“Yes.”
“Convenient,” said Pash, in a not-very-nice voice.
“I will not salute you both,” said We Suffer. “It is too much to ask of me. But if you do this thing, I will salute … I will frankly pin my own medals on your fronts. Crack the sky, Troia cell.”
And then there they were in the truck—the same big truck that had picked up Hot Sauce and Nona, the one with the grille for running people over. Cam and she were at the back, and Pash was at the front, and Nona was startled to see the Angel—Aim—in the passenger seat, even though she had known she would be coming. It was strange to see her peering back through the mesh, looking like she always did, as though she were about to ask Nona for a cup of coffee.
“Where’s Noodle?” Nona blurted.
“In the footwell, poor old man.” The Angel cleared her throat and said, “I like the haircut, Nona.”
“I don’t,” said Nona a little wrathfully, a little shyly. She wasn’t quite sure where she stood with the Angel. “I liked my braids—my head feels strange when I move it.”
“Easy to brush though.”
Camilla said, “No names. Nonagesimus needs to concentrate.”
Nona tried to look as though she could concentrate and stared out of the window, her heart hammering, her palms greasy with sweat. It was not even that she was nervous, not really. Her body had been playing strange games with her ever since she had recovered from the last tantrum. She was beginning to feel like a floating balloon on a string, with a weight tied to the end—the balloon bobbing, the weight dragging behind. She was the balloon, and also the string, but she wasn’t sure she was still the weight. Looking had become quite difficult—she didn’t want to blink too much in case the white came out again—which made the buildings all one great smear, the crowds brightly coloured stick-people. People with their hands in their pockets standing around on the street corners—people walking, people thronging, people righting bins that had been knocked over, as though nothing were happening, as though her whole life really were nothing more than a balloon passing by overhead.
Pash drove them through the city scientifically, which meant that she constantly leant on the horn of the car and occasionally mounted the pavement until Camilla said— “Pull over. We’ll go the rest of the way on foot.”
“You’ll get shot.”
“We’re used to it.”
Pash said, “Zombie, you betray us, you fuck this up, you know we blow that barracks sky-high.”
“I’m relying on it,” said Camilla.
The Angel said quietly— “Will it really be so simple?”
“Yes,” said Camilla.
The car pulled to a stop. Pash got out of the front and slid the big side door open. Nona breathed in the nice smell of fresh air and plastic fumes and fire. There were people huddled on the street and in the buildings and on stoops, looking at them suspiciously, but nobody said or did anything. Pash, with her fierce soldier’s face and attractive eyes, stared at Nona and Camilla hatefully—and then at Cam.
“Chances?” she said shortly.
Cam said, “Fifty-fifty.”
“What happens on the bad roll?”
“I die.”
Camilla unbuckled Nona, and Nona and Camilla staggered out to stand beneath the blue-tinted sky. Nona, with her altered white gaze, saw everything obscured through fog; Camilla helped her to stand, and then she crossed over to the boot of the car and waited quietly for Pash to open it. Nona was surprised to see that the boot was filled with boxes from home, from the cupboard with the fake board in it. Camilla flipped open boxes and took out a belt, which she tied around her waist, and she secured a hook to the side of the belt. To this hook she reverently attached a long plain black scabbard, then a shorter plain black scabbard, and she tested the hilts in her hands. Cam sighed—really sighed!—as though she had gone to lie down in a hot bath.
The last thing Camilla did was reach into her pocket and take out the sunglasses, and she perched them on her nose.
Pash said, “Your people … that obsession with swords.”
“We are our swords,” said Camilla. She shrugged on a crisscross halter of black plastic straps and clipped it tight across the front of her chest, and then she opened a box and took out two long, plain knives, the type of thing they used to chop up fish at the market. All of Cam’s secret knife stash, Nona thought, numb with anticipation.
“Yeah, you’re outdated, just like them,” said Pash. “They’re a weakness. A hand-me-down form of complete fucking insanity.”