She had asked this upward of a dozen times, especially lately, but Palamedes always answered unhesitatingly no matter how many times he had been asked before. “She’s got the wrong kind of body. She and I can cheat … for now … draw on me, not her, for the unusual kinds of things that I do, with the downside being that our time is very limited. If I was in her body for too long, I’d hurt her and the blue light would start to hurt me. But in summary, nothing will hurt Camilla so long as I stick to the time limit. Make sense?”
“I think so,” said Nona, and deciding: “Yes. That’s a relief … I wouldn’t want anything to hurt Camilla. I love Camilla.”
“And why do you love Camilla?”
Nona struggled with this a little. It was like asking why you breathed air.
“I love the way she moves,” she said pitifully.
He said, “Me too.”
“Do you miss seeing her?”
“Dreadfully. But the recordings are nice.”
“Is the blue light going to start hurting Pyrrha, Palamedes?”
Another question she had begun asking again. Camilla said it was anxiety. Palamedes said gently, “No. She’s immune to the blue light and it’s not going to start hurting her. She’s got the right type of body to be hurt by it, but the wrong soul. She was made to be immune to the blue light.”
“So do I have the wrong kind of body, or the wrong kind of soul?”
This was the only question Palamedes ever hesitated on.
“We don’t know. We were worried that the blue light was hurting you when you first came to us, but you’re fine. This could mean that you’re like Pyrrha, and that you’re immune because your soul is protecting your body. But … there are a lot of factors, Nona.”
“Is that why—Blood of Eden don’t want me?”
“Oh, they want you,” said Palamedes. “They want you very badly. Look—are you scared by the conversation Pyrrha and I had this morning?”
“Not really. I mean, I know things are getting worse,” she said, wanting to sound worldly. “I know I’m not fixed and we only have a few more months to fix me, and who knows what’s going to happen in the meanwhile. But I’m not scared of We Suffer. I like We Suffer.”
Palamedes quirked Cam’s eyebrows in the way that meant he was amused.
“Just because the commander gave you a sweet the once?”
“It wasn’t just that,” said Nona.
It was sort of that. We Suffer had given her a sweet early on when she had not been having a good day, and she had said, Keep at the mission, Nona. The sweet had been too sweet—she had to apologetically spit it out after about five sucks because it got too much—but she had liked Keep at the mission, Nona. It had made her feel full of purpose.
“In another time and in different circumstances I would also have liked We Suffer,” said Palamedes. “Hell, I might have liked all of Ctesiphon Wing. Right now though … Tidy up the bones, let’s stop for today.”
They stopped then started tidying up the bones together, putting them in the false bottom of the big box that was otherwise filled with canned beans.
“Sometimes,” she found herself saying, quite meditatively for her, “I don’t like it when you do—the necromancy word—” （“You just said it,” said Palamedes） “—but it feels nice at the same time. It’s mixed up. It’s like when you do that, it makes me sad—not sad that you did it, but sad that you can do it. Did I say something wrong?” Nona added in a rush, seeing Palamedes’s face.
“No,” he said, gently, after a moment. “I don’t understand yet, that’s all. Not even a little. I have so much to learn in the ways of not understanding.”
Then he got the expression he only got when he was thinking about doing something. This was the expression that isolated him the most from Camilla’s face: Camilla had the same look on her face when she was doing something and when she was thinking about it, which was what made Camilla so hugely unexpected. Before he could do whatever it was though, the timer bleated in his pocket. “Time’s up,” he said. “Give this to Cam for me, will you?”
And he spread Nona’s fingers like he always did, and he quietly kissed the second right-hand knuckle.
Nona always paid so much more attention to the lessons of the hand and the mouth than she did to the lessons of the bone and the sword: they were significantly more interesting. With the bone and the sword she faintly got the impression that she was being read a boring bit out of the newspaper, or one of the two-for-one books Pyrrha sometimes bought from the back of somebody’s truck. Whenever she was read to from one of these she was asleep in minutes. But she was good at this, whatever this was; she didn’t even know; nobody would give her the words, and she didn’t have them herself. The first time Palamedes had asked her to do it, quite a long time ago, and the first time she had raised Camilla’s hand to her mouth and done it—pretty much exactly as Palamedes had, making the same shape as his mouth had done like she did when speaking languages, and touching the same way as his hands had touched—Camilla had looked at her, and then she had gone away to sit in the bath by herself in the dark for almost an hour, even though there hadn’t been any water in the bath.