“So you think I trust myself too much,” he said.
Pyrrha said, “I think that you can’t be your own checks and balances, and you shouldn’t try.”
“Sometimes you remind me of my mother,” he said.
“A woman I’d kill to meet,” said Pyrrha.
“Let’s hope you get the chance,” said Palamedes. “Then again…”
Nona teased a soft, swollen sultana to the top and mulched it between her teeth, trying to eat it very delicately. The mush wasn’t bad, only too sweet and a little gritty, but she always had to decide which bits of it she could eat without either bringing it back up or anyone else working out what she was doing. She said, “Are you two fighting now because everyone else in the city is fighting?”
Both Pyrrha and Palamedes looked a little hunted and guilty.
“Don’t get too cute to live, kiddie,” said Pyrrha, but after all she had said kiddie, and given one of her plaits a twitch. “We’re stressed, that’s all. Eat your mush … God, this stuff’s awful.”
Funnily enough, Nona didn’t mind it too much; it was so different from normal food that it was easy to swallow as much as she possibly could without thinking about it, which got her cheap praise from Pyrrha and Palamedes both. Palamedes ate his with a mechanical fury—“Can’t starve Cam,” he said—and then once he had just about finished with the bowl his timer beeped and he said, “Thank God! I did it,” and then there was Camilla. Camilla looked at Nona and said, “Update?”
“Palamedes hates mush,” said Nona.
“We had mush?” Camilla looked down at her plate, and then looked up at Pyrrha, who had reserved all of her sultanas for last and was spooning them into her mouth. She said, “What happened to the food money?”
“I’m not fighting over this twice,” said Pyrrha.
After that there was still lots of time before school, so they did one of Nona’s favourite things. Nona got to stand on Pyrrha’s feet as Pyrrha and Camilla both lay down and did their morning crunches, their sit-ups, and their stretches, with Pyrrha helping Camilla to stretch both her legs to the point where Nona was afraid she would go snap—and then they ruthlessly stretched out Nona too, making her touch her toes, making her stretch out on one leg, stretching her out too until she did hear a lot of little things go snap and felt brief, bright sizzles of pain. “Got to keep your muscle up,” said Pyrrha, “this is brute-forcing it.” At the end she got her back and her calves rubbed, which was the best part. She felt breathless and sparkling by the time they started downstairs, more tired than she dared admit, but by the time they hit the street and wandered past the big steaming vents with the rest of the crowds Nona felt better.
They went down the street all the way and didn’t take any turns until Pyrrha said at the park gates, “Too busy. Let’s go around,” and so Nona took Pyrrha’s hand and they went around. They turned left at the dogleg around the park, past all of the braver stall owners and merchants setting up their wares, smoking cigarettes, setting down long untidy cables attached to exhaust fans to blow smoke away from their shoppers. Nona hung back a little on Pyrrha’s arm to see all of the rows of thin synthetic shirts and plastic-coated boots until Pyrrha said, “What d’you want from the cheap-jacks, No-No?”
“Oh, nothing—except it is my six-monther soon,” she reminded Pyrrha.
Camilla said, “You can get a present once it’s been a year.”
Nona was alarmed; if she didn’t get a present now there was a good chance she would not get to have one later.
But Pyrrha said, “God, you think she’s ever gotten presents? I visited her hometown back before Anastasia got settled, and it was grim as fuck then. Just spooky caves all the way down…”
This interested Nona, except Cam said sharply, “Don’t lead,” and Pyrrha said, “No leading, ma’am, I understand. What do you want for a gift, Nona?”
Nona seethed in a welter of greed.
“I want a pack of coloured rubber bands to tie my hair up with so that you can put one colour on one braid and another colour on another, like Beautiful Ruby has.”
Pyrrha said, “I said a present, Nona, something that costs something.”
Nona was puzzled. “That’s why I picked it, it’s cheap so you can probably get it even if you have to pay the demo crew half your money. You don’t earn much in the first place.”