Camilla was sitting in a chair. The chair had wheels. She had a clipboard in her hands, and the body of Ianthe Naberius was there behind the chair, as Palamedes in his shoulders and the line of his head as ever. Various people tottered down the ramps, assisted by Blood of Eden soldiers—Crown and, astonishingly, Pash, helping an extremely feeble and aged person, about Nona’s size. Palamedes looked very distracted as they approached. He was saying— “Cam, can we get any update on the tunnels?—For fuck’s sake, can someone please stop my mother from walking around talking to Blood of Eden? Someone’s going to put a bullet in her head. Go ask Kester Cinque to do it; he can actually talk to people, though I think right now he’s wishing he never left Koniortos. Where are your fathers? Why is this like herding chickens? Nona, how are you?”
Nona felt very lost and astonished and weary. “Are all these your family?” she asked.
“Metaphorically yes, literally it’s complicated,” he said. There was a great calm relief in his body, which Nona did not expect. Cam was slumped in her chair and she was about six degrees paler than she had ever been. “My mother wanted to meet you—too bad for her, I assume she’s off asking one of the junior officers about the philosophy of violence and how these trucks work and what everyone does for a living.”
Most of the people being helped could not stand, and they all looked thin and crumpled and haggard, though quite cheerful in many cases, Nona thought. Pyrrha looked around and said, “Sextus, any Heralds get down here, I’m not sure these people will survive.”
Camilla said, “They wouldn’t.”
Her voice was thin, barely a whisper. Palamedes supplied, “They’re in pretty poor shape, yes … but there’s also everyone in the city to think about. I’ve tried to explain to them what’s happening, and they’ve got the gist, but before you ask about necromancy, that’s right out. The Master Archivist says any display of aptitude on their part crocks them for days—blinding themselves nearly killed them, and that was when they were much stronger. There’s no hope of us taking anyone back to the barracks to work on something as fine-grained as those wards Ianthe left.”
Nona felt herself being shunted around in Pyrrha’s arms, her weight shifted from side to side. Pyrrha said, “And Ianthe…”
“Kicking,” said Palamedes. He smiled again. “She’s getting lively now. And quite shockingly angry.”
“Sextus,” said Pyrrha, “I’m not used to saying this, but I’m fresh out of plans, and either you’re so completely high on lovey-dovey cavalier shit that you’ve taken leave of your senses—and, you know, fair do’s, I’ve been there—or you know something I don’t.”
“It’s not that I know anything, Pyrrha,” said Palamedes. “It’s that I’m feeling ready to gamble. In a couple of minutes—once the commander gets back to me with the manual—I’m loading everyone here back into the truck. They’re going over it now, in case Merv Wing left anything untoward inside.”
Nona peered around into the truck, into the big well of dim light, and tried to be positive but cautious.
“Palamedes, you know I get motion sick.”
“I know. I’m sorry. You’ll only have to put up with it for a bit, Nona, I promise.”
Pyrrha said, “Look, I know this thing has the tonnage you usually find in spacecraft, but if your plan is to hoon around the city squashing Heralds as you go I have to tell you: that’s not going to work.”
“Didn’t think of that,” said Camilla.
Palamedes said, “No. Don’t worry, Dve, my ambitions don’t extend to the city surface. Hang on—here comes the committee.”
The commander and someone that Nona had never met walked into the big yellow square of light in front of the ramp. The commander looked normal, except Nona was struck afresh by the enormous contrast between her and Palamedes: We Suffer looked a lot more like Pyrrha, in that she was stressed and wild-eyed and had a fatal, brisk focus that was completely at odds with Palamedes’s cheerful anticipation. Palamedes was acting as though he were a tiny at show-and-tell who had brought in his favourite toy with the expectation that he was about to get two minutes all to himself to tell the whole room about it, even the big kids. The crumpled, blind-eyed woman next to We Suffer, who walked with one hand on her gracefully extended arm, stopped in the light. She had quick features and a very long braid of dark, silvering hair, so long that it made Nona wish to have her own braids back. She looked quite old—maybe older even than We Suffer, marks of deep care delineated on her face—and wasn’t glamorous, and wouldn’t have been even had she been in fresh clothes.