A Desolation Called Peace (Teixcalaan #2)

by Arkady Martine

Warmth—all the little hairs on her arms and legs standing up and lying down again in a shivery wave, like her own neurology was touching her gently. This, too, was in none of the imago-training, none of the expectations for what would happen after a person received a live memory and a line of experience to be part of. Nothing in Mahit’s education had told her about the strange kindnesses of living in a body with a—friend. <Sentimentality is not helpful for clarity of thought,> said Yskandr. An intensely annoying friend.

These things can’t fuck with Information’s head, Information comes prefucked.

To hear that there was nothing of how you loved one another that was clean.

“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.

The door to Central Strategy Two irised open for him at his escort’s gesture, and beyond was twilight laced so thickly with stars that for a moment he thought the air had turned into a net.

“I wish I could see it,” Eight Antidote told her, knowing he sounded like a kid, asking for things he couldn’t have, and not being able to help himself from doing it. “The war?” asked the Minister. Eight Antidote had meant the simulation he’d just designed. But—“Yes,” he said. “Can’t let you go out there; there’s only the one of you, and Her Brilliance would be pissed at me.” “How about here?” he asked. “I can see a lot from right here next to you.” “You are a nasty little viper,” said Three Azimuth, and actually ruffled his hair. Her hand was warm and calloused and entirely surprising. “How old are you?” “Eleven.” “Blood and starlight. I was painting my toenails at eleven. All right, kid. Show up here in the morning, and we might make an Emperor of you someday.”

Mahit winced. “I’m—we’re—going to the war, not the City. Councilor.” That plural. She should watch her plurals. She’d meant her and Three Seagrass, surely. Yskandr, a flicker of the younger, damaged version, less prurient, more vicious: <We is an appropriate singular for us.>

She coaxed the kitten off her shoulder and let it settle on the cuecuelihui’s knee, where it transformed itself into an ovoid of contently vibrating black fur and claws.

She had begun petting the Kauraanian kitten, and it purred like it wanted to be a starship engine when it grew up.

How clearly she saw what Amnardbat was, in that moment: a person who so loved Lsel Station that she’d replaced her ethical responsibilities with the appalling brightness of that love, and didn’t care what she burned out to preserve

Wait for the real problem, Your Excellency. Don’t borrow trouble that doesn’t come to you on its own.”

The body forgets pain, but it also writes patterns into itself: endocrine response and chemical triggers. Biofeedback that sets patterns. That’s memory: continuity plus endocrine response.

This person has had their hands inside you, and you welcomed them in. Let’s do it again. Here are nice chemicals to help.

Nor did it sing anything back to her. Instead it drew another human outline next to the eviscerated one. And another. And another. And another. As if to say, But you can make more of you. How wide, after all, could the concept of “you” stretch? Could it be as wide as a species?

She was so lost. She couldn’t talk to these things—these people, they were people, she had to keep thinking of them as people even as she tried not to vomit up everything in her stomach—without language. If she was a poet (you should have been Teixcalaanli, what a poet you would have made) a poet like Three Seagrass, then all of the vast weight of Teixcalaan had sent the wrong sort of storytellers here. What good was poetry now? One of the escorts was talking to Three Seagrass, rapid and hushed. In Teixcalaanli, and for one terrifying moment, Mahit didn’t know language at all—all syllables were useless sounds. <Breathe,> said Yskandr, in her mind, like he had before. But this time he said it in Stationer, the language she’d drunk in with her first breaths of oxygen, and it snapped meaning back into place for her. Sounds had meaning. Words were symbols. She could think in language again.