“Good morning, Ambassador,” said Eight Loop. “Asekretim.”
Mahit bowed over the triangle of her hands pressed together. “Good morning. Thank you for agreeing to see us.”
Nothing about Eight Loop’s expression shifted; she was statue-still, unmoved, flat black eyes lacking either interest or dismay. “It saves time,” she said. “You coming to me.”
“I came a very long way on what has turned out to be your command,” said Mahit. There was little point in dissimulation; she was here to ask why. Why Eight Loop had possessed such urgency, two months ago, when Yskandr had died; why she needed a Lsel ambassador at all.
“I appreciate the promptness with which Lsel answered my request,” Eight Loop said. “It is admirable; that kind of cooperation will only help your people in the future. I suggest you stick to it.”
That sounded like a dismissaclass="underline" No, I don’t need you after all, go and supervise the entry of Lsel into Teixcalaanli space like a good barbarian. The absorption of her Station into the Empire. Cooperatively. Mahit had only just arrived here. What had she done—or not done—in the week she’d been at court that had rendered her useless to Eight Loop? When Eight Loop had wanted her so badly?
Had she never wanted her at all, but instead a Yskandr—or just any Stationer, anyone with an imago-machine which could be harvested for use—if she was the Emperor’s crèchesib, if she’d been in on Yskandr’s idea of keeping Six Direction alive through imago-machines, then she would have wanted a new ambassador right away, whoever it was, as long as that ambassador could get an imago-machine. Or could have their own pulled out of them.
Anger broke over her like a distant and enormous wave. She felt icy cold.
“Your statement in the newsfeeds this morning,” she found herself saying, “didn’t suggest that you were in favor of the annexation of Lsel. Or of annexation in general. Quite the opposite, in fact; I found myself quite offended on behalf of His Brilliance’s judgment—”
“Mahit,” said Three Seagrass warningly.
“Don’t concern yourself with your charge’s impropriety, asekreta,” Eight Loop said. “Her confusion is understandable.”
“You demanded an ambassador,” Mahit said. “I’d like to know why. And what I might do for you which does not involve merely my meek cooperation.”
Still perfectly, insufferably calm, Eight Loop spread her hands out on the surface of her desk. Her knuckles were gnarled, hugely swollen; Mahit couldn’t imagine her holding a stylus. “In the two months it took you to arrive, Ambassador,” she said, “the situation here has shifted. I am sorry if you had hopes that I retained some special purpose for you. I am afraid I do not, in our current circumstances.”
Helpless, in less control of herself than she thought she’d ever been—worse than when she’d killed the man in her apartment, worse than feeling all of Yskandr’s neurochemistry light up in fireworks at the touch of Six Direction’s hand, Mahit asked: “What do you want me to do?”
She sounded plaintive. Desperate, like an abandoned child. Three Seagrass’s hand was on her waist, suddenly, small fingertips pressed to her spine, and she realized what she was saying, and shut her mouth.
“Go back to work, Ambassador,” Eight Loop said. “There will be a great deal of it for you, no matter who sits on the sun throne or stands behind it. No matter whether Six Direction gets his war and draws One Lightning off with it; or gets his war and fails to do so; or doesn’t get it at all. Or points it at some sector you don’t care about. There will be work for the Ambassador from Lsel Station. That is enough for any citizen; it should be enough for you.”
The elevator doors were open, behind them. Backing into them, Mahit felt as if she was stumbling, hardly able to keep her feet; in the small red-lit chamber of their descent, all she could hear was the harshness of her own breathing.
What had she missed? What had shifted? What had made Eight Loop first want someone with access to imago-machines, if that even had been what she had wanted a Lsel ambassador for—but what else was one specifically good for—and then decide that there was simply no point in having one at all?
Looking at Three Seagrass’s and Twelve Azalea’s faces, tinted red, concerned, she thought that three hours of sleep in a garden really hadn’t been enough; she was erratic, she was alone, she wanted—she wanted Yskandr. Someone else to hold her up, in the center of the vast machinery of Teixcalaan.
Mahit sat on a stone bench outside the Judiciary, her head in her hands, and let Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea talk over her.
“—we can’t go back to her apartments—”
“I know you can run on stimulants and bravado for days at a time, Reed, but some of us are human—”
“I am not suggesting she isn’t, please do not insult me or her by insinuating that I don’t think she’s as much of a human being as a citizen is—”
“I’m not, for fuck’s sake. Maybe you can’t hold yourself together with wire and tea and your vainglorious ambition, you’re slipping as much as she is—”
“Do you have a suggestion or are you just going to insult me?”
Twelve Azalea sat down on the bench beside Mahit. She didn’t look up. It was too much work to look up, or intervene. “Come back to my place,” he said heavily. “I’m in this up to my ears anyhow, I’m on every recording the City has of you two for the past six hours, I have lost even the shreds of plausible deniability. You might as well.”
A long pause. Mahit watched the sunlight track across the plaza’s tilework, making it shimmer.
“Such a noble sacrifice,” Three Seagrass said finally. Edged. A challenge.
“Maybe I want to help you,” Twelve Azalea replied. “Maybe I like you, Reed, maybe I’m your friend.”
A sigh. Mahit thought of how water shimmered too, how water and light moved the same way, if you thought about physics correctly. Ripples.
“All right,” said Three Seagrass. “All right, but if there are assassins at your flat I am giving up and applying to join the Fleet and get off-planet, for safer working conditions.”
The noise Twelve Azalea made was not quite laughter; it was too choked for that.
Twelve Azalea kept a flat farther out from the palace complex than Mahit had yet been—a forty-minute commute, he said, but not everyone who worked for the Information Ministry had such cushy perks as Reed had managed, some people had to pay rent on their salary—Mahit thought he was talking just to talk, to hear himself say the normal sorts of things a person might say.
Away from the palace and the central districts the City shifted in tone—there were more shops, smaller, an emphasis on food prepared while the customer waited or organics imported from a long way off, the other continent or off-planet, artisan-made items, everything simultaneously disposable and in imitation of some ideal. Mahit had thought they would be stared at by Teixcalaanli pedestrians: a barbarian and two asekretim, all disheveled and on their way into a residential neighborhood, but they weren’t the source of tension on these streets. The Teixcalaanlitzlim were managing that all by themselves.
At first she had thought that there simply weren’t that many people, that the population of Twelve Azalea’s neighborhood was at work, or lower than the number of dense, tall, flowerlike buildings would suggest, but the way Twelve Azalea’s expression changed from mild serenity to puzzlement to growing dread put that possibility right out. There was something wrong. The air felt charged, a psychological echo of how she’d felt right after the bomb in the restaurant. She trudged, following Twelve Azalea around corners. She couldn’t remember ever having been this tired.