A Desolation Called Peace (Teixcalaan, #2)

by Arkady Martine

It is the minds of a people that have to stay free. Bodies die, or suffer, or are imprisoned. Memory lasts.

But they would be her people. Her people, who had followed her out to this bleak edge. They deserved better than being bodies thrown into the machinery of a war in order to begin the breaking of its gears.

“Within each cell is a bloom of chemical fire,” Twenty Cicada began, and by the time he’d finished the syllables of the line, half the soldiers were saying it along with him, a massed voice that made Nine Hibiscus ache with how much she loved them, loved all of them, loved the hungry and clever beast they made together, they her claws and her lungs and her eyes, and she their guiding mind.

Mahit took her hands down and looked Three Seagrass straight in the face. It felt like her gaze had weight, weight and edges, a sudden revealed landscape of places to cut oneself open on.

Distant, as desire-choked as she felt: <That’s the way we fall—being wanted.>