Nona the Ninth, page 11
She said, a little hoarsely, but in quite normal Camilla tones: “Not your fault.” Then she equally normally set to putting her knives away—sticking them in the bands down her thighs, inside her trousers—and normally seeing that made Nona want to laugh, but that night she felt as though she might vomit instead, which would have added insult to injury.
Camilla said, “Shoulder?” She didn’t sound angry at all, but strangely quiet and tight.
“It’s fine—I’m fine. Cam, what did you do?”
“No questions. They didn’t have silencers. We need to go. Get the bike.”
Nona wasn’t able to help herself. She burst out with, “What did they want?”
“Intel. They were Merv Wing. Turn the lights off.”
The spotlight was still shining out over the ocean like a very small moon. Nona righted the plut-plut bike and turned off the headlight, which left the beach blue and cold. She kept looking at the fallen cops—at their necks and at their chests—but Camilla gently drew her chin up and away, urging her forward, putting the towel around her wet shoulders. It felt nice and dry and scratchy. Nona mechanically wheeled the bike over the sand. Cam threw down her jandals and she squeezed her feet into them, the sand gritty on the bottoms of her heels.
Camilla didn’t say anything. She had zipped up her dark jacket even though the night was still warm, and Nona thought she understood; she was cold too, colder than she ought to have been even when wet. Camilla kept her arms folded tight over her chest as though she was thinking. Nona was too sodden with regret and self-hatred and sea water to think anything but that Cam must have been very angry with her for calling out, and so she was blind to the truth of the situation until they wheeled the bike off the ramp and weaved it through the poles that were meant to prevent you bringing bikes onto the beach and Camilla suddenly staggered to a halt. She leant hard against the wall and shuddered. Nona nearly dropped the bike.
“Cam?”
“Towel,” said Camilla, very calmly. And: “Don’t scream.”
Nona was about to be indignant, but then Cam unzipped her jacket, and she nearly screamed. Cam’s thin cotton top was sodden with blood. The tops of her pants and her whole jacket were already black and wet from spray, so it hadn’t really showed the blood coming through. The worst part was that the blood was coming from everywhere, with no wounds, or bullet holes, or stab marks. It was coming out of her skin.
Cam rubbed the towel down both of her arms, briskly. The towel came away bright red. “Blood sweat,” she said, unsteadily.
“Get Palamedes,” was all Nona could think to say. “Get Palamedes— he can fix it.”
“No,” said Camilla. Nona noticed that her lips had gone the same colour as the skin around them, a sort of ashen rosy brown, instead of either skin or lips being normal. Cam’s voice was still very even and calm, but it was quiet, and came out strangely punctuated as she took in breaths. “He can’t. Not this. Make it worse.”
“But—”
“Get us home,” said Camilla. “You can do it. On the bike.”
The bike! Yet it was not to be borne that Nona would say, “But my car sickness”; if Camilla said anyone could do anything, they could do it. It was not the kind of thing she said often, or at all. It was more buoyed by the sucker-punch of Camilla’s belief than through her own confidence—she suddenly needed to go to the bathroom, which Palamedes always said was her displacement activity—that Nona got on the bike. Her courage had nearly failed her when Camilla got behind her and wrapped her arms around Nona’s middle, very tightly. Nona had realised then that Cam was worried about falling off.
Even thinking about it now, how Nona drove Cam through those black streets she did not know—ignoring all the traffic signals, slowing down laboriously to turn into the little side alleys, the lone truck breaking curfew that chugged along the street next to her like a massive animal of hot wind and noise—but she did, and it took both forever and no time at all. Camilla was very warm and solid behind her with her arms unflinchingly tight. She never released the grip, which was nice until Nona realised that half the warmth was the blood seeping through the towel. She was about to guide the bike into the garage beneath the Building before Cam said, “Dump it. Here,” in a voice barely more than a whisper.
Here was behind a big rubbish cache next to the Building. Cam stood herself against the wall and Nona wheeled it into the gap behind the cache and the wall, then covered the gap up with boxes. She was pleased with the neatness of it until she came back to Camilla and saw the deathly pallor of her face: the stillness that was not Palamedes, but Camilla conserving all of her blood for silence. In the black nighttime of that alley the towel around Camilla’s middle was black with blood, and the sea water and blood had dried on Nona’s clothes. She put Camilla’s arm around her shoulders and they crept into the garage, each breath from Cam’s mouth high and tight. It was so strange to hear Camilla breathing at all.
Somehow they made it up the stairs—of course the elevator didn’t work—and Nona was almost too slippery and panicky to knock. When Pyrrha opened the door all Nona was able to say was, pitifully, “No, no, no,” like the baby she had been: but what a relief it was at the time, to give things over to Pyrrha. Pyrrha had carried Camilla to bed in her big brown arms like Cam weighed nothing, was less than Nona. Pyrrha said, “What happened?” and Nona told her, and Pyrrha wasn’t even angry, but when Nona told her about Cam’s eyes she looked at Nona and said a completely new swear word. It was such an unusual swear word that later on Nona was able to swop it to Honesty for five whole cigarettes, he was that impressed.
Pyrrha sat down with Cam’s head in her lap and pinched her awake, and then made her drink little sips of water. Cam’s eyes were almost closed, like an animal’s when they weren’t quite asleep.
The water brought her around a little. Pyrrha kept saying, low and steady, “Don’t black out, kid. You’re in thanergy shock. Stay awake, come on.” After about five minutes of that treatment, Cam’s eyes opened all the way, and she drank the rest of the water mostly on her own. She let Nona give her a painkiller, but just a cap, not a needle.
In the end Pyrrha said in a calm, dead voice— “You can’t do that ever again, Hect, never. Synthesis is a one-way ticket—I walked the Eightfold, I should damn well know. I’d give Palamedes the hiding of his fucking life if he wasn’t renting an ass with you.”
Camilla, cradled in Pyrrha’s arms, with all the towels bright red, looked up at Pyrrha like Nona wasn’t even in the room. Her eyes were chill and grey and gleaming. She whispered—
“Don’t tell him I was weak.”
“He’s going to know, Hect. You’re killing each other.”
“It’s our choice.”
“He’s going to ask.”
“Do what you’re good at,” said Camilla. “Lie.”
“Hect, you’re not listening. It’s killing him too—”
“It was good,” said Camilla, and her eyes closed. “It was good. We were happy.”
Pyrrha stayed put until Camilla fell asleep. The expression on her face was one Nona had never seen her wear before. Nona stayed too, except to go occasionally to the bathroom out of prolonged stress. Finally Pyrrha told Nona to go make up her bed next to Pyrrha’s on the fold-out part of the couch, and when Nona asked if Camilla was going to be all right, Pyrrha said—
“No.”
But when she saw the expression on Nona’s face she put on a smile—produced one, like she would produce sweets or coins or little magazines—and said, “Don’t worry about it, junior. I don’t mean we’re going to find her dead in the morning.”
Then she had gone to the kitchen and poured herself a little glass of clear grain alcohol. She crossed to the taped-up window, bottle and glass in hand. To Nona’s awe, she twitched the blackout curtains aside—stood bathed in the hyper-blue light from the sky as Nona held her breath—and she said to the window, “Here’s to Camilla Hect, yet another of devotion’s casualties,” and knocked back the glass.
Then she said to the light, quite gently, “No, I don’t blame you, man … He was always looking for things to throw himself on.”
Then Pyrrha settled down on the bed she had extended for Nona and knocked back two more little glasses of alcohol. She let Nona taste a little bit of the second glass when Nona asked, but Nona thought it was awful: it tasted like petrol and felt like sunburn. When she lay down, she kept wiping her lips to take the taste away.
“If Cam’s fine,” she said, “why did you just say goodbye to her?”
“How’d you know it was goodbye?” When Nona opened her mouth, Pyrrha said: “Don’t answer that. Go to sleep.” And after that, there had been no more swimming.
10
GOING TO THE BEACH THOUGH, if there was still lots of light and plenty of people, was another matter. Nona tried her luck.
“No beach,” said Cam, drying dishes at the sink. “I didn’t like the city today. Two people got shot in the centre while I was there. Someone else got dragged out of the river.”
“Drowned?”
“Strangled. Neck snapped—all the way around.”
“Gross,” said Nona. And, struck by an idea: “Cam—can’t I go back to school for the evening?”
“School? Why?”
Nona tried to think up a really intelligent and persuasive reason. “Hot Sauce is worried about something,” she said. “She said someone was watching the classroom and she wouldn’t tell me about it. I want to make sure they’re all okay.”
It wasn’t that Camilla didn’t take this seriously: she could see right away that Cam had taken it a little too seriously. Her dark brows drew together a fraction, and she placed another plate in the rack, and one of her legs folded up beneath her so that she was standing on one leg and resting the other foot at the top of that thigh. “Not in the dark,” she said. “Not after the gunfire today.”
“But it’s not dark yet. And the sky’s always sort of light now.”
“It’ll be dark enough by the time school’s over.”
Nona grew desperate.
“But I’m a Teacher’s Aide. I’ve got a responsibility.”
“I know,” said Camilla, lowering the foot, then raising the other. “It’s also your responsibility to keep yourself safe. Responsibilities clash.”
Nona felt hot and cross.
“It’s hard to feel responsible for the other two people I might be,” she said, knowing she sounded crabby and not knowing how not to. “I don’t know them. But I feel very responsible for Hot Sauce and Honesty and Ruby and Born and even Kevin, and I’ve only got so much time, you know. Maybe the other two people I am would feel incredibly responsible for Hot Sauce and the others too, Cam.”
“Oh, one of them, definitely,” said Camilla. “And maybe the other. I don’t mean you’ve got a responsibility to them. You have a responsibility to me and the Warden and to Pyrrha.”
In desperation, Nona flung herself down on the soft mat on the floor she and Cam had been using for stretches.
“Cam, responsibility just means you can’t ever do anything you think is really important.”
“Yes,” said Cam simply. And: “Let’s stop waiting for Pyrrha and go pick up dinner.”
They walked to the fish shop so that Nona could look longingly at the ocean, and listened to the fishmonger explain the latest about the port riots so that Nona could later translate for Cam. Nice girls with no guns needed to stay inside, urged the fishmonger. The space elevator had gotten breached about an hour ago because too many loyalist soldiers had been rerouted to the barracks siege, and the old workers had busted through with a key card trying to hijack a shuttle off-world. Most of them had been shot, and there were no shuttles there anyway. There were no shuttles anymore.
When Nona relayed this to Camilla, she said: “Hope Pyrrha takes the back roads.”
“Will Pyrrha be okay, Cam?”
“Pyrrha’s a survivor,” said Camilla.
But she let Nona slip her hand into hers and they walked shoulder to shoulder all the way home, with the plastic foam container of spicy rice and oily fish hot and steamy in the crook of Nona’s arm. It had been very cheap; people weren’t eating the harbour fish, because they said that the blue light got into them. They said the blue light got into the air too, and they wore masks for that, though Palamedes said that was nonsense. Cam ate most of the fish and rice as Nona picked at the edges, and then there was all the fruit they hadn’t eaten for afters. Nona’s plate was left still mostly full, despite one genuine effort to eat and two not-so-genuine ones where she faked it.
“You can eat three more mouthfuls, or two and drink some water,” said Camilla inflexibly.
“But I’ve eaten so much today.”
“You ate gruel and a sausage roll.”
“But I’m full, I’m really full.”
“Have you been eating sand again?”
“I haven’t eaten sand in months,” Nona protested, then more truthfully: “Weeks,” and more truthfully than that: “One week.”
Nona eventually took the deal where she drank a glass of water and ate two more mouthfuls; as it turned out though, she never had to eat the second, because the special knock sounded—five short, two long, which they changed often—and Cam unlocked and unbarred the door for Pyrrha.
Pyrrha looked terrible. Her deep skin was powdered with concrete dust and shiny with smoke, splotched with rusty patches on the front that it took Nona a moment to realise were blood. She reeked of petrol and sweat. Cam recognised the red stuff immediately and started trying to check Pyrrha over, tugging at her overalls, her arms—Pyrrha said swiftly, “It’s not mine,” and dropped into one of the chairs at the kitchen table.
Nona got up and went to pour her a glass of ice water from the covered jug. Pyrrha said, “Thanks, Nums,” and drained the whole thing. Nona, fascinated, watched the brown column of her throat move as she swallowed. There was already a fine dark rust of stubble beneath her chin, amid the dust and the dirt, and when Pyrrha caught her looking, she felt there with her hand and said, laughing, “I know, I know … Gideon always had a five o’clock shadow at three o’clock. Sextus, can’t you fix it? If you kick the sebaceous glands back a notch you can interrupt the hair cycle. Quick injection of thanergy below the root’ll freeze the growth.”
Pyrrha’s eyes were hot and shiny and her pupils blown wide. Nona hadn’t even seen Cam and Palamedes switch. Palamedes was busy rolling up one of Pyrrha’s sleeves, examining a slimy patch of scabbing-over blood, and he said briskly: “No thanks. I had the joy of working on a … on a body like yours, the once, and I don’t want to repeat the process for anything smaller than a brain haemorrhage. What hit this forearm?”
“Vehicle shrapnel. They were taking pot shots at the police, and the police took pot shots back, with a munitions launcher.” Pyrrha held the glass out beseechingly to Nona; Nona went and refilled it. “Don’t worry. I squatted in a public bathroom and forked everything out myself. It’s mostly closed up already.”
“Did you…?”
“Saved who I could, left the rest to be buried,” said Pyrrha. “Or burned. Lots of ’em were burning. Couldn’t do anything for them … People notice when you don’t burn, is the thing. There was an audience. Others have been killed for less.”
Palamedes said nothing; he pushed at a pair of glasses that didn’t exist, made a noise of annoyance, and swept his hand lightly over the arm. Nona, fascinated, watched the blood peel away and frizzle to nothing, leaving a long zigzag of clean open meat on Pyrrha’s arm that was wrinkling shut as they watched.
Nona said, “Was it the port riot? Were you there?”
“You heard about that, kiddie? No,” said Pyrrha. “It’s just aftershocks. I was on that side of the city, is all.”
Palamedes said, “Is it finally kicking off?”
“Not yet.” Pyrrha curled her arm inward, examining the disappearing wound, and took the cool glass from Nona’s hands. Her fingers had left dirty fingerprints on the glass. “I know that sounds ridiculous, but not yet. Even though they’re chucking bombs at the cops and yelling shit about No deals, no lords, no zombies, and Cops love zombie money. When it kicks off, nobody will be yelling anything. This is anger, not fear. False labour pains … Do they still do gravid carry where you come from?”
“On the Sixth, only for research,” said Palamedes.
“I helped at a birth once. There’s a lot of noise and run-up before the real thing happens.” Pyrrha necked the second glass of water all the way down and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand before she could think better of it. When she saw the result, she grimaced. Nona fetched a damp cloth without being asked so that Pyrrha could start to clean up. “This has been a shit day … I’m having a cigarette. I’ll smoke it out the window.”
Nona froze, but Palamedes said calmly, “No good; Cam sold them. Said they were our most liquid asset.”
She expected Pyrrha to get very sarcastic. Pyrrha didn’t yell, ever, but Nona experienced so much yelling among her friends that she deeply preferred it. Pyrrha just sighed, deeply.
“How much did she get?”
“Maybe a third of what they were worth.”
“What an entirely haunted time to be alive,” said Pyrrha. “Nona, my sweet, can you draw me a bath? My filth’s got filth.”
Nona sprinted to the bath and put the plug in the plughole and dutifully started grating the soap bar into fine, dusty flakes to put in the hot water, not even minding leaning over the sweaty hot-water tap; but she pricked up her ears when she heard, in the other room, Palamedes saying softly, “I’m going to let Camilla look you over. Tell her what you told me,” and Pyrrha saying, “Wait a moment, Warden. Wait. I want you to hear this first … not Hect. I need you to stop Hect, okay? I need you to hold her back.”
