“Yeah, but he doesn’t look it, does he,” retorted Kiriona. “Sarpedon’s, like, in his fifties? Sixties? It’s nasty! They should know how it looks! It looks suss! Anyway, that’s my dad!”
“You haven’t had to live through an atom of the worst of it,” said Ianthe. “You are an exasperating child and a moron—stop making me argue with you! The important part of this, you gibbering bozo, is that the moment that door opens, you’re not killing the monster inside—”
“Give me five minutes—”
“—you’re not becoming his cavalier—you’re not fixing anything! You’re signing our doom,” snapped Ianthe. “He gets her back, you don’t know what he’ll become! You have no idea, and you’ve deluded yourself into believing him, and he’s just tricking you! You know that, don’t you? Are you trying to kid yourself? Is this about Harry, after all?”
There was a deep indrawn breath; Ianthe laughed and said—
“You don’t have to breathe, you know.”
“You’re so goddamned boring when you talk about Harrowhark, so don’t,” said Kiriona. “Listen to you, big lady of the First. ‘Leave Harrow to die, don’t open the Tomb, mneh mneh mneh.’ What’d you come here for? Stop playing the good son. You don’t give a shit about anything except your own plans, you know. Your sister’s upstairs. Take her and go—let me fight this thing and win, or die trying, who cares?”
“You let that monster out of its box,” said Ianthe, “and you start us down a path nobody can save us from. If God truly wants her out … if Teacher set this all up … if he wants her…”
“Wants her? He told me to kill her. He said, Make it quick, but kill her, said me with my blood could do it—said me with my blood, I was the only one…”
Ianthe rounded on the corpse prince, and she gave her a ringing slap straight through the face. Kiriona did not stagger.
“He loves her!” Ianthe howled. “John loves Alecto—John needs Alecto! Without that piece of goddamned fridge meat, he’s nothing—and we need to keep him that way!”
The secret was told: the secret was out—the middle brain disappeared. Nona unravelled.
The first thing that happened was that a big slit opened up above her baby heart—she gushed up blood against the front of her black shirt; then more slits through her middle—then in and out of her mortal insides, her unshapely organs. All the stuff inside her guts was hammered through. She was slit a thousand times—a million. Her skin erupted in blood through all the pores of her face. It poured out behind the backs of her knees, her ears, her armpits. Anything glandular. She choked up blood; both Tower Princes had whirled around—dropped down to their knees beside her—one said, “Her neck—get her neck,” but as fast as she could be stitched together, she came apart. The baby body was coming apart. A slim brown hand was at her cheek: “Keep it together. Wherever you are, idiot, I know you can hear me. Keep it together…”
Above their voices, and the blood, and the dim sweetness of the pain, she heard Paul say—
“Pyrrha, go.”
A gunshot. The pale yellow figure crumpled over next to Nona’s bust-up body, covered in Nona’s fluids—she jerked and went into a spasmodic fit, shuddering and juddering, as though she could somehow vibrate out of her skin. Paul dropped to Nona’s side with a clinical glance at Crown’s frothing, screaming sister, and said nothing more than, “Effective.”
“I was saving that bullet for John,” said Pyrrha. “Herald bullets don’t grow on trees. Wake made that for me … Or I stole it from her … same difference. Paul— Can we— Is there still…”
Paul sounded detached, strange above her. It was as though she were underwater. She yearned to be underwater. “Open the door,” they said. “Now.”
Nona felt herself lifted—Kiriona’s arms beneath her shoulders, Pyrrha’s beneath her hips. Why were they carrying her that way? Why was Pyrrha saying, “Keep her arm—Paul, her arm’s coming off.” The rock loomed so big above, so awful in the electric light. There were so many people standing above her, her body, the baby’s body. The baby with the big black eyes. The scrap of meat with the purple mouth.
Pyrrha was saying, “This isn’t the real entrance, right? It can’t be,” and someone—the old soldier—was saying, “No. The true rock, so it is said, is down a corridor. But I can’t lift this—I’m no adept…”