“On Crown’s head be it. Don’t worry, Nona. Keep at that cube, and take another when you’re done. You’re almost unconscious.” Then he said, more to himself than to her: “Pyrrha, why the hell did you go off half-cocked? What was so fucking urgent that you couldn’t even pick up Nona?”
“That’s two swears,” said Nona, so nearly asleep she was in danger of choking on the ice cube.
“Not a Teacher’s Aide right now, Nona,” said Palamedes.
She said, “Maybe someone told her about the broadcast on her way to get me. Maybe she went to see the shuttle land.”
Palamedes said, “Neither of those things would prevent her from getting y—” and then he stopped completely dead.
He said, “The shuttle. That fucking shuttle.”
“Three,” said Nona, forgetting.
“Oh, God,” said Palamedes. “Pyrrha Dve, please … Nona, your ice cube’s falling out.”
The last thing she remembered was the ice cube falling out for real and finally; nothing after. Now the alarm was ringing shrilly, far too close for her to stop it with one arm and fall back asleep. Camilla must have set it to make such a horrible sound at some point yesterday. Nona hunted around and pushed its buttons until the noise stopped.
She was completely alone in the bedroom. She panicked for a moment until she saw Camilla and Palamedes’s clothes hung up like normal. But neither of them was there: no Cam with her clipboard, no nothing. It was the first morning that Nona could remember when she hadn’t been woken up to tell her dreams. She heard the running of the tap in the room next door, and that comforted her, all the sounds of someone doing the washing-up. Except it wasn’t Pyrrha, which made her feel bereft. She did not know what to do without someone to give her the cue that it was okay to dress, and in any case she was dressed already. For a moment she lay there, helpless, until the noise of the dishes being wiped stopped and Cam was there in the doorway with one of the blue-and-white-striped cloths that Pyrrha used to dry things with.
“Push the red button and tell the recorder anything you remember,” she said. “I’m making breakfast. Press the one second from left when you’re done.” Then she disappeared again.
Nona didn’t like this at all. Last night’s dream was already mixed up with Pyrrha being gone and the girl on the broadcast, so that she now doubted whether or not the girl on the broadcast had had the face of the girl in the dream or if it was all part of some long nightmare. For a moment she thought about hunting out the picture to confirm, but Cam had told her to record herself, and she’d already forgotten which button to push. Her face burned with embarrassment, so she pushed buttons at random, and the recording within made awful sounds. She turned the volume down low so that Camilla couldn’t hear her screwing up. There was static, and then she heard Camilla’s voice coming out of the speakers, sounding tired.
“—ant her to be Harrowhark, Warden.”
Another plastic echo of buttons. The same voice answered, but not the same person. The conversation that followed was filled with weird pauses, as though they were actors in a play who couldn’t quite get their cues right.
“Yes, but the question we need to ask is, Why? They hate zombie wizards so much more than zombie thralls. To wit, Judith Deuteros. Why do they want a Lyctor on tap?”
Another pause, another clack.
“To remove the R.B.?”
Pause. Clack. “Not sure. Get the feeling that the R.B. is more a crimp in their plans than the plan itself. At first I thought they were keeping Deuteros alive to see if they could make a Lyctor out of her instead, but I’m not so sure. I think I buy Corona’s story that she’s the getaway vehicle … put crudely. But it’s Harrowhark they want—or at least, it’s Harrow that We Suffer wants. I don’t think Merv Wing and the Hopers want Harrow at all, or at least—they’re not holding out for her. Everything comes back to the Tomb, Cam. God, I wish I could see your face.”
Clack. Pause. “Look in the mirror.”
Pause. “It’s not you. It’s me wearing you. I keep turning around to find you, and there’s nobody there.”
Clack. “I know the feeling.”
Pause. “Of course you know. Of course I’m telling you what you already, intimately, know. I have spent three-quarters of my life telling you what you already knew and one-sixth telling you what you didn’t. And now here I am, installed in your body, mere minutes from chewing up your soul … Camilla, I can’t bear this. I’m eating your life.”