Nona struggled to sit up. She was wet and itchy with sweat and the ink where the marker had touched her neck—she rubbed it before she could remember not to, and her hand came back smudged with black.
“Palamedes,” she said, “do you think you know who I am?”
“I’ve got a theory,” began Palamedes.
“Crown said she knew who I was,” said Nona.
“Crown says a lot of things. Theories are all we have.”
“Well, tell me your theories,” Nona demanded, feeling much better from sheer excitement. “Say them out loud. Am I nice? Am I good-looking? Do I have lots of friends? Does everyone listen to me? How many legs do I have?”
Palamedes untucked Camilla’s legs from underneath him and sat knees-up, feet flat on the floor, and he held Nona’s hand. He looked at her with those keen, earnest brown-grey eyes, the softest and nicest of greys and browns, like sheeny earthenware cups.
“Nona, we never wanted to lead you.”
Nona said, “Does it matter anymore?”
“I don’t know, which frightens me,” said Palamedes.
This was hardly to be borne, not after she had waited such a long time and in such circumstances. She said, “Palamedes, please. Tell me something, one titchy little thing, the smallest and tiniest thing. I’ve wanted to know so badly. Maybe I’m dying of … curiosity.”
“Not funny,” said Palamedes.
“Please,” said Nona.
In the end he said, “All I know is this, Nona: if you’re one of two people, current evidence suggests you’re not just the first person, the one who owns your body.”
Nona thought back to mathematics.
“But that means I’m the second person.”
“Or—not solely the first person.”
This was hard to get her head around.
“Can one person even be two people? I feel like I’ve only got enough room inside for me, and sometimes like that room’s not even enough.”
“Lyctors can,” said Palamedes, “or at least—they thought they could; in fact all they became were half-dead cannibals. I think a true Lyctorhood is a mutual death … a gravitational singularity creating something new. A true Grand Lysis, rather than the Petty Lysis of the megatheorem … Oh, God, Nona, I’m rambling, I’m very sorry. I hate it when I’m like this.”
Nona moved over to give him a hug. She hugged him like Camilla would have, the one thing she was truly good at, and he fell into it immediately. He put his head on her shoulder and breathed in deep through his nose.
“Do you remember the girl on the broadcast?” he asked. “The one who wasn’t a startlingly handsome and very obviously dead person with fashion hair?”
“The redhead.” That one was easy.
“That’s the other body you might come from,” said Palamedes. “Her real name is Gideon Nav, and we need to get you to that body, if we can. Spiritual gravity will do the rest.”
This was horrifying.
“But I don’t want to be redheaded,” said Nona. “I do not think of myself as redheaded. And I don’t want to be a necromancer. Or a prince. Palamedes,” she said, “am I—am I a zombie?”
Palamedes took her by the shoulders and looked at her.
“You were born in the Nine Houses, Nona,” he said. “So was I, and Camilla, and Pyrrha. We’re all zombies, as people here would understand them. I was born with aptitude, so I’m a true zombie, a wizard. Camilla and Pyrrha—who weren’t—would be what they call minions.”
This hurt her feelings.
“No wonder Hot Sauce kicked me out of the gang,” she said, and her eyes numbed with tears again.
“Hot Sauce is a very young woman who has been living on her nerves for so long that I imagine she doesn’t have anything else,” said Palamedes briskly. “She’ll regret what she did at some point.”
Nona’s lip wobbled and she had to keep swallowing hard. Palamedes carefully sat himself back down and grimaced, and she looked at his shackle for the first time: it was a big black cuff with an electronic red light that blinked off and on as she watched. He said, “It’s an explosive shackle. After We Suffer saw Camilla and me pull the bullet from your head … I couldn’t not work on you … she has come to her own conclusions, and whatever conclusions Crown wanted to give her. They’ve been very busy since we came back, so they wanted us to stay where they put us.”
Nona was incensed. “I hate it. I hate being locked up.”