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Palamades found himself entwined in the arms of the two people he loved most in the world, Camilla and Dulcinea, sleeping at his side in the Sixth House's barracks.
“Ah, silly me,” Palamades pronounced with belated realization. “This must be a dream!”
“That’s impossible, Warden.” Camilla said, both of her eyes opening as fast as a camera’s shutter. She rose up from the white sheets of the bed, wearing an equally white nightdress, and looked around them. “But, I am forced to admit, against the odds, that I don’t know where we are either. It certainly looks like the Sixth House, but how? It’s simply inconceivable, Warden!”
“Then, stop racking your brain for rare negatives and help me look,” said Palamades, cracking a wry smile at his cavalier before pulling her into a long and indulgent hug.
“I missed you, Warden,” she mumbled into his neck, before he gave her a kiss on the forehead. “As much as I enjoyed being Paul for a while, I think I prefer it like this.”
“As do I,” Palamades exclaimed breathily. “There are vanishingly few people in the whole universe that I could share a body with, and both of them are sitting on my left and right hands.”
“Ditto.” Camilla said mechanically, before looking down at Dulcinea, whispering in a single breath: “holyshitit’sactuallyDulcie.”
“I know, right!” Palamades said excitedly, no longer caring if his voice roused the red-haired girl from her rest. “I saw her ghost but I didn’t know why until now! She finally made it to the right side of the River!”
Camilla’s brain, as always, was running a mile a minute. “You saw her in the River? When?”
Palamedes turned to Camilla, confusion on his face, before remembering with horror that she no longer could read his mind. “In Ianthe’s terrible mind palace thing, when we were duking it out for control over Naberius’ body. It was the most miserable experience of my life, Hect. I still feel like I need a cigarette.”
“We’ll get a nicotine patch for you later. Keep talking.” Camilla said brusquely, before clambering over the bed to check Dulcinea’s vitals. She confirmed that the woman was breathing, but none of the machinery to which she was hooked up was functioning anymore, including the pulmonary drain which Palamades had designed.
“Damn!” said Palamades Sextus, shaking his fist dramatically at the ceiling. “If only I still had my repair tools and a 10 kilowatt generator. This would be an extraordinarily simple fix.”
“The power isn’t the issue here, Warden,” said his cavalier, pointing at the outlet in the wall. “Everything is plugged in, see? It’s something else that’s blocking it.”
Dulcinea roused uncomfortably in her sleep, and Palamedes felt just a touch of panic lick his heart. He wouldn’t lose the chance to meet Dulcinea in person, not after all that they’d been through to get to this point.
Pushing up his glasses, he focused on activating his psychometry—vision going white for a moment before he could begin to see the traces left behind by thanergic activity. The walls and floor were clean of anything, as were the machines hooked up to Dulcinea. Even Dulcinea herself only had the faintest trace of her House’s power, the illness which had ravaged her physical body leaving little power left for her soul. An infusion of thalergy twice a day for the next week or so would be in order, once this crisis had reached its end.
“Palamades!” said Camilla, jerking him out of his investigation with a hand. “Are you listening?”
“Now I am,” said Palamades with a rueful smile crossing over his face. “What is it, dear?”
“It’s not working. Nothing is working,” Camilla explained. “When I tried to open the door, it didn’t budge. When I went to the computer, it didn’t turn on. We’re thoroughly trapped in here.”
“Hmm,” Palamades said, stroking the patchy collection of hairs on his chin that could only generously be described as a beard. “It would very much help to know where here is.”
“Camilla! Warden! Can you hear me?”
The unnaturally cheery voice of Archivist Juno Zeta, the person who contributed the most genetic material for Palamedes to be born, came fuzzily over the intercom.
“Yes, we can!” answered Camilla. “Can you hear us? Where are we?”
“That’s a tricky question to answer…” the voice of Archivist Zeta came through again, losing none of its artificial cheer.
“Out with it, Mother,” Palamades said, the word Mother lumpy and awkward in his throat. “We need to understand the situation fully before we can continue working!”
“Ah, see. That’s the issue. There’s not all that much that can be done,” the Archivist said, the light titter of a suppressed laugh in her voice. “We’re deep in the River now. Just below the Bathyrhoic layer, perhaps? I didn’t think to ask before Her Royal Highness stuck us here!”
“Alecto? Why would she—?” Palamades fell to the ground, clutching his head as scattered memories came back to his mind in a flood. Camilla tried to put a steadying hand on his shoulder, but the warmth of her skin only burned him more, like a space heater cranked too high within an enclosed room.
“She wanted us out of the way, so we’re out of the way!” Archivist Zeta said. “Once Harrow signed off on it, there was little we could do to stop them.”
“But Paul wouldn’t give up… we wouldn’t—”
“We did our best, I’m sure,” said Camilla Hect, voice faltering but still reassuring. “I trust that Harrow knows what she’s doing.”
“Well, I don’t!” Palamedes shouted back, tearing at his scalp with his fingernails. “After all we did for her, after all we did for Nona, they trapped us in the River again! Too damn far away to be of any use to them!”
The hard lines of Camilla’s face only became more deeply set.
“If Nona asked you to step aside, would you?”
In that moment, Palamades wanted nothing more than to emphatically disagree with as many rare negatives as he could pull out of his mind. He loved Nona, still loved Nona, even if she was different now—in fact, precisely because she was different now. There was still so much of that girl he, Camilla and Pyrrha had raised in Alecto, and it hurt so very much that she no longer needed them anymore.
“We did step aside, and we would do it all over again, Camilla. Wouldn’t we?” His voice broke on the final rhetorical question, feeling his heart break into a thousand pieces all over again as he collapsed into Camilla’s arms.
“Archivist Zeta,” Camilla called out. “Are you still there?”
“Yes, of course,” his mother’s voice came through the intercom, just the slightest hint of unease now creeping in. “Are you okay? There was a lot of screaming.”
“We’re fine, but we’re stuck in here. The doors won’t open.”
“Ugh! Not the emergency locks,” Zeta groaned. “I thought I broke all of those after the debacle with Doctor Sex.”
Even after all these years, Palamades could still detect a hint of a chuckle in Camilla’s throat at hearing the name.
“We’ll send Kiana down to fetch you. Sit tight in the meanwhile,” Zeta continued. “Is there anyone else there with you?”
“Dulcinea is here, too.” Camilla said. “Or at least, her sleeping body is.”
“Oh, right! I think her spirit may be out for some walkies?” Zeta said, the word unfamiliar in her mouth. “Something that Aim had mentioned back in the Erebus. I don’t really understand it.”
“That’s good,” said his cavalier as she picked him up into a princess carry, depositing him unceremoniously on the bed next to Dulcinea. “How much oxygen do we have down here, by the way?”
“Hah!” Archivist Zeta said, voice completely and utterly without humor. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to, Camilla.”
And the intercom went off.
Palamades struggled to keep his eyes open as Camilla took care of him: putting his glasses back on the nightstand and pulling the sheets up above his body. It was only now, extremely belatedly, that he realized he was wearing the exact same type of night dress that Camilla and Dulcie were wearing, and that he should probably have thought to have been embarrassed about this.
“I look ridiculous, Camilla,” Palamades muttered to himself. “What if Dulcinea wakes up and sees me like this?”
“She’ll think it looks cute. She likes cute things, according to Letter #12,” Camilla said. “You already know that.”
“I’m sorry,” Palamades replied, feeling tears of exhaustion well in the corners of his eyes. “My ‘Paul’ plan didn’t work, and now I’ve screwed the pooch harder than it’s ever been screwed before.”
“We screwed the pooch, Warden. Now, let’s get some rest with Dulcie before Kiana gets here.”
“What if we don’t wake up, Hect? What if we die of oxygen deprivation, trapped under hundreds of miles of River?”
“Then breathe lightly,” Camilla said simply, giving him a kiss on the forehead. “And through your nose.”
She clambered into bed next to him and the still sleeping body of Dulcinea, whose soul was still on her walkies, and threw her arm over both of them. Palamades clutched the meat of her arm as waves of panic rose and fell in his chest before, mercifully, he was taken into a calm and dreamless sleep.