“Which means I need you, Hect,” said We Suffer.
“Then take this shackle off my damn leg.”
“As soon as I can. They would not let me put you two in the same room without it,” said We Suffer. “They are impressed by her, as I said, but also very frightened. The Houses sent a Lyctor to negotiate, and then there you both are in the limelight, one of you able to shrug off a bullet to the brain and the other fully capable of necromancy. A necromancy I knew not of! If you had told me, Hect, I would have been able to spin it. If you had let me know, we could have thought of something together.”
Camilla said, “You can’t control your own people?”
“I cannot ask them to tolerate the intolerable,” said We Suffer. “I am not a tyrant. I exercise much control you are not seeing. For instance, this affair of yours and Nona’s … it has not yet made it to other cells, and the rest of Ctesiphon will not tell them, not yet. Today this is a family affair, and our hopes and attentions rest on another.”
Before Nona could even conceive of looking at Camilla’s leg and getting angry again, Camilla gave her the cool it expression, and the desk in front of We Suffer beeped urgently. She glanced at a little flip-top electronic screen in front of her, and she said: “Nine in the morning. She is in place. This is confirmed.”
Nine? How long had Nona slept? How little had Cam slept? When she looked at Camilla’s face, she saw that her expression had hardened like the quick-set concrete at Pyrrha’s work.
“This is your last chance,” said Camilla tonelessly. “Pull her out.”
“This is the only move we find it possible to make, and as a move it is sensitive to time,” said We Suffer. “She volunteered. We need someone on the inside. Without understanding, we can make no move on that barracks, nor find the way forward. She is, perhaps, the only person for whom this would not be a suicide mission. She said it herself.”
“You should’ve asked why she said that,” said Camilla. “I could’ve gone in. I’m a citizen of the Nine Houses.”
“After the last eight hours? Not one chance. In your own way, you too are too important to lose here,” said We Suffer. “I need you to hear this as it happens. I need you to translate the nuances. And she needs you to be here for her plan to work, though she said she would do it alone. She said she was expendable, and that you were not. We agreed with this.”
“You’ve been played,” said Camilla.
Nona’s legs felt weak. She slithered into the chair, and We Suffer quite nicely rolled one of the bottles of water in her direction. She caught it awkwardly, and it was nice to feel how cool the plastic was between her hands. She pressed it to her cheeks and her forehead briefly. She was still sweating.
Camilla said, “Listen to me. Pull her out. She can’t do this.”
“Lieutenant Crown knows what she is doing,” said We Suffer calmly, though Nona would not have been so calm with Camilla making the face she was currently making. It was like the time Pyrrha had let Nona smoke a cigarette and Nona had accidentally eaten half. “I have also told you, many times. This is the swings and the roundabouts. A concurrent vote was called yesterday to set off bombs below the barracks and hope Ianthe Naberius did not live through it. There is a sense that we must play the aggressor. Blood of Eden has perfected the defensive game, never moving forward, perpetually shifting to our back foot. We owe Wake too much to keep playing that game. Crown understood. I think she plays to win … and we now know we have more to win than ever.”
Camilla crossed to the table, chain clinking. She adopted a posture that Nona had seen often: arms crossed over each other, head tilted a little in what Nona always thought of as the fly-upward expression. It was a Palamedes posture, and for a moment Nona thought it was Palamedes, but it wasn’t. It was Camilla trying to be Palamedes.
“Listen to me,” she said. Every word was like a rock dropped into a tide pool. “This is a trap. It won’t get you intel. It won’t get you what you’re calling the key. You walk her in there alone, she won’t walk out. She’s giving in, not fighting.”
This was a lot for Camilla to say. Even We Suffer paused and furrowed her brow, and she said, “I cannot believe this girl would kill her own twin sister.”
“Kill her?” said Camilla.
The little electronic device beeped again. We Suffer tapped a button, and the speakers at the sides of the room made awful noises briefly. We Suffer held a hand up to Camilla in the universal shh gesture, and picked up a receiver: “Transmitting. Ready Mu in position. I want snipers ready in case anything goes wrong. Headshots are preferred. Cover Troia if at all possible, but we have been told to take the shot no matter what.”