Nona the Ninth, page 10
“What did you say?” she demanded.
Nona was bewildered. “What did I say when?”
“Out in the courtyard.”
“Oh—nothing,” said Nona, barely able to remember. “I wasn’t good at pretending to talk at all. I just pretended I was talking to someone else and I only talked for like ten seconds because I felt silly.”
Hot Sauce did not look convinced. “Better come inside early. We’ve used the hair dryer.”
“What happened? When I talked on the radio?”
Hot Sauce hesitated, then said: “The watcher took off.”
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it? Right?”
“I need to investigate.”
“But it’s useful to know, isn’t it?”
But when Hot Sauce shrugged, Nona could tell she thought Nona didn’t understand, knew that Hot Sauce was keeping things back: something she didn’t mind as much when Hot Sauce did it but still minded a little. It was shitty being able to tell when people were holding back from her. Hot Sauce just said, “Come inside.”
It wasn’t a great end to the school day, and it seemed to jinx everything from there on. Nona, sitting at the back with Noodle, found she couldn’t follow what was happening in the Hour of Science, which culminated in a lot of ice cubes removed from strange places to triumphant shrieks from the crowd. And then there was the familiar pop-pop-pop from the street, really close, so they had to close all the blinds and the nice lady teacher had to go downstairs to make sure everything was locked up and they did everything sitting down away from shot lines from the window. They’d all done gunfire drill a million times and hardly any of the tinies got scared, even when the dreary siren started up outside. It was more boring and hot than it was terrifying. Even the Angel only seemed annoyed.
“That’s too close for comfort,” she commented. “Probably a one-off.”
But it wasn’t a one-off, it kept happening. They cut off any plenary time and mopped up ice water and the main teacher read to them from a book after a vote. The tinies outvoted everyone to select a book that wasn’t even good, a soppy tale about some children who went to the beach and weren’t eaten by anything. Another sign of the afternoon being cursed, Nona thought dolefully. At least school was nearly over for her.
People’s parents snuck in despite the fact that there was still shooting going on a couple streets away. Some of them said that it had been like that for hours and their child wouldn’t come back for afternoon school, even though both the Angel and the nice lady teacher tried to get them all to stay until it was better. They were still arguing when Camilla came to pick up Nona, and even though the lady teacher’s eyes brightened to see Cam—Nona could see her pamphlet hand twitching—Cam bundled her out of there before she even got a proper goodbye. The last thing she saw was Hot Sauce sitting by the blinded-up window, thoughtful and still as a statue in the park, only her head was still on of course.
Camilla led Nona by a very circuitous way home. They stopped at the street their building was on, and Cam ducked into a bakery and came out with a warm and probably radioactive paper bag of pastries that had been under the bakery light the whole time. When Nona asked how she got the money, Cam said, “Never mind.”
Nona was annoyed.
“You can just say you stole some, Cam, I don’t mind.”
“I sold something,” said Camilla.
Light dawned on Nona back home, after she had choked down some of the meat roll. She tried not to complain about it, but did the thing where she drank water until she said, “I’m full,” and Cam said, “Then we’ll wait. You haven’t had any protein today,” and she had to eat it anyway. She peeled off the casing and ate the stuff inside and hated the experience, but at least then it was over. While Cam was cleaning up she checked the secret drawer and found that the cigarettes were all gone.
When Camilla came back in to tack up the blackout curtains, Nona said, “You sold her stash. Pyrrha’s going to freak out.”
“Pyrrha will deal,” said Camilla. “Start stretching.”
Which meant it was time for swords. When Nona said passionately, “I hate swords, you don’t even teach me how to use them,” this just got written down on the clipboard as though even her complaints were only useful for research. Nona felt very bitter about life.
But her bitterness slowly ebbed away, as it always did, and turned into something a little more like misery. Pyrrha was late coming home that evening. It had used to be that after the bones and the swords Nona would spend sultry evenings out at the harbour, to swim if the beach was empty and if there was nobody there to see, or to dig clams and cockles out with a stick if there were people. Walking made her tired, but she could swim in the salt water for hours and never get enough of it. It was comfortable and private. Unfortunately, these days if she said, “Cam, can’t we go swimming?” Cam would say, “Remember what happened the last time,” and won every argument that way. That was because what happened the last time was that Camilla had got sick, and less important, Nona had got shot.
* * *
What had happened was that after the bones one day Palamedes said she looked peaky and made her eat crackers and spread until Nona worked herself halfway to a tantrum. In the end Palamedes had to promise her a swim for a whole twenty minutes before she would do anything, eat anything, or agree to anything. It was bad behaviour, but Nona had been a whole month younger. Promises made, Palamedes got to go away, saying, “Tell Cam I said it was a water cure,” to which Camilla remarked that Palamedes was an enabler. It didn’t matter to Nona. She had already got her towel and the old shirt she used to swim in—much easier to go naked, but the others had all objected to this, and Cam had said it would make her a sniper target—and her jandals, and then after masks were tied and hats put on they walked to the beach in the low dusk.
That evening they had walked around the long way, which meant it took fully half an hour to get there, but often they walked different routes to throw off anyone who might have gotten interested and tried to follow them. On this walk they ended up spending a little time by the city graveyard. All the concrete tops had been sledged open and the buried coffins had been dug up, piled high, and burned. The smoke still clung to the sides of the buildings and made Nona gag. Pyrrha had told her this was business as usual; Pyrrha said the first thing that happened was all bones got burned, whether they were moving around or not.
By the time they had gotten to the beach Nona was depressed, but it only took her feet being in the salt water to make her happy again. Camilla never came in with her. This was because there were heaps and heaps of jellyfish in the harbour, with their beautiful bodies transparent at the crown and deep indigo at the very tips, and they weren’t at all afraid to come up near to you and brush you. On Nona, this made the place they touched tingle a little, but nothing else. That was why Nona had always swum at dusk, because Cam said the jellyfish sting killed most people within minutes. The water seethed with them because the harbour was closed, and nobody was fixing the barrier nets.
Instead Cam sheltered near the concrete pillars of a jetty out of sight lines with a beat-up paperback book. It had been earlier in the spring, and night had fallen fast. There was no electric light, so she had a little torch. The first time Nona had asked to swim they had let her without cavil: she had barely known how to explain herself, then, but her hunger was so terrible that she had made them all understand. For security, Camilla had taken handfuls of rocks and sailed each one up into the centre of the lamps that shone down from the pier, with a terrific smash of plastic and the brief snappish yowl of a busted wire; and nobody had come around to fix them since. They wouldn’t have had time—the blue light had appeared in the sky soon after.
It had been high tide that night. Nona had gone wading out into the shallows immediately, picking her way over the big pockmarked rocks and the slippery seaweed clumps floating haplessly in the surf, until she was up to her thighs, the shirt billowing around her. Then she plunged into the salt water. She let herself go under and felt the huge, rocking cradle of the waves rolling her forward to the beach, nearly weeping with relief—like going to the bathroom when you were really desperate, or drinking when you were really thirsty, or hearing the door open when you were really lonely. The black water sank right down to the roots of her hair, right through the braids, and made her ears go pop as water blocked up the canals. Bubbles rippled across her face as her laugh came out as oxygen. She kicked up to the surface and her hair and her shirt floated all around her in the water, and she bobbed there, in the dark, avoiding the inviting yellow squares of light that the other jetty lamps made on the roiling surface.
Then she had clung to one of the wooden legs of the pier—bubbled all over with barnacles and crusted with salt and plastered with dried-out fans of seaweed—and watched as blue jellyfish moved about her, squirting through the water or drifting there, looking dead, until suddenly they would undulate forward in delicate blue squiggles of movement. She did get stung, but the sting only gave her pins and needles in one foot, which was soon over. She pushed off from the pillar again and into a wave, and let the tide carry her forward, slowly, to the rocky shore.
Salt water had always relieved her: salt water made her feel as though, if there was someone in there with her, she would suddenly know the words to tell them everything. The sea was so kind after a hot concrete-smelling day, and she knew the water had runoff in it but it seemed so clean anyway. The sea was a big, grinding, unchangeable machine. The only terrible part was an awful longing to let her head go below the surface, to lose all buoyancy and lie at the bottom like a flat fish. Nona didn’t want to die, but she wanted to sit in the water and drowse, which she was forced to admit was the same thing eventually.
That fatal evening she lay with her arms and legs spread out and her middle only a little submerged, shirt plastered flat to her belly and chest. She stared up at the glowing blue circle in the night sky: it crowded out the stars and looked much like an incandescent jellyfish itself, crowning in a black ocean.
Nona had been very happy when she turned around and kicked back toward the jetty and the shore, slipping among the waves and the foam and the floating plastic rings people used to keep bottles together. It felt so easy to be good when you were happy. Nona had been ready to eat as many meals as Camilla wanted her to, so long as the number was less than three. She had made it to the end of the pier and Camilla was clear in her view, and a big shock went right down her spine when she saw her: not because it was Camilla, but because she was not alone.
There was a little cluster of figures in tatty coats spread out on the beach on the side they’d come in on. Nona counted six of them. They looked black-headed, but when Nona squinted she saw that they were wearing goggles and caps or wraps around their heads. One of them was holding one of those little motorized bikes that you often saw going plut-plut down the streets of the city. It was turned off now except for the lamp, which was on full brightness. The suds and the waves filled her ears and she could not make out what anyone was saying—if they were saying anything. It was impossible to see their mouths. Easy enough to see Camilla, silhouetted in the lamp of the plut-plut bike, strung across one of the supports beneath the pier like a sinuous night animal. The beam was hot and white and bright, and Camilla hovered within it like a moth.
Nona assumed it was the police. Only the police got to have those bikes but still couldn’t afford good jackets. Each one had a shoulder holster, which meant each one had a short gun, and they stood in a kind of triangular gaggle with one right at the point before Camilla. Nobody’s guns were drawn, but the holsters were out in the open, each a kind of glittering mechanical bulge at the top of the chest.
Camilla had put her hands out in a beseeching no guns here kind of a way. The light made the wrist-strap watch on her arm glitter. She swung her legs down off her pillar to land in a little puff of sand, with one hand still raised; she rummaged around in her pocket—threw something down on the ground—backed off. One of the figures ducked forward and picked it up. Nona kept the water right up to her eyes and began to approach—made it to the next pole in the jetty, and the pole after that—but Camilla tucked her hair behind one ear, as though she was nervous, and flashed her palm out to the jetty. One thumb tucked in; four fingers spread. That was the sign to stay put.
Nona hesitated, then stayed put. There was a lot of discussion in the triangle about whatever had been picked up. It could have been a perfectly ordinary conversation, albeit a conversation between six people with guns in a triangle and one person with her hands up. Camilla was so bad at staying still: even as they talked she stretched in that cold white circle of light, one foot pressing down into the sand and then the other, slowly and deliberately and liquidly. Nona swam to the nearest pillar, found her footing on a big metal screw, and waited, buffeted by the waves and the brushing lappets of three comfortably stinging jellyfish.
She still couldn’t make out what they were saying. One of the police (?) had thrown the object back down into the sand in front of Camilla. Nona could see it better now; it was Cam’s wallet. Had they asked for papers, or something? Camilla didn’t retrieve it. Then all at once, one of the cops at the back drew their gun—Nona threw herself forward into the water—and shot. The muzzle flashed.
Camilla hadn’t fallen down. She hadn’t been hit. The bullet had gone wide past her shoulder and she hadn’t moved, hadn’t ducked, hadn’t done anything except keep her hands up. Nona kicked silently to the pillar in front, where she could hear snatches of conversation—
“—said scare her—”
“—did what y—”
“—speak House,” Camilla was saying.
The figure at the front made their mouth look different and said, exaggeratedly loudly and clearly, “Try again. Unjust Hope says—” but the waves took the rest.
Camilla said something Nona didn’t catch at all. The cop turned around and said, mouth different again, “—ut a bullet in her this time.”
The one with the gun responded, sounding garbled, but the first figure said clearly, “Get the knee. I’m sick of this—” and something else.
Nona had broken. Her only use was translating, and there she was, listening to the most important conversation that had ever been had, and she was not translating. She had surged out of the water and shrieked, “Run! They’re going to shoot you,” and instead of shooting Camilla, the cop with the gun aimed right into the dark water, and shot Nona.
It felt like someone had punched her in the shoulder—hard. Nona did as Pyrrha had taught her, and went completely limp. For a moment her shoulder felt hot and awkward, and there was a hot burst of blood over her arm, feeling weird against the cool salt water. A yellow light shot through the waves like a dropped egg, and she writhed in its silhouette briefly before deciding to sink right to the bottom. The light arced back and forth, swinging around, never finding her.
She counted to twenty, glad she had taken a big breath, waiting there at the bottom and clutching the black rocks. It was very murky. Every so often a questing jellyfish would bob into view, and she had to bat it away from her face. She thought she heard a brief report, coming thickly from far away, as though maybe someone had pushed the part of the bike that went honk. Then there were weird white lights—quick, darting, moving lights, like very small fireworks—but Nona kept what Pyrrha called firing discipline. Only at the end of the long twenty seconds did she kick away, launching herself forward along the rocky bottom until she hit one of the jetty pillars.
By that time the pain and the weird feeling were over. The bullet had gone clean through the topmost part of her arm, which was good, and there wasn’t even a hole to show where it had been. She felt a little sick, but that was all. Nona had never been shot before. She inched up the pillar until her head broke water.
The beach had gone very quiet. The plut-plut bike’s headlight still shone out in her direction, blinding her a little. As Nona’s eyes adjusted she saw Camilla, squatting on the sand. Everyone else was fanned out, lying down around her, as though they had all decided to take a schooltime nap.
Nona waded through the water, heart racing, struggling through the surf—thrashing upward through the shallows, pulling herself to stand. Her feet felt numb, but looking back that was probably the jellyfish. Each and every single person who wasn’t Camilla was down on the ground. Their unholstered guns were still clutched in their hands or scattered loosely near them. The sand underneath each one was oily black. It hadn’t been that hot, but wisps of steam curled up from the dark, wet sand.
Camilla was crouched down, wiping her knives on one of their jackets. When she looked up, Nona was electrified. One of her eyes was a pale, pearlescent grey; the other one of her eyes was a deep, cool stone colour. Nona understood in a sudden shiver what she was looking at.
“Stay calm,” said Camilla-and-Palamedes. “Five breaths, if you need it.”
Camilla-and-Palamedes’s voice was strange to her, cool and efficient, distantly kind. But Nona wasn’t angry. The air smelled strongly of smoke and burnt meat. It made her deeply unhappy and very hungry, even though she had forced down all those crackers.
“I thought if I played dead,” Nona began, and stopped, because a big lump had come into her throat. She felt stupid; she felt she was being ungrateful; when Camilla-and-Palamedes smiled that strange new person’s smile, she suddenly felt very shy.
But Camilla’s clockwork interrupted with a series of urgent beeps: the BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP of a timer alarm, faster and more panicked than the usual time’s-up sound. Camilla-Palamedes got up all of a sudden, as though they wanted to get getting up over and done with as quickly as possible, and swayed backward and forward a little. The blood on the beach was steaming. Their hands were steaming. Nona struggled forward to catch her—them—the new person; but then Camilla straightened and blinked furiously, and it was Camilla. Her eyes were pale grey again and she shuddered like herself.
