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Harrowhark Nonagesimus is no stranger to being haunted. She is the perfect vessel, because there’s a hole in her that cannot be filled, not by God or the body or the Tomb, and she’s two hundred parts ghost anyway, which has to count for something in the universe’s balance.
(“It’s because you kill the mood in every room you walk into,” says a voice in Harrow’s head that sounds like the snotty tones of Gideon Nav. “You could walk into the lamest, saddest, worst room in the world and still find a way to kill the mood, my umbrous party pooper.”
This is not said with a total degree of sneer. In fact, there is something almost fond about it.)
Harrowhark Nonagesimus is also no stranger to dreams. She understands omens, portents, prophecies. She is familiar with the sensation of waking up in a bloody sweat, gutted through by something that is not real.
But she is being haunted by, and she is dreaming about, herself.
Or, rather, not herself.
Because Harrowhark is missing six months of her life of which she has no distinct memories except in muddied and incomprehensible dreams.
Harrowhark can stand omens. She can stand portents and prophecies. Her mind is a cocoon, hardened from a myriad of major tragedies, a fortress against all the things that want her well and truly dead, but she cannot stand her memories of Nona.
i.
Harrow is dancing in the kitchen with Ortus the First— no, Gideon the First— no, Pyrrha Dve, the Saint of Duty’s parasite. There is a squealing, shrieking, hiccuping sound that she realises, far too late, is coming from her, a burbling laugh she didn’t know she was capable of.
“Come on, kiddie.” Pyrrha's voice is light and amused. She spins Nona’s body in a circle, her callused hand gentle on Nona’s wrist. The last time Harrow felt those hands, they were trying to kill her. “Who knew you had two left feet?”
“Pyrrha, you know I have a left foot and a right foot!” Nona protests. Her voice is light and unfamiliar. Childish. Carefree.
The music—and Harrow has to assume it’s music, because she’s never really heard music before, not this rhythmic, noisy sound—is burst through with static. The kitchen is dim and cramped, all yellowed plastic and grubby countertops, but through Nona’s baby eyes it is perhaps the most magical place in the world.
The Saint of Duty is laughing. Harrow sees teeth and gum and she’s back on the Mithraeum, back in a pool of her own blood, back grating her bones into broth. It's animal fear, the prey instinct. She sees that face and she knows she’s going to die.
But her body—Nona—only feels light and happy as Pyrrha spins her around again, until she protests she’s getting dizzy.
“I love you, Pyrrha,” Nona says once she’s found her balance again, and Harrow, somewhere in the far-off recesses of her own consciousness, flinches.
“If you love me, you’ll eat your eggs.”
“That's not fair!”
“Love’s not fair, cutie pie.”
Russet hair. Knobbed hands. A skeleton all the wrong shape. A shining fondness in those rusted eyes.
Pyrrha ruffles her hair, even though Nona squeals and protests about it messing up her braids. “But, hey, even if love isn’t fair, I love you too, kid.”
Harrow's body does something entirely unfamiliar. It floods with heat, but not the shameful kind of heat, or the dying star kind of heat. It's a peculiar, almost-pleasant warmth, like when Harrow created her first bone construct, or when Gideon Nav pressed her mouth to the space between her eyebrows, dripping salt water, back at Canaan House.
Harrow wakes with a start. Whenever she wakes, she always remembers the warmth, the spark, the way the other person looked at Nona and the way Nona responded in turn.
For a terrible moment, confused by the dark room, Harrow thinks she’s still on New Rho, but something clatters and Harrow knows it’s the sound of Gideon massacring a perfectly good set of ingredients and calling it breakfast.
These days, post-war-to-end-all-wars, post-I-pray-the-tomb-is-shut-forever, post-God-is-a-duplicitous-slut-and-also-Griddle’s-dad-and-Harrow-is-unmoored-without-the-steady-beat-of-her-devotion, she lives a small life.
A diminutive, ripe planet somewhere outside of the Dominicus system. Temperate and teeming with plant matter. Acres and acres of space to make livable, but there’s only one house and only bed, so she and Gideon huddle together like mice every night and try to make it work.
The war is not over, but there is time to breathe.
Harrow doesn’t mind. She and Gideon have lost years of their life chasing each other across the universe. They’re still unlearning and relearning each other.
Gideon pokes her head into the room. Her hair is flat, rusted in the gloom, almost long enough to get in her eyes. “Breakfast.”
These days, Gideon tries to do awful things like feed her. Domesticity used to make Harrow want to put a bullet through her skull, and now it only makes her want to gently strangle herself with her own constructs.
“I’m not hungry,” Harrow says.
Gideon raises a thick, dark eyebrow. God’s eyebrow. Harrow will never be over it.
“Which poor fuck showed up in your dreams this time?”
Harrow raises her chin and says, through the slight tremble, “Pyrrha Dve.”
“Woof.”
“Griddle, she is awful.”
“Did she hurt you?”
Harrow wants to say yes. It felt like hurt, that fondness, twirling Nona’s small body to the radio static.
“No,” Harrow admits.
“Come on,” Gideon says. “I traded your marrow for Paul's eggs during supply drop yesterday. I’m making omelettes.”
If you love me, you’ll eat your eggs.
“That marrow took weeks to grow,” Harrow protests, around the rising bile.
Gideon shrugs, one-shouldered, easy. She moves differently now, her body her own but damaged, her soul her own but battered.
“We've got time,” Gideon says. “I'll even make them just how you like. Bland and mushy. Baby food for the little baby.”
“You are insufferable, Griddle.”
But Harrow gets out of bed. The dream is just a dream. Pyrrha Dve cannot hurt her, not in the way Harrow dreads.
ii.
Harrow is holding Camilla Hect’s hand.
In the dream, the sky is a teeth-clenching electric blue, blotted out by Number Seven. Harrow's body doesn’t seem at all bothered by this. Nona is swinging hers and Camilla’s joined hands as they walk. The air smells like salt and petrol.
“Five minutes,” Camilla says.
“Fifteen,” Nona barters, and Harrow feels a distant sense of somebody else’s pride, that Nona could count to a number that high and mean it.
“Five minutes.”
“Ten!”
Camilla adjusts her hand in Nona’s but doesn’t pull away. Harrow has never wondered what Camilla Hect’s hands might feel like, but she’s forced to know anyway. They’re not as callused as Pyrrha Dve’s, but they’re getting there. Her grip is steady and sure.
“Six,” Camilla concedes.
“Yes!” Nona cheers.
The dream shifts. Harrow is used to this. The memories she receives from New Rho are fragmented and often fuzzy, the pages out of order, the scratched record skipping.
Harrow is drowning. There is water in her ears. Everything is eerie and fluorescent.
She breaks the surface. The city is a glittery smudge past the shore. It is unbearably dark, and plastic bottles and old shoes bob in the water, but Nona just laughs and shifts to float on her back. Jellyfish curl their stinging tentacles around her arms.
Nona loves the way it tickles. Nona loves the way her body floats. Nona loves the greasy sheen of oil on the water’s surface, iridescent when snatched at the right angle.
She loves to swim. Harrow has never loved to swim, can barely paddle enough to not drown. Salt water isn’t for splashing around in; it is for secrets, and deadweight, and confession.
Camilla is a rough shape on the shore. Nona waves wetly. Camilla lifts a hand in return, then holds up three fingers. Nona takes the biggest breath she’s ever taken in her life and slides beneath the water again.
Nona loves the salt. She loves the taste in her mouth, the brief sting in her eyes. Nona loves being among the plastic bottles and old shoes, another segment of the planet swilled with the silt.
She only leaves the water semi-reluctantly, because Camilla was kind enough to let her have six minutes swimming instead of five, even though the gunshots have been worse that night than any other night that week.
Sated and salt-sodden, they walk home.
“I love you,” Nona says. She loops her arm through Camilla’s and rests her damp head on Camilla’s shoulder. From what Harrow knows—from what she thought she knew—of Camilla Hect, she expects to be thrown bodily to the floor and stamped on.
Instead, Camilla briefly touches her head to Nona’s, her blunt hair tickling Nona’s cheek.
“Let’s get you to bed,” Camilla says, which Nona knows means I love you, in Camilla’s own specific way.
She glows the whole way home.
Harrow wakes up tasting salt, and even Gideon’s bland and mushy omelettes can’t wash the taste away.
iii.
The class is drawing portraits.
Nona has just learned that this means you draw somebody who’s nice to look at, or maybe not nice to look at, but it doesn’t make sense why you would want to paint somebody who isn’t nice to look at.
Nona is cramped into one of the tinies’ chairs at the back of the classroom, organising the crayons that nobody wants to use. The gang are engrossed in the task at the next table over; Beautiful Ruby has only made three rude remarks about Born in the Morning’s watery blue eyes, which he can’t find the right colour for. Born in the Morning is drawing cats instead of portraits, and Kevin is eating the crayons, which Nona is deeply envious about, and Hot Sauce is drawing with a dour secrecy that none of the others seem to want to interrupt.
Harrow is deeply nonplussed to be surrounded by so many children. The only child she’s ever known was Griddle, and Harrow was too busy a) being a child herself and b) conducting psychological warfare against her to notice.
When Nona peers over, as stealthy as she can be, she can see Hot Sauce’s paper has more than one face on it. Nona can’t draw at all, so she’s impressed by Hot Sauce’s ability to do eyes and nose and mouths, even though the mouths are all horrible sad lines.
“That’s me!” Nona says, forgetting herself. “At least, I think it’s me. Is that me, Hot Sauce?”
“I’m drawing the whole gang,” Hot Sauce says. “If one of us goes missing, we can share the picture around and ask people if they’ve seen us.”
Nona thrills from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. “You mean—you’d look for me? If I went missing?”
“Who would want to look for Nona?” Born in the Morning sneers. “She has rocks for brains.”
Rocks for brains is the Born in the Morning’s phrase of the week. Born in the Morning has accused everybody of having rocks for brains, including the Angel, which Hot Sauce warned him to shut his mouth about, and including Noodle, which Nona took personal offence about.
Nona gazes at the drawing. Hot Sauce has drawn her brown skin and her black braids and her yellow eyes. None of the gang has hands—because it’s all of them, Hot Sauce and Born in the Morning and Beautiful Ruby and Nona and even Kevin—but Nona thinks it’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen.
“Can I have it?” Nona asks. “Please, Hot Sauce, I want to have it so badly.”
Nona has never wanted anything more, except maybe to not have to eat ever again. But she would eat at least two eggs to be the owner of Hot Sauce’s drawing.
“Have you got rocks for brains?” Born in the Morning crows, right on cue. “How’s anyone meant to find us if our pictures are at your pimp’s place?”
Before Nona can argue crossly for the one millionth time that Pyrrha isn’t a pimp, Hot Sauce interrupts.
“I’ll draw you another one,” Hot Sauce says. She’s focused on colouring Beautiful Ruby’s hair, her face impassive, her hand steady. Nona beams at her.
“I love you, Hot Sauce,” Nona says.
Harrow cannot believe that her mouth has said I love you to a child who looks like they’ve lost a fight with a toaster oven.
Hot Sauce just shrugs. “You’re part of the gang,” she says simply.
When Harrow jolts out of that particular dream in the pre-dawn gloom, she shakes Gideon awake and says, on the verge of serious hysterics, “I was in a gang. A gang of children.”
“Sh,” Gideon mumbles. She wraps her arms around Harrow and rolls them both over, so Harrow is crushed into the mattress with all of Gideon’s weight. “Too early.”
iv.
Gideon finds Harrow one morning staring at the wall, a thousand myriads away.
“What is it?” Gideon asks, with no small degree of alarm. There are a hundred things that could go wrong at any moment, the snap of an elastic band felt all the way across the universe. Neither of them is eager to whip out contingency plan number forty-seven, but the possibility isn’t completely out of the matter.
Gideon never stopped looking so fucking haunted. You die on a spike, spend months drowning in somebody else’s brain, get quasi-resurrected into a soldier at the whim of your dad, who just so happens to be the Necrolord Prime, and take down God himself one time and it leaves you like this. Back from the dead, but different.
“I,” Harrow says. She takes a fortifying breath. “I— she asked Palamedes Sextus what he thinks is sexy.”
Gideon's face, so grey around the edges these days, lights up like a star exploding.
“Please tell me you heard the answer.”
“I am never repeating it,” Harrow says. “Not even upon my imminent death.”
“Harrow,” Gideon says. She actually gets down on her knees, hands clasped in supplication, which Harrow thought physically impossible, considering she never once prayed at Ninth House mass. “My shadow-soaked angel. My black hole. My battish brigand. Please.”
“No.”
“I’ll show you my left tit.”
“I’ve already seen it.”
“I will die if I don’t get to hear who Sex Pal wants to bone.”
“I will die if I have to hear you desecrate the word bone like that again.”
Harrow wins the war in the end. She prays to the tomb that no longer exists that she never has to relive that particular memory.
Nona is so openly curious. She has a bleeding, huge heart. She asks people what they find sexy and tells them she loves them.
Harrow can’t fucking stand it.
v.
Nona is also incredibly vain.
Harrow, to whom vainness is a deeply cardinal sin, worse than murder, adultery, sacrilege, and even Gideon’s dog-eared pornographic magazines, finds this the most disturbing revelation from all her half-shot memories.
Nona loves herself.
She loves herself in a way that makes Harrow squirm with embarrassment, because it’s not her but it’s still her body.
Harrow has so many dreams where she’s just looking in a mirror. She’s looking at her face with their egg yolk eyes. If Harrow didn’t still have Gideon’s eyes, she would find it easier to deal with these dreams, but it’s her pointy face and her dark hair and her cavalier’s eyes.
Nona examines her reflection in the dim bathroom fluorescents. She runs Harrow’s hands over Harrow’s long, black braids and smiles with Harrow’s mouth and Harrow’s teeth.
She leans closer to the mirror. She shows herself an audition-reel of different expressions. Harrow has never seen her face make any of these expressions. They’re awful.
Before leaving Drearburh, Harrow had only seen her reflection in cracked fragments of mirrored glass, spackled with grime and age. She saw enough to apply her sacramental paint, and soon her face became something to cover up, her naked skin a sign that something wasn’t right.
She has grown more used to her reflection, to her bare face, but it doesn’t mean she wants to look at it.
Nona examines her hands. Harrow looks at her own hands from somewhere outside of herself, at her blunt nails, at her scarred knuckles, at her fine-boned and fragile fingers.
“What are you doing?” Camilla asks from the doorway.
“Don’t you think I’m beautiful?” Nona asks, twirling Harrow’s fingers in the end of one braid.
Camilla raises an eyebrow. “Do you think you’re beautiful?”
“Of course! And I think you’re beautiful, and Palamedes is beautiful, and Pyrrha is beautiful, and Hot Sauce is beautiful, and Born in the Morning and Beautiful Ruby and Honesty and, okay, maybe not Kevin, but— oh, please don’t write this down.”
It’s too late. Camilla’s already scribbling. Nona doesn’t even know where she got the paper from.
“What do you find beautiful about yourself?” Camilla asks. Nona wonders whether to reply, because she knows Camilla will write it down, but the answer bursts out of her anyway.
“My hair and my eyes and my skin and my hands,” Nona says. “My teeth. My eyebrows. My ears.”
“Your ears,” Camilla repeats.
“I like their shape.” Nona traces the shell of her ear with a finger. Harrow has never examined the shape of her ears this closely, only when wondering how many bone studs she can store in the cartilage.
“If you could look like anybody else, who would you want to look like?” Camilla asks.
“Crown,” Nona says, then crests with panic because if she looked like Crown she wouldn’t get to see Crown, and anyway, Crown wouldn’t be as beautiful if she was Nona, even if she looked exactly the same. “No, wait, I want to change my answer! I want to look like Noodle. He has the perfect number of legs.”
Camilla takes a long time writing. Nona returns to stroking the ends of her braids, the hair scratchy against the backs of her hands.
“You’re very different to the person whose body you’re in,” Camilla says, almost conversationally, a little-far off, like her mind is a hundred miles away. “I don’t think she ever looked into a mirror, except to pai— ignore that, leading statement.”
“That’s a shame,” Nona says, and she means it wholeheartedly. “She has such a lovely face. She gave me such a lovely face.”
Harrows claws at the wall of her dream, but nothing happens.
“Do you think she loves me?” Nona says.
“I love her,” Nona says.
“Whoever she is, I love her,” Nona says.
It takes Harrow a while to bounce back from that one.
&
“You know I love you, right?” Gideon says one morning, after months on that green-tinted, diminutive planet. Harrow didn’t have any dreams in the night. She has no new memories to unwind. She only has the yellow sun making shapes on the scratchy blanket and Gideon Nav, bare-chested, skin bright with scar, looking at Harrow with Harrow’s dark, bottomless eyes.
It’s not easy to face Gideon, not after everything Harrow’s done. She has never said I love you to somebody—at least, not as herself.
Her same hands. Jellyfish glow. Music on the radio. The world inside the world.
Harrow’s mouth makes the sound. Her body already knows how to say it.