“Harrow’s never this quiet,” said the Prince softly. “Nor this passive. What are you doing, Harry? What’s your plan? Or, more worryingly … what is wrong with you? What happened after Mercymorn stabbed you, Harrow, and where did you go? You never came back, and God said he thought you might be lost to us … How are you surviving, Harrowhark the First? How can you stand beneath the light of Number Seven? Unless I am addressing…”
The fist tightened. No would not do; Yes was worse; Cam had told her to pretend to be the Captain. Nona decided to pretend to be the Captain, and opened her mouth, and screamed like the Captain had screamed.
She had never been good at coming up with conversations. Nona simply made her mouth go as the Captain’s had gone—she could remember the movement, it was easy—and she screamed, “Help! Help! Help!” for want of anything better to say.
The scream moved through her chest and up her throat and out of her nose. When she let it out, it did not at all sound like when she had heard the Captain do it. The scream somehow seemed to take all the lining of her throat with it. It was like the scream was made of her insides—her insides dissolved and resolved themselves by coming out her lips as a vocal bomb. The electric light sizzled in its housing. The room went dark. Prince Ianthe Naberius dropped her and staggered back, and Nona completed her Captain impression by pitching forward, onto the carpet, facedown, practically senseless, aware of nothing but the scream—a noise that seemed to keep coming out of her nose and ears and mouth. She went away from herself briefly.
Nona came back, dimly aware of a yell, a huge scuffle, then movement. When she lifted her head off the carpet she was frightened that she had vomited, or bled, as her mouth and nose were streaming; but she hadn’t coughed up anything except water.
The new situation was much worse than before she screamed. She could see Prince Ianthe Naberius’s shiny knee-length boots, one of them at least. She was down on one knee, but had drawn a rapier from that scabbard at her side and the tip was pinked with blood. On the dais, Pyrrha’s red, rangy body was down—Pyrrha!—on her hands and knees, trying feebly to rise. She had drawn a gun from somewhere—Pyrrha was good at drawing a gun from somewhere—but it had been knocked out of her hand and lay glittering in front of the plain chair. Crown was standing, flanked by two dead people but not being held by them. Camilla, on the other hand, had her arms pinned to her sides by fully four of the dead guards. She had drawn her knives, but her hands were forced outward in front of her, unable to move. The light glittered again, and Nona could see long, cold shadows on the carpet behind her, could feel the press of dead people moving. Some of the dead people had fallen down just like she had, lying jumbled-up on the tiles, and some of them were so close that Nona could see they had been dead for a long time, and some of them had bits missing. Honesty and Hot Sauce and the others had been right. She didn’t like this zombie stuff at all.
Nona thought that she had seriously bogged it.
“Okay,” said the Prince, rising unsteadily to stand. “All right. Okay. Wow. Fine.”
As she rose, some of the other dead bodies rose with her, much less gracefully; others kept still.
The Prince pointed at Nona. Before Nona could react, or struggle, she was seized from behind by strong arms. She tried to make her body fight but she was too dazed even to be angry. She kept snorting and sneezing and shivering, still trying to get the last bits of water out of her nose. One of the cold, gloved, bad-smelling hands took her jaw firmly, and squeezed it shut hard so that Nona could not even say “Yes” or “No.”
“You,” said the Prince, “are coming home to the Emperor tied and gagged, and not as a sex thing. You”—this was to Pyrrha—“prep to leave. This is over. I’m not wasting any more time here. Ready the shuttle to get us out in an hour. We have too much to lose. Duty, are you alive?”
Pyrrha said, with difficulty— “Yes.” And: “Everyone with a necromantic body is down.”
“Yes. I think my real body just threw up. We’re going.”
Pyrrha said, “The Sixth House—”
“Oh, fuck the Sixth House! Daddy can have you three safe and sound … well, soundish … and like it. I’m extracting my sister before anything else happens. You”—Corona had opened her mouth to protest—“you get what you wanted. Deuteros is coming with us. I can’t make any promises, God is capricious about Edenites, but I’ll take the rap, so don’t whine. You can hand her to her father on a silver platter and maybe he’ll stop moaning about supply lines. As for you…”