“No,” said Nona.
“Maybe that’s for the best,” said Pyrrha. Then she opened her mouth and said quietly—
“A…”
“Don’t,” Nona found herself saying. “Don’t. Don’t call me that or anything like that … don’t make me remember. I don’t want to … You won’t like it. Don’t. Don’t make me do it.”
Pyrrha said, “Don’t freak out, junior. Cool it,” but she didn’t feel cool at all, she felt horribly hot. Something itched wetly and warmly on the back of her neck, and she raised a trembling hand to touch the spot, but Pyrrha took her wrist and said, “Don’t smear it. It’s meant to keep … to keep you in the body as long as possible.”
The grip on Nona’s wrist was firm and gentle and totally normal—how many times had Pyrrha grasped her wrist, before crossing a road, or helping her stand, or twirling her around to songs on the radio? But from some hole in the back of Nona’s cupboard behind a fake plank of wood in Nona’s brain, her voice said roughly: “Don’t touch me.”
Pyrrha dropped her wrist, and Nona’s voice went on and on:
“Did you think this was fun, Pyrrha Dve? Did you think this was lovely? Family. Blood. Together. Kiss, kiss. A child’s game. You say nice words and everyone pretends they are the words you say. Here is a house. We live in it. Worms slithering over each other … Did you like playing pretend? Did you like being mother and father? You should have given into your desires and eaten us. Chew and swallow. More natural. Would have respected you for it…”
The voice died away and Nona, in agonies of hatred and repulsion and embarrassment, tried to curl up in on herself, only it didn’t work. She felt as though she had been interrupted in the bathroom. White-hot, fatal shame seemed to start in her middle and travel outward, and she got her own voice and she said—
“Don’t, don’t, don’t. Don’t do this to me, Pyrrha … Pyrrha, just let me die. It’s nicer. I can’t bear it.”
Nona cried for a little while. The tears oozed out of her eyes and landed in her lap. Her face felt hot, and the back of her neck was sore and itchy. After a while the tears subsided, and Pyrrha said— “Better?”
“Yeah,” said Nona, and felt her voice tremble, but said more steadily: “Yes. Can I have a tissue?”
“Wait till Cam and Sextus get here. You don’t want any tissue that’s been in my pockets.”
“Did they find the Sixth House?”
“Yes—thanks to you. And the megatrucks weren’t hard to stop either. The moment Ctesiphon grounded the first one, the others pretty well gave up. It’s … extenuating circumstances.”
This cheered Nona up a little. “That’s good, isn’t it?”
Pyrrha’s face did not look as though she thought it was altogether good.
“Nona,” she said carefully, “what if I told you I thought this was the end of the line, honey? I’m not sure any of us are getting out of this one.”
This cheered Nona up a lot, but she hesitated before saying so. It was an awful relief … that she and Pyrrha and Cam and Palamedes were all together, and nobody had to worry about the next day, or the day after that; that she could put everything else out of her mind—violently put everything else out of her mind—and she did not have to try anymore. But her relief was hard to articulate in a way that did not make her sound awful. So she simply said, “I’ll behave.”
“Let’s go see the others,” said Pyrrha. “You okay to be picked up again?”
Pyrrha’s boots crunched on the shiny black surface as she carried Nona. A megatruck loomed out of the darkness, blizzarded over with luminous strips, bigger than any truck Nona had ever seen. It was as tall as a house. If it had been driven up somehow next to the classroom building you could have stepped out of the window and stood on the top. It rose up out of sight, its top lost to the blackness, and was so wide that it took Pyrrha something like twenty seconds to walk around its bumper. A huge shutter had opened, and a ramp had been laid down, and there were people milling around next to a much smaller Blood of Eden truck with the soldiers laying people down on rollaway beds: checking them over, doing something medical, fluttering in the darkness like moths. Nona noticed many of the people being helped had wide, watery white eyes just like the makeup that Nona had gotten earlier: the sticky, filmy gazes that had so terrified Honesty’s crew.