Nona the Ninth, page 39
“Hot Sauce, why are you called Hot Sauce?”
Hot Sauce blinked at her. “You really want to know?” she said.
“Yes,” said Nona. “Yes, yes. Terribly, yes.”
Hot Sauce looked up at the chipped ceiling of Honesty’s apartment, then down at the carpet, and then at Nona.
“Because I really like it,” she admitted.
“What?”
“You can put it on anything,” said Hot Sauce. “Spicy food’s always better. You can put it on rice but you can also put it on bread.”
Nona reached out. She wrapped her arms around Hot Sauce. She whispered, “Hot Sauce, forgive me—forgive me so I can know what it feels like.”
Hot Sauce was as still as a statue in Nona’s arms. Then she gently perambulated Nona toward the door—bumped her gently over the threshold—looked her dead in the face.
“We’re cool,” she said, and, awkwardly: “I’ll always love you, Nona.”
Nona found that huge tears were dripping out of her eyes, making it hard to see Hot Sauce.
“Can I be in the gang again?” she whispered.
Hot Sauce wavered.
“Yes,” she said, “but you’re on Kevin bathroom duty forever for being a zombie. That’s fair.” And she shut the door.
27
THE THUNDERCRACKS HAD INCREASED tenfold, with no rain to be seen—the night had grown so hot that everyone in the big truck had started to sweat. The moment Nona had moistly thrust the note into We Suffer’s hand, the commander had barked into her headpiece: “Go. All units not on barracks duty are now deployed. Inter-wing rules no longer apply. Ctesiphon Wing cells, repeat, this is Cell Commander We Suffer and We Suffer. We have recommenced Operation Lock and Key—repeat, we have recommenced Operation Lock and Key.” There was a ragged cheer from the drivers and a powerful oo-RAH from deep in Pash’s chest, one hand steadying herself against the rattling car seats as she pulled a pair of tough rustling overalls up over her day clothes. We Suffer continued, “No speeches. All I shall say is, revenge is a dish best served ice, ice cold. Cells Saaftinge, Zoar, Birmingham, Troia, Maputo, Taree, proceed. Memphis, Takṣa, Calakmul, Valencia, Opava, Dundee, proceed.”
There was an aerial screech far overhead, another long, whistling crack of something atmospheric. The commander levered her headset away from her face, sighed nigh-hysterically, and said: “I never thought her operation would begin afresh by extracting Housers from another Blood of Eden wing … and yet, it is unmistakably the first step.”
Pyrrha said, “It’s not one she would have taken.”
We Suffer looked at Pyrrha inquiringly, tapping her fingers on one knee. “I have noticed you love to make these statements,” she said. “‘Commander Wake might have said this. Commander Wake would have thought that.’ I have come to the conclusion that you are not simply trying to annoy me and others like me, but I have no idea what you are doing otherwise.”
Next to Nona, Pyrrha gave an ineloquent shrug. “Maybe I just like talking to other people who knew her.”
“And should they wax so nostalgic with you—her murderer?”
Pyrrha was unmoved. “I like to think I knew her as well as anyone else, Commander … as well as anyone could know her.”
Pash viciously snapped shut the clasps on her trousers and pulled a vest over her head, putting her brightly dyed hair into complete disarray. “Say one more word on this fucking subject and I swear to all fuck, I’ll do for you.”
Pyrrha said, “Wake had your photo, you know. She kept it on her.”
When Pash’s head whipped around, Nona could see that this had shaken her badly. Her bird’s-beak features had all scrunched together toward the front, as though clustering for safety, and this made her scars zigzag up her forehead and her nose. She said, “Oh, shut your mouth,” but there was a desperate note to it.
“Knew it the moment I saw you. What were you, nine? Ten?”
We Suffer said, “Lyctor … Dve … I ask you to stop, from one alive human to another more or less so,” but Pash was saying quickly—“Let her. She’s bullshitting. Con artist stuff.”
“This might be my only chance to say this,” said Pyrrha comfortably, “and I’m seriously nicotine-deprived, which makes me sentimental. You’re the kid in that photo … She kept it folded up in her pliers case. You’re holding an automatic three sizes too big for you, right? One of your front teeth is gone. She holds up that photo to me and she goes, If it wasn’t for filth like you, nice kids like this wouldn’t have to hold these.”
Pash’s throat was working. Pyrrha continued, “I mean, I was all, I’d buy this a lot more if you weren’t so obviously proud as hell, and she only laughed in that mean-ass way she always laughed and said, That’s my submachine gun she’s holding.”
Pash closed her eyes. Nona held her breath, but Pash wasn’t mad or upset. She looked as though she were having a religious experience.
“I remember asking if you really were a nice kid,” Pyrrha said. “She said, No. She’s my flesh and blood. She takes after me. After that … I kept thinking about you for a long time. Sister?”
Pash swallowed once. Twice. Three times.
“No. My mother was her sister,” she said gruffly. And, “Not that it means shit to you, wizard. If you’re lying to me, I swear—”
Palamedes said mildly, “You know we’re conversant with the concept of family in the Nine Houses, right?”
Pash seemed genuinely surprised. “Why the hell would it matter to you?” Then she checked herself and said, “Scratch that. Why the hell would that matter to me? You don’t give a fuck about families when you’re carving them up—”
At a warning glance from We Suffer, Pash scowled expressively. She said, “Well, I’ll leave you with this: fuck you,” and then her vivid blue head disappeared under a helmet, her bright eyes beneath a visor.
Nona found a sigh escaping her chest. All her noises seemed to surprise her now; it was as though her body were capable of shocking her by doing things that did not seem connected to Nona. Pyrrha reached over and touched her hand gently, and said, “How’re you holding up?”
Before Nona could answer, there was another high-pitched whistle—far closer to them now, outside their truck, shockingly close—and a dull thud, and a huge pattering of stone. The truck screeched to a halt, then lurched forward again, and everyone inside held on to their seats as the truck juked left. It said quite a lot about life in the city that nobody really freaked out about this the first time, nor the second time, nor even the third time when they heard yelling coming from the front of the truck.
We Suffer’s headset crackled to life, and she brought it back down to her mouth. “Report,” she said, then: “Pardon?”
Pyrrha stood, swaying with the swerving movements of the truck, and picked her way along the handholds to the back where the cover had been lashed down tight. There was a clear window of soft plastic you could look through, so long as you didn’t want to see much or clearly. It would have been bad looking out of it during the day; at night, with a lot of the streetlights gone, it was basically impossible. Over the headset, We Suffer said, short and clipped, “Keep us together. Do not reroute either package. Do not engage. Take the first off-ramp you can find and get us underground.”
Pyrrha had gotten a long look out the window. She suddenly squatted down, working at the pegs that kept the cover tight at the back. A corner flapped free and slapped violently at itself, letting in gusts of hot, muggy night air, which in that space felt like a breeze. Strong, yellow lights from the headlights of the truck behind strobed over them all. Palamedes moved to clamp his arm around Nona’s and Nona held on to her seat and the armrests tightly as Pyrrha leant out—the truck behind them honked in alarm—and stared out at the street.
When she leant back in, Nona was profoundly upset by her body. Pyrrha was so sinewy and tough, and she was so calm—unbunched, unhurried, unaffected by most things, sweet and slouchy and always the least afraid person in the room, even if that room had Cam in it—but now she looked at Palamedes and Nona with her deep dark eyes, and she had an expression Nona hadn’t seen there before.
“Sextus,” she said, “game over, I’m afraid.”
An air siren was wailing—the one they only used in the rainy season to announce a problematic amount of waves or water. Palamedes looked at Pyrrha and said crisply— “It’s not…?”
“It must have retracted a while ago,” said Pyrrha. “We never could’ve got out of here in the shuttle, no way, no how. The first wave is here.”
We Suffer said—
“No planet-killer has attacked a planet like this in my lifetime, or in the lifetimes of any of my superiors.”
“Number Seven—Varun the Eater—always was lively,” said Pyrrha. “But after killing my necromancer, I’d assumed the damn thing would go dormant for a good century. That’s how it was after it ripped apart Cassiopeia.”
“Is it after the Lyctor?” We Suffer said urgently. “If we neutralised that body, then…?”
Palamedes held out his hands helplessly. “If it were responding to the soul of Ianthe Naberius, wouldn’t it have responded days ago? From what I gather, it doesn’t take a Resurrection Beast that long to spin up—the slow part is getting in position, and it’s been in position for months.”
“It doesn’t matter why. There’s Heralds out there,” said Pyrrha impatiently. “If Number Seven’s blown, it’s blown. We’d need a Lyctor to lead it away—a fully instantiated, experienced, serious Lyctor, who’d need a start point halfway across the galaxy, preferably with two other Lyctors to engage it in the River … and if we had all that, we’d hope to God it rerouted the Heralds the moment it found better prey. You want Cyrus, Augustine, Cassiopeia … You want Gideon the First, and Gideon the First is dead. He’s not coming back. Oh, God, Gideon,” said Pyrrha, suddenly. “Gideon … G—, you died for nothing.”
Suddenly the Captain started violently trembling. Crown immediately moved to hold the Captain’s hands away from her face—said, in low tones, “Come on. Come on, Deuteros. I’m here. Fight this, goddamn you. Stay awake and fight,” and the Captain made a noise like ah, ah, ah.
Nona made her body stand on its two feet. Two feet—the worst number for feet; not so many that they were ever useful, not so few that you didn’t have to think about them. She walked to the end of the truck and stood where the wheels burred beneath her, and she pushed Pyrrha aside—Pyrrha fell back flat on her back on the bottom of the truck, and she was sorry immediately, but she didn’t have time—and she stood in front of Crown, and she held out her hand.
“Sword,” she said.
Crown said, falteringly, “Nona…?”
She took too long. Nona took her sword. She had to use her hands to bend Crown back, enough to get at the scabbard. It wouldn’t pull free—it was at the wrong angle—so she cut it out of its scabbard. The blade parted the scabbard and came out. It was very heavy on her wrist, and dragged a little on the truck floor with a bright, awful screeching.
There was a gun trained on her. Pash had jumped to her feet. We Suffer was saying, “Passion, do not shoot—” and Palamedes was saying, in the other body, “Nona, stop. Nona, talk to me,” and it was too much. Nona had to get out.
She pushed the flap aside—the truck behind them honked again—and she found the side of the truck with her hand. It was too hard to climb with the sword in her other hand—she needed two—so she sheathed it in her hip, making sure it wedged in firmly. Some of the shirt went with it, but it came out the other side. Nona was glad it was someone else’s shirt instead of her Salt Chip Fish Shop shirt. She wasn’t able to think on her love for her Salt Chip Fish Shop shirt—she had clambered up to the top of the truck and was standing there, in the hot wet blast of the wind in the night, with the truck roaring down the street, fishtailing occasionally, and she could see everything.
There was a rain of blobs falling out of the sky. They were shaped like teardrops, twirling crazily as they drove through the atmosphere, lodging themselves in buildings and in the road and in the tops of cars, coming down with an almighty splatter of thick grey mucus. Within these blobs, trembling—the truck was going too fast—Nona saw a thick pod thing like the miniature sleeping bags worms made for themselves before they bust out as moths. The pods and the mucus were transparent, wreathed in smoke, and there were irregular shapes inside—irregular and shivering shapes—and some of the pods had wings poking through, flexing, pushing.
Nona looked at the truck ahead, which was about one truck length away, and the truck behind, which was about one truck length behind. She walked forward to stand on the hard shell driver’s cabin, and with a little run-up she jumped forward and sailed through the distance to land on the truck in front. This hurt her feet briefly—it also hurt the thin metal shell on top of the truck, which dented. She looked up at the sky, and she bellowed: “You said you wouldn’t do anything weird!”
Nona unsheathed her sword from herself, and nearly wept from fury. She put both her hands on the hilt. She did not know how to hold a sword, and she didn’t care.
She could see the broad main drag, with the fisheries off to one side and the harbour far beyond. Her eye, desiring the familiar, looked to where the Building probably was, her home a little grey block among the other grey blocks. The truck made a sudden left turn, veering. The trucks were the only vehicles on the road, but big seething pods had splattered onto the asphalt, and the trucks were having to drive around them. Nona stared around herself as the things kept twirling out of the sky like huge and terrible drops of rain—made hard landings on the buildings, or on the road, or soft landings thudding into the far-off ocean. She could hear yelling—glass breaking—screaming—and the air siren, all at once.
Nona turned around. On the truck she had emerged from, someone was now standing where she had stood, on top of the driver’s cab. It wore tattered old trousers and a thin old shirt, and it was the Captain.
The Captain opened her mouth and said, “Get him. Get him. Get him. He flees.”
“I can’t,” said Nona. “I can’t do anything. I don’t want to do anything.”
The Captain moaned, sharply. “All for nothing—you asked for help—you asked … and all for nothing, only pain. You asked … I gave you blood for blood.”
Nona, grief-stricken, hollered—
“Not like this. I love this place.”
“Do you love?” said the Captain’s mouth.
Nona struggled. “Yes—no—yes,” she said, then: “I don’t know what it means. I say it, and I don’t know what it means … Did I ever know what it meant?”
“Green thing,” said the Captain. “Green-and-breathing thing, big ghost, the drinker, transformed, what will you eat now? Where will your body go? What did he do to you, to make you this way? You eat yourself. I gorge on unliving marrow.”
It was true; the Captain looked as though she were withering before Nona’s eyes. She cried out in haste: “Don’t … stop that! I can’t stop it, but you can stop it. Stop hurting her … She doesn’t know what you’re doing.”
“You cry mercy?” said the Captain.
“Yes—mercy—yes,” said Nona.
“I have crossed the face of the universe,” said the Captain. “I poison it to match my grief.”
“Yes,” said Nona, “but—but stop this, stop hurting the Captain…”
She rooted around wildly to find a phrase, and fell back on Cam—“You’re acting out. Maybe you should take five.”
“For eight thousand unjust bodies I will stop,” said the Captain.
Nona said, “No. I want you to stop now.”
“They concoct their own vengeance,” said the Captain. “Their justice is not my justice. Their water is not my water. I came to help. I am made a mockery. The danger is upon you, and you do not even know … they are coming out of their tower, salt thing. There is a hole at the bottom of their tower. I will pull their teeth. I will make it blank for you.”
Nona said—
“Hot Sauce never did anything wrong, or Beautiful Ruby or Born in the Morning or Kevin, and Honesty”—here she was compelled by the truth—“Honesty doesn’t know any better. Camilla and Palamedes never did anything wrong … Pyrrha says she did a lot wrong, but at least she knows it … and we don’t like the Captain, but we pity her. Stop hurting the Captain … don’t do this.” And Nona found herself saying— “I’m ready to die … really ready.”
“Nothing is really ready to die,” said the Captain.
Nona took a running leap as the truck rounded another corner; she misjudged—she bounced off the side of a building like a ball—she came to a rolling stop in front of the Captain, and knocked her down, and they both fell together. Nona looked at the Captain’s face with its closed eyes—still wasted, but not dead, and looking a little less like a piece of fruit someone had sucked all the juice out of.
Nona lay on her back atop the stretched canvas, and Nona’s mouth said— “Just wait. Just help me … help me do this. I might be different … soon.”
The big dark shapes were still twirling out of the sky, silently it seemed, although there were mismatched boom—CRACKs distantly resounding at the very tops of the tall buildings. Nona watched them anxiously—the sky was so thick with them—but were they thinning? Were fewer falling?
Nona stared up at the sky. She felt movement next to her. The Captain was looking at her, eyes open: normal eyes—the whites covered in little red spindles from where the veins had burst, the ring around the iris deeply black, the iris deeply brown. One of her hands was clasped to the back of her neck, as though it hurt her.
“Harrowhark?” said the Captain doubtfully.
Nona looked up at the sky. She was very tired—or at least, there was a tiredness happening to her: a huge, neighbouring exhaustion that lived, when she sought it, beneath her neck. It was hard understanding how her body fit together. She had to deliberately think about its different parts, when she wanted to feel a sensation.
