Nona the Ninth, page 43
Camilla Hect stared at him stolidly, and then burst into tears. She made very little noise, but the tears were violent anyway; Palamedes took her hands and said in distress, “Cam—dear one—don’t.”
“No,” said Camilla, after an obvious struggle to master herself. “No. I’m crying because … I’m crying because I’m relieved,” she said, frankly mulishly. “I’m relieved … Warden, I’m so relieved.”
“Not long now,” he promised.
Camilla took a couple of gasping breaths—it was obvious how much they hurt her—and then she said: “Warden—will she know who we are, in the River?”
“Oh, she’s not stupid,” said Palamedes lightly. “In the River—beyond the River—I truly believe we will see ourselves and each other as we really are. And I want them to see us. I am not saying this was our inevitable end … I am saying we have found the best and truest and kindest thing we can do in this moment. Tell me no, and we’ll go on as we have been … and we’ll go on unafraid … but say yes, and we will make this end, and this beginning, together.”
Camilla shivered all over. Then she was at rest; she relaxed her head—the lines of her neck drooped like a flower—she raised it again.
“Palamedes, yes,” she said. “My whole life, yes. Yes, forever, yes. Life is too short and love is too long.”
He demanded: “Tell me how to do it, and I’ll do it.”
Camilla said, “Go loud.”
Palamedes took her knife, and he cracked open an invisible seam on the end of the handle. A thin trickle of something white and grey and powdery dribbled into his palm. He held it out to her, and Camilla opened her mouth and—to Nona’s horror—ate it, whatever it was. He took the knife and he scored her finger, saying, “Not much longer,” and he pressed her own bloody finger to her cool and bloody mouth, and he said, “Don’t look back. Whatever you do, don’t look back,” and they huddled their heads together, they rested their heads on each other’s shoulders.
Nothing particularly interesting happened, until Camilla burst into flames. She blazed like a white candle—she rolled away from the body of Ianthe Naberius, booted the inert figure away to roll over and over across the road—and stood, stumbling, completely ablaze, a hot white pillar of fire. Nona watched her open her mouth as though she were calling out, but no sound came. She sizzled: her bandages and clothes and injuries all sizzled, her hair sizzled, she blackened and wasted right in front of them. Wherever she staggered, she left bloody black footprints, and those footprints curled up in flowerlike wreaths of smoke and flame before dribbling to nothing on the road. She dropped to the road as though dying, rolled around in the agonies of the dying, until Nona thought she too would die of watching: that she had finally found something so horrible she could die just from seeing it, the worst thing you could ever see in your life.
The whole tunnel was filled with sparking, sparkling flame, and the crackle of roasting human flesh, Camilla’s body dancing gruesomely trying to put it out—a black thing within the fire—then something red within the fire—and then she tried to stand; she arched, trembling, featureless; the flames died.
In the darkness, the figure was naked and whole and unhurt. It crouched in on itself—elbows to knees, clasping itself, curled up in a kind of C—and then it said: “Clothes, please?”
Nona watched as Kiriona started to unbutton her jacket, then thought better of it. The hawk-faced stranger shimmied, completely unembarrassed, out of her trousers, leaving herself in shorts; We Suffer was taking off her heavy coat. As both of them approached, Nona could see that the stranger’s hawk face was stony and emotionless but that there were wet tracks down her cheeks. The naked figure shrugged on the coat—hastily pulled up the trousers—said, “Thanks,” and buttoned itself in.
And it was just Camilla, after all—Camilla having lost all that fringe and most of her hair except for a charred inch or so—Cam with new eyes, and a new face, for all that they were the same-shaped eyes and the old familiar features. But the eyes were a different colour, though Nona could not see what colour from where she sat. All she could see was that they were different. And the features, though in the same order, were making such a different set of expressions—not Camilla’s, not Palamedes’s—that it struck Nona all at once: they were gone—they had left her—they were no longer there.
Nona lifted her voice, and wailed aloud.
The new figure broke past We Suffer and the hawk-faced woman, and rustled through the pockets of the inert dead body of Ianthe Naberius, alone and still on the road—loped over to Nona in a way that neither Camilla nor Palamedes had ever moved but was filled with both of them, long in the leg, easy in the stride, spare and efficient. They held out a lavender silk handkerchief.
Nona sniffled thickly, and recoiled. “I want a tissue—that’s too fancy,” she mumbled.
“That’s the point,” the figure said, and looked at her with a grave smile. “We know there’s not going to be a big birthday party anymore, but: happy birthday, Nona.”
Nona mopped her eyes dolefully with the handkerchief. “Thank you,” she said. “It’s a relief you didn’t get hair ties.”
The new person suddenly whirled around in one movement. They dashed toward the abandoned body of Ianthe Naberius—an abandoned body that was now propped up on its elbows, staring out with pale, distrustful eyes, an expression on its face of commingled hate and despair.
“So there was another way, Sextus, after all,” the body murmured.
The figure crouched down and extended their arm.
“I know how hard it is for you to kick against the goad,” said the new person. “But there are more worlds than this. Come with us. We are the love that is perfected by death—but even death will be no more; death can also die. There’s still time, Ianthe. Time for you, and for Naberius Tern.”
The abandoned body stared at what had once been Camilla’s hand, at what once had been Camilla’s face, then at the hand again. After which it said brightly—
“I bet you say that to all the boys.”
The body collapsed and was empty; staring up at the top of the tunnel, its eyes strangely white and silent.
29
THEY LOADED EVERYONE BACK into a single truck. Nobody seemed annoyed about this, even though Nona knew they had been on the trucks for months. Maybe once you were on a truck long enough, you forgot that there was anything but the truck. To Nona, it did not seem like a nice kind of home. She kept thinking in a welter of heartbreak about her bedroom, her mattress, her blankets. She had started thinking of bed in a kind of longing, desperate, hungry way.
Pyrrha had taken the wheeled chair that Camilla had used and sat Nona inside it. Camilla—Palamedes—the new person—did not need any kind of wheeled chair anymore, or pain medication, despite having been nearly dead. With enormous energy, few words, and a clipboard clutched in their hands, Palamedes-and-Camilla herded all those bent-down, exhausted people. They stopped every single one briefly, and patted them over, and said things like, “Rehydrated,” or, “Try walking on that,” or, “Fixed the kidneys. Take better care of them.” Somehow simultaneously they took measurements, all while moving like someone Nona had never met. She fell back entirely on Pyrrha, who seemed as absolutely out of her element as Nona was.
“How much to ride the merry-go-round?” said someone familiar.
It was the Angel. The Angel and Pash appeared in front of Nona’s chair, before the truck, and with them—most wonderfully—Noodle; Noodle, sitting on the ground, opening his mouth and panting, closing his mouth and rolling his eyes with displeasure, obviously as past the events of the day as Nona herself. Pyrrha said with a flicker of old humour—“How much to get off?”
“More than we can afford, I guess,” said the Angel. She was looking composed in a long canvas coat like the one We Suffer had given up, with a long bag slung over her shoulder. Pash wore two of the same, one over each shoulder, with a third in her hand. “Sometimes I feel as though I were born on the merry-go-round—I worry I won’t know what to do with myself when it stops. If it ever stops.”
Nona, having seen the bags, and Noodle, and the leashes, found eagerness enough within her to say— “Are you coming with us?”
“Probably not, kiddie,” said Pyrrha, but Pash said unexpectedly: “This is the fucking stupidest idea in the world, but yeah, we are. I go where this goes”—a violent jerk of the head in the Angel’s direction—“and I guess this one is getting on the bus.”
“To the Nine Houses,” said Pyrrha slowly.
“Yes,” said the Angel.
“The very centre of the Emperor Divine’s power,” said Pyrrha.
Pash said, “Don’t even start. You’ll set me off again. We go where we’re sent … and this city’s a death trap. I don’t know, I would have moved out into the tunnels and tried to get clear of the city that way, but…”
“But I exist,” said the Angel. “Pardon—we exist. And as long as we exist, we are a terrible liability. The commander will get some breathing room if she doesn’t have to take us into account with every movement.”
Pash said roughly: “The commander’s probably dead the moment we walk out of here.”
“We have left many wing commanders behind to die,” said the Angel calmly. “This wing commander is particularly cunning and particularly brave and particularly determined—but get used to it, Passion … We’ve been weighed,” she shouted out, and waved her hand at the figures of Palamedes-and-Camilla and We Suffer in the distance, and they waved back.
Nona said: “Who are you?” Then she explained, “Everyone asks me the same question, so—I feel like it’s my turn.”
“You don’t get to ask,” said Pash roughly; which Nona thought was a wonderful and very cool answer she wished she had come up with herself.
But the Angel leant down and looked at Nona. There was something settled in her face: a calmness that had not existed there before—a kind of immovable, fixed-concrete resolve. She had never seen the Angel look like that. Every furtive, fleeting, mercurial spark had gone, leaving something hard and old, something that touched light to some paper deep within Nona. She suddenly reached up and grasped the Angel’s hand, and the Angel grasped hers, and the Angel looked at her.
“I’m the Messenger,” said the Angel simply. “We are the Message … the message has two parts left, and you are looking at one of those parts. The name for this part of the message was ‘Aim’ when the message was passed to us through my forebear Emma Sen. The message is too simple for human beings like us to understand. What do you think the message is?”
Nona couldn’t guess.
“I hope you hear it one day,” said Aim.
She reached out—she ruffled Nona’s hair—she smiled. Then she said, “Noodle, let’s go,” and she stepped resolutely up the ramp and into the truck.
Pash dithered behind a little—a more subdued and unsure Our Lady of the Passion. She said, “I have to shoot you now,” and then she burst out, quickly, “Joke—that was an actual fucking joke, you don’t even need to pay for it,” and she followed the Angel up the ramp.
Pyrrha leant down and plucked Nona out of the chair. Nona was bewildered to find that her arms were now betraying her too. When she tried to place them around Pyrrha’s neck again, they too had become something more like rocks and ice. Pyrrha put them around her shoulders and said— “You’ve been very calm.”
Nona found herself saying: “It’s not long now, is it? Are we going to find me?”
“Yeah,” said Pyrrha. “I think it’s time to wake you up.”
The megatruck, on the inside, was a long corridor of little cubicles. Pyrrha avoided these cubicles and instead travelled up a short flight of metal stairs to another compartment. She opened a door and she brought Nona into an enormous cockpit with wraparound windows, the most complicated car insides that she had ever seen. Pyrrha sat down on a chair made of shiny, soft, cracked stuff, worn at the seat from too much sitting down. The windshield was a huge black expanse, strung with the few lights lit in the tunnel and otherwise looking like the blackness at the bottom of the world.
The corpse prince was already in the cockpit. She had apparently walked there under her own steam—if anyone from Blood of Eden had noticed, they had kept it to themselves—and now she was strapped into one of the sideways seats, her sword beneath her feet, legs splayed carelessly wide at the knees, arms folded over her chest. She did not speak to them, even when Pyrrha said, “Hey, kid.” She had not said much of anything since Camilla and Palamedes had become Camilla-and-Palamedes—seemed withdrawn and lost in thought, unwilling to look at anyone or anything.
Camilla’s body appeared at the doorway. The commander was there with it, and Crown was close behind, with the Captain’s arm around her shoulder. The Captain seemed to be able to stand up now, but was staring, dumb and dull, as though she didn’t understand her surroundings. Supporting her must have been awkward, but Crown didn’t seem to notice. Crown flashed a smile at Nona—she even smiled at Kiriona—before sitting down in one of the front-row chairs. Camilla-and-Palamedes selected the biggest chair of all, right at the front, before the enormous wheel.
“Mind showing me how this thing starts?” they said to the commander.
“Oh, dear God,” said the commander. “For what I am about to do, I will go down as history’s greatest monster.” But she leant over, and she said: “Ignition is there—those are the three brake lines. The lights will need to be green before you hit the ignition. This will start the automatic checks. Press this button to indicate you have read them. If you flip that switch—and do not flip it before everything else has gone green—it will free this lever, which can be manipulated forward … and the wheel turns, although it will also turn automatically with the wall detection … Do you have that?”
Pyrrha said, “Please let me drive.”
“No chance,” said Palamedes-and-Camilla comfortably. And: “Commander … thank you. Leave everything to me.”
“I do—I have,” said We Suffer. And— “Every single hope of Eden now rests within this clapped-out vehicle.”
“Same for the Nine Houses,” said Palamedes-and-Camilla.
“You know what I want,” said We Suffer. She turned to address the rest of the driver’s cockpit. “To complete what she started. Troia, listen to me. Every so often there is invoked a Blood of Eden mission protocol—we call it Protocol One. It is used in times of either terrible joy or the worst possible outcomes. Protocol One means there are no more formal orders—if given in the field of battle, often it is understood as ‘Scatter. Retreat. Disunite,’ but it is not quite that. There is a different protocol that is simply used for retreat, protocol that means ‘Save yourselves.’ I received the order to save myself when I was young … and I saved myself, which is why you hear me now, starting this terrible truck, putting my life’s work in the hands of my enemies and of strangers I do not understand. But now I give you Protocol One … and Protocol One is ‘Live.’”
Crown saluted. Pyrrha looked at the commander, and she saluted too, a slightly different salute with her hand over her heart. Palamedes-and-Camilla turned around in the seat, and they said— “What mission protocol are you about to give Blood of Eden?”
We Suffer flapped her hand dismissively. “Oh, a very common one. It is basically ‘Fight like hell and do not shoot any civilians.’ We can do that one any day of any week. I only wish civilians were not so dumb, like rocks are … Lieutenant Crown Him with Many Crowns, good luck. Pyrrha Dve … I am amazed to say this, but I wish you luck. Nona … I wish you luck. You…”
We Suffer paused. Camilla-and-Palamedes cocked their burnt head to one side.
“Paul,” they suggested.
“Paul. Good luck, Paul,” said We Suffer. “Now … you have my coat, which you can keep, but my wallet is in the breast pocket, so hand it over.”
Palamedes-and-Camilla—Paul—obediently dislodged the wallet and handed it over. We Suffer said, “Now I will give final orders to Aim and Lieutenant Our Lady of the Passion. I will also say goodbye to Juno Zeta, who I understand is your mother, and who is an extraordinary lady who has already memorised the names of various people in my family.”
We Suffer turned around and walked out without ceremony; she paused only for one long, last look at the corpse prince. Nona noticed that Crown held her salute for a long time after the door shut behind We Suffer, and only reluctantly let her hand drop.
“Buckle in,” said Paul.
Pyrrha tested and tightened the seatbelt over Nona’s arms, and asked, “How long were you planning this one?”
“They had a lot of rainy-day backup plans.”
“Yeah, but—Paul?”
“Just Paul,” said Paul.
Crown suggested, “Paul … Hect?”
“Just Paul,” said Paul.
“U Lap,” said the corpse prince, from the back of the cabin.
“Thanks for your contribution,” said Paul.
“Aulp,” said the corpse prince.
“No,” said Paul.
A light started flashing on the megatruck control board. Paul leant over and touched the button, and We Suffer’s voice crackled through.
“Troia cell, do you read? You’re clear. Goodbye, and good hunting.”
“Troia cell copy. Good luck,” said Paul, and, a little laconically—“See you soon.”
“You have a big ego,” she said. “I enjoy that. It is a good and terrible sign. Ctesiphon-1, out.”
Paul settled back in the chair and buckled in. Nona watched as Paul depressed a button until the lights flickered green; a pleasant ding sounded as a screen rolled across the front of the big blackness—as the lights in their little cabin dimmed into nothing, and as a long squiggly readout filled up fully a third of the glass. Paul tapped a button—the readout shifted smoothly over to one side—and flipped a switch, then freed a lever.
There was a deep, smooth clunk all around Nona, insulated by dint of being in Pyrrha’s lap and also by her body feeling so strange and numb. A huge light swept out in front of them—the headlights from the megatruck had come on automatically—so that there was the darkness, and the road, and the beams of light.
