Nona’s breath was misting on the inside of her mask and escaping out its cracks in ghostly grey puffs by the time they made it to the park, comfortable but not talking. It was always the same route—straight down the street all the way to the gates of the thing that had used to be the big park—and then Pyrrha would say something like, “Let’s cut through, it’s so smoky,” or she’d say, “Let’s not. Park’s full of mercs,” and then they’d go around. This morning she said, “Let’s go through the park. Move with the crowd,” so Nona took Camilla’s hand and moved with the crowd.

The plants filtered out some of the clinging smoke, and Nona loved to look at the trees and the bristly, curving shapes of the shrubs and bushes. Much of the vegetation had been turfed up, some in an attempt to make a community garden, some of it into shanty houses skulking against the big concrete fence. Another place had been cleared and ineptly concreted over, and they put the cages there. The cages were bone-cold and they’d been almost fully cleaned, but Nona didn’t like looking, so she spent her time gazing at the mist of trailing vines on the tree trunks instead.

Once they were out of the park and out of the crowd, Pyrrha kissed the top of Nona’s head and said, “Be good,” like she always said. She did not kiss the top of Camilla’s head but told her, “Good hunting, you two.”

“Good hunting,” echoed Camilla.

Pyrrha melted into the crowd in her big steel-toed boots and her over-the-shoulder bag with her helmet and extra batteries for her helmet light and her gloves and her lunch. It was easier now than when Nona had been very new and Palamedes said she had no object permanence, but Nona still always felt a pang watching Pyrrha walk away, commingled with the pride of having Pyrrha, the familiarity of seeing someone and knowing they belonged to you. Camilla drew her back to the pavement with a guiding hand on the small of her back, and said the magic words: “You’ll be late for school.”

Then it was one right turn, one cut through an alley, and one pause as Nona pointed out to Cam a building that had been fine only the other day and now had a huge hole in it (“They used a very big gun,” was Cam’s explanation) before they got buzzed into the school building by the nice lady teacher and went up two flights of squeaky linoleum stairs. Camilla always turned down the offer of a warm drink in the tiny staffroom, and turned it down quicker the more compassionately she was asked, and then she melted away into the street like a grey shadow. Nona often watched her from the window.

“Kevin’s here already, so he can help you take down the chairs and clean the whiteboards,” said the teacher.

This was absolute stupidity on the teacher’s part, as Nona knew Kevin would not help take down the chairs nor clean the whiteboards, nor do anything but sit on the cushions where the stuffing was leaking out in drifts of off-white beads. Then the teacher said, unexpectedly: “Hot Sauce is here too.”