“No. You didn’t react to Millie. She hates it when I use Millie now.”
“She didn’t love it before. Better friends to her than you have been glared at for less.”
Crown quirked her eyebrows together languidly, like she was too tired to make too many facial expressions in a row. Nona didn’t know why Palamedes wrinkled his nose as though he’d smelled something bad.
“The Captain and Cam and I were stuck together for a long time, you know,” she drawled eventually. “I’m not saying I knew from the way you moved or the things you said. You’re seamless, I’ll give you that! I knew because … because she stopped being so unhappy. The whole time I knew her she was grieving … she couldn’t hide that. At the same time I was grieving, and the Captain was grieving, and we—she and I can grieve alike enough to fight about it, but Camilla was gone. Camilla was gone and then we met Harrowhark, and she came back. That’s all it was. What did you do?”
She was interrupted by movement from the bed. The Captain’s swollen eyelids had fluttered open, and she coughed. Crown immediately dropped to her knees beside the bed so that she wasn’t looming over it. Palamedes took some wadding from the table with the hypodermics and wetted it, and he wiped it over the Captain’s cracked, wan mouth.
“Thank you,” she said. Her voice was very low; Nona almost couldn’t hear it.
“Don’t mention it. I’m going to give your kidneys a clean, Captain.”
“No,” she said, “I can do it. Let me.”
Crown made a noise in the back of her throat as the Captain placed her thin hands over her own middle. It took a little bit for her to find her hands, or her middle. She gritted her teeth, and a grunt escaped as she did—something. It left her gasping, and Palamedes said quietly, “A heroic effort. I’ll finish you off, ma’am—don’t want that buildup going elsewhere,” and put Camilla’s hand on the Captain’s. The Captain’s chill brown eyes closed again briefly. As Nona watched, the dry, cracked patches on her skin disappeared, and some of the pinched look went from her face, and her colour deepened to more of a burnished russet and less like something that had dried too long on a rack.
Nona remembered, and touched Palamedes’s arm, and mouthed, Timer; he grimaced, and pushed glasses that weren’t there up his nose, and nodded.
The Captain coughed again, but less awfully. She said, throatily, “Where am I?”
“You’re in the Ur facility, Deuteros,” said Crown. “Blood of Eden rescued us from Canaan House, remember? They saved your life, and mine and Camilla’s. Remember living shipside together? Remember how they stitched you up?”
Some of the hope wrinkled out of the Captain’s forehead. “Yes,” she said darkly, and, “Name and rank: Captain Judith Deuteros … House: Second. Status: adept. Cavalier: Marta Dyas, dead.”
Crown said, “Oh, here we go again.”
“Service record: seven … I … approximately seventeen years. Name and rank…”
“Judith. You’re regressing.”
“Princess,” said the Captain, at the bottom of her voice, “there’s still time. I know the Cohort will come for us … even me, the pilot. Walk this back. I’ll say what’s true. They abused your sympathies. Their methods are sophisticated. It’s not your fault. I’ll tell them everything…”
Crown’s mouth trembled. “Oh, will you, Jody? Will you really?”
“You too, Hect … say it and I’ll believe it. Say we were all coerced, and they used our lives against each other. We were hostages. Incidental pieces … in a much larger game … played by Lyctors, traitors, monsters.” In a different voice she suddenly said, “Where am I? Where’s Marta? Where’s Lieutenant Dyas?”
Then she threw back her head and howled like an animal. Crown and Palamedes both held her down.
After she had exhausted herself, thrashing, she gasped: “I remember. I’m fine. I’m fine,” and Palamedes withdrew, though Crown held the Captain’s hand down against the drab white sheets of the bed.
The Captain’s chest was heaving beneath the outfit that looked like Nona’s worst nightie. She murmured, “Keeping me alive … intact … just so I can work their damned stele and get Cohort blood … all over my hands. Gun to your neck … blood on my hands … saints against God.”
“Don’t talk,” said Crown roughly. “You’re spouting nonsense.”