“How could you have known that was Our Lady of the Passion?”
“It’s … it’s bones,” said Nona, struggling to articulate. “Beneath her clothes. The way she moves her bones,” and Camilla looked at her for the longest time.
“Pash,” said Crown darkly, “is what happens when nepotism and bullshit collide. Boobs and hair…？！ My hair is naturally big and manageable, dickhead! I haven’t been able to condition properly for a year!”
There were two guards waiting outside. They led Pyrrha away to get her collar taken off. Pyrrha went with them much more meekly than Nona expected, and just turned her head to say to Nona: “Remember to stuff,” before the guards shuffled her onward with the butts of their rifles.
As though she wouldn’t. When Nona was locked away in the bathroom stall stealing toilet paper, judiciously stuffing it down her shirt as Pyrrha had taught her—Pyrrha had a very Blood of Eden mindset, if you thought about it—she heard Camilla outside by the sinks, saying quietly: “Let me see her.”
Crown said, as though casually surprised, “Do you really want to? It’s not a good day. She’s in and out … Moving her has been a royal bitch. We’ve had to keep shifting her between beds ever since we got her here.”
“Okay. Let me see her.”
“If you agitate—”
Camilla said, “You know I can help her, Third. You know I want to.”
It seemed like Crown was going to say a joke or something dismissive again, but then she said, “So long as Dve doesn’t tag along. Your call.”
When Nona rustled her way out of the stall, Camilla looked at her chest, and her mouth quirked in something that might have been the tiniest and most beautiful smile yet. But Crown didn’t notice. Her lovely head was bowed and her sooty eyelashes lowered. Nona said, “Are we going right away? I’m going to be so late for school,” but Camilla said, “I want to make a quick visit first. Do you want to come with, or do you want to stay in the waiting room and wait for Pyrrha?”
The waiting room was not an option; Nona would be stuck with some Edenite bodyguard who wouldn’t even talk to her, and no magazines, and nothing to look at. But Camilla loved to give people choices. Nona hated how she fell for that every time: whenever Camilla said something like, “Cereal, or eggs?” Nona would be tricked into saying Cereal even though she had wanted to choose Nothing!! But this choice was easy; she liked visits.
They took the lift downstairs. Crown said the stairs didn’t go as far as they were going. Camilla asked if the depth was doing anything. Crown said in a don’t-care-ish voice, Maybe, it seemed to, but it stopped having an effect after a while. Camilla said, Makes sense, distance isn’t really an issue, the creature isn’t fully instantiated but squatting in the River, and Crown said, How will we know if it instantiates, and Camilla said, Because gravity will change and the planet’ll break up, and Crown said, Hmm. Nona listened to this with one ear only: the toilet paper was itching.
As the lift went down, she said, with the pleasure of realisation—“Oh, we’re visiting the Captain!”
All Blood of Eden buildings seemed to have big elevators going deep down into the earth. In this elevator Crown had pushed the button to go down six whole floors. When they exited it was very dark and cool, and the halls were made of slabs of concrete cracked by some past pressure. The lights weren’t the pretty panels of up top—they were strung on thick juicy plastic wires bundled up high on the walls, and they swung in distress when Nona and the others passed them. It was a place where if you whistled, your whistle would echo back, and Nona pursed her lips, but Camilla saw her and furrowed her eyebrows, so she didn’t.
Most of the doors were open, and the rooms within were dark and full of stacks of abandoned furniture. One door was shut. There was a Blood of Eden person there, wearing a full balaclava and a hood to go over it. Nona wondered if they all kept hats and hoods and things in their back pockets just in case. They gave Crown the salute—three taps to the chest—and shouldered their gun, and walked off down the hall. Crown put her hand on the handle and stopped. She suddenly looked tired.
“Don’t worry about volume,” she said. “Noise never bugs her.”
Camilla said, “Is she part of the negotiation?”
“Ha! She wishes,” said Crown. “No. She’s our ticket out of here.”
Nona hadn’t seen the Captain in a long time; not since a little before the blue sphere had appeared. Palamedes had banned Nona from seeing her. Camilla said Captain Deuteros thought the solution to every problem was to act like the problem had one solution that nobody else was tough enough to take, and then to pursue that solution as hard as possible. She had always been very … intense, with Nona.