The corpse prince was sitting on the back step of the truck when they got there. Palamedes had hit the brakes on the wheeled chair and Camilla was slumped back in it. Even in the darkness of the tunnel Nona could tell that she was in a terrible way. She was very calm but very feeble; her mouth had gone dark.
“No. No more medication,” Nona heard her say clearly. “Need my head … want it clear.”
Pyrrha sat Nona on the truck step, blindly, despite Nona’s warning squawk; Nona very much did not want to be sat next to the shimmering white figure of the dead Kiriona Gaia, who was watching the proceedings with the lively interest of a spectator at a ballgame. Pyrrha practically stumbled away—she dropped to her knees before the chair and Palamedes—she reached out and took Palamedes’s hand, and then Camilla’s. Her face and hands showed only dumb despair.
“I’ve loved you two,” she said. “Not well. Not even wholesomely. I don’t have it in me. But I’ve loved you—in a better world I’d be able to say, ‘Like you were my own,’ but I don’t know what that would even mean anymore. You’ve been my agents … you’ve been stand-ins for something I haven’t had for longer than either of you can understand. Which is why I’m saying—don’t do this. Please, don’t do this.”
Neither of them answered.
Pyrrha continued urgently: “Understand that once you do this, you can’t take it back. It’s better to die. There’s a power to dying clean … dying free. It’s not love, what you’re about to do. It’s not beautiful and it’s not powerful. It’s a mistake. We didn’t even do it right … we were children—playing with the reflections of stars in a pool of water … thinking it was space.”
Palamedes stood, and Pyrrha stood with him. He reached out and grasped her wrist strongly. “Whatever you think we’re doing, we’re not,” he said.
“Whatever you think you’re doing,” said Pyrrha, “you shouldn’t.”
Camilla said, “Just watch us.”
Pyrrha tugged her wrist free of Palamedes’s hand. She reached down, and tilted Camilla’s chin up, and looked at her for the longest time. Then she leant down—she kissed her brusquely and briefly on the forehead—and, startlingly and even more briefly, on the mouth. Nona, who even then could never ditch the lessons of the hand and the mouth, watched that kiss and felt very sad. It was like watching Pyrrha stealing something she didn’t want to take—reaching out for the juicy, cherry-red part of the oven, even when she knew that all it could give her was a burn. And Nona saw Camilla, with her cold, navy blue mouth, and could tell that Camilla understood.
Camilla said, “Could you try not to be such a chicken hawk, Pyrrha?”
Pyrrha reached out, ruffled the perfect hair of the body of Ianthe Naberius, and leant in to briefly kiss Palamedes too—Palamedes said, tolerant and amused, “You are an appalling old roué, Dve,”—and Pyrrha said, “Call me if you need me. Otherwise, see you around.”
Pyrrha crossed over to the truck, to Nona, and leant heavily into the interior; Nona could see that she was sweating, in exactly the same way she had sweated after the bottle of bleach. She mumbled, “You knew this was happening. You knew this was happening months ago,” and when Nona put her hand on Pyrrha’s, it was like Pyrrha hadn’t even noticed her.
By now, other people had filtered through to stand in a ragged semicircle around the wheelchair. There was the birdlike lady with the braid, We Suffer, a tall, lanky, creased young woman in grey whose face looked so startlingly like Cam’s that Nona wondered at it; her hair was nearly all shaved off on both sides, and unlike the others her eyes weren’t milky-white at all, they were set deep and dark in a face like a hawk’s. Crown joined them too, golden, shining Crown, another ragged lamp in the darkness. She was tying her fingers in knots, then untying them, over and over.
Nobody said a thing. Camilla’s head was lolled back against the chair, but she abruptly stood—stood on her own power, rolling her shoulders, cracking her neck. Palamedes drew her to sit down on the cold road, and they sat facing each other, cross-legged. It took Camilla a long time to fold her legs, and when she did, she made a kind of deep oof noise that told Nona it had cost her. She drew one of her knives from its holder, and laid it down between them on the concrete.
All at once, the ragged watchers closed in—just a few steps—so that they formed a ring: not tight enough to smother, but like they were trying to shut out the rest of that vast, empty tunnel, the far-off echoes of bullets. Nona instinctively moved forward, and nearly fell out of the truck; Pyrrha caught her up and they sank to the ground together. Kiriona Gaia was staring politely at the side of the truck, as though there were something really interesting on the paintwork.