It was just as hard to make Nona learn any facts as it was to make her learn the sword or the bones—harder, probably; as she explained all the time, as sweetly as she could, her brain simply wasn’t interested in them. It was as though someone had probably told her everything before and she had already forgotten it. Every lesson she sat in on, at a rickety desk with an old plastic chair at the back of a class full of kids, she could feel exiting her ears as soon as it entered them with the ring of old familiarity—it felt and sounded as though she had heard it all before. The teachers were amazed when they found out about her being able to speak all the languages, but Pyrrha had schooled her to say that she had had “lots of resettlements,” which seemed to suffice. The nice lady teacher abandoned trying to teach Nona, and instead treated her like a good, simple colleague who could be relied upon to clean whiteboards and look after extraneous dogs and explain to the littlest children, in a variety of languages, where the bathroom was—which was really all teachers wanted.

At school, after the first week, Nona was cornered by five children who informed her that she was now their friend.

“Okay,” said Nona.

“Hot Sauce wants you,” she got told.

Hot Sauce was the oldest child, at fourteen, but would have been the authority no matter her age. She was queenly for her years and spoke very seldom. She had burns on most of her body and had got to hold a gun in a war. If you were new to the school her group always eventually found you and said, “You have to come and see Hot Sauce,” and took you to Hot Sauce, and Hot Sauce would lift up her shirt and hoick up her shorts and show you the burns. This was intended to instil a sense of reverence in the fresh meat, not disgust, but the group was just as proud if the new child broke down crying or didn’t want to look.

Hot Sauce herself was blank and unmoving in her moods and did not seem to have many strong passions, except that she was violently disdainful of every subject but the Hour of Science.

Nona wanted to know why Hot Sauce wanted her.

“You’re old and can get us drugs,” said Honesty, who was twelve and served as Hot Sauce’s lieutenant. “You live in the Building.”

None of them was crestfallen when Nona told them that she was not allowed to get anyone drugs; they took it with stoic acceptance. “What’s special about the Building?” she asked.

“It’s banned,” said Honesty.

One of the other children, Beautiful Ruby, said: “My mother says that if you get caught downtown or you shoot at the wrong window you get taken to your building.”

“But you play in the garage all the time,” said Nona. “I’ve seen you. You were one of the ones who hit a car with one of the big hard balls and the alarm went off for three hours.”