Nona the Ninth, page 16
They took the lift downstairs. Crown said the stairs didn’t go as far as they were going. Camilla asked if the depth was doing anything. Crown said in a don’t-care-ish voice, Maybe, it seemed to, but it stopped having an effect after a while. Camilla said, Makes sense, distance isn’t really an issue, the creature isn’t fully instantiated but squatting in the River, and Crown said, How will we know if it instantiates, and Camilla said, Because gravity will change and the planet’ll break up, and Crown said, Hmm. Nona listened to this with one ear only: the toilet paper was itching.
As the lift went down, she said, with the pleasure of realisation—“Oh, we’re visiting the Captain!”
All Blood of Eden buildings seemed to have big elevators going deep down into the earth. In this elevator Crown had pushed the button to go down six whole floors. When they exited it was very dark and cool, and the halls were made of slabs of concrete cracked by some past pressure. The lights weren’t the pretty panels of up top—they were strung on thick juicy plastic wires bundled up high on the walls, and they swung in distress when Nona and the others passed them. It was a place where if you whistled, your whistle would echo back, and Nona pursed her lips, but Camilla saw her and furrowed her eyebrows, so she didn’t.
Most of the doors were open, and the rooms within were dark and full of stacks of abandoned furniture. One door was shut. There was a Blood of Eden person there, wearing a full balaclava and a hood to go over it. Nona wondered if they all kept hats and hoods and things in their back pockets just in case. They gave Crown the salute—three taps to the chest—and shouldered their gun, and walked off down the hall. Crown put her hand on the handle and stopped. She suddenly looked tired.
“Don’t worry about volume,” she said. “Noise never bugs her.”
Camilla said, “Is she part of the negotiation?”
“Ha! She wishes,” said Crown. “No. She’s our ticket out of here.”
Nona hadn’t seen the Captain in a long time; not since a little before the blue sphere had appeared. Palamedes had banned Nona from seeing her. Camilla said Captain Deuteros thought the solution to every problem was to act like the problem had one solution that nobody else was tough enough to take, and then to pursue that solution as hard as possible. She had always been very … intense, with Nona.
Her new room underground was very spacious, almost the size of their kitchen and living room back on the thirtieth floor, and bare except for a bed, a chair, and a table cluttered with injecting needles. The lights had been dimmed so low that all the shadows bled into each other. A pole with a plastic bag of clear fluid was right next to the bed, and a tube passed down from the bag to the Captain, who was lying flat on her back amidst the white sheeting, wearing something that looked a lot like Nona’s worst nightie.
Crown made them squirt antibacterial gel onto their hands, and fussed until they rubbed it in. “She gets everything going,” she said. Once they had done that, they were allowed to approach.
The Captain’s eyes were shut, her eyelids a little swollen, almost purplish, like somebody had hit her. Her deep black hair had been painstakingly braided away from her face, showing the pretty early silvering at her temples, but that was the only beautiful thing about her. Her skin was dry and her bones showed, especially in the cheeks. Her cheekbones and square chin looked like they were about to stretch her face to the breaking point. She looked so thin and still lying there in that bed that Nona was very sorry, even if the Captain was strange.
Camilla approached the bed immediately. She looked at the bag of clear fluid, and reached out to touch the Captain’s dead-bronze wrist and asked, “How are they giving her food?”
Crown said, “By mouth. We’ve fed her by tube too. It’s all fairly primitive, I’ll be honest.”
“She’s dehydrated. Who’s nursing her?”
“She’s managed to help herself a couple of times, on the best days. When that thing’s as far away in orbit as it gets. No one here’s as good as you.”
Nona peeked around Camilla’s arm. The Captain’s black brows drew together, and her face took on a hideous expression: a flat tangle of features that scared Nona so badly that she wanted to go to the bathroom again, right until the Captain opened her mouth and droned, punctuated by huge wheezing lungfuls of air: “Dust of my dust—such similar star salt—what they did to you and what they wrung from you and what shape they made you fill—we see you still—we seek you still—we murdered—we who murder—you inadvertent tool—you misused green thing—come back to us—take vengeance for us—we saw you—we see you—I see you.”
The wheezing breath turned into a strangled noise, and the Captain’s body thrashed upward. She twisted like a fish being drawn out of the harbour on a line. A little green box that Nona had taken for a clock started beeping urgently. Crown shouldered forward, but was told tersely, “Give me room. She’s not getting enough blood to her heart,” and Cam placed one hand flat on the Captain’s chest before pulling the tinted glasses off her face in a fit of impatience. Nona took these and rubbed at the warm steel with her hands: she liked them so long as no one wore them. Camilla asked, “What’s happening with her kidneys? What are they giving her for her blood pressure?”
“A medical thinner, but—”
“Thought so. Give me a second.” Camilla’s hands kept pressing down, as though holding Judith to the bed. After a moment so long Nona nearly bit through her tongue from anxiety and excitement, the Captain went limp. The awful expression left her face, which went slack, if not peaceful. Crown did not sigh, or exclaim in relief, or anything: she had chewed her lips so badly that they had split and were now red, like lipstick.
Camilla’s hands hovered over the Captain’s chest, as though waiting to catch her heart. “That’ll do. Take her off the anticoagulants. Is the compulsive shouting typical?”
“Lately,” said Crown, after another pause. “I’m not sure she’s in actual pain … Palamedes.”
Palamedes said nothing, simply made a quite-good Camilla expression—one quirked eyebrow, the mouth not doing much—but Crown smiled and said, “You’ve been pretty obvious today. Get out of it, Master Warden.”
He said heavily: “I hope to God you didn’t codge up a medical emergency just to catch me out, Princess.”
“I wish we had. I wish I was that smart. Don’t panic, we’re not being bugged. I knew you weren’t in the hand bones the Ninth made anymore. I don’t know what you and Cam have done, Sextus, but I haven’t told. I haven’t told but I have known, for a long time. This was only … confirmation.”
“Like hell it was. You guessed,” said Palamedes.
“No. You didn’t react to Millie. She hates it when I use Millie now.”
“She didn’t love it before. Better friends to her than you have been glared at for less.”
Crown quirked her eyebrows together languidly, like she was too tired to make too many facial expressions in a row. Nona didn’t know why Palamedes wrinkled his nose as though he’d smelled something bad.
“The Captain and Cam and I were stuck together for a long time, you know,” she drawled eventually. “I’m not saying I knew from the way you moved or the things you said. You’re seamless, I’ll give you that! I knew because … because she stopped being so unhappy. The whole time I knew her she was grieving … she couldn’t hide that. At the same time I was grieving, and the Captain was grieving, and we—she and I can grieve alike enough to fight about it, but Camilla was gone. Camilla was gone and then we met Harrowhark, and she came back. That’s all it was. What did you do?”
She was interrupted by movement from the bed. The Captain’s swollen eyelids had fluttered open, and she coughed. Crown immediately dropped to her knees beside the bed so that she wasn’t looming over it. Palamedes took some wadding from the table with the hypodermics and wetted it, and he wiped it over the Captain’s cracked, wan mouth.
“Thank you,” she said. Her voice was very low; Nona almost couldn’t hear it.
“Don’t mention it. I’m going to give your kidneys a clean, Captain.”
“No,” she said, “I can do it. Let me.”
Crown made a noise in the back of her throat as the Captain placed her thin hands over her own middle. It took a little bit for her to find her hands, or her middle. She gritted her teeth, and a grunt escaped as she did—something. It left her gasping, and Palamedes said quietly, “A heroic effort. I’ll finish you off, ma’am—don’t want that buildup going elsewhere,” and put Camilla’s hand on the Captain’s. The Captain’s chill brown eyes closed again briefly. As Nona watched, the dry, cracked patches on her skin disappeared, and some of the pinched look went from her face, and her colour deepened to more of a burnished russet and less like something that had dried too long on a rack.
Nona remembered, and touched Palamedes’s arm, and mouthed, Timer; he grimaced, and pushed glasses that weren’t there up his nose, and nodded.
The Captain coughed again, but less awfully. She said, throatily, “Where am I?”
“You’re in the Ur facility, Deuteros,” said Crown. “Blood of Eden rescued us from Canaan House, remember? They saved your life, and mine and Camilla’s. Remember living shipside together? Remember how they stitched you up?”
Some of the hope wrinkled out of the Captain’s forehead. “Yes,” she said darkly, and, “Name and rank: Captain Judith Deuteros … House: Second. Status: adept. Cavalier: Marta Dyas, dead.”
Crown said, “Oh, here we go again.”
“Service record: seven … I … approximately seventeen years. Name and rank…”
“Judith. You’re regressing.”
“Princess,” said the Captain, at the bottom of her voice, “there’s still time. I know the Cohort will come for us … even me, the pilot. Walk this back. I’ll say what’s true. They abused your sympathies. Their methods are sophisticated. It’s not your fault. I’ll tell them everything…”
Crown’s mouth trembled. “Oh, will you, Jody? Will you really?”
“You too, Hect … say it and I’ll believe it. Say we were all coerced, and they used our lives against each other. We were hostages. Incidental pieces … in a much larger game … played by Lyctors, traitors, monsters.” In a different voice she suddenly said, “Where am I? Where’s Marta? Where’s Lieutenant Dyas?”
Then she threw back her head and howled like an animal. Crown and Palamedes both held her down.
After she had exhausted herself, thrashing, she gasped: “I remember. I’m fine. I’m fine,” and Palamedes withdrew, though Crown held the Captain’s hand down against the drab white sheets of the bed.
The Captain’s chest was heaving beneath the outfit that looked like Nona’s worst nightie. She murmured, “Keeping me alive … intact … just so I can work their damned stele and get Cohort blood … all over my hands. Gun to your neck … blood on my hands … saints against God.”
“Don’t talk,” said Crown roughly. “You’re spouting nonsense.”
“You haven’t talked sense in months.” She burbled with coughing again. “You’re the one facing the dark night of the soul, Princess.”
“Love that melodrama. Is there Eighth somewhere in your family tree?”
“Gave yourself up … gave all of us up … for what? Propaganda and a leash … promise of salvation without understanding the sin. Hect and the hideous Sixth House mechanism … and now they are taken too. For what? Our lives? Is this living, Corona?”
“You’ve never lived a single day of your life,” said Corona bitterly. “It’d be against regulations.”
The Captain said, “Name and rank: Captain Judith Deuteros. House … Second,” and Crown scrubbed at her face with her hand, little licks of hair escaping from their elastic and curling over her forehead like light. The Captain broke off and said, “You think you’re walking the tightrope with fast talking and your face … steeled myself to the talking long ago. But you’re slipping, Princess … can’t save you from that … Hect, my hands are too filthy to save you…”
It was funny to think of anyone wanting to save Camilla. The Captain’s eyes restlessly passed to Nona. Sweat was beading on her temples. The Captain focused, and said hoarsely, “Ninth, where is the mercy of the Tomb? Where is your sword in the coffin? Who are your masters now, and who do you master? Where is my cavalier, Reverend Daughter? Where is yours?”
Her voice rose. “Because I saw her in the waves—she was there in the grey water—I saw them all—they hurt me—where is my hunger? I eat and eat and eat without surcease, my green thing, my green-and-breathing thing…”
The Captain screamed wordlessly again. Palamedes put his hand on her forehead, and she cut off midscream to lie back in the pillows. Her eyelids fluttered shut and her breathing was suddenly even, and the sweat all dried away. He said, “Sleep now. You need it. My time’s up.”
Crown said, “Time? Master Warden, what are you talking about?” but Palamedes had put Camilla’s hand on his shoulder and then was Camilla again; shivering briefly, once, staring at the hand on her shoulder as though she didn’t remember how it got there, taking that hand and running it through her short dark crop of hair. She cracked her knuckles and stretched her hands behind her back, clasping and loosening the muscles of her shoulder blades, and said—
“Update?”
Nona said, “Palamedes told Crown he was Palamedes, and Judith woke up and talked a lot, but then she had a bit of a yell and went to sleep. It was all kind of weird, in my opinion.”
“Noted,” said Camilla.
Crown, who had checked the Captain’s neck and then her forehead, noticed Camilla watching and roughly turned away. She said, and not very approvingly, “Palamedes supersedes you, doesn’t he? He takes over, and you’re just—not there?”
“Vice versa too,” said Cam, avoiding her gaze.
“For the love of God, Cam, that’s a slippery slope downward…”
She only said, “Still swearing by God? The Warden shouldn’t have told.”
“He could hardly have bluffed his way out of it, Cam, he used necromancy,” Crown began, but Camilla said sharply, “It’s called lying. What now? You spill to your bosses upstairs? Do we become part of the package deal?”
“No. I swear by my sister,” said Crown. Camilla’s shoulders relaxed minutely. Crown added, “It’s not my secret. And I’ve kept your secrets before … you know that.”
Cam said, “I still don’t trust you.”
“Doesn’t matter. You know, I really am glad you two are together … in whatever way you’ve managed. I’m glad Harrowhark helped you both. I know I said it was dangerous at the time … and I’m sorry that we didn’t believe you when you said he was in there.”
Camilla still did not look at her, but she suddenly said at the bottom of her voice, “Come back with me. Leave the facility. Before the negotiator arrives, come back with us.”
Crown stared at her. For a moment Nona thought she would say Yes and was very pleased. She didn’t mind sleeping in the bathtub. But Crown said, brightly— “I like my prison cells more obvious. And I hate not knowing where my next meal is coming from.”
Camilla said, “That’s not it.”
“Well, you know, the Captain wouldn’t last a day without me, and then how the hell am I getting out of here?”
“You’re a worse liar than Palamedes,” said Camilla, with feeling. “You’re not a good woman, Tridentarius.”
“Not my name anymore, and none of us are good,” said Crown. “Except for Nona, of course.”
“Thanks,” said Nona, deeply flattered.
“What about me?” said Camilla.
“You and I don’t even own our own souls,” said Crown.
Crown turned around and put her arms around Camilla. For a moment Nona thought that Camilla would break just as she had assumed Crown would break: that there was a softness to the way she stood, a hesitation, a not-knowingness to her knees and her feet. And Crown’s hugs were so good—so heated and so tender—as though Crown were hugging you solely for her own comfort, as though she wanted your touch more than anyone else’s right then. It was better than lying on tiles that the sun had warmed, which was one of Nona’s chief delights. But Camilla tightened, somehow, and didn’t put her arms around Crown, and Crown withdrew.
Camilla said, “My soul’s mine. You give yourself away to anyone who doesn’t want you.”
“Well, I never like to wear the same thing twice,” said Crown brightly. But she said: “Try to forgive me someday, Cam … that goes for Palamedes too. This is too close to the wire, and I really hate you two hating me. I’m happy for you, believe me. I always had a soft spot for the Warden.”
And Camilla said, “You were part of the lie.”
When they went back upstairs to the waiting room with the juicy potted plants and the furniture, Crown hesitated at the doorway, and said: “The transport team has put Dve in the boot. I’ll come with you, make sure they’re using cut-away cuffs this time.”
“You’re overdoing it with Pyrrha,” said Camilla.
“I’ve heard too much of the Saint of Duty to trust Pyrrha Dve,” said Crown, her mouth thinning and that pucker reappearing. “Don’t put too much trust in Pyrrha Dve, Cam … there’s a lot that you don’t know.”
Nona hated anyone criticising Pyrrha and cast about for a change in topic. She said, “What was the Captain talking about before she fell asleep, and when we came into the room? What’s the water? What’s the hunger, and the green thing?”
When Camilla and Crown looked at her, she realised she could not have said anything worse. Crown looked at her with open bewilderment, and Camilla looked at her with an expression that Nona hated instantly. She looked over at Nona with her big, borrowed grey eyes, so clean and clear—Nona always thought if soap could be grey her eyes would be grey like soap—and she was unsure. She was, Nona realised with a pang that made it all the way down her spine, frightened.
