“You’re hungry?”
“I’m so hungry,” said Nona.
The pencil didn’t move. Nona realised Camilla must have been waiting for her, must have been disappointed, so she added in tones of slight injury: “I probably would have remembered more, except then a wet cloth falls on my face and I go ‘Ahhh’ so loudly that the militia person above us stomps, so Pyrrha’s probably going to get another rude letter about us, so really I think the wet cloth on my face isn’t a good idea and can you change the alarm?”
“Well, you didn’t wake up,” said Camilla. “Anything else? Anything else at all?”
“Nothing.”
The record button got pushed down with its big bright clack. Nona, still rubbing her face where the sponge had hit it, panicked herself out of her clothes. Her arms and legs seemed even more unwilling to move in the same direction than normal, which meant she probably didn’t even look like a worm with problems but more like a spider who was about to go terminal. She didn’t like the T-shirt waiting for her, even though she had been the one to lay it out. It depicted a cheeseburger with little legs. The tinies liked it, but today she found it juvenile and unprofessional, not the kind of thing for a Teacher’s Aide at all. Camilla shone the little light at the end of the clipboard on her so that she could do up the button on her trousers and then the cinch, and Nona spent some time mopping her wet fringe.
“Sorry I gave you a fright,” said Camilla. “With the sponge. I didn’t mean to.”
All Nona’s resentment melted away.
“No, I’m sorry I didn’t get up,” she said, contrite. “If you drop a sponge on me tomorrow I promise I won’t scream about it.”
“I won’t do the sponge again. Failed experiment.”
The pencil worked away at the paper. Nona patted her hair down to make sure that the braids were still tight, that nothing was coming out, and when she stood up and peered at herself in the mirror comforted herself on that part: her hair still looked great, at least. There were dark circles under her eyes, and she rubbed them with her thumbs.
“Nona, when you’re looking at your hands…”
That startled her. Camilla rarely asked anything after Nona had recited her dream.
“Yes?”
“Who do they feel like they belong to? Do you like them?”
Nona chortled. “Not one bit.” Nona hated having hands.
But Camilla didn’t ask for any reason why; she just squinted a little as though she was trying to figure out what she could make for dinner out of a limited number of ingredients, and said, “Sure. Thank you.”
“Was that a clue? Are we any closer? Do you know who I am yet?”
“No.”
“That’s okay. I love you. Tell Palamedes I love him too, don’t forget,” said Nona, and, very pleased with herself, went off to brush her teeth and eat her breakfast without even being told; that session had been nice and short.
She was so early that Pyrrha hadn’t even started cooking breakfast yet; or maybe Pyrrha wasn’t going to cook at all because she hadn’t got out the little beaker to fill up the heat ring, and she was getting out a big covered dish from the refrigerator.
Pyrrha emerged from the fridge and said, “Cold mush all right? I covered it with fruit juice last night. Threw a handful of dried sultanas in there too, so go hunting.”
“Better than eggs,” decided Nona. “How was work?”
“Excellent. Two of my guys got in a fight because someone said the fighting at Prithibi had been tougher than the fighting at Antioch. Had to peel them off each other. Ear-biting stuff. Here—take some water, it’s going to be a scorcher today.”
Nona took the water from Pyrrha’s brown, work-chapped hand and even sipped it. It was blisteringly cold.
“Silly thing to fight about.”
“Absolutely, but there’ll be more of that before the end,” said Pyrrha. “They would have just yelled at each other three months ago. Now they’d happily kill each other over who spilt whose beer. There’s more dead bodies in the streets now then there were at the first barracks massacre. You see them lying around, dead, not of exposure either … just dead. Creeps me out. How is it at school?”
“None of my friends want to kill each other,” said Nona. Then she amended: “I mean, they say it all the time, but they don’t really. None of the little kids have bit each other in weeks, and when they argue too much Hot Sauce says, Quiet, and they’re quiet.”