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When she thought about it later, Camilla would have the strange feeling that she had been manipulated somehow. Not in a malicious way -- more like looking back over the events leading up to a satisfying conclusion and slowly realizing that some benevolent third party had been there all along, prodding you gently toward the best possible outcome. It was a feeling Camilla was intimately familiar with, on account of having spent the better part of her life in devoted service to Palamedes Sextus, who had been born a hopeless meddler.
What happened was this: She had just finished washing her face in preparation for bed, wringing the extra water out of the washcloth with practiced efficiency, when she noticed that the edge of the callous on the proximal phalanx of the middle finger on her left hand was peeling. She lifted her palm to her face, studying each callous in turn, and was surprised to discover that several others were also going soft and lifting around the edges.
Camilla rubbed at the callouses with her other hand, massaging the skin, feeling for the flexibility she’d spent long years training into her metacarpals, and tried to remember when the last time was that she’d gone to the gym and run her forms.
She couldn’t remember. She was getting sloppy.
No, that wasn’t quite right -- rather, she was distracted. The attention she’d formerly paid to her combat skills had shifted into attention paid toward resurrection studies.
Well, understandable. That wasn’t really a shift in priorities at all.
Still, she wouldn’t last long in BoE if she let her sword arms atrophy. First thing in the morning, up before Domin -- before the sun, she would go straight to the training floor and put herself through her old paces.
Resolved, she slipped between the cool sheets of her single bed, shut off the light, and closed her eyes.
When her fingers were still worrying at the callouses ten minutes later, she sighed and flicked the light back on. She never had been able to sleep when a problem newly presented itself.
The hallways were dark, and Camilla was surprised to discover that the motion detection lights apparently shut off after a certain hour because they left her in shadow as she moved through the complex, her double swords strapped comfortably across her back. Without the bustle of people, rushing here and there on self-important missions, it reminded her eerily of Canaan House -- silent and full of secrets. But she didn’t much like to remember Canaan House, so she indulged herself in pushing away the comparison.
As she drew closer to the gym, her ears pricked and latched onto a wavering, rhythmic sound, soft and distant, that she couldn’t make sense of at first. It sounded like frustration -- like the sound her brain made when she’d been throwing it against a hypothesis for hours and hours and found no purchase. Like somebody trying to punch their way out of a grave.
The light in the gym was on -- it shone through the crack at the bottom of the door -- and as Camilla drew closer, the sound resolved into sudden clarity: Somebody was sobbing and not bothering to hide it.
Grimly, she pushed open the door and found herself witness to something she had seen only once before and never expected to see again:
Harrowhark Nonagesimus sat in the middle of the training floor, shoulders curled in on themselves, her face buried in her knees. She was bloodied, and it took a moment to locate the source of the blood: her knuckles, which were red and raw, but also slowly knitting themselves back together. She was dressed in black trousers and a black turtleneck, her skin fastidiously hidden even at the ankles and wrists and neck, and she looked somehow smaller than she ever had before.
But of course, this time it wasn’t Harrowhark Nonagesimus who lived in that body.
“Gideon?” she said, holding her voice as flat and affectless as she could. Startled, Harrow’s body scrambled to its feet, whirling wildly to face her, halfway into a ready stance before registering who she was. The pointed, narrow face was hidden behind a carefully but inexpertly painted skull, and her wide eyes glowed like molten gold.
“Camilla,” Gideon said with Harrow’s voice, and Camilla was never going to get used to that, or to Gideon’s unguarded expressions playing across Harrow’s perpetually pinched features. It was like a fish smiling at you. It made her brain itch.
“What happened?” she asked, deciding, for now, not to read into the bloody knuckles, the half dozen discarded weapons strewn across the floor, the gently swaying punching bag, the streaks of skin where tears had washed paint away.
“Nothing,” Gideon lied, and Camilla honored her with a withering stare worthy of the Reverend Daughter herself, and Gideon sighed. She started to scrub a hand through hair -- a gesture Camilla had seen her do a half dozen times, back when it was red -- but then flinched at her own touch and drew the hand back again, fisting it tightly. Harrow’s mouth opened like Gideon was going to offer up a joke, but a hiccuping gasp came out instead, and she slammed it shut in betrayal.
Camilla watched this small drama play out in silence, then stepped into the room, turning to inspect the weapons strewn across the floor.
“I don’t much care for guessing,” Camilla said casually. “I prefer to gather evidence and draw conclusions. Would you like to know what evidence I’m collecting now?”
Gideon didn’t say anything, which Camilla decided to take as a “yes.” She picked up a dagger, weighing its heft in her hand thoughtfully. “Those knuckles are bleeding. Or, more precisely, they were bleeding, but have since healed, which is still weird, by the way.”
That earned a weak laugh -- a small thing that sounded surprised at its own existence.
“Bloody knuckles are consistent with a bag workout, but not a well-planned one. Otherwise, they’d be wrapped, or at least taped. And then there’s these.” Camilla toed at a rapier, flicking it so that the basket rolled around its point like a compass, eventually clinking into a discarded chain and coming to rest. She very intentionally did not look at the two-hander, which lay halfway under a bench at the far side of the room as though it had been unceremoniously flung. “A more or less comprehensive assortment of weapons, decreasing in size, trailing back toward the lockers,” she said, “suggests that somebody intended to train with them, but became quickly frustrated with each, discarding and downgrading until they were left with only their” -- she cleared her throat -- “with only bare hands.”
There was a sharp inhalation, and when she turned at last to look, Gideon was sinking against the low wall that ringed the training floor, looking very much like she had intended to sit on it, found herself too short, and then fully given up on the whole endeavor. Camilla studied the dagger she was still holding for a moment, listening to Gideon’s forcefully deep breathing, then set the blade gently on the floor and went to the wall herself, settling next to the wrong-bodied girl with only a hand’s breadth of space between them.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked the ceiling. Gideon made a strangled noise, and Camilla hastened to add, “you don’t have to, of course, but I might… well, not understand, exactly, but -- maybe, cavalier to cavalier --” she had to swallow hard, but she won the fight to keep her voice steady -- “maybe it’ll help?”
Gideon was silent for a long time, Harrow’s back pressed flat against the wall, Harrow’s fingers picking nervously at the black fabric scrunched across Harrow’s knobby knees, every motion studiously monitored by Gideon’s eyes.
“It’s stupid,” Harrow’s voice finally said. “I know it’s stupid and I’m a perfect moron for it, but I --”
Camilla waited. Gideon lifted one hand, looking at the blood dried across the knuckles.
“It’s my duty to protect her. That’s the entire point of me. The reason I am.” And here, she flexed the hand, making fists and then shaking them out again, as though unsatisfied with the results. “But she’s not here. All I have is her body, and it’s --” a low growl of frustration, and Gideon let Harrow’s hand fall into Harrow’s lap. “I want to keep her body safe for her. I need to keep her body safe, but it’s not -- strong enough. I can’t wield my sword properly. I can’t use a chain, a dagger, a rapier -- can’t even punch properly. I need to make it stronger, but her muscles, her lungs, her skin -- it screams and splits and bleeds, and I can’t -- ” She took in a sharp breath, like she was drowning and wanted to speed up the process. “Everything I do hurts her, and I can feel every fiber of her body crying , and I can’t -- I don’t want -- I --”
Her breath ticked up to an unsustainable rate, and somewhere in the back of her mind, Camilla began cataloging the symptoms, taking in the trembling shoulders, the shallow breathing, the fingers digging into thighs, the mouth that gaped open and shut.
From the front of her mind, Camilla took both of Harrow’s hands in her own, slid onto her knees, and turned to face the strange amalgamation of girl and corpse. She leaned over the thin knees to press her forehead into the greasy skull paint, drawing the delicate hands into her chest and tucking them against her ribs, beginning to rub smooth circles into the fleshy webbing between the thumbs and forefingers.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s okay. Look at me, Gideon.”
Obediently, Gideon looked at her -- startling golden irises around pupils blown wide -- and she held that gaze steadily.
“You’re having a panic attack. You need to breathe. Steady in, steady out. On my count. Got it?”
Minutely, Gideon nodded, and Harrow’s shoulders relaxed the tiniest bit as she struggled to slow her breathing to match Camilla’s pace.
“In… out… in… just like that… out… that’s it…”
It took a long time -- longer than she was used to -- but eventually, Gideon’s breathing slowed to just above normal, and the panic in her eyes subsided into exhaustion.
“There you go,” Camilla said. “See? You’re doing fine.”
Gideon sucked in a last, deep breath, and said, “Camilla, how do I -- how do we protect them now?”
Camilla gave Harrow’s fragile little hands one last reassuring squeeze and pulled away to settle herself against the wall once more. She stared up into the fluorescent lights, letting them burn into her retinas until she saw spots. She hummed.
“When we were kids, Palamedes used to have panic attacks all the time,” she said. “He hated them. Called them ‘hysterics,’ like they were a… a meaningless inconvenience. Nothing to worry about. Just something that happened sometimes, like an itch. He always did love a metaphor.”
“I remember,” Gideon interjected, with a note of fondness that prodded at Camilla’s heart.
“It took me a long time to figure out that the episodes weren’t random. There was a pattern. They happened when he couldn’t solve a problem. When he was frustrated, and angry, and -- and failing to do what he thought he needed to do.”
She paused, willing herself to sit with the memories. “Once I’d figured that out, it got a lot better. I could see them coming and head them off. Redirect his energy to something productive. He didn’t have any at all, for a few years.” She wrinkled her nose. “And then, suddenly, there were a lot of them again, in the weeks before Dulcinea --”
The words lodged in her throat, and she found that she could not force them out, even by reasoning with them. She hummed, hoping that the vibrations might shake them loose, but they stuck fast.
“So what you’re saying,” Gideon said slowly, “is that I’m a failure.”
Camilla shoved sideways without looking, and Harrow’s little bird-body collapsed under the sudden assault.
“Oi! Careful!” Gideon snapped, but there was a note of surprised delight in her voice, so Camilla decided not to regret the shove.
“Don’t draw conclusions without all relevant information, Nav,” she chided. “That always causes trouble.”
Gideon sat up again, pushing up on Harrow’s bony wrists, and this time when she settled against the wall, Camilla reached for one of those borrowed hands and folded it gently into her own.
“What I’m saying is that panic is fear that has nowhere to go,” she said. “It’s what happens when everything is broken and you believe there’s nothing you can do. But there’s always something you can do.”
Gideon snorted. Camilla ignored her.
“I can’t bring Palamedes back,” she said. “I can’t reach into the River and grab him by the ear and haul him up here to answer for --” she cut herself off, taking a breath. Harrow’s hand tightened on hers. “There’s nothing I can do to help him directly. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing I can do. I can continue his research; check his numbers; collect data. I can protect his bones -- make sure he has something to cling to. I can hold space for him in this new world -- carve it out, if I have to. And I can trust that he’ll come back.”
Finally, she allowed her gaze to drift back to Gideon where she huddled inside Harrow’s face.
“The details are different,” she told those eyes, “but our missions are the same. Don’t focus on what you can’t change. Panic is no use to anyone. Instead, focus on what you can do: Hold space for Harrow. Keep that body safe until she comes back for it. Trust that, wherever she is, she will come back for you.”
“Uuuugh,” Gideon groaned plaintively. “But dying was so much easier .”
Camilla rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well, it didn’t stick, so empirically, you’re going to have to try the other thing.”
Gideon considered that for a moment, worrying at Harrow’s lip with her teeth, scraping at paint, and Camilla let the silence stretch out, taking the moment to wonder whether the grease paint smudge on her forehead was going to result in pimples. Probably yes.
Finally, Gideon ventured, “But...what if she doesn’t? Come back for her body, I mean? What if I have to live 10,000 years without -- her?”
“Then you live 10,000 years without her. It’s only fair, don’t you think? After you asked her to do the same?”
Gideon let out a low, slow breath, like a wave breaking over rocks. “Yeah,” she said, and exhaustion must have gotten the better of her, because she lowered Harrow’s temple to Camilla’s shoulder, resting there with a feather-light sigh. “Yeah, fair enough.”
Carefully, Camilla leaned her cheek against the top of Harrow’s head and let herself rest, too. They sat like that, heads together, hands entwined, for a very long time. After the first fifteen minutes, Camilla stopped counting, instead letting her mind wander, worrying at the contours of a thorny data set she’d recently acquired from the fungus lab. When the pulse in Harrow’s wrist finally settled to nearly a normal rate, she lifted her head and shrugged her shoulder, pushing Gideon away.
“Come on,” she said, standing and tugging on Harrow’s stupid, spindly hands, pulling Gideon up with her.
“Where are we going?” Gideon asked.
“Nowhere,” Camilla said. “We’re going to solve your other problem.”
“What’s my other problem?”
“The one where you’re a hulking goliath trapped in a useless twig gremlin’s body,” Camilla deadpanned, “and you have no fucking idea how to fight in it.”
“Hey, lay off my necro,” Gideon snapped, but she was grinning lopsidedly, and Camilla was again reminded of a smiling fish. No, not a fish -- a bird. “Only I’m allowed to make totally accurate comments about the twigishness of her arms.”
Camilla laughed, and it felt good to laugh. “Fair enough,” she said. “But you’ve never started from zero muscle mass before, and that’s why you keep hurting things.”
“Okay, point,” Gideon said. “Teach me, mon petit guerrière.”
Camilla shoved at Harrow’s ribcage, and Gideon caught herself this time, but only just.
“We start with yoga,” Camilla announced. “Seeing as the sun should be rising any minute now, a sun salutation seems appropriate.”
Gideon wrinkled Harrow’s nose.
“What’s yoga?” She asked.
“Oh, you’re going to hate it,” Camilla answered brightly. “Come on.”