Yskandr, who was malfunctioning. Who was half gone, whether through sabotage or her own neurological failure, instead of here with Mahit. Who she had no real way of reaching. There weren’t enough curses in any language she knew, and even the worst possible words in Glyphbook Standard wouldn’t be bad enough. How did she explain I have lost the other half of myself, and I need him, to these two Teixcalaanlitzlim who had spent some time a little while ago explaining how things like Yskandr were immoral? How did she even begin?
Helpless with it, she said, “I am so completely screwed,” and waited for the reaction.
She got one: Twelve Azalea looked worried, like he wasn’t sure what he’d do if the barbarian burst into tears, too—and Three Seagrass lost the last of her former expression of misery and returned to absolute and entire focus.
“Probably, but if you tell us why I might be able to offer some unscrewing,” she said, and Mahit got, all at once, why it was Three Seagrass and not Twelve Azalea who had been given the cultural liaison assignment. There were aptitudes that spelled for analysis, good observation of a situation, information acquisition—and then there were aptitudes that spelled for determination, and Three Seagrass was full up with the latter as well as the former.
She squared her shoulders. Braced herself. If she—and Lsel Station—were going to survive the transition of power from Six Direction to his successor unscathed, she needed as much unscrewing as Three Seagrass was willing to provide.
Here we go, Yskandr. This is me, trusting someone from Teixcalaan with our lives. How did it feel when you did this?
She wasn’t talking to the silent imago-Yskandr, she realized. She was talking to the dead man, who could only hear her if somehow she got access to whatever imprint of him might still dwell, an unused ghost, on his imago-machine.
“I am supposed to have Yskandr Aghavn, or at least a version of him, with me in my mind; I have an imago-machine just like this one,” Mahit began, picking up Yskandr’s machine between her thumb and forefinger. “My copy of his memories is from fifteen years ago. Or would be, if he was still with me—he isn’t, he hasn’t been since I saw his body, the first day I was here. He is—or I am—malfunctioning.”
Three Seagrass said, “I’d figured that much out, Mahit.”
“I hadn’t—”
“Petal, you just joined us this morning.”
“Do you really have one of these inside you? What is it like?”
He said it like he’d say Does it hurt? to a person with a blistering burn. Blank absurdity.
Mahit sighed. “Irrelevant to the current problem, Twelve Azalea, except that usually it’s nice and presently it is not working and I need it to be … I need him.”
“Because of what’s in your encrypted message,” said Three Seagrass.
“Because he has the key to it, and I need to know what my government wants me to do.”
There was a short silence. Mahit wondered if Three Seagrass was waiting for some further revelation, some actual useful piece of information that she could use to give Mahit some cultural-liaison help. But there wasn’t anything else. There was the message, and Mahit, and the hollow electric silence in her head.
Then Three Seagrass said, “What about the Yskandr in there?” and pointed at the imago-machine resting on the table between them all. “I suspect he’d know just as well.”
It hit Mahit in a flash of psychosomatic ache: the tiny scar at the base of her skull opening, the new weight of an imago-machine nestled against the pink-grey folds of neurological tissue. All of that, again.
She closed her palm around what was left of Yskandr Aghavn, murdered Ambassador, as if to hide him from Three Seagrass’s observant Teixcalaanli eyes.
“… let me think about it,” she said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
28. EXT. DAY: chaos and smoke of the BATTLEFIELD of GIENAH-9. Track in past TANGLED BODIES marked with carbon scoring, churned mud, to find THIRTEEN QUARTZ lying half conscious in the shelter of an overturned groundcar. HOLD on THIRTEEN QUARTZ before cutting to
29. EXT. DAY: same as before only POV of NINETY ALLOY. Pull back past NINETY ALLOY’s shoulder to watch as they FALL TO THEIR KNEES beside THIRTEEN QUARTZ—who OPENS THEIR EYES and SMILES FAINTLY.
THIRTEEN QUARTZ (weak)
You came back for me. I always … knew you would. Even now.
(Track around to see NINETY ALLOY’s face.)
NINETY ALLOY
Of course I came back. I need you. Where else am I going to find a second-in-command who can win half a war on their own before breakfast? (sobers) And I need you. You’ve always been my luck. Stand down, now. I’ve got you. We’re going home.
Panel Three: long shot of Captain Cameron on the bridge of his shuttle. All eyes are on him; the rest of the crew look terrified, eager, impatient. Cameron’s consulting his imago, so have the colorist emphasize the white glow around his hands and his head. He is looking at the enemy ship, floating in black space, super ominous and spiky—the ship’s the focus of the panel.
CAMERON: I learned to talk to Ebrekti, back when I was Chadra Mav. This isn’t even going to be hard.
MAHIT thought about it all through the rest of the evening, while Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea did laundry, washing their grass-stained clothes, and they all watched the newsfeeds on the holoscreen replay One Lightning’s speech and the protest footage. Mahit thought about it obsessively, to the counterpoint of troop movements and political exhortations, tonguing the idea like it was a raw sore place in her mouth she couldn’t leave properly alone. She’d put Yskandr’s imago-machine back inside her jacket pocket. The small weight swung there like a pendulum heartbeat.
There were a lot of ways to misuse an imago-machine.
No, better: there were a lot of ways to use an imago-machine that made Mahit, Lsel-raised, Lsel-acculturated down to the blood and bone all despite her pretentions toward loving Teixcalaanli literature, feel the way Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea had described feeling about cheating on the imperial exams. There were a lot of ways to use an imago-machine that were, for lack of more specific vocabulary in either of her languages, immoral.
For instance, a person could take up an imago of their lover who had died—tragically, usually, this was a daytime-entertainment holovision plot—and carry them around instead of allowing that imago to go to the next aptitudes-identified person in the line, and destroy both themselves and the knowledge of generations in the process. That felt immoral. And then there were all the smaller variants: new imago-carriers coming back to the widows of the dead, trying to resume relationships which had ended. That actually happened, everyone knew someone, there were good reasons that Lsel had built psychotherapy into a science …
Make it worse, she told herself. The kind of misuse that makes you squirm, not just the kind that makes you sad.