Mulaghesh snorts. “So did I. Let me dig you up something that’ll look scary but you can’t hurt yourself with.”
“I did receive some basic training when I first joined the Bulikov Embassy.”
“I know,” says Mulaghesh. “That’s what I’m afraid of. You probably learned just enough to be a danger to your own damn self.”
Pitry bows as she marches off into the recesses of her home. He realizes that he has never seen Mulaghesh walk another way: it’s as if her feet know only how to march.
When she’s gone he snatches the balled-up piece of paper on the counter. This is, of course, a grievous violation of his position, not to mention a betrayal of Shara’s trust in him. I am such a terrible spy, he thinks, before remembering that he’s not actually a spy at all, which makes him feel a little less guilty.
He stares at the words on the letter in confusion. “Huh?” he says.
“What was that?” says Mulaghesh’s voice from the next room.
“N-Nothing!” Pitry balls the letter back up and replaces it.
Mulaghesh returns carrying a very long machete. “I have no idea what the original owner used this for,” she says. “Maybe hacking up teak. But if it can cut lukewarm butter now, I’ll be surprised.” She hands it over and walks him to her door. “So, three weeks, huh?”
“That is correct.”
“Then that’s three weeks to eat as much decent food as I can,” says Mulaghesh. “Unless the Continent suddenly figured out how to make dumplings and rice right. And, ugh…” Her hand goes to her stomach. “I thought for so long my belly would never have to deal with cabbage again….”
Pitry bids her good-bye and walks back up the hill. He glances back once, surveying her bland, unhappy little cottage, the sands around it winking with empty bottles and broken glass. Though he’s never been involved in an operation—besides Bulikov, which he feels doesn’t count—he can’t help but be a little concerned about how all this is starting. And he’s not sure why a letter containing only the words “Make it matter” could have any impact on whether it starts at all.
I have trudged through fire and death to come and ask you this: Can we not be better? Can we not do better? Are we so complacent in our comfortable lives that we can no longer even dream of hope, true hope—not simply hope for Saypur, but for humanity itself?
Our ancestors were legends who remade the world. Are we willing to be so small-minded with our brief time upon these shores?
—PARLIAMENTARY ADDRESS BY PRIME MINISTER ASHARA KOMAYD, 1721
She awakes in the night and tries not to scream. The scream rattles around in her throat, a hot bubble of air swelling up inside of her, and she flails around trying to find purchase on something, anything, her right hand twisting the bedsheets into a knot and the balls of her bare feet pressed against the stone wall. She pushes and strains as her brain insists she’s still there, she’s still at the embassy and it’s still five years ago, her arm trapped under the rubble and the sky thick with smoke, the whole world ruined and gone in an instant. She’s still turning over on the street, still glimpsing the young soldier facedown on the concrete, a dew drop of blood in his ear that swells and swells until it brims over, and a trickle of red weaves down his smooth cheek, the cheek of a boy.
Mulaghesh listens for the waves. She knows the waves are there. She knows where she is. She just has to find something to hold on to.
Finally she hears them: soft and steady, the gentle rise and fall as the waters scrape the sand on the shore, just a few hundred feet beyond her little cottage.
You’re in Javrat, she tells herself. You know that. You’re not in Bulikov. All of that happened long ago. Just listen to the waves….
She tries to remember how to relax. She tells each system of muscles to stop, just stop already, and she finally goes limp. It’s then that the pain seeps into her as every muscle remembers it’s been straining to the point of breaking.
She takes a breath and moves her arms and legs to see if she’s strained or sprained anything. She aches, but she seems to be all right.
She glances at her alarm clock. It’s not even midnight yet. But she knows she’ll get no more sleep tonight.
Oh, well, she thinks. Only four hours to wait. She does not look forward to waiting on the docks for the ship to come in. She finds she doesn’t want to see people, or perhaps to be seen by them.
Her gaze moves to the object to the right of the alarm clock: a human hand rendered in dark oak wood, frozen in mid-clutch. The artisan who made it for her said it would help her hold things, and while this is true, Turyin Mulaghesh has always found its pose slightly disconcerting: there is something painful about it, like the hand is so tense in its desire to grasp something that it can hardly move its fingers.
Groaning as her stomach muscles protest, Mulaghesh sits up, takes the false hand and its harness, shoulders her way into its well-worn straps, and gently affixes the prosthetic to where her arm ends a few inches above the wrist. She wraps the soft cotton sleeve around her upper arm, then takes the four leather belts at the false hand’s end, ties them over the sleeve, buckles them, and draws them taut.
She spends some time with the belts, tightening them, loosening them, adjusting them. It always takes time for everything to fit into the right place. She knows it’ll never be perfect.
In the dark, General Turyin Mulaghesh tries to make herself whole.
***
Mulaghesh squints as the passenger vessel Kaypee slowly approaches the dock, a blinding knife of white on the dark tablecloth of the sea. It takes some time for her eyes to decipher that it is not moving incredibly slowly but is simply incredibly large—nearly eight hundred feet long. She sourly reflects that once her country reserved such effort and industry for warfare, yet now in its eighth decade of hegemony, Saypur deigns to put her vast resources toward decadent indulgences.
But the ship is probably not the true source of Mulaghesh’s ire: there on the boarding dock, she is surrounded by families with shrieking babies and sulky teens, doe-eyed lovers still tangled in one another’s arms, and elderly couples emitting a beatific, contented glow as they stare out at the sea.
Mulaghesh seems to be the one person who hasn’t been reinvigorated by her stay on Javrat. Whereas everyone else is loose and open in their light, tropical clothing, Mulaghesh’s appearance is decidedly contained: her graying hair is pulled back in a taut bun, and she wears her immense gray military greatcoat, which conceals most of her false hand. The one tropical influence she allows is a pair of blue-tinted sunglasses, but their chief purpose is to conceal her puffy, hungover eyes.