A Desolation Called Peace (Teixcalaan, #2)

by Arkady Martine

Your Brilliance, you have left me with all the world, and yet I am bereft; I’d take your star-cursed possessing ghost, Six Direction, if only he would teach me how not to sleep.

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.

like her, Twenty Cicada touched the ship, but he touched it like he was longing for space to come in and take his hand.

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.

had perfected the art of thinking the sensation of rolling her eyes.

and 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?

The door opened, so Mahit stopped thinking about dangerous lies she had told. Not thinking about them made them easier to hide. She’d learned that somewhere in the Empire, too.

Nine Hibiscus had been a Shard pilot herself, on that long-ago first deployment, and she still felt the scramble alarm like a delicious vibration in the marrow of her bones: go, go, go. Go now, and if you die, you die star-brilliant.

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,

It was hard to look at, and Nine Hibiscus didn’t know why—some of that recoiling, squirming visual distortion clung to it, made the grey metal of its hull seem oil-slick and unfocused. It had been not-there, and now it was there. Right up on Knifepoint’s tail, just as fast, and closing—

Electric blue. The light that Nine Hibiscus had always imagined a person saw if they accidentally stepped inside an industrial irradiator, in the brief moment they’d have to see anything at all. Deathlight, with its hum like a scramble-alarm, as familiar as breathing or ceasing to breathe.

[…] and of course your reputation precedes you, like an earthquake precedes a city-drowning wave; the tremors of your arrival are already setting the Ministry to vibration as if we were all made of tlini-strings and you were the bow.

don’t trust anyone who makes you feel good without knowing why they want you to feel that way.

Having whole hours to contemplate her degree of fuckedness was a luxury. Back in the City she’d never had time to sit with the dawning horror of revelation: she’d kept moving. She’d had to.

No one could hear her in here; no one could notice how she wasn’t one integrated person but a suspect, secret, virulent merge of three.

Nothing in Mahit’s education had told her about the strange kindnesses of living in a body with a—friend.

Again she felt alive—awake in a way she hadn’t seemed to be ever since she’d come back to Lsel. Awake was close to frightened, and exhilarating.

A sharp, ugly noise with the intimation of a headache inside it, that ended in a scream that had taste—a foul, oilslick, tongue-coating taste that made her nauseated. Synesthesia wasn’t in Nine Hibiscus’s usual suite of neurological oddities, and sound that made humans crosswire to taste was at best unpleasant and at worst actively harmful.

There: she’d justified clinical-grade insomnia as a meritorious action, one which would enable her to deal with a problem before anyone else awoke; that was half her work done for the day, surely.)

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.

She missed her, Three Seagrass decided. Maybe she should fix that, while she was exploding her nascent political career for the sake of the Empire.

Let’s see if interested means “would like me safely dead,” as usual.

It was heady. She felt just exactly like she had when she’d been a trainee and skived off from class: a gorgeous and unfolding sense that she was getting away with something. And it was all entirely, completely, and thoroughly legal. She’d signed off on it herself.

An easy intimacy. Like any other lover Mahit had ever had. Not different at all. And the continuity of endocrine response worked for everyone, Stationer or Teixcalaanlitzlim or something else: endocrine response said, in that brutal language of the flesh, This person has had their hands inside you, and you welcomed them in. Let’s do it again. Here are nice chemicals to help.

hell yeah

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. Mahit couldn’t think about how it made her feel. She didn’t have time to feel anything that strong. That—disarraying of the pattern of the world.

hell yeah