“You see,” Palamedes had said to her, “the eyes are a dead giveaway. When you give yourself to someone else, their soul shows in yours by the eye colour; that’s why you’ll never see me looking out of Camilla’s face with my own eyes again.”
“So someone’s inside me, then? I mean—I’m that somebody?” She always stumbled over this.
“Maybe yes, Nona, maybe no. Eyes can also show that a soul is in someone else’s body temporarily. Your amber eyes could mean that you’re like Camilla and me, or it could mean something else. But you seem to have had … a big shock.”
“Maybe I’ve just lost my memory,” said Nona dubiously.
“It happens,” agreed Palamedes—not convinced.
She didn’t care whose eyes were whose; but she was a little vain, and cared about being nice-looking. Nona knew early that other people thought she was pretty too. Once a long time ago when she was waiting in line to pick up some detergent and Camilla was getting something else they’d forgotten, the person in the line behind her had said, “Hey, pretty thing, where have you been all my life,” and laughed a lot when Nona said truthfully that she didn’t know. Then they had stood quite close to her and touched her on the hip, where her shirt was tucked in. The shop was very crowded and there were a lot of people waiting to get things, and the aisles were packed high with stuff, and there were people the shop paid to make sure nobody stole things, and they added to the crowd. Nobody was paying them any attention.
When Camilla came back the person was still trying to talk to her, and Nona had to translate what they said to Camilla, and Camilla looked the person deep in their eyes and casually touched the hilt of the knife she kept down the waistband of her trousers, and then the person moved to the back of the queue.
“If someone touches you again, and it’s not me, and it’s not Palamedes, and it’s not Pyrrha,” Camilla had told her later, “move away. Get one of us. You don’t know what they want.”
“They wanted to see me naked,” said Nona. “It was a sex thing.”
Camilla had made a sound, and then pretended it was a cough, and drank a whole glass of water. After the glass of water, she said, “How did you know?”
“That’s just the way people look when they want to see you naked and it’s a sex thing,” said Nona. “I don’t really mind.”
After a moment, Camilla had told her it wasn’t a great idea for Nona to let people she didn’t know see her naked, and not to encourage sex things. She said sex things were right out. She said there were enough problems in the world. Camilla said it was bad enough that she had used to help Nona in the bath. Camilla had also written down a lot more notes.
That was after Nona could talk, but before she started making herself a useful member of society. It was difficult living with Pyrrha and Palamedes and Camilla in those early days and feeling as though she couldn’t contribute much. They worked so hard for her. Pyrrha was an excellent planner and good with her hands, and if you gave her five seconds to talk she could make anyone believe anything, so they ate quite a lot off the money she won at cards. She ran them all with what Cam said was military efficiency. Pyrrha was the one who made them learn code words for all clear and danger, which changed every week. Nona got to be the one who picked them on weekends because that helped her to remember. Pyrrha also gave them special emergency code words for someone following （“red ribbon”） and someone listening （“fritters”）。 They even had a code word for important resource, come help me get it （“fishhook”）， but Palamedes said Pyrrha needed to stop treating cigarettes and liquor as important resources, so they hadn’t used that one in ages.
Pyrrha could cook, and she was tough, and if you went up to the roof of the apartment building and put a marble on top of a certain column, she could close her eyes and raise a rifle and shoot the marble from the other side of the rooftop. She wouldn’t do this lately even if Nona asked, because bullets were expensive right now （but a lot cheaper than meat）。 So Pyrrha could earn money and fight with a gun. She was also very wonderful with a sword, but she never lifted a sword unless all the curtains were drawn and the door was locked. They hid the swords behind a false board in the cupboard.
Camilla could fight with pretty much anything, and especially knives—she wouldn’t do the marble trick with her knife because she would just say, “What did it do to me?” and then smile her tiny beautiful smile. Palamedes said that was typical. It seemed like there was nothing Camilla couldn’t do after a few tries—the laundry, or starting up a truck, or opening a door when she didn’t have the keys, or telling the drunk man at the bottom of their hall that none of them liked it when he hit his partner, in a mystical way that caused the man to move out of the apartment forever.