The River swallowed them up. It felt very heavy. The truck’s wheels spun against nothing—the truck groaned horribly from the pressure, creaking like Nona’s hurting heart—and they sank like a stone. The cabin darkened as they sank—the windshield wipers bowed and sagged away from the windshield, and then were suddenly ripped off, sucked into the current—and a soft white starry crack appeared at the edge of the glass.
Nona slithered again, fumbling for the accelerator with her foot, but she couldn’t take her hands off the wheel. She was exhausted. She did not want to drive anymore. Seeing the tower had taken the fight out of her top and her bottom, and now out of her middle too. She looked down the side of the chair, and there was Paul, struggling across the floor and shaking blood out of Camilla’s right ear—Paul, face calm and even and only a little cross-eyed. Paul reached out to put one hand on the dirty accelerator and looked up at her, not beseeching, only waiting.
“Can you get us to the Ninth House?” they said.
There was another awful shriek of metal somewhere in the back of the megatruck. The windscreen darkened all the time—the water was turbid and filthy and the air in the cabin was getting weirdly chill—lots of people were yelling. She could hear Pyrrha in the background, Crown struggling with the Captain.
“Yes,” said Nona, “but—”
“But?”
How could she say that she was so tired—that whatever was going on in her chest was so incredibly urgent that if she closed her eyes and let it happen, she could probably die right there, right then? How to say that she wanted to go as Nona—with all her thoughts and feelings being Nona feelings, which might only be about six months old and therefore not very good, but were still her own? What could she do with the little selfish thought that now Camilla and Palamedes were gone—even if they had left behind Paul, which was probably quite nice of them—and Pyrrha was broken somehow, it was hard to want to live, hard to want everyone else to live, even lovely Crown? The Captain was gone, forever probably, and it didn’t matter about the corpse prince, who was dead already and therefore used to it.
Nona swallowed. She let her eyelids nearly touch, which would have been the end.
“But maybe we shouldn’t,” she said, holding the eyelids to that little slit—watching the onscreen scribbles flash urgently on the truck glass, watching the widening white crack, watching the river water pound itself into the place where it wanted to be even if the River itself didn’t. “If we end here, it’ll be just like … a bad dream, won’t it? And maybe we’ll wake up somewhere else. I know we won’t,” she explained, “but we don’t have to know that … maybe if we all go, it’ll be quick.”
Paul looked at her, with those dark grey-brown pupils widening, slightly.
“Nona,” they said, “Noodle’s in the back.”
The middle thoughts surged. The slit widened all the way.
“Oh my God,” she said, in a panic. “I forgot about Noodle.”
The windshield cracked all the way across the middle. Paul leant their full weight on the accelerator. Nona drove the truck home.
31
THE WATER DISAPPEARED. There was a huge squealing of tires—Paul eased off the accelerator just in time—and a big gravelly noise as the tires, going from water to pressure to nothing to a big field of gritty stone, spun the stone in all directions. The windshield cracked all the way through, and the truck bounced—once—and a whole stream of red text blinked up on the screen overlay. But the light that came through the windshield wasn’t grey light, and in fact wasn’t very bright at all. It was a thin electric yellow light that did very little to pierce the darkness. The megatruck horn honked itself, and Nona was only aware of the sound, its echo, the blaring wail.
Then she became aware of something else; an insistent tugging at top thought, bottom thought, and middle thought. She wanted something. She didn’t know quite what it was, only she wanted it—quite like a bathroom thought in its insistency.
“Headlights,” someone was saying. “Get the headlights.”
Paul had staggered up from behind her and was moving to the back cabin, unlocking the door. Pyrrha said, “We’ve equalised. We’re on level ground,” and then, in the corner of Nona’s vision, the corpse prince rose.
She leant over the driver’s seat, through the electric light, peering out at whatever was there. Then she suddenly cut off a word in her mouth—she followed after Paul—Pyrrha was saying, “Where are we? Back in the tunnel?” and Nona felt Pyrrha’s strong, ropy arms circle around—felt herself lifted up and out of the driver’s seat—found she was mucky with sweat, which embarrassed her, and that the warmth of Pyrrha’s arms was distant and faraway. She could barely remember walking, moving her body in the chair, doing all that driving. She was grateful now for being carried. She felt lifted through the cabin, floating above a high chatter of voices in the megatruck behind: