"A Desolation Called Peace"

[fiefoe]

Here's a rare sequel that improved upon the first, even though there are still too much internal monologues for my taste. At least this time Arkady Martine introduced more voices, and I enjoyed the new ones like 8 Antidote than than Mahit's, who's still too passive for a space opera heroine. 20 Cicada's sacrifice packed a greater ummph than the old emperor's; his philosophy/religion of no waste appeals to me very much.

• To think as a person, with the singing fractal swarm of we, and see these places that we have not yet scavenged, not yet torn open, claws as delicate as surgeon-scalpels, for their secrets!
  Oh, the other hunger, the hunger of we that is nothing to do with the body. The hunger of we to reach out.
• The Emperor Herself might have wanted a war to cut the teeth of her rulership on, but the war that she’d sent Nine Hibiscus out to win was already ugly: ugly and mysterious. A poison tide lapping at the edges of Teixcalaan.
• Taste a little blood, a little dust and fire blooming from the death of an alien ship. A fleet could last a long time, fed on those sips of sugar-water violence, as long as they believed their yaotlek knew what she was doing.
• But he was so correctly a Fleet officer, a Teixcalaanlitzlim’s Teixcalaanlitzlim, seamless in the role of ikantlos-prime and adjutant, a man who could have walked out of The Expansion History or Opening Frontier Poems, except that the system his people had come from hadn’t even been absorbed into Teixcalaan when either of those works had been written.
• “I can have that order composed. The Twenty-Fourth will be cast shouting into whatever void is eating our planets by shift-change, if you like.” One of the problems with Twenty Cicada was that he offered her exactly what she wanted, for precisely long enough for her to remember that it was a bad idea.
• Mahit was too many people, since she’d overlaid her damaged imago with the imago of the same man twenty years further on down the line. She’d had a while to think about it. She was almost used to how it felt, the fault lines between the three of them grinding together like planetary tectonics.
• all of them wanted her to tell them about Teixcalaan. And what could she say? I love it; it almost ate me and all of you together; I can’t tell you a single thing?
  <Propaganda’s fascinating when it’s inside your own mind,> Yskandr murmured. <It endlessly surprises me, how good the City is at engendering compulsive silence.>
• she’d have never thought about Heritage as being in the business of propaganda. But what else were they doing, when they adjusted educational materials for one age group or another, trying to have the aptitudes in five years spit out more pilots or more medical personnel? Changing how children wanted to be.
• "It’s a kindness, to have this much fish cooked for us, and real flatbread, just to ask for an administrative favor that you could have written to me about.”
  Let her deal with the suggestion that she was being profligate with food resources. Heritage Councilors had been removed for lesser corruptions, generations ago.
• Some very nice Teixcalaanlitzlim and my imago have conspired to teach me to weaponize references.
  But Amnardbat was saying, “It’s not a favor,” and as she said it, Mahit realized that she’d underestimated the Councilor, was underestimating the reasons for her behavior, expecting that she could be manipulated like a Teixcalaanlitzlim could be, with allusion and narrative.
• It didn’t come into view. It appeared, as if it had been there all along, hidden in some kind of visual cloak. The black nothingness of space—this sector had so few stars—rippled, squirmed like a nudibranch touched by a finger, an enormous and organic recoiling, and there it was, the first ship-of-their-enemy any Teixcalaanli eyes had seen.
• just before the second cannon barrage struck its inner ball, smashing it open into nothingness and destruction entire, it emitted from the second of its damaged rings some dark viscous substance that fell through null-grav in strange ropes.
  Spit, Nine Hibiscus thought, repulsed.
• What fluid moved like that? As if it was—seeking, mobile, far too cohesive. The surface tension on it—not so much that it clung together in a ball, but enough that it spun itself out in thinning, reaching strings—
  One of the Shards, a glittering wedge tumbling easily onto a new vector, vernier thrusters firing, intersected with one of those spit-strings. Nine Hibiscus watched it happen. Watched all the gleam of the little fighter vanish, slicked over with alien ship-saliva, a fractal net of it that stuck and clung even when the Shard pulled free of the string. Saw, disbelieving while seeing, that net begin to bubble its way through the Shard’s hull, corrosive, eating its metal and plastisteel like some kind of hyperoxidizing fungus.
• I am not equipped to run a first-contact scenario, Nine Hibiscus thought, especially when the things being contacted spit ship-dissolving fluids at my people and don’t make understandable noises. She was a soldier. A strategically minded one, with the vast punch of Teixcalaanli power behind her, but a soldier nonetheless. First contact was for diplomats and people who got into epic poems.
• There were a couple of things Eight Antidote had learned from his ancestor-the-Emperor, and a couple more from Nineteen Adze, who was Emperor now and had promised to take care of him even if it killed her. The biggest one was probably don’t trust anyone who makes you feel good without knowing why they want you to feel that way.
• Eleven Laurel made a noise that might have been laughter a few decades back. “You did look her up. I’d say dumb shit is a fair description, yes.
• It took a particularly vicious sort of self-recrimination for Mahit to wish herself alone inside her own mind: alone like she’d been as a child, imagoless and longing, instead of replete with memories that were only beginning to belong to her, and were doubled and distorted and full of Teixcalaan anyhow.
• There was a waiting sort of silence, an abeyance that wasn’t acknowledgment as much as it was frustration, and Mahit was so tired of not thinking half of her own thoughts. _Are you happy now, Yskandr? I was frightened, and you were spilling trauma reaction all over my endocrine system,
• a snatch of that bright rag of a man, the remains of her first imago, the sabotaged-Yskandr
• Warmth—all the little hairs on her arms and legs standing up and lying down again in a shivery wave, like her own neurology was touching her gently. This, too, was in none of the imago-training, none of the expectations for what would happen after a person received a live memory and a line of experience to be part of. Nothing in Mahit’s education had told her about the strange kindnesses of living in a body with a—friend.
  <Sentimentality is not helpful for clarity of thought,> said Yskandr.
  An intensely annoying friend.
• Someone flexible enough for independent work, strong enough to keep their loyalties regardless, like a metal that didn’t go brittle when bent. Sometimes people like that could talk to barbarians so well that the barbarians forgot they were Teixcalaanlitzlim until it was too late for the barbarians.
• She thought of Eleven Lathe, her poetic model, her hero, writing Dispatches from the Numinous Frontier out alone amongst his aliens, the Ebrekti. Could she do worse? Certainly, but perhaps not much worse—and then, gleeful and bitter, she thought, Fuck you, watch me try, in Twelve Azalea’s eternally silenced voice.
• He didn’t take her body, like he had in Teixcalaan or to calm her out of useless panic in her residence pod—Yskandr slipped forward, helped her muscles remember a walk they’d never used, a center of gravity they did not have. A smile wider than Mahit’s own,
• “Because you’re my guests, and my Fleet Captains—particularly the eager ones—are my best tools in the campaign that is about to begin in earnest,” Nine Hibiscus snapped. There, that was the I-know-what-you-did portion of the meeting gestured at. If she moved fast enough, she wouldn’t need to expand into a full dressing-down.
• Nine Hibiscus knocked back her glass of starshine, leaving only the Emperor’s share, the last sip.
• Confederation, who had an absurd habit of electing their leaders by popular vote.
• Three Seagrass blinked, and tried to summon up her mental inventory of people named Eleven Laurel who the Emperor would want to know her opinion of—rejected out of hand the asekreta trainee serving as an office assistant on the eighth floor of the Ministry, and also the poet-orator who had died when Three Seagrass was thirteen and convulsed the capital in an ecstasy of internal rhyme for months
• No scars there, not yet. She’d never sworn an oath large enough to scar. Even the one she’d sworn two months ago, with Mahit and Nineteen Adze, had healed to invisibility. The body didn’t care about the size of the promise, only the size of the cut.
• Teixcalaan, once we were in the First Emperor’s hands and flying out into the black, learning jumpgates as we went, carrying with us our seeds of civilization like sacrifice-blood welling from the palms of those first planet-breakers—once the Empire was the Empire, extending throughout the universe from jumpgate to jumpgate? Our Emperors were soldiers, and still are, but an empire that holds a galaxy-net of stars in its teeth learns also to speak our poetry in a thousand languages.
• _I know. Let me see.
  And the mirrored room that was her mind unfolded like a flower, floating in some jeweled pool in Palace-East, blue petals like drowning.
• Tarats had written, but perhaps you never managed to alight on why I would want such a hideous thing as imperial desire focused on our Station or on its representative. But what better way to draw a monstrous thing to its death than to use its functions against itself? Teixcalaan wants; its trust is rooted in wanting; it is in this way you and I will destroy it.
  The words were too clear to be organic memory—they were grooved in, words that Yskandr had repeated and reread, thought about so often that they’d become part of his internal narrative. Whether they were Tarats’s actual words almost didn’t matter. They were the story that Yskandr had told himself, remembered being true; they were scent-linked, color-linked, and they were her memory now too, as much true for her as they were for her imago, live memory carried over on sense and image.
• To hear that there was nothing of how you loved one another that was clean.
  <A man pretends,> Yskandr murmured. <A barbarian pretends that civilization might grow in the small hours of the night, between two people.>
  Mahit imagined it, civilization—humanity—blooming like tiny flowers, caught between mouths in the dark, lips that kissed and talked and built. It was a gorgeous phrase, in Teixcalaanli.
• Three Seagrass knew how to do this conversation as an Information agent; she knew how to do this conversation back on Esker-1, where she’d just been City Teixcalaanli and thus mysterious and interesting. The first one was the exercise of social power, and the second one was grift: being too compelling to ignore, and too slippery to hang on to. Neither was going to work here.
• Prickles up and down her spine, chiding. But Yskandr backed off, retreated—for a moment Mahit felt dizzyingly alone. Dizzyingly herself, which was a very naked thing to be.
• Peloa-2 was out on the very edge of Teixcalaanli territory, too hot for most people to do more than a short engineering stint on, earn hazard pay on top of their usual contracts with the War Ministry. The only reason all these people were dead, Nine Hibiscus realized, was that these aliens understood supply lines, and what to do with a single-resource colony. <> Cut it off. And take whatever it had already produced.
• Eight Antidote told his holoprojector to cue up an episode of Dawn with Encroaching Clouds. It was a serial drama with an absolutely enormous costume budget and a set that was partially built out of a real historical warship, a museum piece from four hundred years ago, the same time as when the story took place. There’d been special permission from the War Ministry for using it, during the filming.
• Come with me. You’re the best at talking to aliens of anyone I know.” <> “That’s because you Teixcalaanlitzlim insist on thinking that I’m the alien,” Mahit said, but so very gently. Three Seagrass didn’t think she was behaving in a way that would need gentleness, not from Mahit Dzmare, but quite honestly she couldn’t be sure;
• The parasites line was definitely Twenty Cicada having feelings about plague. About homeostasis, and balance. Even if the rest of this speech was the usual rousing entry to a collective mourning rite—all of those soldiers would be pricking their fingers for a blood-bowl by the end of the hour, the sort of bowl she could pour out on Peloa-2’s empty factory floor like a promise (and she would do it herself, better her than Sixteen Moonrise, it had to be the yaotlek who led the Fleet)—talking about parasites was entirely from Twenty Cicada’s own philosophy and religious convictions.
  Nine Hibiscus trusted him more than anyone else in the entire galaxy, and she still didn’t understand why he didn’t follow the usual Teixcalaanli religion. Spend time in a sun temple and bleed for luck like anyone else.
• “I took courses.” He poured a small amount of his beverage into a plastic cup that looked extremely biodegradable—probably a four-hour cup, organic plastic, with a hydro-triggered decay cycle.
• Now, because bureaucracy was more efficient if teams were near each other no matter who they ultimately reported up to (this was something his tutors liked to repeat a great deal, which just told Eight Antidote that they were bureaucrats and didn’t like the thought of moving offices),
• Eight Antidote went. He tried to skirt around the edges of the projection, but he still walked through star systems, blanking them out for brief moments in his wake, as if he was the aliens who were destroying Teixcalaanli communications.
• It turned out that there was a place you went after you were scared. A big, cold, bright place inside your head. Eight Antidote thought this was a good thing to have discovered.
• The language felt wrong to Mahit for the first time in a long time. Out of context. Three Seagrass, in bright flame-orange, Teixcalaanlitzlim-perfect, was like a cut poisonous flower in the center of the hangar. Something beautiful and dangerous that shouldn’t be where it was, that would die and in its dying take what was nearby with it.
• “Bleeding sunlight,” Three Seagrass cursed, but she was smiling, Stationer-style: the edges of her teeth showing. Mahit felt charmed, and worried at being charmed, and utterly relieved that, given work to do, the two of them were apparently fine with one another.
• Mahit’s childhood had been full of breathless horror biopics about what the Fleet could do to a planet (not a Station, never a Station, always a planet, always far away, but it was easy to extrapolate), and equally breathless serial dramas about life on a Teixcalaanli legionary ship, all uniforms and poetry contests off-shift. Fuck, but she’d devoured those like sugar pastilles. She could probably still explain the plots, the convoluted love stories and the politics and multiseason faction-swapping and here she was, and even after all that had happened in the City three months ago, she still felt doubled. Vertiginous and falling. The self that experienced and the self that evaluated, wondered, Is this when I feel real? Is this when I feel like a civilized person?
  And the self that sounded like Yskandr, dark and amused: Is this when I forget what being a Stationer feels like? How about now? Now? Are we still Mahit Dzmare?
  She had imagined the Fleet, and feared it, and admired it, and seeing it was still a profound discontinuity.
• The first thing that came out of Mahit’s mouth, seeing her, was “That alien did not make those sounds from that throat, yaotlek,” as if she thought direct clarity would prove her usefulness beyond reproach of barbarism.
• Yet, Mahit thought. But it’s politics, and I need to understand— <> <The shape of it. Who wants Information here, and who doesn’t.> And then Yskandr slipped away from her, a banked fire just out of reach, like some fish streaking silver-sided into the shadows of the hydroponic tanks.
• “You remind me I’m a barbarian all the time. Now, in the City before—and not just you, Three Seagrass, the soldiers in the corridors too, but at least they have the honesty not to pretend that I’m anything but what Teixcalaan thinks I am. You? You want to give me uniforms and make me useful and have a clever almost-human barbarian to show off on your arm" ... But Mahit ignored her and kept going, like words were an infection she was squeezing from a wound.
• That seemed like the kind of mistake a person who relied on loyalty would make. He’d have to remember not to make it, when he was Emperor. Loyalty wasn’t transitive. It didn’t move up and down the chain of command smoothly. It could get cut off, or rerouted.
• That kitten had been fluffy, pale, and uninterested in sitting on her shoulder. This one had very long phalanges, like the fingers of a human being, and a sort of thumb that was quite nearly opposable. “They’re in the air ducts,” she repeated, dumbfounded and delighted. <> “They, like me, are everywhere,” said Twenty Cicada, and sighed so as not to laugh. “And they shouldn’t be in here. They’re not native to the hydroponic ecosystem and their waste products have too much ammonia.
• “No,” said the cuecuelihui, “I definitely don’t want a Kauraanian kitten,” and held out her arms for it.
  Three Seagrass felt a sharp pang of recognition: this person knew exactly how to take control of a conversation, combine surprise and confusion and generosity to engender rapid trust. How nice! Someone trained in basic interrogation!
• But the habits of memory created all kinds of false harbors. Narrow, confined spaces to sleep in, suspended inside the complex shell of metal that was a Station—or a ship, even a Teixcalaanli one—were correct.
• Dekakel will remember the easiness with which Aknel Amnardbat answered her for a very long time; the easiness, and the way she abruptly knew she couldn’t trust any imago-line that this woman had touched to be unaltered. How clearly she saw what Amnardbat was, in that moment: a person who so loved Lsel Station that she’d replaced her ethical responsibilities with the appalling brightness of that love, and didn’t care what she burned out to preserve it.
• That Dzmare is a disruptive person. Whether she means to be or not.”
• He knew he’d slipped when he’d said we. Knew he’d been in this office too long. It was awful, to know all that and to still realize it was a useful slip to have made, aligning himself with the two of them. He was going to learn something now. He missed thinking that mistakes were just mistakes. Since he’d become a spy, he felt bad about good things as much as he did about errors.
• One more thing that integration therapists never warned you about: having two people’s heartsickness to evoke with a misplaced slice of self-recrimination.
  <I failed Tarats when I bargained our imago-technology away to Six Direction in exchange for peace,> Yskandr said, finally. <And I failed Six Direction too, in the end. Mahit—do better than I did; the line of us should amount to something worthwhile.>
  She’d never heard him so clearly describe the shape of his own despair, his own sense of self-hatred. It was like looking into a mirror that went on forever, a hole in the world abruptly made real.
• He’d watched that a lot of times. And he had—oh, he had disruptive person rattling around in his skull, making him feel strange and a little sick. (Was he a disruptive person? Could a person become an Emperor without being a disruptive person?)
• The body forgets pain, but it also writes patterns into itself: endocrine response and chemical triggers. Biofeedback that sets patterns. That’s memory: continuity plus endocrine response.
• hearing a yaotlek of the Teixcalaanli Fleet say such poetic words as I am prepared to sink my hands into their heart and rip it out, a statement out of an epic conquest poem, said so casually and easily, the absolute weight of Teixcalaan’s narratives settling over Mahit like a shroud she’d never really taken off—
• Have we ever loved someone like that, she thought. Not quite a question. Enough to want to kill a planet in revenge for them.
  <Not a whole planet,> Yskandr said, and she rather wished she hadn’t asked. What counted as killing a planet, anyway? Was it the deathfire of Fleet bombs, or was it also the gentle, wide, killing-strong jaws of Teixcalaan, wrapped around her own heart where Lsel should be?
• Three Seagrass looked at her, flashfire-quick, her mouth twisted into the same amazed-wry expression she’d worn when Mahit had curled her fingers up inside her just so. Which was also the same expression she’d worn when she had watched Mahit turn the performance of barbarism directly against the Minister of Science Ten Pearl, at the very first event they’d ever been to together. That same pleasure, a twisted amazement and joy, a kind of possessive wanting.
• Quickly, Mahit said, “Ask the Emperor. Let this be, if it is to be, a destruction that is from the heart of Teixcalaan.”
• He kept not finding the edge, where someone—even the City, or the imperial security AI, or a dumb-locked door that needed a physical key—would stop him. He wanted—it was awful and stupid and unfair, but he wanted someone to stop him. That would mean it wasn’t his responsibility anymore. That would mean someone else, someone grown up entirely, would be the one in charge of doing this. Of stopping a—a planetary genocide. Except: the grown-ups were in charge, and so far they weren’t stopping anything at all.
• I’d rather have a pyrrhic victory—display just what Teixcalaan is capable of, smash a living beautiful planet full of people—and yes, they probably are people, but not the kind of people we can understand—smash it to dust and deathrain. I’d rather one act of horror than an endless war of attrition, losing our people and theirs, on and on and on. Like a suppurating wound at the edge of the Empire, forever.”
• “I’ve always said that Information was better than the Palmers if you had to do counterintelligence outside the Fleet because Information’s prefucked—no chance of getting yourselves enamored with barbarians for the first time and forgetting what the Fleet’s for. You’re already corrupt. But I didn’t ever expect one of you to bring me a barbarian who uses Teixcalaanli imperial protocol to prove her points.”
  “Ambassador Dzmare is—unique,” said Three Seagrass, and Mahit tried to decide who had insulted her, and if she should mind. She’d won, hadn’t she? Briefly. She’d—bought them time. Time for Twenty Cicada to keep talking. Time for—something other than all of Teixcalaan’s military bent to inexorable and total destruction, unnuanced, beautiful—an elimination of confusion, of incomprehension. A loss.
• “He died, though,” said Eight Antidote, and wondered if he should be offering condolences. Adults and the way adults loved had never made sense to him. What the Emperor was describing didn’t sound like love at all.
  Nineteen Adze nodded. Her eyes were still closed. “Yes. He died. I helped kill him, for what that’s worth. Which was like killing a city, or a planet. There and then, it really did come to the same thing.
• She said, “I don’t know. Not you. Not Six Direction, either. Something—untenable. Untenable to me. To Teixcalaan.”
  And yet it was tenable to her to kill a whole planet to maybe stop a war. Eight Antidote didn’t understand. He didn’t want to understand. He was glad he wasn’t some ghost, some half-thing, his ancestor and himself wrapped up together, because he was himself, and he didn’t want to understand how Nineteen Adze could kill her friend to save a kid and kill a planet to maybe do nothing but kill a planet.
• “Fire on that ship,” said Nine Hibiscus, with the brittle determination that accompanied making an unwise choice that nevertheless felt better than making no choice at all. She knew this kind of thinking. She’d thought she’d grown out of it, long before she’d been a Fleet Captain, let alone a yaotlek. It was the sort of thinking that obliterated possibilities, unbalanced worlds. Twenty Cicada would be disappointed.
• imago-memory has not managed to preserve for us the reasons that we Stationers came to Bardzravand Sector and stayed. Nor do we remember where we were coming from, or where we were going. Fourteen generations down the chain of live memory, and all our oldest lines have are dreams of numbers and a certainty that if we did this once, we could do it again. Live memory does not retain the reasons for decisions; only the ability to make them. And yet: we did this once. Could we do it again, in reverse?
• THE first thing that Councilor Darj Tarats of Lsel Station said on the bridge of Weight for the Wheel, his hands cuffed behind him in the sort of restraints Three Seagrass assumed were usually used for court-martials or other Fleet unpleasantnesses, was “This is not what I sent you here to do, Dzmare.” He said it in Teixcalaanli, which meant that he wanted everyone else to know that Mahit was his creature and no one else’s.
• Three Seagrass kept being surprised by that use-name, even knowing that Twenty Cicada had the absurdity of an insect as his noun-sign. It had to be something related to his religion. She wished, absently, that she’d had enough time with him to really wrap her head around him. How he identified waste with immorality.
• It took longer than he wanted, though, to compose the order. He’d never written one before, and his first try sounded like he was pretending to be a character in Dawn with Encroaching Clouds, all ancient verb forms that no one used anymore, even in imperial proclamations. His second try was simpler, and it sounded more like him—which meant it sounded like a kid, probably, but he’d rather sound like a kid than like a fake holodrama emperor.
• Right out loud, he said, “Oh fuck,” for the first time in his life, like a grown person would. And then he threw up, turning his head away from the infofiche stick, keeping it clean.
• “How very like a Teixcalaanlitzlim, to say I am welcome and have me chained,” said the Councilor.
  “How very like a barbarian,” Nine Hibiscus said, before she could think better of it—she missed Twenty Cicada, she missed him terribly, it was much harder to be both the voice of reason and the instrument of threat, with only one person talking—“to take a welcome as a chance to demonstrate ingratitude.
• “The very same. It wasn’t Six Rainfall’s fault that he died—I still think he had a massive anaphylactic reaction—and besides, our enemies don’t inject the stuff, they eat it.”
  “An entirely organic way of preserving memory,” said Dzmare, interrupting them in a low, fascinated tone. Nine Hibiscus ignored her. Hadn’t Twenty Cicada just said that it wasn’t memory the aliens shared, but minds?
• “Do you think he’s right?” Three Seagrass said to her, almost too low to hear. “They’re a collective? Is it like—you?”
  “Stationers are chains,” Mahit said, “lines, not—he’s describing a fractal web of minds, that’s nothing like
• No one was paying attention to them right now. Not when they could be listening to the yaotlek and her adjutant argue about whether he should functionally join the enemy forces, biochemically, mentally, entirely, in hopes of being able to stop a war.
  Mahit couldn’t quite believe the degree to which the conversation they were having was public, where she and Three Seagrass and half the officers on the bridge could all hear how it flitted back and forth through the long shape of friendship, trust, arguments they’d clearly had a hundred times before, but were no longer theoretical, no longer abstract.
• She imagined how he would open the box, and put the fungus on his tongue, and be prepared to die, or to solve the problem, exactly as he had in the medbay of Weight for the Wheel. Imagined that, and found that Yskandr was thinking of Six Direction—or she was thinking of Six Direction—fever-flushed, worn to bones and eyes by age and illness. Prepared to die, or solve the problem, even if it meant he was not himself any longer by making use of a Lsel imago-machine.
• Tarats’s cheek was a stinging red where Mahit had slapped it. He lunged for her, a forward motion that seemed to be all teeth, his hands still restrained at the wrist. She darted backward, and Three Seagrass—amazed and horrified and utterly delighted, all at once, which was pretty much how Mahit doing anything made her feel, really—stepped in front of her... It would be an enormous diplomatic faux pas, but what wasn’t, currently? Everything about this bridge right now was a complete mess. All protocol dissolved! There wasn’t an iota of Information Ministry training that covered tripartite negotiations from the bridge of a Fleet flagship, where one of the negotiating parties wasn’t even human and one of the others wasn’t Teixcalaanli, and none of the parties were Information agents except the negotiator. She should write a procedure manual.
• Eight Antidote thought about being a spy: about keeping all his own desires as close as possible, unrevealed, even when asked directly. About choosing, always, if he was going to tell. He could keep doing that. He probably should. He’d be an Emperor, if there was an Empire left, and he couldn’t just tell people what he wanted to have happened, they’d use it against him—
• She was bad at smiling like a Stationer. She showed every tooth she had, the bright bone-white of them. A smile like starlight and threat. Mahit wanted, abruptly, to teach her how to do it right.