Crown had been tentative, but she suddenly surged forward and cradled that very red head in her hands, smoothing her fingers through the hair, playing with one of the little winking leaves that scintillated in the wreath. She said, wondering, “But she looks exactly like she did … apart from the outfit. Ianthe couldn’t have done the outfit. She’s more minimalist than that.”
Her fingers caressed the ashen, upside-down cheek. “Poor Ninth … imagine the hopes and fears of the whole universe contained in one dead little red star.”
“If that’s poetry, don’t quit your day job,” said Pyrrha. “What’s the status of the shuttle?”
Crown dropped her hand from the corpse’s hair and grimaced. “You’re carrying the only good news. Palamedes says the shuttle’s fucked … his words exactly, he got surprisingly filthy.”
“What? How? Is it warded?”
“No, but the fuel is,” confessed Corona, “and that stuff’s not only combustible, Dve … it’s pyrophoric. If we mess around with it too much, this whole barracks is going to go up and set light to most of the quarter.”
Nona said feebly, “I could probably—”
“No,” said Pyrrha.
“Camilla says forget the shuttle for now, we can come back for it—she wants We Suffer to secure the Sixth House and we’ll take it from there. I left them with the Captain, in the main hall,” Crown added. Her forehead crumpled into its worry pucker again and she said, “That’s the other bad news—Judith’s acting up. Her sedative’s taking forever to kick in. The Warden’s working on her, but he says he can’t do much. Why could Ianthe do necromancy through Babs’s corpse but Palamedes can’t?”
“Just answered your own question. Ianthe’s a Lyctor working through the corpse of her own cavalier—that body’s hers to make a revenant out of,” said Pyrrha. “He won’t be able to do anything until he’s back in his cavalier, and at this rate…”
She cut herself off, and said, “Help Nona. She’s worked too hard.”
Nona was about to protest, but then Crown turned around and offered her back for a piggyback. Nona couldn’t resist, even if it was purely a kiddie thing to do; she let Crown pull her legs around her hips and heave her up onto her back, arms twined around Crown’s neck, with Crown saying in her gallant, flirtatious way, “Now I have you, my pretty maid,” and making Nona laugh, if weakly.
Past the big, broad corridor leading to the open front doors, night had fallen profoundly on the city. The honks and nice fresh car-flavoured night air came surging through the doors with a warm breeze. It was disappointing to go back into the big tiled room with all the dead bodies in it, which smelled bad and closed-in, but she was delighted to find Camilla looking much better and even standing up. Her whole abdomen was swathed in bandages, they had taken all the clothing off her top, and she was wearing Ianthe Naberius’s white jacket draped over her shoulders, but she was standing. Her face still looked grey beneath its nice normal olive, and she was shiny with sweat, but she was healthy enough to shift her weight from side to side and jiggle one foot impatiently.
The Captain had been brought into the big room and laid down with some rags rolled up as a pillow beneath her head. She kept moving restlessly—like lightning kept jolting through her arms and legs—like her knees and arms were attached to some drunken puppeteer. Her mouth kept opening but Nona was devoutly grateful that nothing came out, nothing except a noise like: ah, ah, ah.
When Nona and Crown came in, and Pyrrha with the corpse, both Palamedes and Camilla looked up at them keenly. Something in Palamedes’s face changed and creased, and he said— “What—no reaction?”
“No. Nona even gave the damn thing mouth-to-mouth,” said Pyrrha.
Nona was embarrassed at how her voice peeped when she said, “Private information, Pyrrha,” but Palamedes said, “Does that mean—is it just a copy? Put it down.”
Pyrrha fell to her knees, and Nona was interested to see how gentle she was with the redheaded corpse prince, which really did seem completely dead—its arms and legs were heavy and limp. Crown squatted down so that Nona could slither down off her back.
Camilla said, “If that’s a copy, this is all over.”
“It can’t be,” said Crown blankly.
“It very much can,” said Pyrrha.
“No—I mean, that doesn’t make sense,” she said. “If it was a copy, my sister didn’t know it. She’s been acting like she’s been standing on hot coals this entire time—and she wasn’t doing it to fool me.”