The water brought her around a little. Pyrrha kept saying, low and steady, “Don’t black out, kid. You’re in thanergy shock. Stay awake, come on.” After about five minutes of that treatment, Cam’s eyes opened all the way, and she drank the rest of the water mostly on her own. She let Nona give her a painkiller, but just a cap, not a needle.
In the end Pyrrha said in a calm, dead voice— “You can’t do that ever again, Hect, never. Synthesis is a one-way ticket—I walked the Eightfold, I should damn well know. I’d give Palamedes the hiding of his fucking life if he wasn’t renting an ass with you.”
Camilla, cradled in Pyrrha’s arms, with all the towels bright red, looked up at Pyrrha like Nona wasn’t even in the room. Her eyes were chill and grey and gleaming. She whispered—
“Don’t tell him I was weak.”
“He’s going to know, Hect. You’re killing each other.”
“It’s our choice.”
“He’s going to ask.”
“Do what you’re good at,” said Camilla. “Lie.”
“Hect, you’re not listening. It’s killing him too—”
“It was good,” said Camilla, and her eyes closed. “It was good. We were happy.”
Pyrrha stayed put until Camilla fell asleep. The expression on her face was one Nona had never seen her wear before. Nona stayed too, except to go occasionally to the bathroom out of prolonged stress. Finally Pyrrha told Nona to go make up her bed next to Pyrrha’s on the fold-out part of the couch, and when Nona asked if Camilla was going to be all right, Pyrrha said—
“No.”
But when she saw the expression on Nona’s face she put on a smile—produced one, like she would produce sweets or coins or little magazines—and said, “Don’t worry about it, junior. I don’t mean we’re going to find her dead in the morning.”
Then she had gone to the kitchen and poured herself a little glass of clear grain alcohol. She crossed to the taped-up window, bottle and glass in hand. To Nona’s awe, she twitched the blackout curtains aside—stood bathed in the hyper-blue light from the sky as Nona held her breath—and she said to the window, “Here’s to Camilla Hect, yet another of devotion’s casualties,” and knocked back the glass.
Then she said to the light, quite gently, “No, I don’t blame you, man … He was always looking for things to throw himself on.”
Then Pyrrha settled down on the bed she had extended for Nona and knocked back two more little glasses of alcohol. She let Nona taste a little bit of the second glass when Nona asked, but Nona thought it was awful: it tasted like petrol and felt like sunburn. When she lay down, she kept wiping her lips to take the taste away.
“If Cam’s fine,” she said, “why did you just say goodbye to her?”
“How’d you know it was goodbye?” When Nona opened her mouth, Pyrrha said: “Don’t answer that. Go to sleep.” And after that, there had been no more swimming.
10
GOING TO THE BEACH THOUGH, if there was still lots of light and plenty of people, was another matter. Nona tried her luck.
“No beach,” said Cam, drying dishes at the sink. “I didn’t like the city today. Two people got shot in the centre while I was there. Someone else got dragged out of the river.”
“Drowned?”
“Strangled. Neck snapped—all the way around.”
“Gross,” said Nona. And, struck by an idea: “Cam—can’t I go back to school for the evening?”
“School? Why?”
Nona tried to think up a really intelligent and persuasive reason. “Hot Sauce is worried about something,” she said. “She said someone was watching the classroom and she wouldn’t tell me about it. I want to make sure they’re all okay.”
It wasn’t that Camilla didn’t take this seriously: she could see right away that Cam had taken it a little too seriously. Her dark brows drew together a fraction, and she placed another plate in the rack, and one of her legs folded up beneath her so that she was standing on one leg and resting the other foot at the top of that thigh. “Not in the dark,” she said. “Not after the gunfire today.”
“But it’s not dark yet. And the sky’s always sort of light now.”
“It’ll be dark enough by the time school’s over.”
Nona grew desperate.
“But I’m a Teacher’s Aide. I’ve got a responsibility.”