A Desolation Called Peace (Teixcalaan #2)

by Arkady Martine

Propaganda’s fascinating when it’s inside your own mind,

Mahit laughed, a raw sound that ended in a bubbling, weepy cough, choking on her own ridiculous fluids. She couldn’t do it at all. She thought in Teixcalaanli, in imperial-style metaphor and overdetermination. She’d had this whole conversation in their language. Deliberately, she thought in Stationer, We’re not free. And in the same language, Yskandr agreed: <There’s no such fucking thing.>

apolitical—if anything could be said to lack politics that came out of her mouth now, what the Empire had done to her tongue was more than language—

Mahit bowed deep over her fingertips, and found herself distressed all over again by the comfort of knowing that gesture was appropriate again, here. At how easily she’d been scooped up out of the Station, slipped easily into the politics and pleasures and poisons of Teixcalaan. At how much she wanted to be useful, and how much she hated that wanting.

She’d said, When you know why I had to come with you, then we can talk. And she hadn’t meant, When you figure out the political situation on Lsel Station, she’d meant— She’d meant, When you understand that when the Empire commands, I can’t say no. She’d meant, When you understand that there’s no room for me to mean yes, even if I want to. She’d meant, You don’t understand that there’s no such thing as being free. Free to choose, or free otherwise.

“Where is the envoy?” the soldier asked, interrupting Mahit’s excess of internal delight and sending her just as easily crashing down into the humdrum, miserable reality of having driven off her only friend (if friends were even a category that Teixcalaanlitzlim could fit into, and that was the horrible crux of everything, wasn’t it).

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?