They're taken into the First House and Gideon's description shows both the dramatic differences between First and Ninth, and the sequestered life she's experienced. She's amazed by the fountain, the staircase, the abundance of wood and marble and glass. All old and moldering, abandoned, but immense and rich. It is apparent to her that the best of the Ninth was bad when it was new. You can hear her sense of perspective stretching.
The priests gather everyone. There's tea, which is another new experience: Gideon's first hot drink. Can you imagine, in a place cold enough that your room heat turned off will kill you, to never drink something hot?
Then there's religion. Teacher leads a prayer, and everyone but Pro, the Third House twins, and Harrow+Gideon join in. Gideon has never heard it. Then teacher asks for a Ninth prayer and Harrow obliges. As Gideon watches everyone, she notices how odd the Ninth religion actually is.
They're given one key (given to the cavaliers), and the instructions. Gideon's thoughts are humoring her, imagining the necromancers excited for training with "Dr. Skelebone". Instead they're just told the skeletons would attend to their needs, and they have one rule: don't go into locked rooms without permission.
They're led to their rooms which are huge and musty. Gideon abandons the cavalier bed at the bottom of the adept bed and puts her things down in the next room. She's looking out the window when she sees the shuttles being pushed over the edge into the sea by skeletons. Why? Huge weird waste when they're remote piloted anyway.
We still haven't met the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, or 8th..
Crux hauls Gideon down all the stairs to the sanctuary. She rouses and makes a feeble escape attempt, but he kicks her in the head and she passes out. She comes to sitting or laying on a pew. It's so cold that she can see her breath and her skin is frozen to the pew. The church service is explained, and it sounds so weird. Maybe less weird to Catholic people, dunno. All of the nuns are using bones knotted on cords for prayers. However they're not praying out loud, so you can just hear a bunch of bones rattling. Gideon says that half of the sanctuary is filled with skeletons. She said that the sanctuary could fit a thousand so that suggests like 500 skeletons. The section made me really wonder about who is left on the 9th period and what happened after all the kids were killed. Did all the parents commit suicide after that, or were there not really parents there. Or did they find some way to make their peace and now they are nuns or what do they say, hermits? Solitairies? The sanctum has one row of gas light that is dim, and there is bioluminescent powder dusted on arches. Harrow has the bioluminescent powder dusted on her face, which sticks to the blood trails coming from her nose. Gross.
The nuns are described so oddly. Two are blind, and have black strips of cloth across their faces with eyes painted on.
Then ... Then we become A-okay with Gideon hating Harrow, and we hate her too. Except for a little tiny piece of knowing her that slips in beside. And that piece hurts like a splinter.
Harrow at church is simpering. She reads the summons from Jod. [[It is such a lie, Cytherea or no Cytherea, such a lie]]
Ortus and his mother are sad and loud. Harrow obviously plotting more. Then at the end, when Harrow tells Gideon that she's known for a week. That she chose not to do it then because she wanted to wait until Gideon thought she was actually away, to take it from her. Harrow's expression, Gideon thinks, is the same as it was the day they found Harrow's parents' bodies: blank.
Then Harrow yanks us back from that splinter of sympathy, "Because I completely fucking hate you. No offense."
This chapter clued us in on the weird cultishness of the Ninth House, needed for when they meet the others. It gave more backstory on Harrow. And it furthered the aggression between them. Given that it's Gideon's perspective we don't get a ton of sympathy for Harrow yet.
I wallowed for about 14 hours after finishing my Nona reread and decided to start over again and write myself some summaries during The Wait.
Gideon the Ninth Chapter 1
In which we learn Gideon is a goob but we love her.
Gideon is escaping. She stole a security cuff key but left the cuff on until the morning of. She's taking her sword, her "shoes" - later called steel toed boots- , and her smut mags. Her clothes are all synthetics. She has enough hair to brush. She knows about chocolates and fancy hotels, somehow ... from mags? From Wake/mom's niche is 22 flights of stairs up to the landing field, which is still at the bottom of a deep tunnel. There are lamps on but they're low. She's kicking apart lumps of "rubble" but that's not further described. She eats porridge from a plastic bag then throws the bag over a rail somewhere. There's a balcony area. Skeletons with red eyes go to pick snow leeks.
There are white castle doors at the bottom, "three bodies wide and six bodies tall". She talks about the figures carved into the area above the doors and remembers screaming as a kid about them creeping her out. I wonder what they are, maybe related to the killed generation? How much trauma from a two year old survivor of all the kids dying?
Muster call (20 Bells) calls back the skeletons.
That's when the Marshall/Crux stomps in to accuse her. Gideon says, "say my shuttle exploded, I died and it was such a shame". 😳 (Crux thinks great idea, will do) Introduces Frontline Titties of the Fifth. He calls her chattel. He wears a big knife over a shoulder.
He gives an impressive number of threats. Gideon wasn't bothered by Crux's threats. But then he invoked Harrow and her "palms prickled". He leaves and Aiglamene enters. Gideon says she's tried to enlist 33 times. Aiglamene has a badly repaired missing leg and a scarred face.
Gideon lists what's happened when she's tried to leave before: jammed in lift, turned off heat frostbite in three toes, poisoned. She clarifies that she's indentured not a slave and claims she's not of fiscal use there. She says she will "you can quote me 'do my duty to the ninth' ". Gideon goes on a rant about "your lady" with a host of great insults, then gets slapped.
"Nobody had ever loved her in the ninth". Aiglamene was the reason she got to have a sword and training. "I'm naturally demeaning". Aiglamene walks away and Gideon falters a bit but sticks.
"Nav was a Niner name". Mentions the prison as a bubble halfway up in the atmosphere. At the end of the chapter we get the limited story of day-old Gideon being in a bio container plugged into the suit of a braindead woman who had fallen in a suit down the shaft 18 years ago. None of the Ninth necromancers could get her ghost to do more than scream Gideon three times then she fled.
"They chipped her, surnamed her, and put her in the nursery". I don't think they mention the chips again, interesting. She was kid #201. Where did the kids come from? Had they been harvesting gametes and growing them? Because the "old" people going into the doors were heavily outnumbered by skeletons. Then two years later it was just her, Harrow (who still hasn't been directly introduced as other then Lady), and Ortus. By 10 she "knew too much and that she could never be allowed to go". Of course. Because that's when Harrow had opened the tomb and her parents had died. She had started trying to escape when she was 4.
Thoughts. What's up with all the plastic? Isn't plastic from petroleum? How would Pluto have petroleum?
“It is the first day of November, so today, someone will die”
“‘will not be your weakness Sean Kendrick’ ‘it’s late for that, Puck.’”
“The sky and the sand and the sea and Corr”
“She stands beside Corr looking up at him. I want her to love him.”
“‘Something tells me my spit wouldn’t mean as much to Corr as yours would.’ There’s a long pause before Sean speaks. He says, ‘Maybe not yet’” (bonus: “Yet! I don’t think I’ve heard such a fine word before.”)
“‘That’s a poor match, Sean Kendrick. Neither of you are a housewife.’-‘you swallow her with your eyes. I’m surprised there’s any of her left for the rest of us to see’”
“Their clothes don’t come off with your eyes, Sean Kendrick”
“I draw myself up next to her and look at her profile, making no effort to disguise my attention, here, where there is only Puck to see me. The evening sun loves her throat and her cheekbones. Her hair the color of cliff grass rises and falls over her face in the breeze. Her expression is less ferocious then usual, less guarded.”
Page 60.
“‘You two are a strange pair. You are a pair, aren’t you?’ ‘We’re in training.’”
