“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.