Camilla didn’t say anything. She had zipped up her dark jacket even though the night was still warm, and Nona thought she understood; she was cold too, colder than she ought to have been even when wet. Camilla kept her arms folded tight over her chest as though she was thinking. Nona was too sodden with regret and self-hatred and sea water to think anything but that Cam must have been very angry with her for calling out, and so she was blind to the truth of the situation until they wheeled the bike off the ramp and weaved it through the poles that were meant to prevent you bringing bikes onto the beach and Camilla suddenly staggered to a halt. She leant hard against the wall and shuddered. Nona nearly dropped the bike.
“Cam?”
“Towel,” said Camilla, very calmly. And: “Don’t scream.”
Nona was about to be indignant, but then Cam unzipped her jacket, and she nearly screamed. Cam’s thin cotton top was sodden with blood. The tops of her pants and her whole jacket were already black and wet from spray, so it hadn’t really showed the blood coming through. The worst part was that the blood was coming from everywhere, with no wounds, or bullet holes, or stab marks. It was coming out of her skin.
Cam rubbed the towel down both of her arms, briskly. The towel came away bright red. “Blood sweat,” she said, unsteadily.
“Get Palamedes,” was all Nona could think to say. “Get Palamedes— he can fix it.”
“No,” said Camilla. Nona noticed that her lips had gone the same colour as the skin around them, a sort of ashen rosy brown, instead of either skin or lips being normal. Cam’s voice was still very even and calm, but it was quiet, and came out strangely punctuated as she took in breaths. “He can’t. Not this. Make it worse.”
“But—”
“Get us home,” said Camilla. “You can do it. On the bike.”
The bike! Yet it was not to be borne that Nona would say, “But my car sickness”; if Camilla said anyone could do anything, they could do it. It was not the kind of thing she said often, or at all. It was more buoyed by the sucker-punch of Camilla’s belief than through her own confidence—she suddenly needed to go to the bathroom, which Palamedes always said was her displacement activity—that Nona got on the bike. Her courage had nearly failed her when Camilla got behind her and wrapped her arms around Nona’s middle, very tightly. Nona had realised then that Cam was worried about falling off.
Even thinking about it now, how Nona drove Cam through those black streets she did not know—ignoring all the traffic signals, slowing down laboriously to turn into the little side alleys, the lone truck breaking curfew that chugged along the street next to her like a massive animal of hot wind and noise—but she did, and it took both forever and no time at all. Camilla was very warm and solid behind her with her arms unflinchingly tight. She never released the grip, which was nice until Nona realised that half the warmth was the blood seeping through the towel. She was about to guide the bike into the garage beneath the Building before Cam said, “Dump it. Here,” in a voice barely more than a whisper.
Here was behind a big rubbish cache next to the Building. Cam stood herself against the wall and Nona wheeled it into the gap behind the cache and the wall, then covered the gap up with boxes. She was pleased with the neatness of it until she came back to Camilla and saw the deathly pallor of her face: the stillness that was not Palamedes, but Camilla conserving all of her blood for silence. In the black nighttime of that alley the towel around Camilla’s middle was black with blood, and the sea water and blood had dried on Nona’s clothes. She put Camilla’s arm around her shoulders and they crept into the garage, each breath from Cam’s mouth high and tight. It was so strange to hear Camilla breathing at all.
Somehow they made it up the stairs—of course the elevator didn’t work—and Nona was almost too slippery and panicky to knock. When Pyrrha opened the door all Nona was able to say was, pitifully, “No, no, no,” like the baby she had been: but what a relief it was at the time, to give things over to Pyrrha. Pyrrha had carried Camilla to bed in her big brown arms like Cam weighed nothing, was less than Nona. Pyrrha said, “What happened?” and Nona told her, and Pyrrha wasn’t even angry, but when Nona told her about Cam’s eyes she looked at Nona and said a completely new swear word. It was such an unusual swear word that later on Nona was able to swop it to Honesty for five whole cigarettes, he was that impressed.
Pyrrha sat down with Cam’s head in her lap and pinched her awake, and then made her drink little sips of water. Cam’s eyes were almost closed, like an animal’s when they weren’t quite asleep.