He said, That’s how I ended up going home with a couple billion dollars and a suitcase nuke.
19
WHEN NONA GOT HER sight back she was lying on a bed made of three chairs pushed together. Her sight and her sound and her smell came back all at once, but her memories stayed weirdly distant, like they were shuffling their feet behind a doorway, waiting to announce a surprise party. She did not know the room. She was staring up at a particle-board roof with holes in it and a long flickering bar light, and she was lying in the awkward, rucked-up way one always has to lie on a makeshift bed.
That didn’t matter. She had been put to sleep on makeshift beds plenty of times by plenty of people. What mattered was that her ankles had been haphazardly bound to one of the struts on the chair’s frame, and one of her hands had been tied to the bit of the chair that was closest to her head. The other hand had been chained to the radiator with the type of plastic-sheathed chain that people put around their bicycles when they wanted the bicycle thief to really have to work for it. She had seen that type of chain in the city, usually in two pieces from where it had been cut with pliers.
Abruptly, Nona threw her third tantrum.
Nona had thrown exactly two tantrums in her entire life. She couldn’t remember anything about the first one, but Pyrrha had told her about it. Pyrrha had been laughing with her mouth, but not with her eyes: her eyes had been very brown and distant and uneasy, as though this tantrum had reminded Pyrrha of something her brain didn’t want to bring back. Everyone could remember her second tantrum. That was when it had been impressed upon her to keep her temper, and it was the reason Palamedes and Camilla always let her go to the ocean even though it was the most dangerous thing she could ever possibly want, both for their anonymity and just in general. The ocean made her stop being angry, and had a prolonged effect, so that a weekly dip meant that she was never worse than a little whingy. But at that moment everything that had happened—Pyrrha—the Angel—Hot Sauce—calmly wiped out long and careful weeks of Palamedes and Camilla dipping her in the ocean.
Nona arched her back right up off the chair and let out a long, bellowing scream, one that went on for ever and ever and ever until her throat broke and healed and broke again and she was screaming blood as well as sound. This was her warning to everyone else. After she had done that, she gave in to the simplicity of anger. She tugged and tugged and tugged on the arm chained through the radiator until it should have hurt, but as always happened, she was beyond pain or thought. In fact everything hurt a lot. It hurt in that slippery, frightening way her body used to let her know that she had made a huge mistake, but Nona’s anger gave her the power not to listen. Her hand came free of the chain and the radiator. It made a mess. Next she had to get her ankles free of the chair, and that was harder, because everything was wet now. She had to use both hands and both her feet. For long, helpless, frantic moments she thought she was stuck, the way she used to get frightened when Camilla had put a shirt over her head and things went wrong on the way and her head tried to get through the armhole. It was with the same kind of sweating, anxious rearrangement that she got her feet free now. The plastic ties were good, like Corona had said, and they didn’t break. But Nona came through them, screaming.
There was nothing in the room but the three chairs, which would probably never be used as chairs again after what she had done, and a dusty laminate table, and the light, and the locked door. Nona would have posted herself under the door if she had to. But the door wasn’t actually that strong. She brushed some of the mess and a discarded finger off the seat of one of the chairs and she hit the door with it. The beauty of her anger was not in her strength; Nona’s body could never be strong. The beauty was in the fact that she could hit the door over and over, as hard as she possibly could, as many times as she liked. That was a mess too. But she was angry. The door caved in.
The chair’s cushion cover had come off, and so had one of the welded arms. The other arm had snapped off earlier. It had been useful when she needed a jaggedy edge to make herself smaller. This second arm had come off longer, and she gripped that one firmly, one hand at the bottom and the other hand atop that one. Even with everything so soggy and slippery, that felt safe. When she finally battered down the last fragments of door she stood with the weapon held before her and faced a tight knot of people in their masks and their combat trousers and their big boots, just like Pash’s boots.
The thought of Pash’s boots made her mad again. She suddenly hated Pash. If it had not been for Pash, maybe nobody would have got shot. Maybe nobody would have locked Hot Sauce in the generator room. In front of her was a row of shining holes at the ends of raised guns, and for the fourth time in a very short period, they shot her. She slipped in a puddle and fell backward into the splintery door wreckage, two bullets in her chest, one in her knee.