You were not allowed to say the words zombies, necromancers, or necromancy outside her house, or really inside it either. Nona said they talked about everything else, so why not those words, but Palamedes said superstition for the latter and indignation for the former, which Nona did not understand. This had been the case for Nona’s entire life, which would be six months next week, and Pyrrha had said as a treat she would take everyone for a birthday trip to the beach （if nobody was setting up a mortar on it）。
Nona was so grateful to have had a whole six months of this. It was greedy to expect much longer.
3
HARDLY ANYONE WAS SUSPICIOUS OF NONA, even in the early days. They assumed she was the way she was because she had been through something terrible. They had all known at least one person who had not been through something terrible. When she asked Camilla how she came across to other people, Camilla said unworldly. Pyrrha said she acted like she had given away one of her two brain cells already. Pyrrha said to keep going, that people loved it if you were good-looking and dumb.
Nona didn’t want to be just good-looking and dumb; she wanted to be useful. She was dimly aware that she was not what anyone had wanted. This was why she had gone out and got herself a job, even though it wasn’t a paying one.
About four months in, when Nona had learnt enough to be allowed outside and to talk to strangers and to do up her own shirts, she was permitted to visit not merely the garage beneath the Building but the surrounding three buildings too. There was a school behind her building that used the first two floors of an old beat-up office block for classrooms, and Nona liked to hang around near the fence and watch the children play during break time. This caught the attention of a nice lady teacher who asked Nona why she wasn’t in school herself. She said truthfully enough that she did lessons at home, and the nice lady had made a face and asked Nona where she lived. When she heard that Nona lived in the Building, she didn’t quail, but wrote down the floor and apartment number on a piece of paper.
When the nice lady teacher turned up one evening and told Pyrrha and Camilla how wonderful the school was and how it had almost twenty other children and reading and writing at all the levels and an hour of the sciences every day and games, and talked about how it was even more important for children in the refuges to have a routine so why didn’t they want that for Nona, Cam had to tell the nice lady that Nona was nearly nineteen.
The nice lady was totally foxed.
“But she’s such a dot.”
Pyrrha explained without missing a beat that what with everything Nona had gone through she had been ill and still didn’t eat very much, which was why she was so knobbly and undergrown. The nice lady said that yes, many of the children had problems like that, but it was still hard to imagine Nona was anywhere over fourteen, wasn’t it? The nice lady added that she obviously didn’t get her build from her father, and she smiled at Pyrrha. Before anyone could stop her, Nona laughed and laughed and said, Pyrrha wasn’t her father. The nice lady got suspicious—Nona could see it in her hands—and suggested that Nona should come anyway, could even be a Teacher’s Aide, someone who helped the other children with their lessons. They told her Nona couldn’t read or write and the nice lady said, Oh.
But at this point Nona felt the lure of not only an hour of the sciences every day and games but also the glory suggested by the capitals of a Teacher’s Aide, and she said: I want to go, please and thank you.
The nice lady asked why didn’t they try it out the next morning and see how it went. Nona was delighted. The lady said she was the main teacher, but they also had a wonderful science teacher and it would be lovely to have someone else on the team. Their last Teacher’s Aide had tragically died. Pyrrha said, Were the kids that bad then. The teacher’s mouth thinned and she said, No, the water plant explosion, and so Nona said, Yes she would go! before Camilla or especially Pyrrha could say anything else. Then Pyrrha, much to Camilla’s disgust, flirted outrageously with the nice lady teacher until the nice lady teacher left.
After Pyrrha saw the nice lady teacher out, Camilla, who had been pacing around the kitchen, looked up and said coolly—
“What was that?”
“Getting us out of hot water, my naive beauty,” said Pyrrha, collapsing into a chair with an appalling creak. “She paid you and junior the compliment of thinking you were working girls, and that I was your pimp. God knows I’d have had better luck pimping out Augustine and Alfred.”
Nona wanted to know: “What’s pimp?”