“Did you know, my colleague thought you were a prossie,” said the Angel, wiping her hands together. “I never thought it fit.”
“What I know about sex work could fit in a teaspoon and leave a lot left over,” said Palamedes. “Did you know the children call you ‘the Angel’？”
Now the Angel’s mouth quirked on the other side. Her composure had come back, in part, and her teacher voice came to the fore, so that she might have been describing why socks would, in fact, insulate the ice cube.
“Yes, they’ve come up with a very strange take on my—my nickname. It’s that Hot Sauce’s fault, I’m afraid. She’s overheard a couple of things she doesn’t understand. I didn’t know anything about it until last night, when she explained. The kids usually call me ‘Miss’ or ‘Mister’ or ‘Sir.’ Usually ‘Sir’ so that Joli can be ‘Miss,’ and of course the kids just call Nona, ‘Nona.’”
Palamedes said, “What is the implant? Please. We only have so much time.”
The Angel hesitated.
“Look,” she said, and moistened her lips with her tongue. “Will Nona listen to you, if you send her to the kitchen?”
“I could ask her to, if it’s important to you,” he said, “but she’s an adult who can make her own decisions.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ve made my mind up. I want to stay,” said Nona.
Hearing that, the Angel stopped looking at Nona altogether and held Palamedes’s gaze instead, her own rigid, like she had put on blinders and narrowed existence to him.
“Why aren’t you affected by the blue madness? Which one are you—and how many of you are still alive? I thought it was sheer optimism, the report that most of you were down.”
Palamedes stepped Camilla’s body forward and the Angel said swiftly, “Don’t move, please. If you take one step closer, I’m leaving … out the window, if I have to. You can get what you can from my dead body, but if you’re this good you might have an inkling that my dead body is designed to deny you answers.”
Palamedes put his hands up. “I’m staying right here. I want no harm to come to you, I won’t compel you, I have no thought of hurting you—I am not your enemy.”
“You were born my enemy,” said the Angel, very sadly and very tiredly now, “or, worse, you became my enemy … in the last five minutes. By doing the thing you can’t walk back from.”
Palamedes said slowly, “What do you think I am?”
“You can be nobody but a Lyctor,” said the Angel. “You used necromancy on me when you touched me, for that split second when I thought you’d fallen. It couldn’t be anything else. I don’t know what you sensed today … I’ve met you dozens of times and you’ve never cared before, so I don’t know what’s changed, or how I messed up. But, God, what a mess!”
Nona would have laughed aloud at the idea that Palamedes was a Lyctor, only she was too scared to laugh: she did not know what to say or what to do. She sat in her pocket of blue light and wished hard that Camilla had just taken her home, that they were a million miles away, that today had never happened. She had the terrible sinking feeling that whatever was going wrong right now, it was her fault somehow: that she hadn’t been smart enough or good enough.
Palamedes was saying, “I am not a Lyctor, if it helps.”
“Swear to me,” said the Angel, suddenly intent. “Swear on your bloody life.”
“I swear on the life of Camilla Hect that I am not a Lyctor,” said Palamedes.
The Angel searched his face. Whatever the Angel wanted to find there—Nona was watching her face as hard as she could, so hard her eyes were watering—she eventually found it. She slumped back in the chair with her chin sagging to her chest, and she glanced at Palamedes, drawn and gaunt and complete. “Then that’ll make this easier,” she said.
The door next to the corridor opened. The Angel flinched so hard that it looked as though she might be having a fit. Nona turned her head and saw Hot Sauce. Hot Sauce looked at the open curtains: she looked at Nona.
Then a huge, rippling sound entered Nona’s head. She was aware of a tight, hard noise, pop—pop, distant and then much much closer—as though her whole head was exploding. Everything went black, but she wasn’t asleep. She had the biggest and most frantic headache and she was terrified, her body wasn’t working, she could feel nothing and perceive nothing. The headache got worse and worse and worse, then suddenly it stopped, and she didn’t know anything at all.