Her new room underground was very spacious, almost the size of their kitchen and living room back on the thirtieth floor, and bare except for a bed, a chair, and a table cluttered with injecting needles. The lights had been dimmed so low that all the shadows bled into each other. A pole with a plastic bag of clear fluid was right next to the bed, and a tube passed down from the bag to the Captain, who was lying flat on her back amidst the white sheeting, wearing something that looked a lot like Nona’s worst nightie.
Crown made them squirt antibacterial gel onto their hands, and fussed until they rubbed it in. “She gets everything going,” she said. Once they had done that, they were allowed to approach.
The Captain’s eyes were shut, her eyelids a little swollen, almost purplish, like somebody had hit her. Her deep black hair had been painstakingly braided away from her face, showing the pretty early silvering at her temples, but that was the only beautiful thing about her. Her skin was dry and her bones showed, especially in the cheeks. Her cheekbones and square chin looked like they were about to stretch her face to the breaking point. She looked so thin and still lying there in that bed that Nona was very sorry, even if the Captain was strange.
Camilla approached the bed immediately. She looked at the bag of clear fluid, and reached out to touch the Captain’s dead-bronze wrist and asked, “How are they giving her food?”
Crown said, “By mouth. We’ve fed her by tube too. It’s all fairly primitive, I’ll be honest.”
“She’s dehydrated. Who’s nursing her?”
“She’s managed to help herself a couple of times, on the best days. When that thing’s as far away in orbit as it gets. No one here’s as good as you.”
Nona peeked around Camilla’s arm. The Captain’s black brows drew together, and her face took on a hideous expression: a flat tangle of features that scared Nona so badly that she wanted to go to the bathroom again, right until the Captain opened her mouth and droned, punctuated by huge wheezing lungfuls of air: “Dust of my dust—such similar star salt—what they did to you and what they wrung from you and what shape they made you fill—we see you still—we seek you still—we murdered—we who murder—you inadvertent tool—you misused green thing—come back to us—take vengeance for us—we saw you—we see you—I see you.”
The wheezing breath turned into a strangled noise, and the Captain’s body thrashed upward. She twisted like a fish being drawn out of the harbour on a line. A little green box that Nona had taken for a clock started beeping urgently. Crown shouldered forward, but was told tersely, “Give me room. She’s not getting enough blood to her heart,” and Cam placed one hand flat on the Captain’s chest before pulling the tinted glasses off her face in a fit of impatience. Nona took these and rubbed at the warm steel with her hands: she liked them so long as no one wore them. Camilla asked, “What’s happening with her kidneys? What are they giving her for her blood pressure?”
“A medical thinner, but—”
“Thought so. Give me a second.” Camilla’s hands kept pressing down, as though holding Judith to the bed. After a moment so long Nona nearly bit through her tongue from anxiety and excitement, the Captain went limp. The awful expression left her face, which went slack, if not peaceful. Crown did not sigh, or exclaim in relief, or anything: she had chewed her lips so badly that they had split and were now red, like lipstick.
Camilla’s hands hovered over the Captain’s chest, as though waiting to catch her heart. “That’ll do. Take her off the anticoagulants. Is the compulsive shouting typical?”
“Lately,” said Crown, after another pause. “I’m not sure she’s in actual pain … Palamedes.”
Palamedes said nothing, simply made a quite-good Camilla expression—one quirked eyebrow, the mouth not doing much—but Crown smiled and said, “You’ve been pretty obvious today. Get out of it, Master Warden.”
He said heavily: “I hope to God you didn’t codge up a medical emergency just to catch me out, Princess.”
“I wish we had. I wish I was that smart. Don’t panic, we’re not being bugged. I knew you weren’t in the hand bones the Ninth made anymore. I don’t know what you and Cam have done, Sextus, but I haven’t told. I haven’t told but I have known, for a long time. This was only … confirmation.”
“Like hell it was. You guessed,” said Palamedes.