Mahit watched the Station come into view. The Emperor’s hand—slim, dark-fingered, intimately familiar—had reached out, in the plaza. Reached out and taken Mahit’s jaw between her fingers, turned her face. Mahit should have been frightened, or stunned into endocrine cascade. But she had felt—floating. Distant, free. “We do need an ambassador from Lsel,” Nineteen Adze had said, “though it’s not terribly urgent at the moment. If I want you, Mahit, I will send for you.” Mahit felt that way now, as Lsel came back into the center of her ship’s viewports. Very distant. A certain kind of free. Not, in
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