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.

Palamedes could think. He said it was his party trick.

But Nona couldn’t shoot or fight or think. All she had was a good nature—that wasn’t true all the time, but Nona didn’t want it bruited about that she had a bad temper when she had only ever thrown two tantrums in her life and couldn’t remember either of them. Even if she’d been proud of those, you couldn’t brag about two tantrums. Every day she held a sword until she seriously didn’t care about swords anymore, but she still couldn’t fight with one, no matter how big or thin it was. Camilla had wanted to teach her properly, but Pyrrha said not to, that they wouldn’t be able to tell if anything suddenly came back.