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What had happened was that after the bones one day Palamedes said she looked peaky and made her eat crackers and spread until Nona worked herself halfway to a tantrum. In the end Palamedes had to promise her a swim for a whole twenty minutes before she would do anything, eat anything, or agree to anything. It was bad behaviour, but Nona had been a whole month younger. Promises made, Palamedes got to go away, saying, “Tell Cam I said it was a water cure,” to which Camilla remarked that Palamedes was an enabler. It didn’t matter to Nona. She had already got her towel and the old shirt she used to swim in—much easier to go naked, but the others had all objected to this, and Cam had said it would make her a sniper target—and her jandals, and then after masks were tied and hats put on they walked to the beach in the low dusk.
That evening they had walked around the long way, which meant it took fully half an hour to get there, but often they walked different routes to throw off anyone who might have gotten interested and tried to follow them. On this walk they ended up spending a little time by the city graveyard. All the concrete tops had been sledged open and the buried coffins had been dug up, piled high, and burned. The smoke still clung to the sides of the buildings and made Nona gag. Pyrrha had told her this was business as usual; Pyrrha said the first thing that happened was all bones got burned, whether they were moving around or not.
By the time they had gotten to the beach Nona was depressed, but it only took her feet being in the salt water to make her happy again. Camilla never came in with her. This was because there were heaps and heaps of jellyfish in the harbour, with their beautiful bodies transparent at the crown and deep indigo at the very tips, and they weren’t at all afraid to come up near to you and brush you. On Nona, this made the place they touched tingle a little, but nothing else. That was why Nona had always swum at dusk, because Cam said the jellyfish sting killed most people within minutes. The water seethed with them because the harbour was closed, and nobody was fixing the barrier nets.
Instead Cam sheltered near the concrete pillars of a jetty out of sight lines with a beat-up paperback book. It had been earlier in the spring, and night had fallen fast. There was no electric light, so she had a little torch. The first time Nona had asked to swim they had let her without cavil: she had barely known how to explain herself, then, but her hunger was so terrible that she had made them all understand. For security, Camilla had taken handfuls of rocks and sailed each one up into the centre of the lamps that shone down from the pier, with a terrific smash of plastic and the brief snappish yowl of a busted wire; and nobody had come around to fix them since. They wouldn’t have had time—the blue light had appeared in the sky soon after.
It had been high tide that night. Nona had gone wading out into the shallows immediately, picking her way over the big pockmarked rocks and the slippery seaweed clumps floating haplessly in the surf, until she was up to her thighs, the shirt billowing around her. Then she plunged into the salt water. She let herself go under and felt the huge, rocking cradle of the waves rolling her forward to the beach, nearly weeping with relief—like going to the bathroom when you were really desperate, or drinking when you were really thirsty, or hearing the door open when you were really lonely. The black water sank right down to the roots of her hair, right through the braids, and made her ears go pop as water blocked up the canals. Bubbles rippled across her face as her laugh came out as oxygen. She kicked up to the surface and her hair and her shirt floated all around her in the water, and she bobbed there, in the dark, avoiding the inviting yellow squares of light that the other jetty lamps made on the roiling surface.
Then she had clung to one of the wooden legs of the pier—bubbled all over with barnacles and crusted with salt and plastered with dried-out fans of seaweed—and watched as blue jellyfish moved about her, squirting through the water or drifting there, looking dead, until suddenly they would undulate forward in delicate blue squiggles of movement. She did get stung, but the sting only gave her pins and needles in one foot, which was soon over. She pushed off from the pillar again and into a wave, and let the tide carry her forward, slowly, to the rocky shore.
Salt water had always relieved her: salt water made her feel as though, if there was someone in there with her, she would suddenly know the words to tell them everything. The sea was so kind after a hot concrete-smelling day, and she knew the water had runoff in it but it seemed so clean anyway. The sea was a big, grinding, unchangeable machine. The only terrible part was an awful longing to let her head go below the surface, to lose all buoyancy and lie at the bottom like a flat fish. Nona didn’t want to die, but she wanted to sit in the water and drowse, which she was forced to admit was the same thing eventually.