“They don’t come loose and the plain plaits do.” Nona added in the spirit of truth: “And I can’t help chewing the ends with plaits. I want to steer clear of Temptation.”

“Don’t we all? I need to stop torturing myself by staring at the cigarette drawer.”

“Don’t start the secondhand smoke argument again,” said Nona in alarm, but then, figuring she’d been harsh: “Anyway, they’re bad for you and I love you, Pyrrha.”

“Prove it,” said Pyrrha, which meant she had to eat the eggs.

Nona ate while Pyrrha brushed out her hair in short, brisk strokes, letting its fine black sheets fall over Nona’s shoulders. It went almost to the bottom of her back now, and it was soft and thin as water: every fourth haircut day they cut it, but not every haircut day because it was a pain, and because people noticed your hair growing less when it was already long, Camilla said. Camilla and Pyrrha both got to have short hair, which she envied. Cam’s was dark brown and bobbed off sharply at the chin and it felt nice against your cheek, and whenever Pyrrha didn’t shave her head quick enough she got a little flat cap of dark terracotta, the colour of wet red earth at the building site. Most of Pyrrha was the colours of the building site: deep dried-out browns, dusty hunks of clay, rusted metal. She was raw and ropy and square-shouldered, and Camilla was long and shadowy and lean. Nona thought they were both exquisite.

Camilla came in when Pyrrha was fixing up the first braid and when Nona had gotten as far as chewing the eggs, which was an agonising step on the journey to eating the eggs. Camilla said unhappily, “Eggs? Have we not invented a new protein?” which meant it wasn’t Camilla at all.

The easiest way of telling who was who was in the eyes. Palamedes had soft cool eyes of brownish grey, like bare ground in the cold mornings when Nona had been little, and Camilla had the clearest of clear grey eyes like storybook ice, not like normal cloudy ice at all. But Nona could tell them apart from across the room, which she was proud of, because their body was otherwise exactly the same. The difference was how they stood: Camilla couldn’t stand still, ever, not without shifting her weight back and forth on each knee or popping her knuckles, and Palamedes stood like he was playing a game of Hot Chocolate and the tagger was looking right at him. Hot Chocolate was in fashion with her friends at the moment and Nona wanted to get really good at it.

“Meat’s black-market only right now,” Pyrrha said, starting in on a second braid. Palamedes was spooning gritty black spoonfuls of instant coffee into mugs. He said absently, “Coffee, Nona?” even though she always said, “No, but thank you”—Palamedes liked giving you options—and he even waited until she said, “No, but thank you” before he poured the boiling water twice. No milk, because they’d run out of packets. He put one mug where Pyrrha could reach it—she was currently leaning over to the counter for a hairpin—and kept one for himself. They sat and steamed in the muggy air, and Nona sniffed at the nice bitter coffee smell. Pyrrha continued, “Anyway, you’re paying for the meat roulette. The stuff the butcher’s keeping back is only ten percent upholstery, the rest is livers and gristle.”