“I love it here,” said Nona sincerely. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”
“You’re sweet,” said Hot Sauce.
That settled it, Nona knew. If Hot Sauce thought Nona was sweet, she was going to be part of the group no matter what. From that day nobody bothered to question Nona’s presence no matter what she said or how old she was or how little facility she had for buying anyone drugs. She was one of them, which gave her enormous pleasure. She was born to the untold wealth of belonging to Camilla and Pyrrha and Palamedes, and now added the beauty of being friends with Hot Sauce and Hot Sauce’s friends, which gave her high status in the world, even considering Kevin. She loved Camilla and Pyrrha and Palamedes, but the thing about being with Hot Sauce and the others was that you could be completely and entirely alone.
Eventually, when it got dark enough, all their families would come looking for them—Cam always came horribly early—except for Hot Sauce, who had nobody to come looking for her, and Honesty, whom nobody ever remembered about. But even with this flaw in paradise, Nona could do nothing but hug her knees to her chest and feel fantastically, wonderfully lucky, luckier than anyone else who had ever had the pleasure of being born.
4
THE MORNING ROUTINE was that they would walk together until Pyrrha had to split off, and then Cam would drop Nona off at school and go off to do her own thing, clean the house or do crimes that Nona wasn’t allowed to partake in. Nona liked the walk, but the early morning was as cold as the afternoon was hot, so to keep warm she had to stamp her feet and put her hands in her pockets. They walked alongside all the other workers—the ones who didn’t get picked up in the morning in the worker vans, or didn’t have a job that merited a worker van, or didn’t have a job but lived in hope—and they all trudged slowly through the street in clusters, parting only when a truck ground through, the driver leaning on the horn if someone didn’t move out of the way quick enough.
Nona’s breath was misting on the inside of her mask and escaping out its cracks in ghostly grey puffs by the time they made it to the park, comfortable but not talking. It was always the same route—straight down the street all the way to the gates of the thing that had used to be the big park—and then Pyrrha would say something like, “Let’s cut through, it’s so smoky,” or she’d say, “Let’s not. Park’s full of mercs,” and then they’d go around. This morning she said, “Let’s go through the park. Move with the crowd,” so Nona took Camilla’s hand and moved with the crowd.
The plants filtered out some of the clinging smoke, and Nona loved to look at the trees and the bristly, curving shapes of the shrubs and bushes. Much of the vegetation had been turfed up, some in an attempt to make a community garden, some of it into shanty houses skulking against the big concrete fence. Another place had been cleared and ineptly concreted over, and they put the cages there. The cages were bone-cold and they’d been almost fully cleaned, but Nona didn’t like looking, so she spent her time gazing at the mist of trailing vines on the tree trunks instead.
Once they were out of the park and out of the crowd, Pyrrha kissed the top of Nona’s head and said, “Be good,” like she always said. She did not kiss the top of Camilla’s head but told her, “Good hunting, you two.”
“Good hunting,” echoed Camilla.
Pyrrha melted into the crowd in her big steel-toed boots and her over-the-shoulder bag with her helmet and extra batteries for her helmet light and her gloves and her lunch. It was easier now than when Nona had been very new and Palamedes said she had no object permanence, but Nona still always felt a pang watching Pyrrha walk away, commingled with the pride of having Pyrrha, the familiarity of seeing someone and knowing they belonged to you. Camilla drew her back to the pavement with a guiding hand on the small of her back, and said the magic words: “You’ll be late for school.”
Then it was one right turn, one cut through an alley, and one pause as Nona pointed out to Cam a building that had been fine only the other day and now had a huge hole in it （“They used a very big gun,” was Cam’s explanation） before they got buzzed into the school building by the nice lady teacher and went up two flights of squeaky linoleum stairs. Camilla always turned down the offer of a warm drink in the tiny staffroom, and turned it down quicker the more compassionately she was asked, and then she melted away into the street like a grey shadow. Nona often watched her from the window.