Suited

by Jo Anderton

  Lad stopped suddenly, jarring my chest against his shoulder and knocking the breath from my lungs. “Says we are safe here,” he whispered, close to my ear. He was shivering, not only with the exertion of carrying me and dragging Kichlan. There was a terrified cold clamminess to his skin. As quickly as he had collected me he let me go, and I fell unprepared into the filth at his feet.

  “Tan!” Strong hands hauled me up. “You okay, Tan?”

  “I am.” I patted Lad’s arms and wiped more of the thick, putrid sludge from my clothes. “Thanks to you.”

  “He told me.” Lad kept his voice low. “Said we had to run.” He paused. “Really wants to talk to you now.”

  I could see the Keeper if I allowed my suit to spread from its six silver bands and cover all of me, but Lad could hear him all the time. He was a Half, belonging partly to this world and partly to the Keeper’s, always in the centre of a tug of war between them both. It accounted for his childishness, for the quickness of his temper and the brightness of his smile.

  And it wasn’t fair. We used him, the Keeper used him, and he never really understood any of it.

  “I’m sure he does.” But I did not obey the Keeper’s summons instantly. Instead – as I caught my breath and wrung water from my scarf – I turned to survey the tunnel behind us.

  “What was that?” Kichlan stood beside me. He touched my elbow, the gentlest caress of fingertips, and I leaned against him to let him know I wasn’t hurt.

  “Why are we standing here?” Mizra, his voice too high and far too loud in this place with its sharp acoustics, was still holding onto Sofia. “We need to get out of here. Now!”

  “Is safe now,” Lad murmured.

  “How do you know that?” Uzdal asked. He sounded much calmer than his twin brother.

  “Because the Keeper told him,” I answered. “Just as he warned us.”

  “And we can trust your Keeper.” Doubts weighed Kichlan’s voice, kept quiet so only I could hear.

  I glanced up and met Kichlan’s dark brown eyes. My Keeper?

  “Wants to talk to you,” Lad said.

  Needs to learn some patience too. But I nodded and released the bonds on my suit.

  Silver crawled cool and solid up along my legs, across my abdomen and chest, down arms and over shoulders. The sewer disappeared as the suit enveloped my chin, mouth, nose, and eyes, and was replaced by doors. I hated that moment, that instant between real world and the shadowed, door-riddled place the Keeper called home. But my suit longed for it, and as it wrapped me in its mask, the constant tug, the ever-present discomfort of metal in my bones eased into something like pleasure.

  To say it was unsettling would be an understatement.

  The Keeper leaned against a cracked and weathered-looking door, watching me anxiously. While he looked like a naked, hairless man with black eyes and thin, pale skin, he was actually debris – but quite a different form to the small lumps of floating darkness we collected.

  The door loomed tall above me, curving slightly overhead with the shape of the sewer wall. It appeared to be built from large planks of rough timber, stained mahogany faded by age, with a twisted copper handle turning green. It shook as though battered by a fierce wind, straining its rusted hinges and splintering cracks through the wood.

  “This is the beginning,” the Keeper said, and I wondered at his emotionless calm.

  Features slowly formed on the doors: the real world, bleeding through in faint outlines. Kichlan, by Lad’s side; Mizra, Uzdal and Sofia huddled in the sewer’s shallow; Natasha, rubbing her wrist. My collecting team, insubstantial, like light projected against the wood.

  I glanced around us. So many doors, just like this one, all tall and rattling. They crowded each other, allowing only slivers of darkness between them. This other world, this dark and door world, rumbled with the thumping of wood, the squealing of hinges, and the protest of handles.

  “What happened to the sewer?” I had to shout over their ruckus bang-bang-banging. “Why do you keep bringing us down here?” My throat felt dry, the words scraping. “You put Lad in danger.”

  The sound pounded into me, reverberating through the suit that coated my body. I ached to leave this place, to draw in the smooth metal that encased me so I didn’t have to listen to that sound. And feel it.

  I held the Keeper’s gaze, my silver mask reflected in the liquid black of his eyes.

  “I have been looking for one, just the right one, to show you.” The Keeper, for all his transparent skin and the dark lines of debris flowing visible through him, still managed a powerfully shamefaced expression. It was a skill he cultivated, each time he used Lad to call me to this world at the back of my collecting suit. “I’m sorry, but the doors are weaker underground, closer to the old city and the places that are even more ancient than that. So I had to bring you down here, because you need to see.”

  I approached the Keeper and the door, no longer aware of the push of water. The large step out from the sewer to a thin ledge was easy to make with the suit giving strength to my legs and reach to my arms.

  “The rest of your team should draw back.” The Keeper lifted his hand from the wood and stepped away.

  Dimly, I could hear Lad pass the Keeper’s warning on, and Mizra’s panicked, high-pitched response.

  Something tickled a warning in my bones as I leaned forward and peered at the wood I knew wasn’t actually wood, at the handle that didn’t exist, at the hinges screwed only into darkness. The feeling travelled from the suit’s second skin in pinpricks of fear, and a sense that this was very wrong.

  “Do not fear. I will close it this time.”

  I almost missed it. It was the tiniest of cracks, barely wide enough to fit a fingernail through, but the door was open.

  “It begins.”

  A breeze slid through the gap to brush against my face, the lightest touch of air and–

  –and it seized the silver that coated my face, it clutched at me so I could barely move, hardly breathe. That soft air drilled down through the layer of impenetrable metal to scorch my skin. I pulled back. It grabbed me, dragged me up against the rough wood so I was pressed to the small crack while invisible tendrils of air like fire, like ice, tore at the suit, penetrated down, further down to my skin, to my muscle and bone and–

  –the Keeper closed the door. One handed, with no apparent effort, the gentle twitching of his wrist.

  Released, I fell back, crashed onto stone and into water. Around me, inside me, my suit cried and rolled, discordant and painful. It clenched every part of me, like it was patting me down, making sure we were both still there, together, and the breath beyond that door hadn’t torn us apart.

  Stormwater lapped at my ears. Lying in sewerage, I stared up at the Keeper’s sad face. I was dimly aware of Kichlan shouting, of his hands slipping for purchase on my suit-wrapped arms.

  The bastard could have warned me, could have just told me, described, not dragged us through shit for moons just to, to–

  I thought of the sewer dissolving behind us, the boiling and the steaming of rock. Was that a warning, an illustration? Had he allowed the door to open long enough to almost flatten us, bury us, just to make his point?

  Was that what would happen to Movoc-under-Keeper if its doors opened?

  I forced control over my body and my suit. My mouth tasted like dirt and blood. I levered myself upright, shook off Kichlan. Lad let out a low, broken moan and I remembered what I had read in a hidden basement library, in an ancient book written with debris instead of ink.

  Fear for everything.

  Kichlan left to calm his brother, and again I climbed to the unsteady sewer edge.

  The Keeper still rested against the wood. Wood, I reminded myself, which was not wood at all. That door was debris, and it had once been part of the Keeper. But now, due to the pion manipulation that built the city above us, it had been stripped from the Keeper’s control. He’d warned us, he’d told us that the doors were a gateway between wo
rlds, and he existed to ensure they remained closed.

  “That was the other world, wasn’t it?” I asked. My voice sounded too loud, my suit and skin both brittle and thin.

  “The worlds are divided,” the Keeper said. “Dark world, Light world.”

  Yes, so I had read. And the Keeper alone could maintain the balance.

  “So that was darkness from the other world?”

  He shook his head. “Not darkness, nothingness. This world is solid.” He cupped his fingers as though trailing water. “That world is not. If they come together, both will be destroyed.” He drummed a beat on the wood. It echoed through my head. “This is the beginning.”

  And he was gone.

  Feeling thin, strung out, I withdrew my suit, dragging it back into the bands at my wrists, ankles, waist and neck. It resisted, tugging at my muscles and bones, setting my skin twitching.

  “What happened?” Kichlan was right in front of me. He grabbed my arm as my suit retracted and searched my face as though he might find the answer tattooed there, his expression frightening and shadowed in the steam-heavy sunlight filtering down from a grate above us.

  “Gone,” Lad said, quiet and glum.

  “It was–” I stuttered, not at all sure what to say to make them understand. I didn’t really know myself. “An open door.”

  “What does that mean?” Sofia hissed. “You should have seen yourself, Tanyana. I thought you were mad, jerking around like someone had you on strings. And when you fell like that, I thought you were hurt!”

  I smiled at her. “Worried about me?”

  “Of course.” She lifted her nose.

  “It was scary. And ripply.” Lad, eyes very wide, skin very pale, could have been mistaken for a ghost. “I didn’t like it.”

  “Neither did I.” I stroked his forearm. “What do you mean ripply?”

  He made wave motions with his hands. Ever-helpful.

  “The suit,” Kichlan translated. “When you started... moving, like that, and just before you fell. The suit did some very strange things.”

  “Ripply is a good word,” Sofia said. Lad beamed his bright smile at her.

  “It is.” Kichlan wiped sludge from his knees and jacket sleeves. “It looked almost liquid, like ripples in a pond. Except, that’s not quite right.”

  “I’d say sand.” Natasha, to my surprise, offered her own interpretation. “Lots of shifting grains of sand.”

  The hard, pliable metal of my suit changed to shifting grains of sand? “The open door destroyed the sewer. It dissolved it, right down to its pion bonds.” Right down to the pions themselves? What had happened to the pions in the sewer, what had started happening to the pions in my suit? Times like this I wished I could still see them. “And it started doing the same thing to me. Undoing me.” Turning me to sand, to liquid. To nothing.

  Mizra stepped away from me, hands raised, as though the nothingness that had destroyed the sewer and taken hold of me might be contagious. Uzdal scowled at him and shoved him forward.

  Cautiously, Lad took my hand. His none-too-gentle squeeze was an unspoken offer of support. I stretched to brush cobwebs from the mess of his blonde hair.

  Together, we stared at the rubble that had once been a sewer. Water was starting to pool around the earth and jagged stone. Sooner or later the sewer would flood, and the veche would be forced to employ architects to rebuild it. Would they wonder what had caused it? Would the wrongness of it all – the missing material, the heat-warped stone, and tangled, ruined pion systems – warn them that something terrible was happening in Movoc-under-Keeper, something they needed to stop?

  “The Keeper brought us down here to see this.” My words sent the heavy, pungent steam coming off the sewerage tumbling away from my mouth. “The door was opening, and he didn’t shut it, not straight away. So we could see this.”

  Kichlan spat into the fetid water. “I knew it.” He scowled, face flushed with anger beneath smears of muck and what was left of a spider that had foolishly tried to crawl on his cheek. “Your Keeper is dangerous.”

  I didn’t answer. What, really, could I say?

  “Spitting like that is a delightful habit,” Uzdal, hand still on his brother’s back, made a disgusted face.

  “It’s a sewer,” Kichlan growled. “I’m hardly going to get any dirtier, am I?”

  “Can we leave now?” Lad asked. “He’s gone.” He lifted a leg. “And it’s wet and stinks.”

  “Best thing I’ve heard all day.” Mizra needed no further encouragement to hurry back the way we had come.

  I was too weak to push myself through the flow so quickly. Almost as large as his younger brother, Kichlan lent me his strength, one hand on my shoulder, one on an elbow, keeping me balanced and moving.

  “There are so many doors,” I whispered to him. “And he said this was the beginning. If they all open...” I didn’t need to say it.

  “Then we need to do something about it.” He started to spit again, cast me a guilty look and stopped. “But that involves helping that Keeper of yours. Following him, listening to him. Trying to make sense of what he says.”

  And that was the problem.

  When we emerged – wet, filthy, and fatigued – and returned to our sublevel rooms, the veche was waiting. They stood under the decrepit awnings on Darkwater, creating a rough semicircle around the locked door. Two technicians, one of whom I knew. Two collectors like us, though I recognised neither of them. And two puppet men, pale, expressionless, looking damned near inhuman to me.

  Lad flinched at the sight of them and huddled against his brother. I forced myself to keep a steady pace, to show no apprehension, and meet Devich’s eyes squarely. I was proud of that. But I did not look at the puppet men, their wooden faces and emotionless, mouldy-green eyes; or the seams I had seen running along their skin, between mouth and chin, jaw and neck, along the hairline, like they were wearing masks, sewn on.

  “What do you want?” I didn’t even pretend politeness. Not for Devich.

  One of the new collectors cast me a surprised glance. He was a broad-chested man, wrapped in a thick leather coat and a head-hugging cap that could not hide an ugly-looking scar running diagonally across his forehead, nose and cheek.

  Fair enough, I supposed. The technicians that fitted our suits were employed by the veche and had considerable influence over our lives. They could inspect us on a whim, and even send us back to the horror of the suiting table like machines to be serviced. It would therefore be prudent to be polite to the men who could, if they desired, clamp us down and inject us with the Other only knew what.

  And that didn’t even take the puppet men into account. They reported directly to the national veche, to the most powerful members of the most powerful families in all of Varsnia. Unless you knew better, you’d think they might deserve some kind of respect.

  We, of course, knew better.

  Puppet men was not, strangely enough, their official title. With their wooden faces and seamed, ill-fitting skin, they reminded me of puppets. That, and the way they seemed to pull all the strings. They were directly responsible for the debris outbreak that had almost destroyed Movoc-under-Keeper not two moons ago, and they had done so simply to test new collecting suits. Suits like mine. They toyed with debris like vicious cats with damaged mice, and even though the Keeper had warned them not to, had begged them, they continued to do so. With each twisting, screaming, bleeding creature they tore from the Keeper’s control, another door grew.

  Devich cleared his throat. He looked anxious, and thinner than I remembered him, his skin a sickly sallow colour. Good. I didn’t believe his guilt-ridden, remorseful act for an instant, but at least it looked like he was suffering. Lying, veche-spawn bastard.

  “The veche has, ah, come to a decision.” Something in Devich’s rich green eyes pleaded for understanding. They ached in his formal expression, begged me to understand why he had been forced to seduce me, to betray me, and cast me to the claws of the puppet men; why I shou
ld forgive him.

  Those eyes could swim with emotion all they liked. I wasn’t interested.

  “A decision about what?” Kichlan passed his brother to Mizra and Sofia. Between them, they worked to keep him calm. The last thing we wanted was for Lad to draw attention to himself.

  Because if those puppet men realised he was anything more than the usual collector – that he could hear the Keeper’s voice – they would take him away. And Kichlan, I knew, would never let that happen. Not while he was still alive and in one piece.

  I really didn’t want to see that tested.

  “Your team has failed to meet quota for two moons now,” one of the puppet men said.

  “The veche believes you would benefit from fresh blood,” the second said, in the same voice.

  “And to this end, your collecting team has been disbanded.”

  The words hit me like a kick in the gut. If they wore any human expression, I was certain the puppet men would gloat. As it was, they simply watched us impassively.

  “Bro?” Lad whimpered like an injured animal.

  Numb, I turned. Kichlan had blanched a kind of sickly white, and for the first time since I had known him, he looked afraid. Not snappish, not ruthlessly organised and stoic. He looked as helpless – as frightened – as his brother.

  “Your new postings.” The second technician held a small stack of cards. Paper of any kind was rare, because most people corresponded with pions instead. Debris collectors like us, however, who couldn’t see those bright particles that everyone else manipulated, could not rely on messages written in their lights and projected from small glass slides.

  Where would the puppet men send us? They could disperse us to the edges of Varsnia if they wanted. Or would they send us to the colonies? Did they even need debris collectors on the frontiers?

  “Tan?” Lad tugged against Mizra’s hold.

  “Oh, come now.”

  I spun. Both puppet men were fixed on me, empty eyes boring through my skin to the suit in my very bones. It seemed to tighten under their scrutiny; the band between my sleeve and glove spun faster, symbols crowding each other and desperately shifting form. I folded my hand into a fist and forced the suit back under my control.