Nona the Ninth, page 12
Nona shut off the hot-water tap. It wasn’t as though she was deliberately trying to eavesdrop; she was still carefully holding the paring knife and trying to make the longest unbroken rind of soap that she could, watching flakes disappear and dissolve into white scum on the surface of the water. Her hair was itchy with sweat. She heard Palamedes say, “Oh, God, Pyrrha, just tell me.”
Pyrrha said, “In the chaos, they found some … people … to take to the park tonight.”
There was a very long silence, or else Nona couldn’t hear. Pyrrha said, “I saw them for two, three seconds. In the back of a truck. Three adults. It was dark. Said they’d taken them off the cops. One person I asked said they’d been in the barracks, another one said they’d found them wild.”
Nona couldn’t wait anymore; she ran the cold water tap before she died of being too hot, and let the water run over her wrists and her palms, like Camilla had taught her. Wrists were the best place for cooling down. That meant she only caught fragments, until Pyrrha and Palamedes helpfully made their voices louder—
“You versus two hundred motherfuckers with machine guns! Camilla versus two hundred motherfuckers with machine guns, Sextus! I know you and she are doing some ungodly tricks with soul manipulation, but what do you think you are, a damned Ly—L-word? You’re not even a fraction of one, you’re only a step in the theory. The poor fools they have probably aren’t even—”
“How many people do you leave to burn tonight, Dve?”
“You say that because you think it hurts, and because you’re frightened,” said Pyrrha coolly. “The answer, my boy, is multitudes … so long as it doesn’t include you and me and Nona. We’re all three of us in enough trouble as it is. Don’t make me repeat myself.”
“Pyrrha, they tape their arms to their sides and they put them in those cages and they douse them in petrol, in gasoline…”
“Yes, and then they set them alight, and it’s terrible, and usually somebody shoots them long before the fire takes them. There’s always some softie in the crowd, Sextus, even for zombies. And it won’t be ‘zombies.’ Listen to me. What I’ve been trying to tell you this whole night is that me and the boys combed Site C and I found nothing: no bodies, no blood, none of your people. No sign they were even kept there by Edenites. This is the public taking it out on a couple of poor bastards they pick up who are insane, or drug-addled, or who said the wrong thing and gave someone a wonderful opportunity to get them out the way. You know that’s been the vast majority of the cage deaths since the initial flush. Even if it is one of yours then Number Seven’ll have them so out of their tree that they’ll hardly notice when—”
“This isn’t about House loyalty,” said Palamedes quietly. “It’s about three people being burnt to death.”
There was a big silence. Nona made a number of tiny noises, cleaning the paring knife, cleaning her hands, making sure Pyrrha’s towel was dry.
Pyrrha said, “Keep Camilla home tonight. I’ll call it quits for the cigs.”
Palamedes said, “Do you know she has a half sister? Did she tell you? It’s not my secret to tell. They’re quite fond of each other. Camilla’s ten years younger. Kiki’s a member of Oversight Body, junior fellow. She was one of the group that came to negotiate with Ctesiphon Wing.”
“I didn’t know that, no,” said Pyrrha.
“Alongside fifteen other of the finest minds of my House,” said Palamedes. “Led here by my conviction and Camilla’s hand. My colleagues, my friends. My family … The people they put in cages will be someone’s family, someone’s friends.”
“Keep—Camilla—home—tonight,” said Pyrrha. “That is all I am saying. Keep her home. No heroics. I’m not moved by sentiment. Whatever it takes. Don’t feel. Just do.”
“Tonight I hate almost all the human race,” said Palamedes wearily.
“That’s a feeling,” said Pyrrha brutally. “Kill it.”
Palamedes did not seem to notice when Nona crept back into the kitchen, drying her hands on her front; he had ducked into the bedroom. It was just Pyrrha, peeling her bloodied shirt off and putting it in the sink to soak; Pyrrha with her naked chest so moth-eaten with scars that even Camilla and Palamedes couldn’t guess the cause of. Nona always felt soft and tender when she saw Pyrrha with her shirt off, and liked to rest her head on her back, between her prominent shoulder blades. But tonight she just said humbly: “Can I go into the corridor for five minutes?”
Pyrrha raised one eyebrow. “Does Cam let you do that?”
“No—but I just want to sit outside number three-oh-two. They play the radio, and we don’t have one.”
“Sounds harmless. What’s Camilla’s objection?”
“She says they’re maniacs.”
“Go. Take five. I won’t tell her if you don’t get shot,” said Pyrrha.
Nona unlatched the door and tiptoed outside, even though she had been granted permission. The desire to listen to the radio at number 302 was only a mild blind. She knew that if she hung around the question of the remaining mouthful would come back into play, and she wanted a moment to walk by herself and think by herself. The corridor lights were dimmed and the cool linoleum under her bare feet felt sticky with each step, and condensation left perfect Nona-shaped footprints on the squares as she went.
The windows were all blinded and boarded, so she could not crack one and get a breath of fresh air, but she lolled outside number 302. The radio was on, and was playing something mournful she could not really translate; Nona always found listening to the radio much harder to understand, with no mouth and no eyes. She sat there in the moist dim corridor night, thinking escapeful thoughts. She wondered if she quite had the bottle to go down the stairwell and down to the garage and check to see if anyone she knew was down there; but that felt like more of a betrayal than she wanted to truck with.
Outside number 302 she found a window that had only been taped up most of the way and peeled it off just a little bit more with her fingertips. The sun had set. The nighttime light was blue from the sphere that hung over the city, and she let the light touch her eyes and her lips and felt better for it.
This was a secret that Nona kept from Pyrrha and Camilla and Palamedes, almost the only one she kept from them, but one too beautiful to tell. She knew the luminous sphere hanging above the city, high in space, had kicked off all the riots, and was making everyone scream, and had caused the siege in the port, and made people throw themselves in front of buses, and made everyone say the end of the world was coming soon. It was making everybody’s lives horrible, and it had given Palamedes and Camilla the same grave, pensive expression, and Pyrrha slapped on an extra nicotine patch every time the fog burned away and it hung like a great blue ball in the sky.
But Nona loved the blue sphere as much as she loved everything else. She, and nobody else, could hear it sing.
“Good night, Varun,” she said.
When she tiptoed back down the corridor—the whole building seemed still tonight, as though it were tucked into a dark corner hoping nobody would notice it—she opened the door as quietly as she could. There was nobody in the front room. Nona heard the slopping sounds of Pyrrha in the bath. She walked on the balls of her feet to the bedroom, and she found Camilla in front of the recorder with the single lamp on—Camilla with her arms clasped around her knees, her chin sunk down to the tops of her thighs, staring greyly out into space.
Nona lay down on the mattress. She felt very tired and sad all of a sudden, seeing Camilla tired and Camilla sad. On some impulse she opened her arms, and Camilla unexpectedly lay down next to her and crawled inside them—not quite letting Nona hold her, but letting Nona put an arm around her, putting an arm around Nona in return. It was hot, but Nona didn’t mind.
“Cam,” Nona whispered.
“What’s up?”
“I could go to the park for you,” whispered Nona, desperately trying to sort through the words, say the correct thing, communicate the right desire. “I could help … really. You know what happens when I get hurt. That’s got to be worth something.”
Camilla said, “Is that your plan? Getting hurt?”
“Well, it might freak them out,” said Nona. “And I’m not scared of dying. Really truly, Cam, I’m not…”
“Why not?” said Camilla.
Nona thought about it. “Because I like letting go of the pull-up bars and falling off,” she said. “I don’t like the part just before you let go and I don’t like the part where you hit the floor, but I like the letting go.”
“I don’t let go,” said Camilla. “It’s my one thing.”
Nona was amazed at that—the idea that Camilla, who could do so much and do it so fluently, could sum herself up as having one thing. Amazed too, a little, that anyone might not love the weightlessness when your fingers slipped off the metal and you hung, unsuspended, in midair. Camilla’s hand wound itself around the end of her braid and held it, as though to find some kind of leash or safety rope, as though Nona really might fall.
She was half-asleep by the time Pyrrha finished with her bath (and rinsed the bath down twice); this meant it was Nona’s turn to take a bath, so she undressed herself half-asleep and would have been all the way asleep in the water once she got in if Camilla hadn’t been there saying, every so often, “Not yet.” Which kept her awake, because it would have been terrifically stupid to drown at this point.
She was three-quarters unconscious pulling on the shirt she slept in, and stumbled out of the bathroom but didn’t quite get it all the way so that Pyrrha had to say, “Tits, Nona, don’t give Camilla a heart attack,” which jolted her awake enough to lie down on the mattress and rebutton her shirt from the bottom. She reached nearly all the way up before she fell deeply and completely asleep.
JOHN 5:18
IN THE DREAM, night had fallen, or what she assumed was night. They were lying atop the hill they had climbed and he was pointing out all the constellations that they would be able to see if it weren’t for the thick green cloud and the softly falling flakes of ash. They were lying head-to-head, their eyes aimed at the right part of the sky to see, or in this case not see, the Southern Cross. The stars were sweet and familiar, but she did not know their names, though they seemed to be at the tip of her tongue. She asked him why it was called the Southern Cross. He said that was just one name for it, but the stars were in a cruciform pattern and it was only visible from the southern hemisphere. He said when he was little he’d been taught it was the anchor of a ship. He still preferred that, he said. Liked the idea that the Milky Way was pinned down and couldn’t go anywhere. Said when he was a kid he hated change, any change at all.
She had quite liked change—mostly. But he did not want to dwell on that. So she asked him about the fingers trick, and he was happier to talk about why it had upset everyone so much.
He said, Keep this in mind: it was the first time anyone had ever done it. You couldn’t explain it away. There were no strings or magnets. No illusion of the witch or whatever. I could repeat it for anyone who wanted to walk in and deal with M— dry-retching in the corner. And I did. Everyone had to come watch, the whole gang. And by then …
He said, By then it was easy. By then I had Titania and Ulysses sitting up. By the end of the day they were walking around with me, sitting down when I sat or standing when I stood. It gave the others the absolute shits. Again, I didn’t mean to be a creep. I just wanted them close so I could look after them—it seemed so important. And A— was right, I wasn’t operating on a lot of food or sleep.
He said, Everyone had a big fight over what it meant. C— and G— took it fine. Funny in hindsight that they were the ones who were the least weirded out. C— had been raised little-England Anglican and G— ’s grandparents who raised him had been religious as hell, White Sunday and suit and tie for church, that kind of thing. It was M— who couldn’t take it. M— had been hard atheist since she was twelve. But she got over it; she was a walking contradiction anyway. Her best friend in the whole world was a nun. Also, at some point A— gave her a benzo and a shot of whiskey, so that helped.
He said, But you know what? They wanted to believe. All of them. We all wanted a miracle. Everyone wants to believe that God’s randomly made them one of the X-Men. We all thought of you right away, what it could mean for you. P— was worried that this was some kind of zombie apocalypse, but Titania and Ulysses weren’t zombies. They were … extensions. Constructions without a soul. They hadn’t woken up, they hadn’t resurrected in that sense of the word. Their bodies moved when I wanted them to move. And then I stopped having to hold the strings—I could say, Go here, or, Go there, and they’d go like I’d programmed them to. You had to make sure you told them to stop, or they’d keep walking into things. It wasn’t like they could talk or bite you, you know? I wished they could’ve. But they were just me.
For a moment they were both silent, brushing ash off their faces, their hair. It was falling thick and fast like snow. They took shelter beneath a burnt-out tree and watched the ash hump up against the rocks and branches. Some of it got in their mouths.
After a moment, he said: I knew it was fine. I knew I’d touched something, come away with something, that could be used for good. Could be used to fix everything, used for you. I only had to figure out how. There was so much to figure out. But I’d got a dream team on tap, eh? People who could think. C—’s N—, she was on board. C— was still pretending they weren’t dating—she was an artist, so that was cool. If you have two scientists and an engineer and a detective and a lawyer and an artist you’re pretty much sweet as. Sounds like the start of a joke, right? Two scientists, an engineer, a detective, a lawyer, and an artist walk into a bar to help me become God.
He said: They put me through my paces. I was exhausted all the time. We all came up with trials to figure out what I could do, what I couldn’t do. There was too much to go on. We figured out early that what really helped was if I was near the dead bodies, if I was in the facility. Back then we thought maybe there was something about the ground, something about our particular patch in the Wairarapas, but if we loaded up the ute with a bunch of bodies and looked out for the cops we could do the same thing anywhere else. The corpses were what mattered. They were my batteries.
He said, So of course, what do M— and A— do, they go raid a fucking graveyard. I was pissed off with them about that. So was P— but, like, mainly because it was illegal and she had to cover it up. But that proved it wasn’t that we had a load of specific magical corpses on our hands. I could take a body that had been dead for twenty years and do the same thing. Can’t believe we didn’t get caught.
He said, At that point we knew that was the biggest risk: getting caught. Getting hushed up. Getting flown to some government facility in America. Or weaponised—given to another group of stakeholders or bought by another magnate son of a bitch. I guess we’d seen too many movies. We assumed that we’d all go missing. Get disappeared. Get used for evil.
He said, So we figured that what we had to do was make as big a noise as humanly possible, turn to the public. Find out if anyone else was like me, if there was someone out there who could do the same thing. And there was a way we could do just that. It was a different time back then. I didn’t want to do it. It felt too—kill switch, too awful to contemplate. Too grisly. Too shitty. But it was the only trick we had up our sleeves.
He sighed and said, “We had the internet. We decided to stream.”
She said, “What is this internet?”
And he said, “See, I did make a utopia.”
DAY THREE
A VISIT—CROWN TAKES NONA TO SCHOOL—IMPORTANT NEWS—HOT SAUCE AND NONA HAVE AN ADVENTURE—THE TWO PRINCES—THREE DAYS UNTIL THE TOMB OPENS.
11
THE NEXT MORNING CAMILLA pushed the button and said, “Start.”
Nona did not close her eyes this time, but stared hard at the black mould marks on the ceiling, as though for inspiration, and began: “I’m holding something down in the water. It’s the same water, the good water. But whatever I’m holding doesn’t want to stay down, it keeps coming back. To the surface, I mean.”
“What are you holding?”
“The girl with the painted face.”
“Tell me about the girl.”
“She’s under the water. She’s not drowning, she’s lying there. Her eyes are closed, I think. The water’s cloudy. But then there’s the arms still around me … I think. I’m mixing parts up.”
“Show me where.”
Nona wriggled around in an attempt to embrace herself: she rolled over frontways on the mattress and attempted to get one arm slung over her neck, the other over her waist. Camilla said to these efforts, “Demonstrate on me.”
Delighted at the opportunity, Nona immediately sat up—ignoring the brief wave of dizziness—and wound her arms around Camilla. She paused halfway and said, “It’s a bit—are you sure?” and Camilla said, “You’ve shown me before. Show me again.”
Nona concentrated on how it felt in the dream, as strange and multibodied as it was: she was good at the hand and the mouth, she was good at this, but she hesitated. She said, “I can’t do it by myself,” and took Camilla’s arms. She put Camilla’s hand on her hip, put Camilla’s other hand on her other hip, splayed her fingers, said, “More. No—there,” as Camilla kept up, then reached out to Camilla—like she was drowning; like she wanted to drown. It was nice to be this close to Camilla. Camilla’s hands on her were a little clinical, a little unsure.
“Okay,” said Camilla, once they were locked in this clinch. “Anything else?”
“No. Was that useful?”
“Everything’s useful.”
Camilla detached one hand from Nona’s hip to reach out and depress the button of the recorder, but kept the other in place. Nona liked seeing Camilla up close: liked seeing the lines of her collarbone through the unbuttoned part of her shirt, the naked parts of her arms, her ears. Camilla was so sweetly handsome and good. Nona always wanted to be close to her. Pyrrha said it was puppy love, but Nona knew that puppy love was different, it just made you want to open the puppy’s lips and play with the puppy’s teeth.
