This briefly corpsed the person who went to work for her. Pyrrha leant against the sink and seemed pleased that the question of the park had passed, then shook the jug with the powder and the reconstituted milk in it until they were all mixed together. Then she poured it expertly into perfect circles in the hot pan, each puffing up quickly in the heat, big bubbles swelling like magic in the pale brown batter.
“It’s the job,” Pyrrha said. “You can’t take the woman out of the job.”
Nona kept her voice at its very lowest register. “Pyrrha, why did you go?”
Pyrrha did not answer. Nona persisted, “Did you save anyone? Because you can tell Camilla and Palamedes if you did that, you know they’d like it.”
“No,” said Pyrrha. “Not how they’d understand it.”
“Then, Pyrrha—”
“And I wasn’t the only one,” said Pyrrha, flipping one of the pikelets over. Nona stared at its perforated yellow top, which was a little bit darker brown everywhere a bubble had touched the pan. “Don’t ask questions, Nona. But do something for me … Be very careful about those kids at that school, the ones you hang out with.”
This blew all the smoke in Nona’s brain in the other direction.
“My school? What’s wrong with my friends?”
“Shh-shh,” warned Pyrrha, then said: “Not all your friends … That kid with the burns, that’s the one I mean. The one with the stupid name.”
It took Nona a moment to realise who was being referred to. None of her friends had stupid names; she had to remember what burns were.
“Pyrrha, I’m not sure I like you being mean about Hot Sauce,” she said, feeling redder and more bewildered and unhappier all the time. “She has a wonderful name with an important and exciting reason behind it.”
“Mean? Not my intention,” said Pyrrha. “Nona, all I mean is, your friend Hot Sauce was there last night at the burn cages and she was keeping some pretty ferocious company.”
The world revolved. For one moment Nona couldn’t think, and couldn’t feel, and couldn’t stop her body. Pyrrha said, more gently, “Sit and take five,” so she sat and took five breaths, in and out, and felt better for it. She concentrated on taking deep bruisy lungfuls through the nose and whistling them out her pursed lips, and by the time Pyrrha had counted out, “Five,” she was at peace again.
This was due less to the breathing than it was to the force of her belief in Hot Sauce. If Hot Sauce had been at the burn cages she had a good reason for it. Nona was one of Hot Sauce’s friends, a member of her gang. She wouldn’t even say a thing until Hot Sauce wanted to tell her about it. That was all. She relaxed.
“Are you mad at me?” said Pyrrha. “You know it’s okay to be mad at me, right?”
“No,” said Nona. “But I’m not going to stop being friends with Hot Sauce.”
“I’m not saying don’t be friends, I’m saying be careful.”
Nona decided it was time to change the subject. She hated feeling cross with Pyrrha. And there was getting mad, and then there was having a tantrum.
“What do you think is sexy?” said Nona, in her normal voice.
Pyrrha seemed pleased to think about something different, and waited until the bubbles were getting really big before she took the spatula and slid it under a rising patty, flipping it over. Nona had come up by her elbow to watch.
“Do you want what I really think is sexy, or what I’d tell someone if they asked and I wanted to impress them?”
Nona was pleased that Pyrrha understood.
“The first one.”
“Landmine people,” said Pyrrha, and when she saw Nona’s brows cross in confusion, she said: “Some people were put into the universe to rig it to explode, then walk away … I always fell for that.”
Nona thought she got it, but she was unsure on a few points.
“But you can’t really tell that about someone when you first look at them.”
“Oh, you can,” said Pyrrha. “You haven’t looked for it.” She flipped over another pikelet, looked grave and intelligent for a moment, and then said: “I mean, also redheads. Love a redhead.”
Apart from Pyrrha, whose hair was a very deep dark russet, Honesty was the only redhead that Nona knew, and Honesty had big, pallid blue eyes that he could make float in different directions, when one wasn’t smushed. He also had skin like a horrible ghost’s. You could see all the veins in his eyelids. Nona said, “Okay. I don’t think redheads are very sexy.”