Hot Sauce automatically placed her thumb outside of the city gates, on a lone square.
“I’ve hid out here before. It’s an old watchtower. Keep along the road. White building with the top railing. Nobody else likes it. One of its legs looks sunk into the sand. But it’s stable. There’s stuff there.”
“Good going, boss,” said Honesty.
“If you try to sell anything I’ve left there,” said Hot Sauce evenly, “I’ll have you.”
“I wouldn’t sell your stuff,” said Honesty, injured. When Hot Sauce waited, he said, “I promise, I promise. I’m your best boy, Hot Sauce.”
“Well, selling supplies you don’t need isn’t a bad idea in a pinch—trading I mean,” said the Angel briskly. “But like I said, this ought to be short-term, and you might not even use a hideout … But if shooting breaks out in the city, serious shooting, you don’t want to be anywhere near it.”
Beautiful Ruby said, “But the necromancers can’t do anything anymore.”
“So we think,” said the Angel, “but now there’s a Lyctor.”
Nona shuddered at the word, on hearing it outside, for real. The Angel noticed and said, more gently: “Don’t be too alarmed. Really, even a Lyctor shouldn’t be able to do much due to the blue madness … I’d love to know how one made it all the way down here without frothing. I’m not even sure they can survive on the surface, the way things are. But that said, if the necromancers don’t have necromantic abilities to fall back on they may simply shell the place if things get too bad. That’s what I’m talking about. No one wants to be in a city that’s getting shelled. Lots of people are about to start streaming out, and it’s in the Houses’ best interest that the population stays in one place, and stays put. So you need to find a middle ground. All right?”
There was a ssstt from overhead. The lights abruptly went out. Everyone looked up, waiting, and then they came on again but much more softly. Then there was a deep chug-a-lug noise that sounded as though it were coming from down the hall. “Wondered when that would happen,” said the Angel. “I guess that’s our wheels spoked.”
Camilla said, “A generator?”
“Yes. It’ll only last an hour or two though, it’s crap. I don’t like keeping the kids here if the electronic locks don’t work. I think that’s it for school for now,” she said. “I’m going to tack up this map here … and here … and Honesty, Hot Sauce, I think you should both try to memorise it. Blue area, red area, safe square. Test each other. The rest of you, let’s go clean out the fridge. Take whatever’s in it home to your families. Shake a leg, people.”
That was said in the exact same tones in which the Angel would have told them to go and get out the stuff for the Hour of Science, so everyone moved without thinking about it, and even though Beautiful Ruby and Honesty lifted up their voices to complain that they wanted more school （Honesty wanting more school!） they didn’t need prompting to raid the fridge. Hot Sauce, unusually mild and active, helped tack the map up on the board and stack the chairs. Nona thought this would be the moment Camilla would take her home, but it wasn’t: Camilla was at the back of the classroom lost in her own world, hunched in on herself and her paper, as though nobody else were there.
So Nona busied herself finding all of the drawings they’d made yesterday and marking on the back who’d done them—not a hard puzzle. Kevin still didn’t know how to draw and didn’t want to learn. Born in the Morning was quite good but only ever drew cats. He said this was because they were his favourite, but they all knew that he was only good at drawing cats. Hot Sauce was the one with the palest, most hesitant drawing of Noodle, as though she had really drawn Noodle’s ghost. Honesty always drew himself in all his pictures, so Ruby’s was whatever was left over, and obviously Nona knew her own drawing. She smoothed them out and shook them over the sink so that all the crayon crumbs disappeared, and then she used that as an excuse to approach the Angel, holding them before her. The Angel took the proffered sheaf.
“Might be nice to have these to take home, I suppose,” said the Angel. “A reminder of normal times.”
“Are we never coming back?” said Nona.
The Angel winced and touched an urgent finger to her own lips in a shush!, but the others were too busy quarrelling over the yellow yeast berries and whether or not they should set out some for Born in the Morning—“We shouldn’t,” Beautiful Ruby was saying, but then Hot Sauce said, “We are,” and that ended it—to care about what Nona said to the Angel. The Angel leafed through the drawings and said softly, “With that one little broadcast everything’s changed, Nona.”