Palamedes could think. He said it was his party trick.
But Nona couldn’t shoot or fight or think. All she had was a good nature—that wasn’t true all the time, but Nona didn’t want it bruited about that she had a bad temper when she had only ever thrown two tantrums in her life and couldn’t remember either of them. Even if she’d been proud of those, you couldn’t brag about two tantrums. Every day she held a sword until she seriously didn’t care about swords anymore, but she still couldn’t fight with one, no matter how big or thin it was. Camilla had wanted to teach her properly, but Pyrrha said not to, that they wouldn’t be able to tell if anything suddenly came back.
Nona couldn’t do the forbidden bone tricks either, even though Palamedes did nearly the exact same thing with big grey lumps of bone as Camilla did with the sword. She had to hold them, and listen when he told her to do nonsensical things—“Pretend you can stretch it; stretch it now,” or “Pretend you can touch the insides; split it open.” He never made Nona feel bad for not being able to do any of these things, only acted like it was interesting that she couldn’t.
In the beginning she hadn’t been able to do much for herself at all, but over time she had remembered how to button her shirts, and tie up her laces, and soap herself in the bath, and pour water into a glass so that her hand didn’t tremble and the water didn’t slop out. It shamed her, remembering how little she could do at the start. She had been so frustrated, in those slow early days. But now she could do nearly everything. She knew important facts like what was expected and what was unexpected at different parts of the day, and that people’s ears weren’t so interesting that she had to put her fingers inside them. In those early days Palamedes and Camilla and Pyrrha had often looked at her in a sort of stupefied shock; now they were still stupefied but they were not so shocked, and often she made them laugh.
And now they touched her, sometimes not even by explicit request. Pyrrha would roughly hug her in one big suddenness, or sweep Nona up in her hard, wiry arms before setting her down on the sofa; Palamedes would pull the blankets up over her if she was getting into bed and tuck them in softly at the corners. If she slipped her hand into Camilla’s, when they were walking down the street, Camilla would hold it. Nona didn’t understand how the others could walk around and go through their lives only touching each other as much as was necessary. When Nona asked, Camilla said that this was because they needed to get the washing-up done.
Nona could do all the basic things now, but there was still distressingly little that she was good at. Nona was good at:
touching,
wiping dishes,
running her hand over the flat cork carpet in a way that got all the hair out of it,
sleeping in lots of different ways and positions, and
speaking any language that was spoken to her, in person, so she could see the person’s face and eyes and lips.
It turned out that Palamedes and Camilla could only speak one language, and Pyrrha could speak all of that one and some of another two and a little bit of about five more. The one language all three were fluent in was a kind people used for business transactions, so it wasn’t strange that they used it—but it was falling out of favour, because it was a language used by awful people. Even then, the dialect spoken in the city didn’t always make sense to them, or the pronunciation was strange. Nona understood everybody, and could speak back to them so that they understood her, and nobody ever said she had an accent. This confounded Palamedes. When she first said that she could speak back by watching them talk and making her lips look like theirs, it confounded him so much more that it gave Camilla a headache.
There were lots of different languages and dialects around because of all the refugees from other planets, and because of all the resettlements—Nona knew about resettlements because it was all anyone talked about in a queue—and if you spoke someone else’s language they were nicer to you, and assumed you had come from the same place they had come from and lived through what they’d lived through, which was helpful. Many people were suspicious of other people because they wanted a good resettlement and were afraid that other people would somehow get them a bad resettlement. Many people had lived through at least one bad resettlement already. Everyone was crammed on one of three planets now, and they all agreed that this planet was easily the worst, though this always made Nona feel a little bit offended on the planet’s part.
And so Nona lived with Camilla, Palamedes, and Pyrrha, on the thirtieth floor of a building where nearly everyone was unhappy, in a city where nearly everyone was unhappy, on a world where everyone said that you could outrun the zombies, but not forever.