Nona got up again and she was madder than ever. She stamped one foot in the splatter, and then another; she brandished the piece of broken cheap metal like a sword, and she screamed so loudly that it was coming out of her nose and her eyes and her brain, and every one of those soldiers took a step backward.
Nona turned and ran. Her feet made slop, slop, slop sounds as she fled down the corridor. There were people gathering in front of her, with more guns, people who for all their different masks and goggles and hoods always seemed like the same fake person. Somebody down the corridor shouted, “Disengage! Disengage!” but Nona’s scream was louder. One of the soldiers didn’t disengage, they shot her again instead. She raised the metal over her head, and she ran at him. They were screaming through their mask. Nona screamed through hers, the mask that was the front of her face.
There was a lot of noise now. Sounds crowded in all at once. It was like being the person in the middle of a traffic island whose job it was to direct all the heavy vehicles. Nona had once thought that seemed like a wonderful job to get to do, but no longer. Even the Edenite had cringed away from her screaming; they had dropped their gun and their gloved hands were clapped over their helmet, over their ears, and she opened her mouth to remember her teeth.
Someone dropped something over her head. It was a hood, and it was tightening at the neck. She reached up to tear it off, but something big and heavy pinned her arms against her body. It was like being swaddled. Nona struggled, but this was a good defence against her, maybe the only defence; Camilla had wrapped her up in a blanket too, the second time. When it all went dark, her body seemed to remember that she had used something up inside her, something enormous, and she started to tremble.
She trembled so hard that she thought she would die then and there, that this was what dying was finally like. Inside the hood she heard her mouth say, savage and distinct and cool despite the trembles: “Fool. You’re killing her.”
But she was only talking to herself, after all.
JOHN 3:20
IN THE DREAM, nights did not give way to mornings. The light coming through the clouds changed colour, but nothing rose and nothing sank except their chests when they breathed. In the dream she quite often forgot how to breathe, or swallow, and she would choke on her own saliva until the fright passed and the body remembered for her.
In a darkness that could have been sunrise he said, None of us ever wanted to use that nuke. We never thought we would. It felt like a toy. We kept laughing that it came with a manual. I think we were scared of what would happen if we stopped laughing. We pulled up the floor and put a safe beneath the lino and swore we were never going to use it. G— made sure it couldn’t be armed, it was never something we were going to blow for real. But it was our leverage—it was a way to force people to listen to us just as much as the money was. Our first method was to keep telling the truth, keep pushing on the FTL story, keep asking hard questions. Our second method was to throw money at it. Our third method was to tell people that we’d got a nuke.
He said, It wasn’t as naive as it sounded. Like, yeah, we were very aware that simply having this thing, that’s a serious international incident. But we’d been party to this massive secret, right, we had access to one of the biggest political scandals of all time, and we were key helpers on the cover-up. A bomb would at least give them pause. It had to. And we were sick of how much time everything was taking. We’d been subjected to so much bureaucracy and so much red tape and so many people refusing to do so many things that we were willing to gamble on being tried at the Hague just to stop the process. Ready to make a hell of a mess to buy time. Prepared to do anything to keep you going.
C— kept saying, Pick one. Are we more invested in proving this new plan is bullshit, or in saving you? I was like, It’s both, how can it not be both. C— was like, It can’t be both. Pick one and stick to it. Decide what you give a fuck about.
He said, I found that the problem with being the death man is you stop giving much of a fuck.
Then he said, rubbing circles into one temple with his thumb, I still can’t believe they wouldn’t give me the time of day and they were scared of me. It’s not fair. Either you’re the evil wizard and everyone wants to know what you think, or you’re the good wizard and nobody cares. It wasn’t fair. That wasn’t how it was meant to work.
In the dream she did not ask him questions. The burnt-out shell of the car was still smouldering. It seemed like the smell was in her clothes, in her hair, in the mud. It was still cold this high up, in the mist, and the cold made the fronts of her arms bumpy, which panicked her until he told her it was natural.