She said— “What else did I say?”
He said: “You said, ‘What have you done to me? I am a hideousness.’”
She said— “What else did I say?”
He said, “Where did you put the people? Where did they go?”
She said, “I still love you.”
He said, “You said that too.”
28
NONA WOKE ON THE COLD, shoe-smelling surface of the back of a truck, in the dark mostly. The seats seemed to close in on her arms and legs, and she panicked briefly, thrashing her head this way and that, until somebody said, quite gently—
“Chill.”
The back doors of the truck were wide open—the air was cool and damp and reeked of oil and cold road. From far off there were the familiar peppery sounds of gunfire—a yell, occasionally—metal creaks and moans that echoed sharply all over the place, as though she were stationed in a deep tunnel. This was because she was stationed in a deep tunnel, she realised. She sat up and looked out the back of the truck and saw blackness stretch before her—blackness occasionally relieved by pockets of pale pink light, the spluttery try-hard light you got from solar power, offering little relief to the eye. Much bigger spotlights had been placed at points on the road, like windows to some other world—big luminous rectangles, suckling on cables that were lying in thick coils over the painted concrete, in heaps and snarls. Some of them led back into the truck; and there was Prince Kiriona Gaia, stretched out on the seats, lying flat, looking at her from the shadows with those golden eyes like a dead animal’s.
Nona looked at her; she looked at Nona. They looked at each other for a very long time. The scarf at Kiriona’s neck had been tied back up, and her jacket had been buttoned up, so that you couldn’t see her wounds. The corpse prince looked at her, and her expression was flat, and cool, and metallic.
Kiriona said, “Where is she?”
Nona didn’t know what to say. The corpse prince urged—
“Come on. Where’d she go? Where is she?”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” said Nona miserably.
“Listen, she can be in hell for all I care, I won’t get mad,” said Kiriona. “She can be at the bottom of the sea or at the bottom of space. I just need to know—where.”
When Nona didn’t answer, the corpse prince said—
“Okay. Different question. Do you love her?”
“Take a walk, Nav,” said a new voice.
It was Pyrrha, at the back of the truck, looking stretched thin and worn out. There were long, healing grazes going up both of her arms, like she’d taken a tumble since Nona last saw her, extending up to underneath her neck. Her stubble was a glittery scrape of red across her cheeks and on the underside of her chin and upper lip. Her hard, familiar face looked impossibly tired.
Kiriona said, “Kind of pretending to be dead here.”
“All right. We’ll take a walk. Don’t go anywhere, and stop being a little shit,” said Pyrrha.
“It’s genetic,” said the corpse prince.
Pyrrha got up into the back of the truck, making it jolt and jostle, and shifted cables away from Nona.
Nona said, trying to find the words: “The fingers—the things…？”
“The Heralds have us pinned down in here,” said Pyrrha. “Not that many of ’em, but even a handful is more than enough.”
“Oh, yeah, those things are bastards,” said Kiriona. “I fought a handful up close, back on the Mithraeum.”
“Yeah, well. We fight those things up close, the fight’s over. You have to take them out long range. Couple of BoE cars are taking potshots at them from the on-ramp, about two kilometres down. No—don’t move, kiddie…”
Nona had tried to slither her way up into the halo of Pyrrha’s arms, and found her legs felt like blocks of marble. They had never felt that way before: sort of fizzy and numb. Sometimes her gang had given each other dead legs and arms, and she had offered herself up for this treatment, but to her disappointment it had never worked on her. Pyrrha cradled her in her arms and worked her way, very carefully, out the back of the truck. It was dark and echoey outside, with small sanctuaries of light here and there on the oil-smelling road.
There was a barrier a little way from the truck, a waist-high slab of concrete. Pyrrha put her down with her back propped against it, then crouched next to her.
Nona said, surprised: “I can’t walk.”
“Do you remember what happened after you blacked out on top of the car?” asked Pyrrha.