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After the flame, when the stranger with strange eyes comes to her, Nona screams.
It's an accident. She's just been through so much, and everyone has been touching her, to dress her and cut her hair and change her eyes; and the corpses too, falling on top of her and not letting her go with their suffocating weight. It’s a lot , and she hasn’t been having a good week anyway, and when the stranger puts their hand on her back, she screams.
What she is saying is this: Stop touching me. Who are you? I want to go home.
What comes out is more of a strangled yelp, that increases in loudness and intensity until the stranger removes their hand and steps back. Their hands are raised to shoulder height, palms open. Their eyes are wide, face so carefully neutral.
The body says: I am not a threat . The body lies. Nona can see the lie, clearly as if the body had raised a fist instead of an empty palm. She sees it in the lack. The difference. The strange way the stranger moves and their impossible eyes—the way the stranger would feel a threat regardless of their intention, because it’s not about what they could do. It’s what they have done, and who they aren’t.
Nona doesn’t want to think about it. She can’t—it’s too big. She doesn’t want to look at the stranger either, because every second she does makes it harder for her to not think, and thinking is halfway to knowing, and she doesn’t want to know. She turns around and presses the heels of her hands into her eyes.
"Nona, hey," they say. “Have you eaten?”
Nona doesn’t turn around. She just presses the heels of her hands into her eyes until she sees stars, tries to lose herself in that tiny pocket of space. She wishes she was like Noodle, and had an extra pair of limbs to cover her ears with. Their voice is all wrong, too. It’s wrong, made all the worse because their words are familiar, everything about it reaching out to her, singing home-safe-family. Even the voice sounds the same, or close enough. If Nona was almost falling asleep, maybe, or if she was in the other room, and she heard that voice and those words, she wouldn’t even know. Maybe. She doesn’t want to open her eyes. She does not want to turn around, and greet the stranger. She does not want to face the reality of those words coming from that mouth, and that mouth no longer being a person she loves.
But sounding the same does not mean being the same, and everything else about them is strange and new. Nona thinks she may have liked new things, at some point, but everything lately has been changing so much and in ways she can't control and she doesn't like it anymore. She doesn't look at them. She wants to go home .
"I want to talk to Cam." The words come out of her before she knows what she's saying. The words are tangled—what she’s actually saying is a lot more complicated, and longer, but it feels like the part of her that usually makes the words from her brain is what’s holding her insides together right now and so the only thing she can do is hope they will understand.
"Cam's here," says the stranger.
Nona shakes her head. No. Her insides slip, turn to ice in her gut and roil with nausea. They don't understand. She makes her words sharper, then, and they still come out of her mouth all wrong.
"Ca-mil-a," Nona tries again, as if speaking to one of the tinies except her voice keeps going higher. "Camilla Hect. I want her. Or Palamedes, if you have him."
"We're here, Nona," says the stranger.
"No," Nona whispers. "No, no—"
"Nona," the stranger's voice is steady, speaking as if she is a small animal, like she doesn't understand. But she does. It's them that doesn't understand. She wants Cam, and she wants Pal, and neither of them are here. The stranger lies .
“Where is Camilla,” Nona screams. Nona doesn't know how to do anything else but scream. And the problem is, she knows. She's not stupid, even though Honesty always pretends he thinks she is except for when he’s defending her against someone bigger. She knows they're gone. Knows they were good as eaten by the stranger in front of her, knows they left her behind and no amount of asking will change the fact that they went somewhere she cannot follow. But she doesn't want to know these things. It is easier and better to believe that she doesn't know.
Nona opens her mouth to say something else, and she doesn’t even know what it is because it won’t come out. She doesn't like this new person, with their impossible eyes and Camilla's face, a memorial to the both of them with none of the important parts preserved.
“They loved you,” says the stranger. “We loved you. I love you.”
The parts holding her together unravel. She doesn’t know what happens, just knows that the next thing she’s aware of is their arms around her. She bucks, fights, rips and tears, but the stranger keeps holding. They do not let go. She wants to sink her hands into them, she wants to break her skin against theirs, reach into their insides and pull out what they have taken from her. Her nails break into skin that heals around her hands before she’s even reached to make another cut. There’s red everywhere, red that dries to a dark, ruddy brown and crumbles away. She shatters herself against their arms until there is nothing in her left to break, and then she sags, her whole body a dead weight in their arms.
"I want them back," Nona sobs. “Give them back to me.”
"I can't undo it," the stranger says. “I’m sorry. It's done. They loved you."
"They didnt love me enough to stay."
She doesn't know how much time passes, but eventually they rest her down on the floor, her back to a concrete wall which should be cold but that she can't really feel anymore. Their hand brushes her forehead, combing the ghost-strings of hair out of her face and scratching lightly at the buzzcut that's there.
Footsteps. A soft, heavy weight laid over her that smells like home. A cup pressed against her lips, water that she does not swallow. And then she's being lifted again, arms cradling her legs and back and her head resting against the slow rise-fall chest of someone she loves.
"You made a mess, kiddo," Pyrrha says.
Nona doesn't reply for a long time. She thinks she's being carried, but she doesn't know where to, and she doesn't care anyway. She lets her whole universe be Pyrrha's arms, the smell of Pyrrha's coat and the steady beat of her heart. She wants to freeze everything, she wants to forget everything. She wants her forever to just be this moment, where she is safe and can pretend she does not have to grieve.
It doesn't last, though. Eventually, her throat remembers how to work, the building pain behind her eyes bringing her back to her body.
"Do you miss them?" Nona hardly recognizes her own voice. Everything seems far away, too above and below her to be truly comprehended.
A pause. "Of course."
Pyrrha says something else, but Nona isn't listening to her words. She's preoccupied with something terrifying, worming its way up from her insides, threatening to spill out. How do you let yourself go? How do you see your death in another's rebirth, and walk forward? And then, more frightening: can Nona let it all go?
Just last week, Nona would never have considered it, because she loves being Nona. For six whole months, she's been Nona, with a family who loves her and friends who love her and six months is basically forever, and—and if she changes, then everything changes. But everything has already changed, Palamedes and Camilla are gone and she can't follow and her and…. maybe she can go too.
She nudges the rock over the tomb of her heart that holds things she is terrified of, and it moves, just a bit.
"How do I—" Nona stops. She can't… she can't say it, because saying it makes it real, as if it isn't already real enough to hold her as she screams. As if it isn't already real enough to have emptied her totally. As if it isn't already real enough to be rotting her from the inside out.
What comes out of her mouth next is different, her tongue moving without her understanding it. "How could they both—how could they both just—I love them, I want—" Nona stops. It's too big. She can't voice it. There's something else in there, deeper, but it's all too much and so she decides to stop thinking at all.
Later, when the rock that was made meat was bade to wake from the Tomb that was to be her final resting place, she remembers Anastasia, now nothing but bones curled up against the rock. She remembers John, and how he loved her so much he broke her. She remembers Palamedes Sextus and Camilla Hect, sees the shadow of the stranger with strange eyes standing on the opposite shore, who is both of them and neither of them, who is someone new.
She screams.