Nona enjoyed the water, but wilted a little at the sight of Camilla removing a carton of more sliced fruit from the cupboard. She and Pyrrha and Palamedes had gotten it into their heads a month or so ago that Nona could be tempted with fruit, which was true then but not particularly true now. Nona had decided that she was fine with having eaten fruit, but not with eating fruit; but she was too cheerful to disappoint Camilla, so they both ate slices of sweating orange melon until it was time to tack up the thick black sheeting on the windows, and then Cam barred the door and gave Nona the bones.
Nona sat cross-legged on the floor and chose to arrange them into a sort of snaking spiral, smallest pieces in the centre and biggest pieces on the outside, as Camilla sat nearby and sketched what she was doing on a brown sheet of butcher’s paper.
“Where did you go?” Nona asked, once she had taken the time to admire her handiwork. “When I was at school, I mean.”
The pencil stilled briefly. “Seeing people.”
“About Site C?”
“Keep going. There are some bones left.”
Nona added a big greyish knobble of bone to the spiral, but with no great interest. It was only a bone. Nice to nibble at, boring otherwise. “Done,” she said, then guessed, “People like Crown?”
The pencil had been put down. The eyes had shadowed into earthen greys. “Crown,” said Palamedes pleasantly, “isn’t our friend right now. Okay, take that smallest piece there and try rolling it in your fingers. Feel all the little indentations in that scooped-out portion.”
“I love Crown,” Nona protested, giving the smallest bone a desultory grope.
“Why do you love Crown?”
Nona thought about it.
“She has lovely hair. And when she hugs you she smells like cinnamon, and her breasts feel nice, and she’s so big and pretty.”
Palamedes looked at her, and then he took the notepad out of Camilla’s capacious pockets. Nona despaired: there was always a tick somewhere if she mentioned breasts. “That’s not exactly love as I would classify it,” he said. “That’s simply a list of things most red-blooded human beings like about Crown. How do you know what cinnamon smells like, Nona?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I just do. Is your timer on?”
“Yes, it’s on. Thank you for asking. Why don’t you pick out the piece of bone you like best, and tell me about it?”
She looked at them all: there were long treelike pieces with branches coming off them, and little wedged pieces and a long smooth piece with a jaggedy end. Nona picked the jaggedy piece and ran her thumb over the prickly splintered end, liking the bright itch. “Am I not allowed to love Crown?” she said.
“I could never stop you from loving anything. I don’t have the right. Nobody has the right to tell you who to love or who not to love, and equally nobody’s obliged to love you. If you were forced into loving them, it wouldn’t be love…”
Nona liked that.
“That’s why I love Hot Sauce and Honesty and my friends so much. They don’t have to like me, and it was a huge surprise when they liked me, but they do.”
“Being unexpectedly loved is so wonderful or terrible, isn’t it?”
“Wonderful, I think,” she said. Then she said, “Well, I still love Crown, anyway.”
“She’s used to people loving her anyway,” said Palamedes, with the air of someone not wholly paying a compliment.
“Do we still like the Captain?” （Even Nona couldn’t quite love the Captain.）
“I pity the Captain to the very depths of my heart, and never did like her much,” said Palamedes. “I pity Crown not at all, and like her terribly; that’s the problem. Why don’t you try to make that end smooth?”
Nona pressed her thumb down hard on the jagged end of the bone piece. The pad of her thumb began to feel warm. The tiny splinters of bone broke her skin, and a pinprick of red blood bubbled up. Nona stuck her thumb in her mouth. Palamedes carefully drew it away—“Good thinking, that’s antiseptic, but I can do better,” he said—and, with fine lines appearing at the side of Camilla’s mouth, the minutest fragment of bone popped out from the blood. Then the wound was gone, and the warm feeling with it.
Nona said curiously, “Does that hurt Camilla?”
“No, thank God. I’d never do it if it did.”
“Why is it that the blue light in the sky hurts—other people,” said Nona, “but not you and Cam?”