“She’s lying,” said Nona instantly. With all the white noise coming from the corpse prince, she couldn’t tell exactly where the lie was, but it was buried deep around her smile.
“I thought I told you to shut your stolen goddamned mouth,” said Kiriona, not pleasantly, and Camilla said—
“Don’t push it, Ninth.”
Nona’s heart fluttered. It didn’t even matter when Kiriona said, “Sure, Cam. Marry a moron, then die. I get the urge.”
Palamedes repeated, very patiently: “What do you want, Gideon?”
The corpse prince didn’t turn an eyelash.
“I want to go back. Who cares about my reasons?”
That didn’t look like a lie. Crown looked at Nona; Nona shrugged. Crown looked desperately at Palamedes. Palamedes, Nona noticed, was looking curiously rocklike, giving nothing away.
Crown said, “Warden, please. We need her.”
“Yeah, you do,” said the Prince. “I don’t come in test tubes. So you can either let me hitch back to the Ninth, or you can all come at me, together, and see if you can draw a single drop of my dead-ass blood. Go nuts. I get a little bit of excitement in my day whatever happens.”
Camilla twitched forward, and the Prince saw her. She grinned. “Yeah, that’s the spirit,” she said. “Come on, Cam. You’re still mostly alive, right? Here, look, I’ll make it easy on you.” She rolled up one sleeve and stuck the bare forearm out in front of her, fist clenched, steady. “Try it. I’m ready for my shot, doc.”
Camilla stepped forward more deliberately, keeping her eyes on the Prince’s eyes. Palamedes said, “For heaven’s sake, Nav, lay off the grandstanding,” but Camilla took the Prince’s wrist, positioned the needle, and pushed the syringe decisively home.
The needle snapped in half, like she’d jabbed it into the tiled floor. Camilla staggered back as if this had thrown her off-balance. Kiriona Gaia opened her hand—moved it to steady Camilla’s shoulder—then, like she was flinching, roughly shoved her away. Camilla fell back into Palamedes’s arms.
The Prince stared at them. Her eyes weren’t like Nona’s at all now: they were hard and dead and bright, like something that had been dug up.
“My father has made my body’s bones denser than titanium plex,” said the Crown Prince coldly. “My father has made my skin turn away bullets. I am the perfect sword hand and the final expression of the art of the Nine Houses. Don’t you get it? I am the Emperor’s construct.”
Pyrrha said—
“Shame he didn’t get some spackle for your extra holes, right?”
“Those are my speed holes. They help me go fast,” said Kiriona quickly.
Then Kiriona looked over at Camilla, and the red splotch on Cam’s bandages, and her crooked mouth screwed up, and she said: “You’re seriously going to end up like me if you keep fucking around.”
Camilla said, “Nav. What would have happened if I’d gotten that sample?”
“What—used a sharper needle? No dice. My blood burns up outside my body, turns to ash,” said Kiriona. “You need to preserve it to get it out—you know, like, impregnate it with thalergy to stop the short-term thanergy reaction. When it reacts with air, the preservation, like, rolls backward—it’s not static.”
When she looked at Palamedes’s face, she laughed again. “Come on, boy. I’m Gideon version two. I know up to five necromancy facts now.”
For some reason, it was this that made Palamedes look as though he’d been slapped; Ianthe Naberius’s face screwed up, briefly. Then he shook himself clear, and he said—
“If Blood of Eden knows you’re up and walking, Gideon, they’re going to handcuff you in about sixteen different places. How do you feel about that?”
Kiriona turned her body to look at them. Nona couldn’t quite believe that they couldn’t all see it; but they weren’t watching, goggle-eyed, they hadn’t even seemed to notice. It was in Kiriona’s every movement—the bright, swift flexions of her arms, and the way she swung her legs, big and brash, and the weirdly easy, light grace with which she moved her dead body.
Nona had never seen anyone so sad in her whole short life. It made her nearly afraid to die.
“Nobody locks me up anywhere,” said Kiriona.
26
THE COMMANDER HAD NOT brought along Pash’s truck with the grille. They had packed everyone into one of the big people-moving trucks with the seats that faced the sides, the kind you saw mercs riding in around the city but with a cover so that nobody could see inside. It was a dark and blueless night—thick clouds had gathered over the tops of the buildings, an unusual amount of atmosphere. It made everything sticky and hot and awful.