“But I exist,” said the Angel. “Pardon—we exist. And as long as we exist, we are a terrible liability. The commander will get some breathing room if she doesn’t have to take us into account with every movement.”
Pash said roughly: “The commander’s probably dead the moment we walk out of here.”
“We have left many wing commanders behind to die,” said the Angel calmly. “This wing commander is particularly cunning and particularly brave and particularly determined—but get used to it, Passion … We’ve been weighed,” she shouted out, and waved her hand at the figures of Palamedes-and-Camilla and We Suffer in the distance, and they waved back.
Nona said: “Who are you?” Then she explained, “Everyone asks me the same question, so—I feel like it’s my turn.”
“You don’t get to ask,” said Pash roughly; which Nona thought was a wonderful and very cool answer she wished she had come up with herself.
But the Angel leant down and looked at Nona. There was something settled in her face: a calmness that had not existed there before—a kind of immovable, fixed-concrete resolve. She had never seen the Angel look like that. Every furtive, fleeting, mercurial spark had gone, leaving something hard and old, something that touched light to some paper deep within Nona. She suddenly reached up and grasped the Angel’s hand, and the Angel grasped hers, and the Angel looked at her.
“I’m the Messenger,” said the Angel simply. “We are the Message … the message has two parts left, and you are looking at one of those parts. The name for this part of the message was ‘Aim’ when the message was passed to us through my forebear Emma Sen. The message is too simple for human beings like us to understand. What do you think the message is?”
Nona couldn’t guess.
“I hope you hear it one day,” said Aim.
She reached out—she ruffled Nona’s hair—she smiled. Then she said, “Noodle, let’s go,” and she stepped resolutely up the ramp and into the truck.
Pash dithered behind a little—a more subdued and unsure Our Lady of the Passion. She said, “I have to shoot you now,” and then she burst out, quickly, “Joke—that was an actual fucking joke, you don’t even need to pay for it,” and she followed the Angel up the ramp.
Pyrrha leant down and plucked Nona out of the chair. Nona was bewildered to find that her arms were now betraying her too. When she tried to place them around Pyrrha’s neck again, they too had become something more like rocks and ice. Pyrrha put them around her shoulders and said— “You’ve been very calm.”
Nona found herself saying: “It’s not long now, is it? Are we going to find me?”
“Yeah,” said Pyrrha. “I think it’s time to wake you up.”
The megatruck, on the inside, was a long corridor of little cubicles. Pyrrha avoided these cubicles and instead travelled up a short flight of metal stairs to another compartment. She opened a door and she brought Nona into an enormous cockpit with wraparound windows, the most complicated car insides that she had ever seen. Pyrrha sat down on a chair made of shiny, soft, cracked stuff, worn at the seat from too much sitting down. The windshield was a huge black expanse, strung with the few lights lit in the tunnel and otherwise looking like the blackness at the bottom of the world.
The corpse prince was already in the cockpit. She had apparently walked there under her own steam—if anyone from Blood of Eden had noticed, they had kept it to themselves—and now she was strapped into one of the sideways seats, her sword beneath her feet, legs splayed carelessly wide at the knees, arms folded over her chest. She did not speak to them, even when Pyrrha said, “Hey, kid.” She had not said much of anything since Camilla and Palamedes had become Camilla-and-Palamedes—seemed withdrawn and lost in thought, unwilling to look at anyone or anything.
Camilla’s body appeared at the doorway. The commander was there with it, and Crown was close behind, with the Captain’s arm around her shoulder. The Captain seemed to be able to stand up now, but was staring, dumb and dull, as though she didn’t understand her surroundings. Supporting her must have been awkward, but Crown didn’t seem to notice. Crown flashed a smile at Nona—she even smiled at Kiriona—before sitting down in one of the front-row chairs. Camilla-and-Palamedes selected the biggest chair of all, right at the front, before the enormous wheel.
“Mind showing me how this thing starts?” they said to the commander.