“Yes,” said Palamedes.
“Well, I thought I was only going to be sick for not much longer, maybe a few weeks or a month,” said Nona, trying to organise her thoughts. She licked her lips and whispered up to the ceiling: “But now I think I only have a few days. Oh, thank goodness, I said it. Wow, that’s a relief.”
Palamedes went silent. Then he said: “A few days of what?”
“Oh—living,” said Nona, too relieved at having said it to feel stupid. “It’s nearly over, Palamedes. I’m dying. I’ve been dying for months.”
Then Palamedes touched her, and he did not throttle her. He ran Cam’s soft, chapped hand all over her head. He touched her ribs and her belly and he pulled off her shoes and touched the soles of her feet. Then he got up and he pulled open a drawer on the desk and he came back with, of all things, a fat black marker. He said, “Nona, put your hands on your hips and put your ankles together, I need a closed circuit.”
She put her hands on her hips and joined her ankles. Palamedes lightly sketched something just beneath the hollow of her throat, saying, “Keep still now,” when she laughed, being ticklish. The pen made a lot of little light, feathery fwip—fwip—fwips on her, and then Palamedes laid it down and said: “Here goes nothing.”
And nothing was what happened as Palamedes hovered Camilla’s hand over Nona’s face—her throat, down the line of her abdomen—except that his fingers were wreathed in fine blue flames, completely smokeless and heatless. They cast terrifying lights in the room even though they didn’t flicker, staying nearly perfectly still. There was nothing more than a slight tingling feeling as he made it all the way down to her feet and back, and then he clutched Camilla’s fist closed, and she looked at him and saw that he was bewildered.
“God save me from Lyctoral masking,” he said, exasperated. “Cytherea the First must have enjoyed those games she played with me … Hang on.”
Now he poked and prodded her: her heart, her belly, the tops of her thighs, the place at her temple where the bullet had gone in. When she flinched, Palamedes said gently, “Sorry. Give me a moment,” and she gave him a moment, and then after a long time he said— “You’re shedding thalergy like chaff in the wind. What’s going on? It’s almost like a starvation reaction, but Cam and I know you’re eating.”
“Not very much,” admitted Nona, but Palamedes said, “Not so little that your framework should have gone into thalergy metabolism. You’re eating your own reserves. You’ve got the level of retention I’d usually only see in palliative care. Nona—your soul’s trying to leave your body.”
Nona puzzled over this a little.
“But I like my body.”
“It doesn’t matter about liking,” said Palamedes. “What’s happening to you is why I can’t be in Camilla’s body for more than a handful of minutes, Nona. If I stay too long I start trying to make inroads on her soul—I start trying to bed down and put up new wallpaper and displace Camilla, for all that we’ve tried to make sure that doesn’t happen. At the same time, Cam’s body tries to reject my soul, like when you try to blink dust out of your eye. But your body would never try to reject its own soul … unless it didn’t recognise it. Unless your soul was a stranger’s … or a melange. Is that the gestalt theory busted—or confirmed? Is that how we explain the rapid healing?”
He was talking much more to himself now. How could she explain?
“But you see, Palamedes, I don’t mind dying,” said Nona, trying to make him understand. “I’ve been doing it for ages. I’m not scared.”
This explanation died on impact. Palamedes said with a voice like concrete: “I will not be party to this again.”
Nona was a little bit afraid of that voice.
“I’m sorry, Palamedes.”
“No. Don’t be. It’s simply—Nona, we can’t let your body die,” he said. “For one thing, it’s the body of someone I owe a favour to, and I’d rather like to see the look on her face when I present it back to her … And if we lose the body, whither goes the soul? Let’s say you are the other soul … And let’s say I lose you. You die; she wakes up. The final kick in the pants in what I gather was a life long on kicks and short on very much else. And yet if I don’t preserve her … Ninth, really, I sincerely did not want to have to look after your bedamned water bottle.”