Nona unsheathed her sword from herself, and nearly wept from fury. She put both her hands on the hilt. She did not know how to hold a sword, and she didn’t care.
She could see the broad main drag, with the fisheries off to one side and the harbour far beyond. Her eye, desiring the familiar, looked to where the Building probably was, her home a little grey block among the other grey blocks. The truck made a sudden left turn, veering. The trucks were the only vehicles on the road, but big seething pods had splattered onto the asphalt, and the trucks were having to drive around them. Nona stared around herself as the things kept twirling out of the sky like huge and terrible drops of rain—made hard landings on the buildings, or on the road, or soft landings thudding into the far-off ocean. She could hear yelling—glass breaking—screaming—and the air siren, all at once.
Nona turned around. On the truck she had emerged from, someone was now standing where she had stood, on top of the driver’s cab. It wore tattered old trousers and a thin old shirt, and it was the Captain.
The Captain opened her mouth and said, “Get him. Get him. Get him. He flees.”
“I can’t,” said Nona. “I can’t do anything. I don’t want to do anything.”
The Captain moaned, sharply. “All for nothing—you asked for help—you asked … and all for nothing, only pain. You asked … I gave you blood for blood.”
Nona, grief-stricken, hollered—
“Not like this. I love this place.”
“Do you love?” said the Captain’s mouth.
Nona struggled. “Yes—no—yes,” she said, then: “I don’t know what it means. I say it, and I don’t know what it means … Did I ever know what it meant?”
“Green thing,” said the Captain. “Green-and-breathing thing, big ghost, the drinker, transformed, what will you eat now? Where will your body go? What did he do to you, to make you this way? You eat yourself. I gorge on unliving marrow.”
It was true; the Captain looked as though she were withering before Nona’s eyes. She cried out in haste: “Don’t … stop that! I can’t stop it, but you can stop it. Stop hurting her … She doesn’t know what you’re doing.”
“You cry mercy?” said the Captain.
“Yes—mercy—yes,” said Nona.
“I have crossed the face of the universe,” said the Captain. “I poison it to match my grief.”
“Yes,” said Nona, “but—but stop this, stop hurting the Captain…”
She rooted around wildly to find a phrase, and fell back on Cam—“You’re acting out. Maybe you should take five.”
“For eight thousand unjust bodies I will stop,” said the Captain.
Nona said, “No. I want you to stop now.”
“They concoct their own vengeance,” said the Captain. “Their justice is not my justice. Their water is not my water. I came to help. I am made a mockery. The danger is upon you, and you do not even know … they are coming out of their tower, salt thing. There is a hole at the bottom of their tower. I will pull their teeth. I will make it blank for you.”
Nona said—
“Hot Sauce never did anything wrong, or Beautiful Ruby or Born in the Morning or Kevin, and Honesty”—here she was compelled by the truth—“Honesty doesn’t know any better. Camilla and Palamedes never did anything wrong … Pyrrha says she did a lot wrong, but at least she knows it … and we don’t like the Captain, but we pity her. Stop hurting the Captain … don’t do this.” And Nona found herself saying— “I’m ready to die … really ready.”
“Nothing is really ready to die,” said the Captain.
Nona took a running leap as the truck rounded another corner; she misjudged—she bounced off the side of a building like a ball—she came to a rolling stop in front of the Captain, and knocked her down, and they both fell together. Nona looked at the Captain’s face with its closed eyes—still wasted, but not dead, and looking a little less like a piece of fruit someone had sucked all the juice out of.
Nona lay on her back atop the stretched canvas, and Nona’s mouth said— “Just wait. Just help me … help me do this. I might be different … soon.”
The big dark shapes were still twirling out of the sky, silently it seemed, although there were mismatched boom—CRACKs distantly resounding at the very tops of the tall buildings. Nona watched them anxiously—the sky was so thick with them—but were they thinning? Were fewer falling?