Then he got the expression he only got when he was thinking about doing something. This was the expression that isolated him the most from Camilla’s face: Camilla had the same look on her face when she was doing something and when she was thinking about it, which was what made Camilla so hugely unexpected. Before he could do whatever it was though, the timer bleated in his pocket. “Time’s up,” he said. “Give this to Cam for me, will you?”

And he spread Nona’s fingers like he always did, and he quietly kissed the second right-hand knuckle.

Nona always paid so much more attention to the lessons of the hand and the mouth than she did to the lessons of the bone and the sword: they were significantly more interesting. With the bone and the sword she faintly got the impression that she was being read a boring bit out of the newspaper, or one of the two-for-one books Pyrrha sometimes bought from the back of somebody’s truck. Whenever she was read to from one of these she was asleep in minutes. But she was good at this, whatever this was; she didn’t even know; nobody would give her the words, and she didn’t have them herself. The first time Palamedes had asked her to do it, quite a long time ago, and the first time she had raised Camilla’s hand to her mouth and done it—pretty much exactly as Palamedes had, making the same shape as his mouth had done like she did when speaking languages, and touching the same way as his hands had touched—Camilla had looked at her, and then she had gone away to sit in the bath by herself in the dark for almost an hour, even though there hadn’t been any water in the bath.

Now when Nona waited for Camilla’s eyes to clear, and she lifted up Camilla’s hand to press her mouth to it, all Camilla said was, “Thanks.” And she almost didn’t flinch.

6

PYRRHA WAS WORKING LATE THAT EVENING. They were demolishing a big building that everyone was worried was about to come down and squash all of the surrounding streets flat and go right through the road to the tunnels. The work kept on being stop-start stop-start because people couldn’t decide who was responsible for paying the workers: the militia or the old civic government. Down at the local dairy one of the old men had grumbled that at least with the Houses around you knew who was paying who and the other old man had said, Is that all you care about, you shameful old bastard, and then they realised Nona was there and to cover up their mutual embarrassment they had asked Nona what she thought. She said she didn’t mind what happened so long as Pyrrha got paid, because she wanted a birthday present. Then they chucked her beneath the chin and laughed a lot and Nona didn’t know why, because she had been perfectly sincere. They each gave her a coffee coupon, and she was so excited that she nearly dropped the coupons twice on the way home.