Pyrrha looked at Nona. She looked at the dead body. She put her hand on the dead body’s forehead—worked her fingers into the funny little scarf at her neck—and the corpse lay as inert and as dead as it had when Nona walked into the room. Nona said, “I mean it … I woke her up … I, uh, I kissed her.”
Now Pyrrha looked at Nona. The look on her face was nothing but a very sad, rough kind of amusement, less desire than a kind of understanding that Nona suddenly didn’t want. Pyrrha touched Nona briefly on the cheek and said: “Why?”
Nona found her cheeks growing hot.
“I just did, no reason.”
“Nothing happened? What’d it feel like?”
“That’s private, thank you,” said Nona primly.
“Huh,” said Pyrrha. “Well, you’re not in a heap on the floor, so we can rule out pneumatic reversion.” She scrubbed a hand across her eyes briefly. “There was a bad option where your soul snapped straight into her body, leaving your body stuck with no soul at all, and that would have been a shit time all round.”
“Would I have died?” Nona asked, interested.
“You’d have tried to,” said Pyrrha. “The body needs thalergy and a soul to keep the lights on. Anastasia’s tripod principle. Body plus thalergy, but no soul, is basically a very weird vegetable … after a while it gives up and shuts down.”
“She looked at me, Pyrrha,” said Nona, and to demonstrate, reached over and prodded the body hard, in the ribs. The body did not respond.
“Did you catch her eye colour?”
“Gold—like mine, but cloudy.”
“Good. Ianthe couldn’t transfer,” said Pyrrha. “God, that little shit shouldn’t be running around in this day and age … would’ve taken Cassiopeia and Cyrus and Ulysses and Cytherea just to keep her in hand. She’s good and she’s imaginative and she’s very frightening, and now there’s no one to stop her. Why the hell did John let her bring the kid’s body? He must have known that Blood of Eden would go apeshit the moment they saw it. Well … heave-ho.”
She squatted down, then heaved the corpse over her shoulder; the girl’s head hung down over Pyrrha’s back, and her legs hung across Pyrrha’s front. Nona saw that the girl was wearing a beautiful jewelled scabbard on her hip, with a lovely sword hilt right above it, all in a sort of pearly white colour. There was something clipped to her other hip that she couldn’t quite make out, also pearl-white, a jumble of clear white blades and plate rivets. Everything she was wearing was lovely, as lovely as Ianthe Naberius’s clothes had been if not lovelier. But the pristine whiteness of her uniform made her look that much more dead, except for the hair.
Pyrrha grunted and said, “Fuck me, she’s heavy. It’s all this crappy First House tat. I don’t know what the fuck John’s thinking, dressing everyone to look like the military wing of disco.”
Nona was beginning to doubt herself furiously. “Pyrrha, I’m still not sure…”
“Tell Sextus and Hect once we’re upstairs,” said Pyrrha. “Also, hey—I have half a protein bar in my pocket. I want you to eat that. I bet you haven’t had anything in hours. Cam can’t make you eat like I can, right?”
Nona subsided into glum silence. She stared at the head of the corpse prince as Pyrrha carefully walked her out of the doorway—hoping briefly that Pyrrha would clonk the corpse’s head so that the corpse maybe said, “Ow”—but Pyrrha manoeuvred her smoothly. The eyes kept shut—Nona trailed behind watchfully the whole time, but they kept shut—and even when Nona caught up to Pyrrha and gently touched that cool dark corpse hand, nothing happened.
As they passed through the broken wards of the corridor, now completely scuffed out, Nona found herself staggering. Pyrrha said, “You okay? Can you keep up just a little longer?” and she said, “Yes,” and tried to keep up. They took two rights, and thankfully Pyrrha didn’t ask for help as she heaved the corpse prince up the stairs.
Crown was waiting for them in the corridor. When she saw the body, her lovely violet eyes widened, and her hand went reflexively to the black-hilted sword at her hip, and she said— “It is her. Poor Gideon…”
“Don’t get your hopes up. It might be a doll copy,” warned Pyrrha. “I can’t see why John would ever let her corpse out into the world, even with a Lyctor to guard it. She’s a walking suicide note.”