to do about your immortality machines, a possible conspiracy between Science and War, the war in general, the fact that various members of my government want you to die, which I am expressly against for both professional and personal reasons, and you still have not told me what the Emperor said to you—”
“You spoke to His Illuminate Majesty?” asked Twelve Azalea, flabbergasted, at the same moment as Mahit said,
“Personal reasons?”
Three Seagrass snickered. “I am taking a nap,” she repeated. “Talk to Petal, Mahit, or go to sleep, we look like slumming asekretim trainees, no one will bother us in a garden in East Four, and I’ll … think of a plan when I’m awake again.” She shut her eyes. Mahit could see her go limp—whether she was sleeping or just pretending to was somewhat beside the point.
“Was she like this when you were students?” Mahit said, feeling entirely overwhelmed.
“A … less terrifying version, yes,” said Twelve Azalea. “Did you actually have an audience with Six Direction?”
Eighty years of peace, the Emperor had told her, in that audience. He’d spoken the words with such vehemence, such naked want. Eighty years of civil servants feeling so remarkably secure that taking a nap on a lawn was preferable to finding political shelter. The vast arc of the sky was so blue and so endless, and Mahit felt so very tiny under it. She was never going to get used to the unboundedness of planets, even a planet that was mostly a city.
“Yes,” she said. “I did. But I can’t talk about it now.”
“How long have you been awake?”
“About as long as she has, I guess.” Longer, possibly. Mahit had lost track. That was a bad sign. Her fingers were still prickly, almost numb. For the first time she wondered what it would be like if she was like this forever; if she was damaged in an unfixable way. If everything she would ever touch again would be dim electric fire, and not sensation.
If she could learn to live with that. She wasn’t sure. Abruptly she felt on the verge of tears.
Twelve Azalea sighed. “Much as I hate to say it, I think Reed is right. Lie down. Shut your eyes. I’ll … keep watch.”
“You don’t have to,” Mahit said, out of some impulse to protect at least one person from the spiraling mess that association with anything Yskandr had touched was becoming.
“I already desecrated a corpse for you, and now I sound like a bad holoproduction of Ninety Alloy. Go to sleep.”
Mahit lay down. It felt like giving in. The grass was surprisingly comfortable, and the sunlight was dizzyingly warm against her skin. She could feel the tiny lumps of Yskandr’s imago-machine and the Lsel communication lying pressed against her ribs. “What’s Ninety Alloy?” she asked.
“Military propaganda spun through a remarkably addictive romance storyline,” Twelve Azalea said. “Someone is always telling someone else they’ll keep watch. Usually they all end up dead.”
“Pick a different genre to quote from,” Mahit said, and then found herself falling away from consciousness, easily, lightly, the dark behind her eyelids opening up like the soft comfort of freefall.
She couldn’t stay asleep long, even as exhausted as she was. The garden filled up with Teixcalaanlitzlim as the morning wore on, and they ran and shouted and enthusiastically bought ice cream and strange breakfasts made of rolled-up pancakes. None of them seemed to be concerned with civil unrest or domestic terrorism. They were just young, and happy, and there was sunlight and laughing voices in dialects of Teixcalaanli that Mahit didn’t know and wanted to. (Some other life. Some other life when she’d come here alone, imagoless in truth, and—studied, wrote poetry, learned the rhythms of other ways of speaking that didn’t come out of a textbook. Some other life, but the walls between lives felt so thin sometimes.) After a while Mahit couldn’t even pretend she was sleeping by keeping her eyes shut, so she sat up. There were blue-green grass stains on her elbows. Some of the prickling nerve pain had died back, but it was still there as an undercurrent, a distraction, a thread underneath the worse pain of her damaged hand.
Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea were talking quietly, their heads together, bent over a piece of infosheet; the easy familiarity between them made Mahit feel hideously lonely. She missed Yskandr. She kept missing him, even when she was angry with him, and she was angry with him almost all the time.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Mid-morning,” said Three Seagrass. “You might want to see this, come here.”
At Three Seagrass’s side was a small pile of news: a whole bunch of pamphlets and plastifilm infosheets, wide transparent sheets of foldable plastic, covered all over with glyphs. The ones on top of the pile seemed to be an angry university-student pamphlet on atrocities committed in the Odile System by overzealous imperial legions, an advertisement for discounted tickets to a game of handball between two teams from provinces Mahit didn’t recognize but were clearly endowed with a great many fans, and a broadsheet full of new poetry, most of which was simultaneously very bad in terms of scansion and very happy about One Lightning. Mahit thought again about who was running around so blithely in this garden. Slumming asekretim trainees, Three Seagrass had said. University students. This was a place young people felt safe, safe enough to be mildly radical. To pass around pamphlets for just about anything, and not worry about the imperial censorship boards. Who would censor kids just learning to be servants of empire?
The infosheet that Twelve Azalea was holding seemed to be a newsfeed—stories, sketches, headlines. Twelve Azalea ran his fingers over it, and the text moved under his command: it was like he was holding a transparent window made of news. Mahit caught sight of a small Item of Note! in the lower left: her name spelled out in Teixcalaanli glyphs, rendered awkwardly syllabic. LSEL AMBASSADOR MAKES HIGH-PLACED FRIENDS, it read. Is the new ambassador from distant Lsel still as close with the Light-Emitting Emperor as the old one? Surveillance photographs suggest SHE IS! Last seen in the company of the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze entering Palace-Earth AT MIDNIGHT …