It felt like someone had punched her in the shoulder—hard. Nona did as Pyrrha had taught her, and went completely limp. For a moment her shoulder felt hot and awkward, and there was a hot burst of blood over her arm, feeling weird against the cool salt water. A yellow light shot through the waves like a dropped egg, and she writhed in its silhouette briefly before deciding to sink right to the bottom. The light arced back and forth, swinging around, never finding her.
She counted to twenty, glad she had taken a big breath, waiting there at the bottom and clutching the black rocks. It was very murky. Every so often a questing jellyfish would bob into view, and she had to bat it away from her face. She thought she heard a brief report, coming thickly from far away, as though maybe someone had pushed the part of the bike that went honk. Then there were weird white lights—quick, darting, moving lights, like very small fireworks—but Nona kept what Pyrrha called firing discipline. Only at the end of the long twenty seconds did she kick away, launching herself forward along the rocky bottom until she hit one of the jetty pillars.
By that time the pain and the weird feeling were over. The bullet had gone clean through the topmost part of her arm, which was good, and there wasn’t even a hole to show where it had been. She felt a little sick, but that was all. Nona had never been shot before. She inched up the pillar until her head broke water.
The beach had gone very quiet. The plut-plut bike’s headlight still shone out in her direction, blinding her a little. As Nona’s eyes adjusted she saw Camilla, squatting on the sand. Everyone else was fanned out, lying down around her, as though they had all decided to take a schooltime nap.
Nona waded through the water, heart racing, struggling through the surf—thrashing upward through the shallows, pulling herself to stand. Her feet felt numb, but looking back that was probably the jellyfish. Each and every single person who wasn’t Camilla was down on the ground. Their unholstered guns were still clutched in their hands or scattered loosely near them. The sand underneath each one was oily black. It hadn’t been that hot, but wisps of steam curled up from the dark, wet sand.
Camilla was crouched down, wiping her knives on one of their jackets. When she looked up, Nona was electrified. One of her eyes was a pale, pearlescent grey; the other one of her eyes was a deep, cool stone colour. Nona understood in a sudden shiver what she was looking at.
“Stay calm,” said Camilla-and-Palamedes. “Five breaths, if you need it.”
Camilla-and-Palamedes’s voice was strange to her, cool and efficient, distantly kind. But Nona wasn’t angry. The air smelled strongly of smoke and burnt meat. It made her deeply unhappy and very hungry, even though she had forced down all those crackers.
“I thought if I played dead,” Nona began, and stopped, because a big lump had come into her throat. She felt stupid; she felt she was being ungrateful; when Camilla-and-Palamedes smiled that strange new person’s smile, she suddenly felt very shy.
But Camilla’s clockwork interrupted with a series of urgent beeps: the BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP of a timer alarm, faster and more panicked than the usual time’s-up sound. Camilla-Palamedes got up all of a sudden, as though they wanted to get getting up over and done with as quickly as possible, and swayed backward and forward a little. The blood on the beach was steaming. Their hands were steaming. Nona struggled forward to catch her—them—the new person; but then Camilla straightened and blinked furiously, and it was Camilla. Her eyes were pale grey again and she shuddered like herself.
She said, a little hoarsely, but in quite normal Camilla tones: “Not your fault.” Then she equally normally set to putting her knives away—sticking them in the bands down her thighs, inside her trousers—and normally seeing that made Nona want to laugh, but that night she felt as though she might vomit instead, which would have added insult to injury.
Camilla said, “Shoulder?” She didn’t sound angry at all, but strangely quiet and tight.
“It’s fine—I’m fine. Cam, what did you do?”
“No questions. They didn’t have silencers. We need to go. Get the bike.”
Nona wasn’t able to help herself. She burst out with, “What did they want?”
“Intel. They were Merv Wing. Turn the lights off.”
The spotlight was still shining out over the ocean like a very small moon. Nona righted the plut-plut bike and turned off the headlight, which left the beach blue and cold. She kept looking at the fallen cops—at their necks and at their chests—but Camilla gently drew her chin up and away, urging her forward, putting the towel around her wet shoulders. It felt nice and dry and scratchy. Nona mechanically wheeled the bike over the sand. Cam threw down her jandals and she squeezed her feet into them, the sand gritty on the bottoms of her heels.