will you promise not to hurt us? Nor set nobody else on to do it?”
She lifted up her head and looked at me. She didn’t say nothing; she only looked. I think she meant that look to cow me and defy me, but her sorrowing was bigger than her hate and I wasn’t cowed. “You gonna promise that?” I asked again.
“No,” she says. “I ain’t.”
“So even she agrees she’s a danger,” Monono said. “That’s almost unanimous, Koli-bou.” She swapped to the induction field then. “I thought you were going to die, dopey boy. I’m not ready for that just yet.”
“Well, I can’t sort this out,” I said. “And I can’t tell any one out of the three of you what to do or what not to do. I can only make up my own mind, and I’m not uncommon good even at that.
“But here’s what. I’m going to London, because that was my idea in the first place, even before Monono said there was a signal there. And I’m taking Cup, if I got to carry her, because it’s clear she won’t live long if I leave her. Then once I’m out of Calder, I’m untying her hands and letting her go where she wants to, whether that’s Dandrake’s garden or the dead god’s Hell. Ursala, I got to thank you for all you done for me, but it seems like this is where we go our different ways.”
“And what about me, little dumpling?” Monono says.
Well, that floored me, and I did not have no answer.
I already remarked on how I spent most of my time since I found the DreamSleeve, one way or another, sitting in a hole in the ground. It’s true in another way too, only I didn’t see it until this moment I’m telling you about now. The moment when we was standing in the clearing, a little way away from the river, talking about who was to live and who was to die like we had got the right to say. The reason I didn’t see it was because this was a different kind of hole.
It wasn’t altogether my fault, for it was a hole I growed up in, kind of, and the things that’s all around you when you first come into the world is ever after invisible to you, unless you make a great effort to see them.
In Mythen Rood, tech was either a thing that answered to you or a thing that didn’t. If it did, that was a glorious thing. The tech become yours, and it lifted you up over everyone else. So tech was owned, and the owners of it was called Ramparts to set them apart and above.
Then I come along, and I got a piece of tech for my own self. I thought my fortune was made until Catrin and them teached me better. But even after that, I never stopped thinking the DreamSleeve was something I owned. Even though it had someone living inside it.
If I owned the DreamSleeve, I owned Monono.
So I guess I didn’t own the DreamSleeve after all.
I stood there for a long while with nothing to say, turning over the thoughts I just set down. It was like I was trying to unravel a thread, only it kept ravelling itself up again and I could not find the end of it.
“You got to decide for yourself, Monono,” I said at last. I was split in two, kind of. I heard the words being said at the same time I said them, and I was dismayed. What’s that then? I thought. What happens if she says she won’t go with me? Am I going to leave the DreamSleeve lying on the ground? Or give it to Ursala to take with her, saying she had got to treat Monono right, like you might do with your pet dog when you was going off to hunt?
How could someone be free to make their own choices when they was stuck inside a box?
“Oh, I pre-decided,” Monono said. “I think Ursala is right that your brains are all scrambled up like eggs, but you’re still my favourite breakfast. I’m not going to leave you, Koli-bou. Not yet anyway.”
I was sort of weak with relief at that. And I didn’t ask what not yet meant, for I was not in no hurry to find out. I was going to have to figure out answers to the rest of them hard questions, but they could wait until I had more time to think on them.
Ursala took a good while longer to make up her mind, but she seen well enough that we was more likely to thrive if we stayed together. Also, Monono was the one who knowed where that signal was coming from, so finding it would be much easier with her than without her.
But Ursala laid down her own rules for what we was to do with Cup, starting with the rope that bound her hands. The rope was not nearly enough, Ursala said. She went to the drudge and got some strips of bandage that was startling white, like snow. She wrapped them around Cup’s hands and arms, tying the ends off tight. This was on top of the ropes, so Cup would not have a chance of getting to the one set of knots since she would have to slip out of the other set first.
“How is she gonna feed herself?” I asked.
“Oh, how stupid of me,” Ursala said, though her calm face didn’t fit with the words she was saying. “I didn’t think of that. Sorry, Koli. I don’t think she can. You’re going to have to do it for her.”
She turned her back on me and gun to put away her tent and the things that was inside it.
A little while later, we was on our way.
And where we went after that, and where we come to at last, is the next thing I mean to tell.