How wonderful it sounded—The Convoy—so big and mysterious and subterranean. Nona had no real idea of what a convoy was or what it looked like for a very long time, but she joined in with the others when they felt the rumble in the old office-space hideout and competed to be the first to say, “The Convoy,” and have the others question, or jeer, or confirm.

“Can’t feel it.”

“That’s a fart.”

“No way, no way, that’s right. That’s the Convoy, I can feel it, my shoes are off.”

The whole broken building would rumble and shake, and at the end they would chorus, “Convoy gone.”

Nona was frankly disappointed when she asked Pyrrha what a convoy was, when Pyrrha was half-absorbed in melting slag for dummy pellets in her little bullet-shaped crucible, and Pyrrha explained that it was a bunch of vehicles driving in a line, probably very big ones. But she never quite got over that little shake, that tight vibration of the stomach when the Convoy was near, how it excited her somehow. It was like she could feel something wonderful in it.

They often stayed in the abandoned office building until the glowering dusk, because nobody wanted that space or threw chunks of brick at them to make them leave. Nona loved to watch the moon tremble in front of the big broken hanging blueness in the sky, careless of it, while Honesty prised bullet casings out of holes in the walls and Kevin played with his dolls. Beautiful Ruby and Born in the Morning whiled away the time with a deck of playing cards that had too many numbers for Nona to join in. Sometimes Hot Sauce would play too, but mainly Hot Sauce silently and majestically held court as the city honked and smouldered and yelled.

Nona liked to sit near Hot Sauce; it was good to be quiet. One time they were sitting there and the Convoy rumbled beneath them, with the others hooting and hollering and Kevin putting his hands over his ears patiently waiting for the Convoy to go away, and when the last rumbles had died, Honesty looked over and said—

“You’ll join, Hot Sauce, won’t you? Hot Sauce will join.”

“Join what?” said Nona, the ignorant one.

Which made the others do their usual chorus of—

“Nona doesn’t know.”

“Nona doesn’t know anything.”

“Tell Nona.”

And Honesty, who had been very nice since the cigarette arrangement, said: “When we leave school, we’re going to kill zombies, we’re gonna kill necromancers.”

“You shouldn’t say the word,” said Nona, forgetting in a panic that that was a Nona rule, not a school rule.

All Honesty did was drum his heels on the floor next to the wheelie chair that the stuffing was coming out of and exclaim: “Who cares? I’m not scared. This isn’t class, I can say what I want.”

Born in the Morning said with an air of old rehearsal, “I threw a rock at a necromancer and it died,” and Kevin crowed, “No, you didn’t! No, you didn’t!” and Beautiful Ruby said, “That’s such a bullshit story you tell,” and Honesty, easily and hypocritically, said, “You are such a liar, my man.”