Most of the best things she learnt from Pyrrha, and Palamedes and Camilla, whom she loved and trusted with all her numbered days; but in those early times when she wasn’t used to living, the schoolchildren had taught her everything else. New words, mostly, which were always enlightening, but also how to spend time doing nothing.
They made doing nothing an art: squatting on stoops or loitering in parks beneath splintering trees, running like crazy if they heard shots, running like crazy even if they didn’t—so hard to keep up!—hunkering beneath the roofs near the sanitation ponds, going where nobody cared if they went, fighting over scraps of shade near the huge cemetery hills where they had dug all the bodies out of the cracked sand and concrete and put them in a huge pile, which still smelled terrible. One of their favourite ways to hide was to clamber up a dusty mound of rocks and rebar right at the very edge of their part of the city—they had to do this carefully because they could easily slice themselves open on a piece of rusty metal, and that meant Nona had to be doubly more careful than anyone—and sit around on the second floor of a building that had been blown wide open to the sky. There was plenty of stained old office furniture to squat on, and they could watch the enormous stretch of road that ran all around the city. There was a huge expanse of it: Honesty said you could fit twenty vans on it at a time and there used to be a train track in the middle, with turn-offs and turn-offs for the turn-offs that led to a nest of tunnels beneath the city itself. In the tunnels you could drive and drive and drive for hours and never see sunlight, said Honesty, but hardly anyone used them now. There were special fleets of gunners in cars that patrolled down there and shook people up for money, or scavenged the cars that had never made their way out. Every so often an absolutely enormous earthquake rumbled beneath them, and when Nona first asked what it was, Hot Sauce said, “The Convoy”; and because it was Hot Sauce and not Honesty, she knew it had to be true.
How wonderful it sounded—The Convoy—so big and mysterious and subterranean. Nona had no real idea of what a convoy was or what it looked like for a very long time, but she joined in with the others when they felt the rumble in the old office-space hideout and competed to be the first to say, “The Convoy,” and have the others question, or jeer, or confirm.
“Can’t feel it.”
“That’s a fart.”
“No way, no way, that’s right. That’s the Convoy, I can feel it, my shoes are off.”
The whole broken building would rumble and shake, and at the end they would chorus, “Convoy gone.”
Nona was frankly disappointed when she asked Pyrrha what a convoy was, when Pyrrha was half-absorbed in melting slag for dummy pellets in her little bullet-shaped crucible, and Pyrrha explained that it was a bunch of vehicles driving in a line, probably very big ones. But she never quite got over that little shake, that tight vibration of the stomach when the Convoy was near, how it excited her somehow. It was like she could feel something wonderful in it.
They often stayed in the abandoned office building until the glowering dusk, because nobody wanted that space or threw chunks of brick at them to make them leave. Nona loved to watch the moon tremble in front of the big broken hanging blueness in the sky, careless of it, while Honesty prised bullet casings out of holes in the walls and Kevin played with his dolls. Beautiful Ruby and Born in the Morning whiled away the time with a deck of playing cards that had too many numbers for Nona to join in. Sometimes Hot Sauce would play too, but mainly Hot Sauce silently and majestically held court as the city honked and smouldered and yelled.
Nona liked to sit near Hot Sauce; it was good to be quiet. One time they were sitting there and the Convoy rumbled beneath them, with the others hooting and hollering and Kevin putting his hands over his ears patiently waiting for the Convoy to go away, and when the last rumbles had died, Honesty looked over and said—
“You’ll join, Hot Sauce, won’t you? Hot Sauce will join.”
“Join what?” said Nona, the ignorant one.
Which made the others do their usual chorus of—
“Nona doesn’t know.”
“Nona doesn’t know anything.”
“Tell Nona.”
And Honesty, who had been very nice since the cigarette arrangement, said: “When we leave school, we’re going to kill zombies, we’re gonna kill necromancers.”
“You shouldn’t say the word,” said Nona, forgetting in a panic that that was a Nona rule, not a school rule.