“Knew it the moment I saw you. What were you, nine? Ten?”
We Suffer said, “Lyctor … Dve … I ask you to stop, from one alive human to another more or less so,” but Pash was saying quickly—“Let her. She’s bullshitting. Con artist stuff.”
“This might be my only chance to say this,” said Pyrrha comfortably, “and I’m seriously nicotine-deprived, which makes me sentimental. You’re the kid in that photo … She kept it folded up in her pliers case. You’re holding an automatic three sizes too big for you, right? One of your front teeth is gone. She holds up that photo to me and she goes, If it wasn’t for filth like you, nice kids like this wouldn’t have to hold these.”
Pash’s throat was working. Pyrrha continued, “I mean, I was all, I’d buy this a lot more if you weren’t so obviously proud as hell, and she only laughed in that mean-ass way she always laughed and said, That’s my submachine gun she’s holding.”
Pash closed her eyes. Nona held her breath, but Pash wasn’t mad or upset. She looked as though she were having a religious experience.
“I remember asking if you really were a nice kid,” Pyrrha said. “She said, No. She’s my flesh and blood. She takes after me. After that … I kept thinking about you for a long time. Sister?”
Pash swallowed once. Twice. Three times.
“No. My mother was her sister,” she said gruffly. And, “Not that it means shit to you, wizard. If you’re lying to me, I swear—”
Palamedes said mildly, “You know we’re conversant with the concept of family in the Nine Houses, right?”
Pash seemed genuinely surprised. “Why the hell would it matter to you?” Then she checked herself and said, “Scratch that. Why the hell would that matter to me? You don’t give a fuck about families when you’re carving them up—”
At a warning glance from We Suffer, Pash scowled expressively. She said, “Well, I’ll leave you with this: fuck you,” and then her vivid blue head disappeared under a helmet, her bright eyes beneath a visor.
Nona found a sigh escaping her chest. All her noises seemed to surprise her now; it was as though her body were capable of shocking her by doing things that did not seem connected to Nona. Pyrrha reached over and touched her hand gently, and said, “How’re you holding up?”
Before Nona could answer, there was another high-pitched whistle—far closer to them now, outside their truck, shockingly close—and a dull thud, and a huge pattering of stone. The truck screeched to a halt, then lurched forward again, and everyone inside held on to their seats as the truck juked left. It said quite a lot about life in the city that nobody really freaked out about this the first time, nor the second time, nor even the third time when they heard yelling coming from the front of the truck.
We Suffer’s headset crackled to life, and she brought it back down to her mouth. “Report,” she said, then: “Pardon?”
Pyrrha stood, swaying with the swerving movements of the truck, and picked her way along the handholds to the back where the cover had been lashed down tight. There was a clear window of soft plastic you could look through, so long as you didn’t want to see much or clearly. It would have been bad looking out of it during the day; at night, with a lot of the streetlights gone, it was basically impossible. Over the headset, We Suffer said, short and clipped, “Keep us together. Do not reroute either package. Do not engage. Take the first off-ramp you can find and get us underground.”
Pyrrha had gotten a long look out the window. She suddenly squatted down, working at the pegs that kept the cover tight at the back. A corner flapped free and slapped violently at itself, letting in gusts of hot, muggy night air, which in that space felt like a breeze. Strong, yellow lights from the headlights of the truck behind strobed over them all. Palamedes moved to clamp his arm around Nona’s and Nona held on to her seat and the armrests tightly as Pyrrha leant out—the truck behind them honked in alarm—and stared out at the street.
When she leant back in, Nona was profoundly upset by her body. Pyrrha was so sinewy and tough, and she was so calm—unbunched, unhurried, unaffected by most things, sweet and slouchy and always the least afraid person in the room, even if that room had Cam in it—but now she looked at Palamedes and Nona with her deep dark eyes, and she had an expression Nona hadn’t seen there before.
“Sextus,” she said, “game over, I’m afraid.”