Palamedes said, “Give me a moment.”
He fell to his knees next to the corpse—quite awkwardly; he wasn’t moving as nicely as he usually did. As he fell he said mildly, “Mm. Think I displaced a patella. It’s not as easy as with you, Cam … Right, Gideon. Let’s have a look at you.”
He undid her scarf, and Nona looked away. Beneath the scarf a huge wound in the throat made the neck yawn wide open. When she peeked back, wishing she had her braids to screen everything, she saw that Palamedes had unbuttoned the shirt partway and there was another big wound in the chest—a big purple bloodless puncture wound, with white teeth peeking out coyly from within.
“Damage is consistent with reported injuries. There’s another wound lower down.”
“If it’s John’s copy, that doesn’t prove anything. It’s going to be exact,” said Pyrrha.
“I know. But I do have a personal advantage here—I’ve touched her when she was alive.”
“Yeah, but—”
Palamedes had placed Ianthe Naberius’s hand over the wound. He closed his eyes—really his eyes, his nice dark grey ones, not the strange blue ones with flecks—but almost immediately after closing them, he turned his head and sneezed violently; shuddered with the same violence; pulled his hand away, and said—
“What? What is that?”
“You just met God,” said Pyrrha.
“I didn’t like him,” said Palamedes.
“God’s preserving her … or God created her, or both. Good luck seeing anything through that. His aptitude’s like a punch in the nose, Sextus. Once he gets his fingers on something you’ll never find any other fingerprints on it. Too much noise.”
But Crown’s exquisite face had puckered again. “But that was the whole point. When Blood of Eden picked her up—that was why they thought she was strange—Gideon never showed any sign of decomposing. She was always like a corpse that had been dead for only minutes. They wrapped her in plex and dropped her in rivers, trying to see if that would do anything … I was there. It was awful at first,” she added, “and then it simply started being very funny … Shh, Judith. I’m here.”
The Captain had started fussing again. Crown, distracted, moved to her side. She said tenderly, “If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be in all this trouble. You thorn, you pest,” but the Captain subsided, merely jiggling her arms and her legs.
Palamedes said— “This may well be what’s keeping Nona out too. Doesn’t matter. We have to operate on the basis that she really is Gideon Nav. First, lift her head so I can reach her neck … let’s make sure Ianthe can’t transfer to her again, whatever happens. Surely I’m good enough for a simple ghost ward. Cam, I’ll use your blood—it’s the one resource we’ve got basically sprayed around the room.”
“I can give you some more,” said Camilla. “There’s a spoonful left, somewhere in here.”
“Camilla Hect,” said Palamedes, “I would slap you—except Naberius Tern trying to slap you would force me to kick my own ass.”
They rolled the corpse prince over. Palamedes sketched some squiggles onto the back of her neck with the pad of Ianthe Naberius’s littlest finger, using Cam’s bloodied clothes as a kind of paint box. He did this very carefully, then started fanning his hand to dry the mark. Camilla said, “Warden, do we continue?”
“Yes. We get the Oversight Body. Then we get out of here.”
Crown said, “But the shuttle—”
“Oversight Body, then the shuttle,” said Palamedes. “Master Archivist Juno Zeta is pretty damned good with wards; she’ll probably have ten ideas I never thought of, once she rips through all the ideas I have.”
This did not appear to fully convince Crown. “But even if we get the shuttle working, what next?”
“The Sixth House installation,” said Camilla, and Palamedes finished—
“We join up with the rest of the Sixth—we get the necromancers out of this system and out of the halo—we find some way to lure the Resurrection Beast away from this planet so that the population gets some breathing room, while at the same time safeguarding it from any more House strong-arming—we fix Nona … we stop the war, we sue for peace … and we go to the Ninth House, and we begin the real fight.”
Nona found that all eyes were on her. She looked around, in case there was someone behind her that everyone was actually looking at, but it was just her. She did not know what the Ninth House was. Nobody she knew had more than One House. Honesty barely had a Quarter House. She did not know what the Ninth House was—and yet her teeth were chattering, quite apart from herself, and she had to clench her jaw very hard to make them stop. This made everyone look away, which annoyed her, because the way they moved their faces was pure pity.