Nona the Ninth, page 21
And their eyes—
After that first, astonishing moment, Nona stared without seeing in a wild paralysis of recognition. She was trembling. The face on the screen was the face of the girl in her dream; it was the picture of the face that Camilla and Palamedes had drawn for her; but so much more serious, so lifeless, so slack, like the girl was sleeping with her eyes open, that for a moment she thought she must be mistaken. Yet there she was—it was her, the girl in her dream. For a moment Nona panicked, convinced that somehow the broadcast could see her too, that the girl was looking at her. But she had imagined it. Broadcasts didn’t work that way.
“The Emperor has sent no intermediary to vouchsafe you,” the first person said. Nona could barely hear for looking. “All these promises are made by no lowlier personages than myself and Her Most Serene Highness, Crown Prince Kiriona Gaia, heir to the First House, the Emperor’s only daughter.”
Nobody said anything. Prince Ianthe Naberius continued, “The Emperor Undying has sent nothing less than his own Tower Princes, as gracious tokens of his extreme love and concern … his unimpeachable authority.”
There was something irrepressible hovering at the edges of the person called Prince Ianthe Naberius’s mouth at love and at concern—like a struggle not to smile, or not to explode in a fit of temper. Nona had rarely seen those two feelings go to war before. But it only lasted a second. The camera waited on the other person—the other prince—as though waiting for them, for her, to say anything. She didn’t. She was as stony and as cool and as uninterested as she had been before. Curiously, Nona noticed, she didn’t even seem to be breathing.
“Anyway! Back to me, Prince Ianthe Naberius,” said Prince Ianthe Naberius.
The screen nauseously wobbled back and closed in. The Crown Prince, the dream girl, disappeared from view.
They said, “I will broadcast again, exactly twenty-four hours from now, with new instructions. What those instructions are will depend very much on you.
“Hail to the Emperor Undying, to his Nine Houses, and also to you, his respected pactmates, beneficiaries, and allies.”
There was a pause.
In quite a different voice the person said, “That’ll fix their little red wagons. Is this still on…?”
The screen flickered and a disembodied voice said, “This broadcast will repeat at five o’clock tomorrow as a recording.” Then it all went dead.
The hexagons flared white. One sparked at the end of the frame. The sun had sunk a little lower behind the buildings, so when the broadcast stopped it all seemed extraordinarily dark, like nighttime had come early. Nona clung to the pole with slippery hands, feeling all at sea; she focused in on Hot Sauce’s breathing—which was very shallow and very soft, but there. Nona looked at the way Hot Sauce’s nostrils flared deep inside her hood, at the rise and fall of her chest. She wanted to make sure.
The silence had broken. Some of the militia had taken over the loudspeakers, telling people to go. They repeated, “Disperse, disperse.” But nobody seemed to want to disperse. The noise grew and grew and grew. Someone right under Nona’s pole said, “This city’s over. I’m going into the desert. We won’t survive another one of these.”
Someone in the crowd was yelling. They were being pulled away by two other people. Nona saw their face as the crowd pressed and the crowd parted. They were saying, “Liars! Liars! Ur is fighting! They’re losing! Liars!”
The megaphone was still bleating out Disperse, disperse. One of the militia trucks had turned on its alarm so that Nona couldn’t hear individual voices anymore; it was a horrible sound, a long dying whine punctuated by a whirring WHEE-ooh WHEE-ooh noise like when the poison cats were fighting. She clung to Hot Sauce and the pole. Some people tried to throw things at the screen, but other people were pulling them away. The crowd’s fear had changed and mixed them up; they were surging this way and that, forming rivers and currents, some people refusing to move, others struggling to get away. One of the militia trucks was slowly chugging into the crowd, people pushing to get out of its path, as someone on the back of it yelled and gesticulated: “Everyone on this side of me, go down the broadway. Everyone on this side of me, back toward the motorway. Come on…”
No shots had rung out, at least. There were scuffles among the people, but most sets of shoulders Nona saw seemed more depressed than anything. She looked at Hot Sauce and nervously joggled her elbow. Hot Sauce didn’t seem inclined to move. She whispered, “What now?”
Hot Sauce looked at Nona. Her pupils had gone small and dark.
“They’re not people, Nona,” she said. “They’re not people.”
Nona ventured, “They seemed strange…”
“Because they’re not real,” said Hot Sauce.
Her lips were a little wet. She was terribly afraid all of a sudden, Nona could see, filled with the fear her body spent so much of its time rejecting. Nona thought about her tantrums and, buoyed by the courage that had brought her here, reached out to seize Hot Sauce’s wrist that wasn’t holding the pole. “Listen to me,” she commanded. “I’m your Teacher’s Aide. Breathe with me … I’ll squeeze your hand for in and let go for out. In through the nose … Out through the mouth … Not so quickly. Don’t hyperventilate,” she added, knowing she sounded exactly like Camilla.
Hot Sauce acquiesced. She took five breaths in—five breaths out—all the while the alarm blared horribly and the crowd surged and billowed beneath them. Her face still looked strange and rigid, as though she might puke. Nona realised that although Hot Sauce was still her leader, she had to help Hot Sauce, she had to be the one who was nearly nineteen. She started to caterpillar herself back down the pole—her long career as the worm with problems had taught her the movements she needed to lower herself—and when her feet touched the bottom, jostled by people on her elbows and shoulders all the way, she called: “Come down, let’s go.”
Hot Sauce came down. Nona held her hand as they joined the crowd. She had scanned over the top of people’s heads and thought, a little desperately, that she knew where the crowd was thickest: she was very grateful in that moment that she knew about movements. She hurled herself and Hot Sauce into the current and dragged her toward where they had come from—changed her mind in a moment of stillness, joined a rivulet heading east, wriggling into their midst and saying loudly, “My sister’s going to be sick,” which got them a tiny opening, enough to move through. The crowd extended all the way up the back street. She could smell the smoke where the old water treatment plant was still smouldering. They had barely made it into the artery going up the street before a shot rang out in the crowd behind them. Everyone screamed and cringed, and then everyone ran.
At the noise of the bullet, Hot Sauce seemed to come online again—she dragged Nona into a tiny alleyway, away from the stampede. She said, “Go!” and Nona was grateful to have her back, grateful to let her take the lead. They had to climb mounds of leaking garbage sacks, and Nona cut herself terribly on a jaggedy old can. She squealed at the pain, but stuck her hand in her pocket to hide it. The noise grew terrible: alarms, yells, backfiring trucks. They scrambled up and down fences—the wires cut their hands—they skidded and fell down in broken and half-demolished buildings. It seemed like the sound was always right behind them and they couldn’t get away from it.
“Nona!” called a voice. “Nona! Hot Sauce! Girls!”
This voice came from a truck with a grille. This truck had mounted the pavement and other cars were honking at it. It was the Angel, sitting in the passenger’s seat. She had the window rolled down, and she was twisting herself into a knot to open the back door. She bawled, “Get in!”
Hot Sauce and Nona didn’t need asking twice. They threw themselves at the truck, scrambled up into the rough, potholed back seats, and shut the door behind them, panting. Noodle was there lying in the bit where your feet went, looking baleful at all the noise and interruptions.
The Angel said to someone, “Drive.” They were separated from the passenger seat by a fine black mesh, but the Angel had peeled it back so that she could look at them. She said sharply, “Are you hurt?”
“Nona got cut,” said Hot Sauce, grimy and dirty and bloody herself.
“No, I didn’t,” said Nona quickly. “I thought I did, but I didn’t.”
“You’re covered in blood.”
“I’m fine. I’m fine.”
The Angel, having ascertained that neither of the girls was bleeding out, said— “Buckle yourselves in. Both of you deserve to be bloody pancakes. Kevin was in hysterics.”
“How did you know where we were?” asked Nona, wrestling with the seat belt.
“I’m not stupid—I’ve been doing doughnuts around the school building for the last half hour waiting for you two to turn up.”
Nona was amazed that she and Hot Sauce had gotten as far as the school building, but also that they had not gone further. It seemed as though they had been running for ages.
Hot Sauce said, “Where are the others?” and the Angel said, “Safe—the moment I knew you two had scarpered, I decided to pull everyone back in case they got the same idea. Go left,” she said, to the unseen driver. “For God’s sake, don’t use the motorway, everyone’s driving like maniacs. Don’t take anything that feeds onto the Civic. And don’t rear-end anyone.”
“Who is driving this fucking car,” said the driver. They had a low, terse voice and surprisingly good House.
“You, so make sure we have a car to drive by the end of the journey,” said the Angel. She turned back to the girls. She had fixed her face into steely, teacherly disapproval, and Nona writhed beneath it. She said, “Hot Sauce, I’m driving you to the shelter.”
“No shelter. I’ll bunk with Honesty,” said Hot Sauce distantly.
“As if. I dropped off Honesty myself—you know where Honesty lives, and you’d be going back in the wrong direction, inside that mess.”
“No shelter. They’re autocrats,” said Hot Sauce.
“Okay. You can sleep in—a place I know. It’s mine, but I’m not going to be using it.”
The driver said, “You’re not?”
“If I don’t go home with you, you’re going to crouch outside my door all night.”
“Don’t make it sound like it’s my idea,” said the driver.
Hot Sauce subsided into silence; Nona watched her face flatten, which meant that she had no argument to make. The Angel turned her sights on Nona instead and said briskly, “Nona, where do you live?”
Nona told them. The driver tried to crane their neck around to look at her, but it was simply impossible; there was too much grille and they were wearing a thick desert muffler round their head. The Angel, who could crane, had craned immediately. She said, bewildered: “I thought Joli was funning me. The Building? Inside of it, you mean?”
“Yes,” said Nona, who was about to elaborate on exactly where but remembered Palamedes and Camilla’s warnings, and shut herself up in time. She said, “I do live there, really truly.”
The Angel righted herself in her seat. She said, “We’ll go there first, then.”
“Thank you,” said Nona meekly. Now that the adrenaline had passed, all the fight had left her; she just felt frightened and shivery. When the Angel said, “Hot Sauce, how badly is she hurt? Nona, have you had your stonemouth jab?” she couldn’t think of anything smarter to do than tuck her hands inside her jacket and say, “I’m fine! Not hurt at all!”
“Horseshit,” said the Angel. “You’re all over blood. There’s a first-aid kit beneath your seat, Hot Sauce—”
“Really I’m not. It can’t be my blood. It must be someone else’s. Maybe it’s tomato sauce. Who knows? It could be anything. But please don’t worry about it.”
Not, as Pyrrha would have said, her best effort. But maybe the rising pitch of hysteria in her voice convinced the Angel, because she only said, “I’ll check you out tomorrow. If you start to feel faint or get a fever, let someone know, all right?”
“I will. I will. I promise.”
The person in the driver’s seat muttered, “I can’t believe this.”
“Yes?” said the Angel. “Were those your dulcet tones making commentary?”
“If people knew this was how you spent your time, Aim—”
“They should hope to God they spent their own time half so usefully,” said the Angel wrathfully.
“Pretending you can bandage bipeds? Teaching snot-nosed kids about particles?”
“None of us have snot,” said Nona, deeply offended. Then she thought about it and said more truthfully, “Anyway, it’s not Kevin’s fault.”
The driver didn’t say anything. Hot Sauce spoke up— “We love her.”
The driver said, to the Angel and not Hot Sauce, “Now I see. Chance to be her, huh? A little independent living for once?”
“It is my enormous privilege to be they. Just drive,” said the Angel crisply. “I don’t pay you for your opinions.”
“You don’t pay me anything,” said the driver. “I’m here for my bloody sins.”
The drive would have been extremely exciting had Nona’s carsickness not warred with her homesickness. Around twenty-six highly unusual bad things had happened to her today, and she had assumed she only had room for six unusual bad things before she had a tantrum; it must mean she was growing up. The driver gunned the ignition and drove in all the places cars weren’t meant to drive. Thankfully a lot of other cars were doing that too. Many times there was a huge bump as the car went onto the pavement, or had to swerve suddenly, or rattled down along a little road that didn’t have the type of terrain meant for a car. Most terrifyingly, the car once drove down a whole road that had been closed to cars due to the crevasses and potholes, right through a plastic snapper that had an illustration of a car falling down a huge hole, and Nona couldn’t help uttering tiny shrieks every time they drove close to those huge black lightless wells. Noodle uttered tiny aroo … aroo … aroo sounds with her, as though in sympathy, even when the Angel said without any particular heat, “Shut up, dog. We’ve been through worse.” Nona felt embarrassed that greater courage was expected of the dog than of her. Hot Sauce settled back in the car seat, and Nona noticed with absolute disbelief that she had fallen asleep. Nona closed her eyes and put her feet close to Noodle.
And then it was suddenly their road. The Building loomed high above the car window, and tears smarted in Nona’s eyes to be finally home after such a long and hideous day. They had to wait until the gate opened before pulling into the deep garage. Nona didn’t even question why the truck that the Angel was being driven in was allowed access to the gate: maybe whoever was manning the gate saw the grille and thought better of stopping them. The lights had all been turned off in the underbuilding where the other cars and trucks and motorcycles went, and it was astonishingly dark, all except for the truck’s big headlights.
There were people next to idling trucks, next to cars, people with their dust hoods up, people with their guns out, or people standing and talking quietly. When they saw the truck they turned their heads, then immediately looked away again. The driver turned off the lights—it was now so dark inside the car that Nona could barely see herself—and the Angel said, “Will you be all right from here?”
“Yes,” said Nona. “Yes, I think so.”
“School will be in session tomorrow,” said the Angel.
The driver said, “No, it won’t,” and the Angel said, “Yes, it will. Can I depend on you, Nona?”
“Am I going to be in trouble?”
“Least said,” said the Angel, “soonest mended.”
Even in the dark Nona could see her teeth, her tired smile, the soft set of her shoulders. She reached out a very calloused hand and patted Nona on the head, just as though she were Noodle, and Nona felt better. She knew from that touch that she wasn’t really in trouble. Hot Sauce spoke up suddenly, in the darkness, and said, “It was my idea.”
“Yes, I was aware,” said the Angel wearily. “Tomorrow, Nona—it’ll be safe at the school.”
Nona pushed hard on the big truck door and slithered out of the vehicle. Outside the truck it was a little easier to see. There were lights from people’s cigarettes, lights from the reflective sprays on the backs of the trucks, lights from the landing. She said, “Thanks—I love you,” and then darted away into the elevator well as fast as she could, feeling red hot with embarrassment. She hadn’t meant to say it—it was like the time Born in the Morning had called the Angel Dad—only she did mean it. She did love the Angel, after today.
Nona took the stairwell up because the elevator stuck so much. Her legs were wobbly and tired, and she had to wait on the landing every time her calves and her feet got too stiff. Thankfully that sensation never lasted long—it was like a brief twinge—and she was able to keep climbing, up all thirty-three flights, though after the thirty-second she gave up and went on her hands and knees. By the time she was on her own dear scrubby-carpeted thirty-third floor with the cop below and the militia guys above and the adjacent crying baby (which was not making itself known) she nearly kissed the floor, only she thought that Palamedes would say that was the easiest way to bring on a serious virus.
The last few metres were the longest. Fumbling around beneath the mat for where they had glued the spare key and thumbing the right number into the numlock pad took all she had left. She turned the knob, and flung the door open, and wailed in a big excited hurry: “I’m home! I’m safe! You don’t have to worry!”
Camilla rose from the table, empty waterglasses stacked neatly before her, a whole page of newspaper torn into beautifully even strips, exactly as if a bird had done it—the work of hours, the labour of anxiety. Nona flew to her. Cam caught her up by the arms and looked through her, not at her; her beautiful pale grey eyes looked like holes burnt in a mask.
