Nona the Ninth, page 14
“I’ll tell them to use the plastic ties for you next time,” said Crown, once Nona had withdrawn and was working the tape painfully away from her wrists, where it took all the hairs off and reddened the skin. “Your turn, Camilla— Oh!”
For Camilla’s bonds were already gone, even though both her arms had been taped squarely to her thighs. She must have used the very secret knife. Crown’s mouth tightened. Camilla was peeling the last remnant away, not making eye contact. All she said was, “Where’d you put Pyrrha?”
“The others only deal with the Saint after he’s scanned. You know that,” said Crown.
“She’s not a Lyctor.”
“Not everyone’s got that clearance. And it’s not like you know the whole picture either.”
“She isn’t hiding anything.”
“You don’t believe that,” said Crown.
Camilla fell silent. Then she said, “You’re still wearing the sword.”
This seemed to put Crown back on more comfortable ground. “Of course. Makes me think of home.”
“You’re not even wearing it for anyone.”
Crown said, smiling, “I didn’t take you for a traditionalist. I don’t have to wear it for anyone. Anyway … it’s an aesthetic.”
“It doesn’t belong to you.”
“I’ll give it back if its owner asks, but otherwise, finders keepers,” said Crown lightly. “You sound like the Captain, you know.”
“They haven’t put her down yet?”
If this was meant to hurt Crown’s feelings too, it didn’t appear to hit very hard. She said cheerfully, “If I haven’t put a pillow over her face, they won’t anytime soon.”
“Won’t be a pillow,” said Camilla. “It’ll be head and hands off and the burn cage at the park.”
A silvery laugh. “Ooh, she’d love that. Head and hands, like a Cohort martyr. Can you imagine? Can’t you just hear her say, ‘I regret that I have only one life to give’?”
“You sound like your sister.”
“Do I?” Now Crown sounded gratified. “Thanks. I could use some of her gravitas, honestly. I always think I sound too flighty for command … I feel like a schoolgirl every time I give a briefing. Everyone else around here feels so old, even if they’re three years my junior.”
Camilla said, “Are you trying to disgust me, or yourself?”
Another laugh. “Because you know me so well, sweetling—”
“I don’t know you, Coronabeth,” said Camilla. “I don’t know you at all anymore.”
They fell silent. After a while Crown said, quietly and somehow more truthfully, “It’s good to see you, even if you don’t feel the same,” but Camilla didn’t say anything to that either, only rubbed her wrists where the tape had been. Nona’s skin was already back to its nice normal colour, and the fine dark hairs on her forearms had regrown themselves. Camilla’s skin still looked red and sore.
Crown said, “They’re probably finished now. Don’t worry so much. The Cell Commander wants to see you in private this morning. This isn’t official … just a chat.”
“I’m missing school right now,” said Nona, reminded of her grief. “I’m a Teacher’s Aide, Crown, and there’s lots of stuff going on.”
“You’ve got to skip sometimes, or they won’t know how much they need you,” advised Crown, smiling—but Nona could tell she didn’t sympathise that much. There was a worry pucker right in the centre of her forehead, and it wasn’t a worry pucker for Nona. “I could write you a note.”
Camilla said, “I am no longer interested in whatever the Cell Commander has to say.”
“I know,” said Crown—and there was that worry pucker again. “I know. But try, Camilla … I know you refuse to see it anymore, but We Suffer’s on your side. We’re not the hardliners. We want the same things you do.”
“You really don’t,” said Cam.
Camilla reached down into her shirt pocket to take out a hard-shell case. She retrieved the pair of worn dark glasses with big smoked lenses, and slid them up the bridge of her nose. Nona didn’t like the way they looked on her face: they made her look like one of the people who would sit in the back of an armoured truck with shiny rifles covered in blazes of orange tape, chewing bubble gum, waiting to get hired by people who wanted to go shoot something up but didn’t have enough friends to scare the militia. Hiring them cost a little bit more than bread. They whistled at you if you had gone swimming and were wearing damp shorts and still drying your hair, and Camilla didn’t stop them the way she stopped other people. When Nona asked why Palamedes said he had made Camilla promise to never stop them, never get their attention, never make a fuss. He said Nona needed to do the same. He said for one thing they only had so many towels at home.
Crown murmured, all her annoyance gone, “Be careful, Sixth, We Suffer’s not stupid,” but Camilla just said—
“Let’s get this over with. I had things to do today.”
“You have no idea” was all Crown said, mysteriously.
Nona had been to “debriefings,” which were always extraordinarily strange and uncomfortable, and they always escorted you to the bathroom nearly into the cubicle, which was hell. But they had never been seen in private before. Crown led them down unfamiliar corridors until they reached the usual long, dusty corridor they always walked down, and the room they were always led to—the tall narrow room dominated by one long table, covered in wood veneer and cracked in several places, though very clean. There were still pens and loose scraps of paper on the table, as there always were, which gave you the feeling that you were walking into a meeting right as the last one had ended. The ceiling was multi-holed ventilation panelling of a type Nona longed to throw pencils at, to see if they would stick in the holes. The only decoration was a series of portraits, clustered at the far end of the table.
The portraits were of people from the shoulders up. There were little shelves inset at the bottom of each frame where people had left flowers, dried or plastic, and long burnt-out joss sticks in little glasses, or coins that didn’t look like any kind of legal tender Nona ever handed over in return for a bottle of milk. What distinguished most of the portraits was that they were paintings, and very old, all except for one: a photograph of a woman with ferociously red hair and an expression that said she was about to hit the photographer. She blossomed out of a thicket of dusty plastic flowers more numerous than those her painted associates got.
Pyrrha was sitting in the special chair they always got out for Pyrrha. It was a hard chair made of bent metal tubing and scratchy matte plastic pads, and they always strapped a thing to her neck that made soft klik … klik sounds whenever she moved her head back and forth. This was because if Pyrrha made too many sudden movements it would blow out her spinal column automatically. It made a soft klik as Pyrrha turned back her head to look at them: she had been staring at the portrait of the lady who looked as though she were about to hit the photographer.
There was another klik, more of a click, as the door locked behind them. This startled Nona; she hadn’t seen anyone walking with them and Crown down the corridor. Crown didn’t seem to care, but Camilla tensed up.
There were people already in the room when they got there, dressed the way Blood of Eden always dressed. Nona was forever amazed by their get-up. Everyone she ever met at the meetings covered their heads like they were in a dust storm, and wore masks that varied wildly—gas masks and surgery masks and festival masks with teeth drawn on, and welder’s goggles that covered the eyes, and dark glasses that let you see in the nighttime—everyone had visored eyes and swathed themselves in layers of fabric so that it was hard to tell what lay beneath. When they talked, their voices sounded flat and muffled, or breathy and tinny if they were wearing gas apparatuses. Some people with bigger masks had voices that did not sound like any voice that had ever come out of anyone. Palamedes had said they were using tech to hide what they sounded like.
Usually there were a dozen people like this at the meetings; today there were only two.
It was easy to tell which person was the more important. They were sat right in front of the portrait, haloed by that thicket of plastic flowers. A kind of bodyguard stood a little to their left, a long gun slung over their back and a big machete strapped to each thigh. Nona used to think that was cool, but Camilla said it was completely stupid and not cool at all. Palamedes then said Cam was a big hypocrite. The two-thigh-machetes person had their face obscured with an air cleanser toggle mask and welder’s goggles, which made them look quite frightening to Nona, like a monster picture. Two-Thigh-Machetes was hooded and wore a long jacket and gloves, so not one bit of their true self was visible.
The sitting person was less frightening in a white mask, the kind they had a box of at home, and quite ordinary black goggles and a deep black hood. You couldn’t see any forehead or ears, or any skin at all. This was the commander. In heavily accented House she said, “Please sit.”
The soft panel lights at the sides of the room had been dimmed, which made the overdressed visages sitting with them at the table all the more indistinct and weird. It also made Crown’s beautiful face more beautiful, lending her eyes a softness and her laughing mouth a tenderness that bright light sometimes took away. Camilla and Nona sat down at the very end of the table and Crown sat on Nona’s left. Camilla took one of the click pens from the table in front of her and rolled it between her fingers very slowly, making it flip from knuckle to knuckle, her hips angled forward on the chair.
Crown pressed one hand to her chest in a formal salute and said, “Crown Him with Many Crowns Thy Full Gallant Legions He Found It in Him to Forgive, representing Ctesiphon-3, acknowledges We Suffer and We Suffer of Ctesiphon-1. Troia cell reporting in, Cell Commander.”
“Let’s not be so formal. I have had three emergency meetings today and I am pretending this is, how you say, a coffee break,” said We Suffer and We Suffer. “This is … a personal discussion. So please consider all information here limited to Troia cell, not to be mentioned in outside chitchat.”
“Have you checked the room for bugs?” asked Pyrrha pleasantly.
“Please try to do a little less of the telling me my own business, Ms. Dve,” said We Suffer.
“Just wanted to make sure,” said Pyrrha. “Because this is off the log, isn’t it? We’re in one of the old buildings on the southeast, in a district Blood of Eden doesn’t hold. You’re outside your zone.”
Two-Thigh-Machetes drew the big gun from their back and it made the ready noise. They said— “The Lyctor knows too much.”
Only their air-toggle mask had some kind of vocaliser on it, so they sounded like a pissed-off robot suffering an occasional blast of static, sort of THE LYCTOR ZZT KNOWS TOO MUCH.
“At ease,” said We Suffer, not even looking at Two-Thigh-Machetes. Two-Thigh-Machetes did not move to being at ease. We Suffer kept her eyes on Pyrrha. She asked, “Did the drivers take the southern motorway, with the bumps?”
“It’s a giveaway,” said Pyrrha.
“Goddamn it,” said We Suffer. She waved her hand again; Two-Thigh-Machetes slowly lowered the gun. She said, “Yes. We are not on our A-game today. Let us move on from playing games with how clever and how old you are. I am not impressed, and they annoy my colleague.”
Camilla popped the nib on the pen and said, “Who armed the dockworkers who busted through Port Authority yesterday?”
Two-Thigh-Machetes said, “Here we go.” This became HERE WE ZZZT GO.
We Suffer steepled her fingers together and said, “We have a great deal to discuss and that is not really relevant,” and Camilla said— “Let me make it more relevant. Did you know about the Port Authority assault beforehand, or didn’t you?”
Before We Suffer could answer this question, their bodyguard said intensely: “Did you have an objection?” (ZZT?)
Camilla said, “Twenty-two people were shot,” and the bodyguard said, “No. Nineteen people were shot, and three zombie loyalists got put down. Get your maths right. Do you care about the nineteen? Or the three?”
Because of the mask it came out very flat, like DO YOU CARE ZZT ABOUT THE NINETEEN ZZT?, which didn’t work at all. Nona longed to point this out, but Crown got in first— “If you question Troia cell’s loyalty you’re questioning my loyalty, agent. Are you? Because Blood of Eden states I’ve got right of recourse, and I can take that recourse right here, right now. How about it? Bet you’ve never been challenged before. How does it feel?”
Even through a plastic mask and some goggles and a hood We Suffer was starting to look distinctly pained, and when the bodyguard intoned, “JUST GREAT. LET’S GO ZZZT,” We Suffer said: “That is much more than enough. You are trained soldiers, not dockside rabble two beers down. There is no right of recourse here. I would rate you both, except that we have no time for that whatsoever.”
The bodyguard and Crown fell silent. Crown’s eyes were hot and angry, and her lips were pressed together: as per usual she looked great. When Nona was very angry her cheeks went red and her voice got squeaky; she felt deeply envious.
We Suffer said, “Please listen calmly to what I have to tell you, Hect. The negotiator is in orbit.”
Camilla stood up.
Pyrrha said gently, “We were expecting this. Get the intel,” and Camilla sat down. From the side Nona could see her eyes were angry in a different and less magnificent way than Crown’s. They were blank, as though everything Camilla in them had been erased: perfectly grey and glassy and still.
Pyrrha said, “You could have saved yourself half an hour and us a round trip by telling us this back at our digs, Commander.”
“What I do is watched very carefully, Ms. Dve,” said We Suffer. “So I am being very casual … very by the book … so that I can get a chance to talk with my Troia cell, in the normal way, quietly. The negotiator arriving throws us all into disarray. Many factions did not expect them to dare to come, not with the blue madness.”
“How’s consensus?” asked Pyrrha.
“Currently there is an emergency meeting I am not attending about whether to blow the negotiator out of the sky. The numbers are now not so in favour of that that I am especially worried,” said We Suffer. “They are the anarchists who propose this in any case, not the hardcore. They would blow most of the planet up as a middle finger, but they do not have the support. Officially I am willing to be led. Unofficially I am wildly delighted by this. As time goes by … as we dither and panic here and lose more and more on Antioch … the antinegotiation sect loses momentum. And this is a huge boon in many ways as far as we are concerned. The picture, please.”
This was said to Two-Thigh-Machetes, who crossed to the left side of the table and vented their feelings on a cord dangling from the ceiling, making a length of white sheeting come tumbling down the wall. Then they returned to the other side of the room behind We Suffer and started to fiddle with the projector box embedded in the table, mumbling darkly all the while, which sounded through the air circulator a lot like they were fizzing.
Nona grew vaguely excited, because she did like seeing projector box displays. With Blood of Eden all you normally got to see were maps, or numbers, or pictures of dead bodies dumped on one another, but you took what you could get.
“Thank you. Let us get this thing loading,” said We Suffer.
Crown said slowly, “You didn’t show me a picture, Commander.”
“No,” said We Suffer. “I am showing you now.”
The guard flicked the switch. In response, the projector hummed to life and the white screen exploded into greys, but the image projected came into focus so slowly that it was barely a picture at all. It looked as though it was being painted on the screen row by row, from the top to the bottom, every row constantly redrafted with higher resolution and sharpness. Nona made out something lumpy on a darker background, but that was it.
“The limits of technology. Excuse it. We are using shortwave,” said We Suffer, with a touch of impatience. “I knew I should have loaded it before … I have been in cars all of last evening, all the night, all this morning. I will get a thrombosis. Let me give you a little preamble. You are about to see a stellar craft sighted”—We Suffer looked down at a folder in front of her—“six hours and twenty-five minutes ago. It is in orbit as we speak.”
The grey-on-grey blob resolved into a shuttle. Nona had seen shuttles planetside before the sky changed: big boxy cargo launchers with hooks on top so that they could attach to the space elevator and launch from the geostation. They looked like cake tins with company pictures etched on the sides. This looked sleeker and it wasn’t etched at all. There were bones inlaid in the sides like fossils in a dried-out riverbed: whole skeletons curled up as though they had fallen in the shuttle mould, beautifully and intricately set. And it had windows of dark glass. No cargo launcher had windows.
The moment the image came into view Camilla’s fingers had stilled on the pen. She clicked it so that the nib appeared, and then idly doodled on the paper, except that Camilla was never idle and was physically incapable of doing anything that sounded like doodle.
We Suffer said, “You understand that this image caused serious consternation.”
“Should’ve eased your minds,” said Pyrrha. “That’s not a reinforcement craft.”
“I agree. It is not a troop carrier. It is maybe ten metres across,” said We Suffer.
The bodyguard said hotly, “I can cram a battalion into ten metres. Give me time and I’ll cram two.” (ZZT TWO.)
We Suffer said, “Mmm. Perhaps stacking them lengthways?”
“The soldiers will do as I say,” said the bodyguard.
“Then how relaxing it is for the soldiers that we have removed you from active duty,” said We Suffer. “Crown? Let your people comment.”
