“I don’t,” explained Nona. “Honesty found someone else to buy him drugs, so I don’t have to.”

“Is his name really and truly Honesty?” Palamedes wanted to know.

Nona struggled.

“That’s how I hear it. Anyway, he shouldn’t be called Honesty at all, he tells huge lies and he’s trying to teach me too.”

Nona longed to lie, but didn’t know how to stop her body from showing the truth; at first, she had triumphantly caught every one of Honesty’s lies, until he took her behind the bike sheds and said he would give her a cigarette a week if she stopped. He was lying, but she could see how much it meant to him, so she stopped. And when she did get a cigarette, she slipped it to Pyrrha.

Most of the best things she learnt from Pyrrha, and Palamedes and Camilla, whom she loved and trusted with all her numbered days; but in those early times when she wasn’t used to living, the schoolchildren had taught her everything else. New words, mostly, which were always enlightening, but also how to spend time doing nothing.

They made doing nothing an art: squatting on stoops or loitering in parks beneath splintering trees, running like crazy if they heard shots, running like crazy even if they didn’t—so hard to keep up!—hunkering beneath the roofs near the sanitation ponds, going where nobody cared if they went, fighting over scraps of shade near the huge cemetery hills where they had dug all the bodies out of the cracked sand and concrete and put them in a huge pile, which still smelled terrible. One of their favourite ways to hide was to clamber up a dusty mound of rocks and rebar right at the very edge of their part of the city—they had to do this carefully because they could easily slice themselves open on a piece of rusty metal, and that meant Nona had to be doubly more careful than anyone—and sit around on the second floor of a building that had been blown wide open to the sky. There was plenty of stained old office furniture to squat on, and they could watch the enormous stretch of road that ran all around the city. There was a huge expanse of it: Honesty said you could fit twenty vans on it at a time and there used to be a train track in the middle, with turn-offs and turn-offs for the turn-offs that led to a nest of tunnels beneath the city itself. In the tunnels you could drive and drive and drive for hours and never see sunlight, said Honesty, but hardly anyone used them now. There were special fleets of gunners in cars that patrolled down there and shook people up for money, or scavenged the cars that had never made their way out. Every so often an absolutely enormous earthquake rumbled beneath them, and when Nona first asked what it was, Hot Sauce said, “The Convoy”; and because it was Hot Sauce and not Honesty, she knew it had to be true.