Outside number 302 she found a window that had only been taped up most of the way and peeled it off just a little bit more with her fingertips. The sun had set. The nighttime light was blue from the sphere that hung over the city, and she let the light touch her eyes and her lips and felt better for it.
This was a secret that Nona kept from Pyrrha and Camilla and Palamedes, almost the only one she kept from them, but one too beautiful to tell. She knew the luminous sphere hanging above the city, high in space, had kicked off all the riots, and was making everyone scream, and had caused the siege in the port, and made people throw themselves in front of buses, and made everyone say the end of the world was coming soon. It was making everybody’s lives horrible, and it had given Palamedes and Camilla the same grave, pensive expression, and Pyrrha slapped on an extra nicotine patch every time the fog burned away and it hung like a great blue ball in the sky.
But Nona loved the blue sphere as much as she loved everything else. She, and nobody else, could hear it sing.
“Good night, Varun,” she said.
When she tiptoed back down the corridor—the whole building seemed still tonight, as though it were tucked into a dark corner hoping nobody would notice it—she opened the door as quietly as she could. There was nobody in the front room. Nona heard the slopping sounds of Pyrrha in the bath. She walked on the balls of her feet to the bedroom, and she found Camilla in front of the recorder with the single lamp on—Camilla with her arms clasped around her knees, her chin sunk down to the tops of her thighs, staring greyly out into space.
Nona lay down on the mattress. She felt very tired and sad all of a sudden, seeing Camilla tired and Camilla sad. On some impulse she opened her arms, and Camilla unexpectedly lay down next to her and crawled inside them—not quite letting Nona hold her, but letting Nona put an arm around her, putting an arm around Nona in return. It was hot, but Nona didn’t mind.
“Cam,” Nona whispered.
“What’s up?”
“I could go to the park for you,” whispered Nona, desperately trying to sort through the words, say the correct thing, communicate the right desire. “I could help … really. You know what happens when I get hurt. That’s got to be worth something.”
Camilla said, “Is that your plan? Getting hurt?”
“Well, it might freak them out,” said Nona. “And I’m not scared of dying. Really truly, Cam, I’m not…”
“Why not?” said Camilla.
Nona thought about it. “Because I like letting go of the pull-up bars and falling off,” she said. “I don’t like the part just before you let go and I don’t like the part where you hit the floor, but I like the letting go.”
“I don’t let go,” said Camilla. “It’s my one thing.”
Nona was amazed at that—the idea that Camilla, who could do so much and do it so fluently, could sum herself up as having one thing. Amazed too, a little, that anyone might not love the weightlessness when your fingers slipped off the metal and you hung, unsuspended, in midair. Camilla’s hand wound itself around the end of her braid and held it, as though to find some kind of leash or safety rope, as though Nona really might fall.
She was half-asleep by the time Pyrrha finished with her bath （and rinsed the bath down twice）; this meant it was Nona’s turn to take a bath, so she undressed herself half-asleep and would have been all the way asleep in the water once she got in if Camilla hadn’t been there saying, every so often, “Not yet.” Which kept her awake, because it would have been terrifically stupid to drown at this point.
She was three-quarters unconscious pulling on the shirt she slept in, and stumbled out of the bathroom but didn’t quite get it all the way so that Pyrrha had to say, “Tits, Nona, don’t give Camilla a heart attack,” which jolted her awake enough to lie down on the mattress and rebutton her shirt from the bottom. She reached nearly all the way up before she fell deeply and completely asleep.
JOHN 5:18
IN THE DREAM, night had fallen, or what she assumed was night. They were lying atop the hill they had climbed and he was pointing out all the constellations that they would be able to see if it weren’t for the thick green cloud and the softly falling flakes of ash. They were lying head-to-head, their eyes aimed at the right part of the sky to see, or in this case not see, the Southern Cross. The stars were sweet and familiar, but she did not know their names, though they seemed to be at the tip of her tongue. She asked him why it was called the Southern Cross. He said that was just one name for it, but the stars were in a cruciform pattern and it was only visible from the southern hemisphere. He said when he was little he’d been taught it was the anchor of a ship. He still preferred that, he said. Liked the idea that the Milky Way was pinned down and couldn’t go anywhere. Said when he was a kid he hated change, any change at all.