“Am I going to be in trouble?”
“Least said,” said the Angel, “soonest mended.”
Even in the dark Nona could see her teeth, her tired smile, the soft set of her shoulders. She reached out a very calloused hand and patted Nona on the head, just as though she were Noodle, and Nona felt better. She knew from that touch that she wasn’t really in trouble. Hot Sauce spoke up suddenly, in the darkness, and said, “It was my idea.”
“Yes, I was aware,” said the Angel wearily. “Tomorrow, Nona—it’ll be safe at the school.”
Nona pushed hard on the big truck door and slithered out of the vehicle. Outside the truck it was a little easier to see. There were lights from people’s cigarettes, lights from the reflective sprays on the backs of the trucks, lights from the landing. She said, “Thanks—I love you,” and then darted away into the elevator well as fast as she could, feeling red hot with embarrassment. She hadn’t meant to say it—it was like the time Born in the Morning had called the Angel Dad—only she did mean it. She did love the Angel, after today.
Nona took the stairwell up because the elevator stuck so much. Her legs were wobbly and tired, and she had to wait on the landing every time her calves and her feet got too stiff. Thankfully that sensation never lasted long—it was like a brief twinge—and she was able to keep climbing, up all thirty-three flights, though after the thirty-second she gave up and went on her hands and knees. By the time she was on her own dear scrubby-carpeted thirty-third floor with the cop below and the militia guys above and the adjacent crying baby （which was not making itself known） she nearly kissed the floor, only she thought that Palamedes would say that was the easiest way to bring on a serious virus.
The last few metres were the longest. Fumbling around beneath the mat for where they had glued the spare key and thumbing the right number into the numlock pad took all she had left. She turned the knob, and flung the door open, and wailed in a big excited hurry: “I’m home! I’m safe! You don’t have to worry!”
Camilla rose from the table, empty waterglasses stacked neatly before her, a whole page of newspaper torn into beautifully even strips, exactly as if a bird had done it—the work of hours, the labour of anxiety. Nona flew to her. Cam caught her up by the arms and looked through her, not at her; her beautiful pale grey eyes looked like holes burnt in a mask.
Then she held Nona so hard that it very literally hurt. Nona’s face was squashed into the hard bits of her chest.
“Cam, I’m fine!” she said again, flattened and breathless. “I’m okay! Where’s Pyrrha?”
Camilla’s arms went slack so Nona could pull back a little way. She looked up at the door, as though she expected to see something there and had just realised she hadn’t; she looked down at Nona. When she looked at Nona again her face was horrible.
“Nona,” she said, “Pyrrha went to pick you up from school before lunch. I thought she was with you.”
JOHN 19:18
IN THE DREAM the waters kept rising. They started making a hut at the top of the hill. Bodies were bobbing up and down in the water. He was scared of that—he was always scared of the water—and he made the waters go away for a while, and he raised up some parts of the earth that had been covered by sea. She watched them explode upward, shedding tonnes of water back into the soup. She asked him if it was hard; he said the hardest thing was remembering that he could do it, and not just doing things the old difficult way.
On the new plank of land, all cut up from the water and the damage, there was a broken concrete building guarded by enormous shards of cracked bone. Like an egg that had been smashed from above. They wandered through the fields, slipping in icy brown mud, but they didn’t go anywhere near the building. They found the hood of a half-dead car to sit on, which was drying in the light, and he said: Politically, we were a landmine. Everybody was trying to get to grips with the timescale. We didn’t have much time left, and new data fucked around with the numbers every day. Every time you breathed funny, we wet ourselves. But the old backers, they were the most scared of us, kept saying we were working with this country, or that country, pushed the hardest to prove what we were doing wasn’t real and that anybody talking to us was helping us pull the world’s leg. They were all going round and round and round. I kept saying, give me a seat at the table, let’s work out if I can help, if I can do something.
He said, Turns out you can’t even talk about whether or not you can work out how to do something without twelve weeks of diplomatic dialogue. It was sick.