She could be imagining it. Paranoia was a very understandable response when a multitude of people were, in fact, out to get you. They’d taught that in the psychology classes on Lsel, and Mahit had less and less reason to disbelieve it. Besides, half of the subways were on delay or closed entirely, and angry commuters were not contributing to anyone’s sense of safety or well-being. The borders between the six-pronged palace complex and the rest of town were visible as borders, now, as they hadn’t been when Mahit and Three Seagrass had left Mahit’s confiscated crime-scene apartments with Twelve Azalea. There were Sunlit standing in a line, checking the cloudhooks of each Teixcalaanlitzlim, verifying identities. Behind them was the shimmering glass and wire wall of the City itself, irising open and shut for the approved visitors. It seemed like more of a direct threat than ever.
She was carrying the encrypted paper communiqué from Lsel under her freshly laundered shirt, attached to her ribs by virtue of an elastic sports bandage that Twelve Azalea had found in the back of one of his drawers, before they’d left him to find someone to perform back-alley neurosurgery and headed back toward the palace complex. Twelve Azalea had it because he’d twisted his ankle while playing some form of team sport with a ball and net, the same sort of thing which had been advertised on the flyer they’d been given in the garden. Twelve Azalea had been more willing to enthuse about it—apparently he played in an intramural team once a week—than Mahit had been willing to listen, but it hadn’t mattered: the bandage was conscripted into use, and now she felt like she was smuggling secrets across enemy lines. Even if they were her secrets to begin with, legally and morally.
“Think we’re going to get arrested?” Mahit asked.
Over-cheerful and under her breath, Three Seagrass said, “Not yet.” In her clean Information Ministry suit, she looked like a very fine, very precise edged weapon, and Mahit was not in fact sure what she would do without her.
“If not now, when?” she said, with a certain bleak amusement of her own, and then they had come up to the wall of gold-mirrored helmets. Three Seagrass presented herself and Mahit easily, unaffectedly—the very picture of a cultural liaison supervising the movement of her charge through closed doors. The Sunlit asked her for her cloudhook—she handed it over. The Sunlit asked her where they’d been—she explained, without deception or guilt, that they had spent the night at the house of her former classmate and good friend.
Mahit wondered again if the Sunlit shared one enormous mind with the City—whether this one was right at this moment considering the work of its fellows, in her apartment. It certainly was taking its time. It looked up, and behind Mahit and Three Seagrass—another of those flashes of mist-grey, a reflection in the smooth gold faceplate, something behind Mahit for the Sunlit to look at for too long, an endless little stretch—and down again. Perhaps it was consulting through its fellows with the Six Outreaching Palms. Conspiracy on conspiracy. She was being paranoid. No one was following them and Science wasn’t colluding with War to unseat the Emperor and there weren’t protests in the streets and the bomb in Plaza Central Nine had been an accident of circumstance, not for her at all, for something unrelated to her, a representative gesture for the people of Odile—surely.
The Sunlit waved her and Three Seagrass through, so abruptly she was actually surprised: adrenaline-drop prickles, hot and cold, slipping down her spine. Walking through the door opened in the City’s internal wall felt like climbing into the mouth of an animal. It shut behind them and Mahit thought of the circular teeth on the maws of some station-dwelling parasites, the kind which lived in crawlspaces and battened on to power cable insulation.
The palace complex was, in daylight, much more serene than anywhere else. Walls did that. Walls kept out the visible signifiers of unrest. The walk to the Science Ministry was easy, and the air smelled of the ever-present Teixcalaanli flowers, pepper-sharp and rich white musk, and there was a chilly sort of sunlight, and yet Mahit could not get her heart rate to come down to something lower than a thrum.
“I’d vastly prefer it if we came out of this one without declaring war, allegiance, or getting you kidnapped by Ten Pearl’s best ixplanatlim for experiments on your brain,” Three Seagrass said.
“I can promise you a lack of declarations of war,” Mahit told her, looking up at the silver-steel bloom of the Science Ministry, its pearl-inlaid relief decorations showing the tracks of subatomic particles, the shapes of proteins. “I don’t have that authority.”
“Wonderful. We’ll be fine.”
Inside, there was an episode of the now-familiar dance of high-court Teixcalaanli protocol. Three Seagrass made introductions and confirmed their appointment with Ten Pearl; Mahit bowed over her fingertips; inclined her body to a degree that felt right, and whether that was her own instinct or the leftover flickering presence of Yskandr didn’t really matter.
She and Three Seagrass were escorted to a windowless conference room, bland pale chairs around a bland pale table, no decoration except for an unobtrusive stripe of that same pearl-inlaid relief circumnavigating the walls right underneath the light switch panels. There they waited.
Three Seagrass tapped her fingernails on the table, a nervous gesture Mahit hadn’t noticed her making before. For her own part, Mahit had taken to fiddling with Yskandr’s imago-machine inside the pocket of her jacket, unconsciously, and had to make herself stop more than once, and she kept thinking that the communiqué bound under her shirt would crackle if she breathed too deeply, even though it wasn’t making any noise at all. The advent of Ten Pearl through the conference room door was a relief. She could do something, now that he was here to talk to. Waiting was … not working, right now. It wasn’t working at all.
“Minister,” she said, standing to greet him.
“Ambassador. A pleasure. I’d heard you were missing!”
Ah. So this was how they were going to play this out. Fair enough—the last time she’d seen Ten Pearl she’d played him for the benefit of the newsfeeds at the Emperor’s oration-contest banquet. She probably deserved having to fence her way through whatever interpretation of her absence from the palace Nineteen Adze had concocted.
“I’ve known where I was the whole time,” she said, and realized as she said it that she was going to abandon her previous pose as a barbarian and a rube; there was no point to that smokescreen now, and it hadn’t worked anyway. Two people at least had tried to kill her, once with a poison flower and once by ambush in her apartments. Being a barbarian—performatively, like a shield—hadn’t made her any less vulnerable than being a political operator would. She might as well be honest now. A clever barbarian, like Nineteen Adze had called her.
Ten Pearl laughed politely. “I’m sure you have! What a charming way of putting it. How can I help you, Ambassador?”
When Mahit had set up this meeting, she had intended to try to figure out if Yskandr had really been so obvious about his intention to sell imago technology to Teixcalaan as to run afoul of Science—a question which hardly mattered now. Yskandr was dead, and the person he’d sold the imago tech to was the Emperor. What she needed to know now was far more along the lines of who Ten Pearl supported for succession, so that she could figure out if he wanted anything to do with the annexation of Lsel, and if he could be manipulated in her favor to stop it.
“I don’t want to linger on unpleasant subjects,” she began, using just as many tenses as she wanted, no pretense of ignorance between her and the Minister now, “but I would like very much to know—for the sake of my own interests and health, you understand—what it was that you and my predecessor discussed on the night of his death.” She could feel how Three Seagrass sat up straighter next to her; the careful focus she had acquired.