“Won’t be a pillow,” said Camilla. “It’ll be head and hands off and the burn cage at the park.”
A silvery laugh. “Ooh, she’d love that. Head and hands, like a Cohort martyr. Can you imagine? Can’t you just hear her say, ‘I regret that I have only one life to give’？”
“You sound like your sister.”
“Do I?” Now Crown sounded gratified. “Thanks. I could use some of her gravitas, honestly. I always think I sound too flighty for command … I feel like a schoolgirl every time I give a briefing. Everyone else around here feels so old, even if they’re three years my junior.”
Camilla said, “Are you trying to disgust me, or yourself?”
Another laugh. “Because you know me so well, sweetling—”
“I don’t know you, Coronabeth,” said Camilla. “I don’t know you at all anymore.”
They fell silent. After a while Crown said, quietly and somehow more truthfully, “It’s good to see you, even if you don’t feel the same,” but Camilla didn’t say anything to that either, only rubbed her wrists where the tape had been. Nona’s skin was already back to its nice normal colour, and the fine dark hairs on her forearms had regrown themselves. Camilla’s skin still looked red and sore.
Crown said, “They’re probably finished now. Don’t worry so much. The Cell Commander wants to see you in private this morning. This isn’t official … just a chat.”
“I’m missing school right now,” said Nona, reminded of her grief. “I’m a Teacher’s Aide, Crown, and there’s lots of stuff going on.”
“You’ve got to skip sometimes, or they won’t know how much they need you,” advised Crown, smiling—but Nona could tell she didn’t sympathise that much. There was a worry pucker right in the centre of her forehead, and it wasn’t a worry pucker for Nona. “I could write you a note.”
Camilla said, “I am no longer interested in whatever the Cell Commander has to say.”
“I know,” said Crown—and there was that worry pucker again. “I know. But try, Camilla … I know you refuse to see it anymore, but We Suffer’s on your side. We’re not the hardliners. We want the same things you do.”
“You really don’t,” said Cam.
Camilla reached down into her shirt pocket to take out a hard-shell case. She retrieved the pair of worn dark glasses with big smoked lenses, and slid them up the bridge of her nose. Nona didn’t like the way they looked on her face: they made her look like one of the people who would sit in the back of an armoured truck with shiny rifles covered in blazes of orange tape, chewing bubble gum, waiting to get hired by people who wanted to go shoot something up but didn’t have enough friends to scare the militia. Hiring them cost a little bit more than bread. They whistled at you if you had gone swimming and were wearing damp shorts and still drying your hair, and Camilla didn’t stop them the way she stopped other people. When Nona asked why Palamedes said he had made Camilla promise to never stop them, never get their attention, never make a fuss. He said Nona needed to do the same. He said for one thing they only had so many towels at home.
Crown murmured, all her annoyance gone, “Be careful, Sixth, We Suffer’s not stupid,” but Camilla just said—
“Let’s get this over with. I had things to do today.”
“You have no idea” was all Crown said, mysteriously.
Nona had been to “debriefings,” which were always extraordinarily strange and uncomfortable, and they always escorted you to the bathroom nearly into the cubicle, which was hell. But they had never been seen in private before. Crown led them down unfamiliar corridors until they reached the usual long, dusty corridor they always walked down, and the room they were always led to—the tall narrow room dominated by one long table, covered in wood veneer and cracked in several places, though very clean. There were still pens and loose scraps of paper on the table, as there always were, which gave you the feeling that you were walking into a meeting right as the last one had ended. The ceiling was multi-holed ventilation panelling of a type Nona longed to throw pencils at, to see if they would stick in the holes. The only decoration was a series of portraits, clustered at the far end of the table.
The portraits were of people from the shoulders up. There were little shelves inset at the bottom of each frame where people had left flowers, dried or plastic, and long burnt-out joss sticks in little glasses, or coins that didn’t look like any kind of legal tender Nona ever handed over in return for a bottle of milk. What distinguished most of the portraits was that they were paintings, and very old, all except for one: a photograph of a woman with ferociously red hair and an expression that said she was about to hit the photographer. She blossomed out of a thicket of dusty plastic flowers more numerous than those her painted associates got.