A Desolation Called Peace (Teixcalaan, #2)

by Arkady Martine

If someone murdered my home, I would fight them forever.”

an empire strong enough to be at peace. How are we going to get there from—from killing a planet?”

I’d rather have a clever, annoying successor than a dullard.

Even if you are in my living room trying to make me feel ashamed of killing our enemies viciously enough that they will leave us alone.

the Emperor Six Direction

once he loved the Ambassador from Lsel Station.”

Yskandr Aghavn.

She laughed. The sound was fragile and strange.

“Because on Lsel Station, where Yskandr and Mahit both come from—there is a technology that they use to put the mind of one’s predecessor inside the mind of the successor.

Yskandr offered him one of those machines. Imago-machines, they call them.

A way to record himself, and put himself inside a new body, like a ghost.

And have eighty times eighty year...

You’re quite like him. Except in all the ways you’re not.”

Nine Hibiscus,

Mahit Dzmare

Darj Tarats,

“Also it’s rude,”

Haha

I don’t trust this timing, Envoy.

Bardzravand Sector

Live memory does not retain the reasons for decisions; only the ability to make them.

rude.

Five Thistle,

put a pulse pistol under her chin.

she was meant to be a spy. Worse than a spy: a saboteur, intended to make this war go on forever,

Meant to be a saboteur for this man, who repaid the kindness of sparing his life by putting hers in danger.

No time for anything! Anything save talking. And talking was what Three Seagrass was for.

It shuts off options, yaotlek, and I believe we were just discussing how useful it would be to keep options open,

she wasn’t about to turn around and check. She was going to be fearless and assured,

Petal

My agenda is to keep talking,

The scatterpoint lights of the Seventeenth Legion’s Shards on Two Foam’s holomap swarmed and fell to nothing,

even if Three Seagrass thought it was mostly due to Sixteen Moonrise’s forward momentum, it was still true.

“Our enemy might be talking,” she said.

use-name,

noun-sign.

he identified waste with immorality.

the aliens, who killed without understanding individual life and individual contribution—

Eight Antidote

Shards could—

talk faster, one to another, than a message could pass through jumpgates.

He needed a sealed imperial infofiche stick. And he needed—he needed a Shard.

so full up with the possibility of doing something that he thought he might burst.

He needed to be entirely—him.

It took longer than he wanted, though, to compose the order.

Parzrawantlak Sector,

He wondered if he was in the process of setting policy for Emperors to come, and decided that he could do that, if he wanted.

He was himself, and Nineteen Adze had let him be, and this was what he knew was true and right and Teixcalaanli.

Inmost Province Spaceport.

Five Agate