A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

Author:Arkady Martine [Martine, Arkady]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781529001655
Google: 46L7DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07QPJHNSM
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2021-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Mahit lay flat on her back in the dark and tried to feel the ship around her, the great engine of it, the hum of live machinery. Her face was a foot from the ceiling. After she’d finished reading The Perilous Frontier! there had really been nothing else to do but go to bed. She’d taken the higher bunk, both out of deference to Three Seagrass if she ever came back to their assigned quarters (it was miserable climbing a bunk-ladder in the dark, everyone knew that), and out of wanting what comfort she could get from enclosure. If she ignored the drop to her right side, the distance to the floor, she could be inside her own sleep-pod on Lsel, safe.

Not that she’d been safe there. But the habits of memory created all kinds of false harbors. Narrow, confined spaces to sleep in, suspended inside the complex shell of metal that was a Station—or a ship, even a Teixcalaanli one—were correct. They felt right. She reached up and brushed the ceiling with her fingertips—and found them numb still, waking to shimmering prickles when they touched its surface.

Neuropathy. It happened more often now. Or—it surprised her more often now, how it could sneak in even when she wasn’t trying to work with her imago. With either version of her imago. She was going to have to learn to live with it, wasn’t she. As a permanent part of herself.

A sensation of sorrow, from very far off: not even a thought, but an emotional echo. How she herself wanted to cry, and didn’t want to want to, and felt also that Yskandr was—sorry, wished that there was an otherwise life for them, where this wasn’t happening—

<You’re projecting, Mahit. Also wallowing.>

It is very late at night, and I am on a Teixcalaanli warship, and I have fought so badly with my friend that she won’t come back to a room I am in. Also I am an exile twice over, once from my home and once from Teixcalaan, which could never have been my home. And my hands hurt. I have every right to wallow.

<You’re not an exile,> Yskandr said, and there was a chilled finality to the way he said it that made Mahit want to press him further, like she’d press on a bruise.

How are we not?

<You bought us Lsel, with what you promised Tarats. And if you make up with your friend, you have Teixcalaan—anywhere in all of Teixcalaan.>

Anywhere in all the world, in the language they both so habitually spoke in the privacy of their mind—the language which was neither of their own, but was the Empire’s. Mahit couldn’t seem to find a way to stop. It was the language they both thought in best.

I didn’t buy us anything. I made myself a spy, that’s all. Someone else has my eyes: Darj Tarats sees through me. No promises of any reward. And he’ll want worse than spywork if I tell him about the conflict between the yaotlek and Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise.

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