BACK into the subway, and past another checkpoint—the Sunlit all still, all golden and observant. They were less concerned with people leaving the palace complex than they had been with people coming in, which wasn’t surprising, but Mahit was nevertheless profoundly nervous passing through them. She wondered if an algorithm could sense plans, could feel the anticipatory thrum of guilt; if an algorithm, even one which was made up of people who had at least at one point been Teixcalaanlitzlim, could have observed the conversation she and Three Seagrass had had in the restaurant, and act to stop them before they could do anything more. And oh, how she wanted to have time to find out if the Sunlit still were Teixcalaanlitzlim, considering the stated Teixcalaanli attitude toward neurological enhancements, and how all of the Sunlit nevertheless turned to look at her and Three Seagrass as they passed, a collective rotation like the inevitable swing of a satellite around a star, seven golden helmets rotating together.
Mahit was braced for them to at least want to ask her more questions about the dead man in her apartments—he was two days dead, now, and surely someone like Eleven Conifer, who had been able to show up at the Emperor’s oration-contest banquet, would have had family, associates, old friends from the army. Someone to make a fuss, someone to demand justice.
But the Sunlit only paused, and seemed to consult with one another, and let them go without a word. Perhaps she was being protected? If the algorithm was controlling the Sunlit, there might be more than one person influencing it—not just whoever it was in War, or Ten Pearl himself, but … someone else. Those glimpses of grey, the Judiciary agents (or the Judiciary mirages), occurred to her again, and Mahit glanced around. She couldn’t spot them, but that didn’t mean they were gone. Walking faster now, keeping pace with Three Seagrass with quick little steps, she considered jurisdiction in Teixcalaanli law. If the Judiciary was following her, perhaps the Sunlit wouldn’t dare intervene. She really ought to have studied the intricacies of the legal code for criminal law, not just the laws governing the movement and activity of barbarians.
She should have done a lot of things. In the subway, with Three Seagrass directing her toward the central train station, Mahit could still feel the racing of her pulse in her fingertips, beating there along with the ever-present hum of the peripheral neuropathy.
“Not arrested yet,” she murmured again.
Three Seagrass’s expression was caught somewhere between laughter and what looked like a desperate desire to tell Mahit to hush. “Not yet,” she said. Mahit grinned at her. Hysteria was catching. She felt like a child, suddenly, playing in the corridors of the Station with her friends, holding on to a secret that the adults weren’t supposed to see. When she breathed deeply the wrapped bandage holding the encrypted communiqué around her ribs pressed into her, a reminder.
The central transportation hub for the Inmost Province—the province which contained seventeen million Teixcalaanlitzlim, the palace, the Central City, the province where Mahit had expected to spend the majority of her ambassadorial career—was an enormous, monumental building. It hove into view as they climbed the long staircase up from the subway: a huge edifice crowned with a dome that ate half the sky, surrounded by thorn-spiked towers: a thistle of a building, concrete and glass. Behind it would spread the tendrils and loops of maglev tracks, like a huge system of twisting vines spread in a fan. Mahit knew the verse from The Buildings which began the description of this station: indestructible, many-faceted, the eye that sends out / our citizens, observing. It did look something like an eye, the eye of an insect—the facets gleamed. When Teixcalaanli literature talked about eyes it was often talking about touch, or the ability to affect—an eye sees, an eye changes what it sees. Half quantum mechanics, half narrative.
All narrative, on Teixcalaan, even if quantum mechanics helped.
“Where are we meeting Twelve Azalea?” Mahit asked. It would be so easy to get lost in this building—to vanish into the stream of constant motion, Teixcalaanlitzlim traveling in and out, a flow like water.
“In the Great Hall, by the statue of ezuazuacat One Telescope,” Three Seagrass said. “It’ll be obvious; that statue was done during the period where statues were extremely shiny, and also very large—two hundred years back, it was a fad, One Telescope is basically all mother-of-pearl.”
An enormous statue covered with the insides of shells, that had to have been harvested from an actual ocean. Slowly. Over time. Mahit wanted to laugh, again, and couldn’t quite feel why, why she couldn’t calm down, why everything was edged with this sense of hurtling toward an inevitable crash. You’re about to have experimental neurosurgery, that might be why, she told herself, and nodded to Three Seagrass. “Let’s go, then.”
They spotted the grey-suited Judiciary agents, spotted them in truth and not just in Mahit’s imagination, at the entrance. They loitered there, too casual, too observant, as they walked in. Mahit wasn’t sufficiently dazzled by the sudden clear arc of the Great Hall, the cantilevered glass dome stretching impossibly wide, to not notice that everyone who came through those doors was being taken careful note of. When she spotted another one of them, pacing like a distracted commuter in front of the ticket kiosks but never buying a ticket, she nudged Three Seagrass in the shoulder.
“The Mist. Do you think they followed us?”
“… I’m not sure,” Three Seagrass muttered, almost soundless in the din of Teixcalaanlitzlim searching for their trains. “There might have been one on the street outside Twelve Azalea’s apartment who was following us, but if that one even existed they’d peeled off by the time we came out of Science—and these ones were here before we got here…”
There were a lot of reasons the Judiciary might be looking for people who looked like her and Three Seagrass, beginning with Eight Loop has reconsidered how useful I am and heading on down to illegal desecration of Yskandr’s corpse. Though that latter action had been mostly Twelve Azalea.
“I don’t think they’re looking for us,” Mahit said. “They’re looking for—” She didn’t want to use his name. “For Petal. Because of the machine.”
Three Seagrass cursed quietly. “And they only followed us because we came out of his apartment, and then—We were innocuous, we went to an appointment and out to lunch, we’re not the targets.”
Again, Mahit considered jurisdiction. Maybe they hadn’t been the targets of the agent who’d followed them, but they’d been followed, and that might have kept the Sunlit from arresting them right then. She found herself in a state of simultaneous gratitude and fury. (She was getting used to the combination: that doubling, the strangeness of being grateful for something she should never have had to experience in the first place. Teixcalaan was full of it.)
“Maybe we’re not,” said Mahit. “Can you see him? Petal.” She gestured toward what must be the statue of One Telescope, an enormous woman with a barrel chest and wide hips, glowing in swirling ocean-pearl colors from the top of her pedestal. She couldn’t spot Twelve Azalea anywhere nearby.