That made sense. “Tell me! I’ll eat the whole thing if you tell me,” said Nona, enchanted, starting to pull on her trousers but deeply distracted. “Oh, Cam, please, please. I’ve been so good lately. And when I haven’t been good it hasn’t been because I haven’t tried. Yesterday was awful. I need to know—I know it’ll help my memory. It’s like a deep need inside of me, it must be my real self wanting to know, right? So this is work, right? What does Palamedes find sexy?”
Camilla took up the clipboard and the pen and wrote, serene and tranquil, underlining something once—twice.
“Strong work ethic,” she said eventually. “High test scores.”
Nona buttoned up her shirt and wriggled on one sock, then the other, contemplating this. “Okay,” she said. “Wow.”
“Go get breakfast—tell Pyrrha I’ll be along in a moment. How’s your hair?”
“My braids are still okay,” Nona decided, and then: “Do you know who I am yet? Did that help?”
“Not yet,” said Camilla, and bent her head back to the paper. It was a dismissal.
Nona waited, hoping for another smile like the one she’d got the other day. Camilla did not glance back at her, and no smile came. This filled Nona with sharp pangs of disappointment. It wasn’t as though the smile had kept things perfect up till now—obviously a lot of terrible stuff had happened in the interim—but that smile had been a kind of guerdon, a safeguard against anything terrible touching them. Camilla had stayed home. Pyrrha had come home. Nobody had come to hurt Noodle or the Angel. Nobody had come to get her.
Thinking about Noodle and the Angel made her forget about Camilla’s face and how good the day would or wouldn’t be. She fled to the front room where Pyrrha, fully dressed, was whisking powdered milk into a jug of water. Her posture—the way her arms were set; her shoulders, a little stooped—brought Nona up short.
“You didn’t go to bed last night,” she said accusingly.
Pyrrha looked over her shoulder; she smiled that easy smile that always seemed so strange on her strong-jawed, weather-beaten face, set the jug down, and crossed to close the door to the bedroom very, very casually. “Sure I did, slept like a baby,” she said, but her smile didn’t crinkle her eyes. They were very alert and brown and watchful. “What were you and Camilla talking about? Sounded fruity.”
Nona in that moment remembered that she had not told either Palamedes or Camilla she loved them. She glanced at the plastic jug of pale brown-flecked powder and wanted to become happy again, but there was a shadow over her joy now. Pyrrha saw her looking and said, “Hey, you said you wanted pikelet mix. I can be trusted to bring home groceries sometimes, you know.”
“Where have you been?” said Nona. “You’ve been crouching. Your right arm’s stiff.”
Pyrrha, who had picked up the spatula, set it down again. Nona wondered how anyone would ever believe she’d slept. There was wakefulness in her eyes, in the short dead russet of her hair, in the bunching-up of her shoulders—so stringy in her clothes, really, not a spare scrap of fat or softness to her, but she seemed bigger than her body gave her rights to. Her body was a rubber band, but she moved like an animal—like the big dust-coloured cats that lived on the outskirts, the ones with venomous whiskers and ruffs. She moved to the bottom of her voice, and she towered in front of Nona, and said: “I’m putting you in my circle of trust. Can you do that for me? Is it going to be hard for you?”
“Yes,” said Nona, automatically dropping her voice to match Pyrrha’s. “No.”
“I went to the park.”
Nona thought about this for a while. Camilla hadn’t smiled at her, and now she was being asked to keep a secret. These flags were serious ill omens, even if there was pikelet mix. Even two weeks ago she would have become really and genuinely excited for pikelets: she liked scraping the canolene on them and watching it melt into bright yellow puddles, and they were easy to get down, they were so soft. She whispered slowly, “You know you shouldn’t have done that.”
“Since when have you been my keeper?” Pyrrha just seemed amused. “I don’t think you’ve ever criticised me before. This is rotten. I was about to marry you.”
“I wouldn’t marry you even if you asked,” said Nona apologetically. “I love you, Pyrrha, and I think you’re wonderful and very beautiful—” （“Are you kidding?” said Pyrrha. “I look like two elbows.”） “—but I don’t want to be married to you. You’d never act like you were married to me.”