He stood. He was taller than she was. She was not afraid. He reached out a hand to her, and placed it upon her shoulder, and looked at her, wondering, with his ordinary face; if she had suspected his fear might manifest itself, yet again, as an act of murder, she could not see that in him now.
“God is a dream, Harrow,” he said very gently. “You all dream me together—and she’s dreaming me too. In a way, her dead dreams of God mean more than all your dreams put together. In this dream of yours, where will you seek out God? Where will you go?”
Harrow turned away from the hand, and crunched out, barefoot, over the wet sand—her feet slapped with each step—and she stood ankle-deep in the River, disbelieving.
Before her, the waters parted, speared-through and mute, for the enormous lance of a tower—a tower that had never been there before; a tower that soared, impossible and deadly grey, out of the waters—a tower of grey bricks, lurching out of the River as though gasping for air. An impossible, cone-capped tower—a belled tower; she could see the steeple, but the bell cot was too far from shore to see the bell.
“I’ll start there,” she said.
And she stepped into the River. She took another step, and she walked, and she walked.
30
WHEN NONA’S EYES OPENED, it was still dark—but then the darkness changed. It thickened, then resolved, then turned grey, then turned transparent. There was a huge roaring pop! within her body’s ears, and then they weren’t in the tunnel at all. They weren’t in anything. The space between the windshield and whatever was out there wasn’t space at all: it was as though someone had thrown a bucket of grey paint over the windshield. She couldn’t see out.
Nona stood up—or at least, her body stood up: she was nauseous, and thought that if she stood something would be left on the chair or stuck within Pyrrha’s arms. The belt of the chair broke as she stood. Pyrrha reached out for her. She brushed Pyrrha’s arm away. Her legs still felt like distant nothing, as did her arms, and her trunk, and her neck, but her eyes could still see and her ears could still hear and her tongue could still taste. When she opened her mouth so that her tongue could taste, it helped her to see a little better. Everyone was talking, talking, talking. Pyrrha was saying something—Paul was saying, in calm repose, “No. I’ve bubbled us,” and all Nona caught of Pyrrha’s response was:
“—not enough, I’m not saying velocity exists here but—”
“—untethered, but—”
“—if you want to get into the current you’ll—”
Crown was whispering in her softest and most coaxingest voice, “Judith? Won’t you come back to me—Judith—Jody?” and of course the Captain wasn’t saying anything back. Pyrrha swung around to the corpse prince and said, “Kid, you still in there?” and Kiriona said scornfully, “It takes more than this.” Nobody was speaking to, or noticing, Nona.
Until Nona’s hand tapped Paul on the shoulder. Paul looked up into her face with a grave play of understanding flashing across Camilla’s once-familiar features, the unfamiliar eyes with their deep slate dot in the centre.
Nona took a long time to examine those new eyes and decide what she thought of them: whether she liked the pupil that was that cool grey-brown, the iris of clear and limitless grey. Her mouth said— “I’ll take it from here.”
Paul looked at her one final time, then unbuckled—moved aside—steadied themselves as Nona sat in the chair. It was made for someone longer and her leg did not reach the accelerator, so Paul extended one leg and pressed down with a foot, and braced against the chair and the side of the console.
Nona said, “Your thing. The outline. Won’t work. Don’t ask me questions.”
Paul said, “That skin’s all that’s lying between us and certain death.”
Nona’s eyes dazzled. Her body shuddered beneath her. For one of the first times she acknowledged it, she felt the body as something with her, on top of her, but not her; her sense of living outside it. There was a fragile, pulpable ecstasy in that body. It was like one of the soft blue jellyfish in the harbour, with all its stings and promises, and now Nona’s self, Nona’s thoughts, were a hand closing around the jellyfish, unbidden, feeling it undulate blindly between the fingers. And the more she felt like fingers, the more she closed down.
Somewhere, in that shimmering space between fingers and palm, she heard a voice: Pyrrha saying, “Kiddie—stay with us.”