“What? Hang on,” said Camilla, opening the door—no, Palamedes, opening the door, busy buttoning himself into Camilla’s jacket—“That’s a very interesting thing you just said, Nona. Let me write that down. Is that pikelets, Pyrrha? You’re a legend.”
Nona wondered how Palamedes couldn’t see the hitch in Pyrrha’s shoulder, nor all the crinkles in her posture or her clothes that screamed PARK … PARK … PARK, but took her moment.
“Palamedes, what do you think is sexy?”
“Those little outfits nurses wear,” said Palamedes promptly.
So Camilla had been lying, after all.
Breakfast that morning was a dismal affair, pikelets or no pikelets. Pyrrha and Palamedes didn’t seem to have much to say to each other, though Palamedes was cordial—he ate Camilla’s pikelets, saying, “She said she wasn’t hungry,” which filled Nona with a new hot envy wishing she had someone to eat food for her. But Palamedes could never stay long, and so there he was resting his hand on Nona’s shoulder, saying, “Take care of everyone for me, Nona,” which was Palamedes all over. Never be good, or even be safe, but leaving you in charge, like he really thought you’d be up to it. Nona always loved him for that.
But then once he had gone Camilla was grey-eyed and quiet and wrathful, and breakfast became almost entirely silent and Camilla paid far too much attention to what Nona was eating, which was uncomfortable.
Nona had negotiated her way through one and a half pikelets and a piece of yesterday’s melon and a glass of water when the door burst open despite the fact that it had been locked and a gun made that ker-KLUNK noise that Pyrrha had explained meant it was ready to spin small pieces of metal through you at high speeds, and a voice, through a tinny layer of plastic, said: “Heads down, hands up. The first sign of zombie shit and I blow your brainstems.”
12
THE HOUSEHOLD HAD BEEN very well drilled, even better drilled than her classroom with the gunfire. Nona hit her melamine plate with her forehead and shot her hands in the air, and there was the answering clatter of Camilla doing the same opposite her—of Pyrrha, who had gotten up to refill her glass, hitting the deck, facedown on the floor. Booted footsteps filled the room—Nona knew without looking that it was six sets of feet: they never came with fewer than six—but as she felt her chin jerked up, and felt the rough, dark plastic weave of the hood working over her head, she couldn’t help but give a muffled protest: “But I’ve got to go to school!”
But Blood of Eden never cared if you had to go to school, or clean the whiteboards, or examine the psychodramas Kevin was playing out with two erasers that Born in the Morning had drawn faces on.
In the Building people did not come to look when they heard booted feet down the corridor, or a door flung violently open. As had happened many times before, Nona and Camilla’s wrists were taped to their sides with cut lengths of silver tape even as Pyrrha, lying facedown, kept saying calmly: “Cool it, Ctesiphon, you know we’ll do what you say. There are too many of you, we don’t want to get hurt,” but got handcuffed anyway—Pyrrha always got tape and handcuffs. All three of them were patted down for weapons in their clothes. Almost all of the knives Camilla had strapped to her got taken away, but not the very hidden knife, or at least the one hidden knife Nona knew about. There were probably more. And no one ever found anything on Pyrrha, which didn’t necessarily mean that Pyrrha didn’t have anything, although when Nona had asked her the once she had said, What would I have? and winked. Then they got two people on either side of them to march them down the hallway. All of the doors were shut tight that morning. One door opened a crack, but nobody emerged.
All three of them were taken downstairs via the big concrete stairwell with the fizzing broken lamps, and then came the part that Nona really hated, when they would emerge in the cool garage space below street level and be bundled into the back of a big white four-wheeled car.
The seats at the back of the car had been taken out, and Nona and Camilla had to lie down and Pyrrha got locked in the boot. This was ostensibly so that if anyone shot through the windows they wouldn’t get hit, but as Camilla said the car doors weren’t exactly armoured and there was every chance they’d catch a bullet and then things would get interesting. Their hoods got pulled off, and even in the darkness of the garage everything seemed very bright. While they were lying down one of the people in the masks waved a little machine that went parp! over them, and another took a temperature measurement from their mouths and under one armpit. Camilla said they did this to make sure that they were alive, and not something else. Nona resentfully reacquainted herself with the carpet flooring on the car. It was made of very scrubby, itchy fibres, and it reeked of the fuel they put in the car engine and the mud on people’s boots.