Suited

by Jo Anderton

  Our loose collecting team did not go unnoticed as we headed down the seventh Effluent. We stopped at lamps, we poked drains, we peered over fences and into gaps in walls. Before the debris disaster that had almost destroyed Movoc-under-Keeper we had done this, and not been seen. Debris collectors were shadows, invisible to most pion-binders because they simply did not want to see us. But they knew us now; all of Movoc knew it was collectors who had saved them and that even though debris was rubbish clogging their precious pion-powered city, it could be dangerous.

  So now, we were watched.

  A young woman in a thick grey shawl stopped at the sight of us collecting a tiny cache of debris grains from the inside of a crack where two buildings joined. She stood across the street, gloved hands clasped at her chest, and watched until we turned a corner. We walked by a run-down coffee house. Conversation stopped. The scent of burned, cheap coffee turned my stomach even more than the regard of a dozen or so old men.

  I couldn’t decide which was worse – when the only attention we generated was mess-on-the-bottom-of-my-shoe looks, or this silent awe, this uncertain respect? It made me nervous. Would it last? And what did they expect from us now? Saviours of the city carried greater responsibilities than garbage collectors, even if we did exactly the same thing.

  Only Lad and Aleksey didn’t notice the attention. Lad hummed softly, hand holding mine, and scanned the street for debris as we walked. I could sense his nervousness, how much he hated doing this without his brother’s strong and protective presence by his side. It travelled in little tremors from the dips and highs in his tuneless song.

  I squeezed his hand back, not sure what else I could do to assure him that I was here, and I would look after him. Just like Kichlan did.

  Aleksey concentrated on his suit. He held the slowly spinning, faintly glowing band on his wrist close to his face. He peered at the symbols that bobbed in the not-liquid, and scrunched his face into a parody mask of concentration. Trying to work out how to mesh those symbols together, how to induce them to rise and free themselves from the band, to spread across his hand in one shining–

  “Tan?” Lad was staring at me, worried. “What are you doing, Tan?”

  I glanced down. My suit had spread from my wrist to wrap us both in metal, and had even risen to cover my jacket sleeve. It looked so strange, like that. Bright metal from forearm to elbow, skin-tight and solid, then the thick material of my coat puffed out and wide.

  “Sorry.” I gritted my teeth and forced the suit back.

  Lad disentangled himself. He stretched his fingers, flexed them, and caught my hand again. “It’s warm, Tan,” he said. “In your suit.”

  “Sorry, Lad. I didn’t mean–”

  He stopped in the middle of the street, eyes suddenly wide, expression distant.

  I knew that look. The last thing we needed now was the Keeper dragging us on one of his pointless underground quests into who knew what kind of danger. Not in front of Aleksey. Not now, so soon after the door that had almost killed us. “Lad?”

  His mouth moved, whispered words, and his gaze snapped suddenly to me. “Tan, he says he needs you, he says it has to be now! Oh hurry Tan, hurry!”

  He tried to pull away, to set us running, but I tugged on his hand and he stopped, shocked. “Lad, listen to me.”

  “But he–”

  “Remember yesterday; remember what nearly happened to us.”

  He ducked his head down, rubbed at his chin. “Saved us because we ran.” He squeezed his eyes closed and shook his head. “He is very upset. Very much.”

  My throat felt tight, restricted. Was this fair on Lad, to turn him into a rope tugged between the Keeper and me? I had promised Kichlan I would care for him, even if that meant protecting him from the Keeper.

  “And we will help him. But we will not run into danger again, we will not follow blindly.” I paused. “Does he understand?”

  Lad sniffed. “He is crying.”

  Great. “Let’s go then, follow him. But we will walk.”

  Lad’s idea of a walk stretched my arm until my shoulder socket hurt, and forced me into a trot. Natasha hurried to keep up, Mizra and Aleksey followed.

  “What’s going on?” Natasha hissed.

  “Keeper.” I glanced over my shoulder. Aleksey looked between us, puzzled, his gaze resting on Lad longer than I would have liked. I sighed.

  Lad wound a complicated way through streets and back alleys, ducking under fences, pushing through gates, until I wasn’t sure how we would find our way back, or even where in Movoc-under-Keeper we were. “Please, Tan,” he hiccupped words and tears ran down his cheeks as he forced himself to walk, not to run. “Saying stuff and I don’t understand and please, please, if you go he will be quiet.”

  What did the Keeper think he was doing?

  “Is… Is he all right?” Aleksey sounded taken aback.

  “He’s Lad,” Mizra answered, offering no further details.

  The crumbling brickwork of the tight alley we were following widened, and Lad slowed. The worn paving stones beneath our feet were old, laced with cracks, puddled with stains and craters. A roof of corroded iron shadowed us from the weak Movoc sun, held up by a latticework of metal beams and stone pillars.

  The whole structure looked like it could fall on us at any moment; it creaked and groaned at the slightest of draughts.

  Lad dragged me toward a building hidden in the shadows of the roof. More cracked and stained stonework, windows of shattered glass like sightless eyes, broken tubing protruding from gangrenous holes in the walls. Lad pointed to a doorway, curtained by rusted strips of a disintegrated roller door. “Says to go in.”

  “–good spot for debris collecting.” Natasha was explaining in a falsely reasonable, audibly strained voice. “Anywhere pion systems aren’t working cleanly.”

  “But it looks dangerous,” Aleksey said.

  “It often is.”

  I turned. Natasha, Mizra and Aleksey hesitated at the end of the alleyway, not quite ready to brave the unsteady structure. “We will go ahead,” I called to them. “No point risking all of us.”

  Natasha and Mizra nodded. Aleksey took a step forward. “Is that safe?” He glanced around. “Maybe I should–”

  “No.” Mizra and Natasha took an arm each, and guided him back to the relative safety of the alley.

  “If we stay here,” Mizra said.

  “We can help them,” Natasha said. “If something goes wrong.”

  “Need to hurry,” Lad murmured in my ear.

  I didn’t have time to wait for Aleksey to be convinced, so I allowed Lad to lead me around the sharp edges of the door’s remains, and into the building.

  It was a factory. Or, at least, it had been, many years ago. The charging machinery for compounded critical circles still remained.

  Lad paused beside a nine point loop, momentarily distracted. He waved a hand beside his ear, muttering to himself, but still traced the loop’s curling ceramic with his fingertips. “Tan?” He glanced at me, morose, torn, curious. “What is this?”

  It was so rare for Lad to ignore the Keeper’s pressure, to be able to do anything else than obey his voice. So the Keeper could just wait while I indulged him.

  “This helps the people who used to work in this factory.” The loop was old and splintered, but the general shape remained. Built of a pale ceramic, thin and delicate, it wound like a ribbon in a flower-petal pattern. Nine circles, all surrounding a tenth point in the centre where the ribbon knotted, thickened, and fed into a tube that plunged beneath the floor. “They work in teams of nine.” I pointed to each of the circles. “A person would stand in each of these, and the last one in the middle. They would hold onto the loop.” I clutched the ceramic only to feel it break against my hands. With a rueful smile I dusted white sand against my coat. “Then they’d send the pions that they charged along the loop, into the centre and down across the city’s systems to warm up someone’s home. At least, I think this was for heating.
”

  Lad listened, avid. “Did you use one like this, Tan? Before you came to work with us?”

  “No, Lad.” I allowed myself a chuckle. “I didn’t need one. I was stronger than that.”

  “Ah.” Lad closed his eyes. “Have to hurry, says we shouldn’t stop, shouldn’t talk. Just hurry, hurry.”

  The moment was gone.

  Lad led us deeper into the abandoned factory. Large, shattered glass sides still hung on the walls; the rotting wooden frames of tables and chairs huddled in a corner, covered in cobwebs and mould. Great holes let in light through the iron-mesh roof; the concrete beneath them eaten away by the elements. We stopped at one such crack in the floor.

  “Wants to talk to you,” Lad whispered. “Please.”

  My suit encased me gladly; tight and eager over my skin like a lover’s hands. It left me shuddering. The Keeper was pressed up against Lad in his world of doors, begging with him, pleading with him.

  “What are you doing to Lad?” I snapped.

  The Keeper didn’t miss a beat. He disappeared from Lad’s side, reappeared at mine. “You need to hurry, now, or it will be too late.”

  “You have to stop using Lad like this, you don’t understand–”

  “Tanyana, please. Or she will die.”

  I shuddered. “Who?”

  “Please? She’s on the floor beneath us.”

  “This whole place isn’t going to come down on my head again is it–?”

  “They are with her.”

  They.

  I pulled my suit back in. I didn’t want to leave Lad here, alone, like this, but I didn’t seem to have a choice. “Can you wait here for me?” To leave a distressed Lad all alone in an unstable and dangerous ruin, and I’d promised Kichlan I would look after him. Ah yes, there was that famous Tanyana luck again.

  He nodded, sniffing loudly.

  I gripped the broken concrete and swung down. It was far deeper than I’d realised, but my suit spread over my feet and legs before I hit the distant ground and took the impact of my fall. I didn’t fight the suit this time. I let it coat me feet to knees, wrists to elbows, and peered around me, the space lit by the suit’s glow.

  I was in some kind of tank. Every sound echoed, from the scrape of my booted feet to the rasp of my breath. The walls were white, paint peeling. Ceramic loops curled up from the floor, rising like trees in a knee-high forest from the bottom of the tank, thick as my wrist but flat, and evenly spaced, leaving paths between them. Pion storage? A way to keep heat-charged pions until they were needed?

  From the darkness and oppressive stillness, I heard a whimper. I wove a cautious path toward the sound. I saw a light that blinked unsteadily through the ceramic forest. The tank was enormous, easily as long and as wide as the entire building, including the courtyard with its unsteady roofing. Some of it was inaccessible, cordoned off into smaller tanks within tanks, and in places the loops tied into vast and complicated knots that reared above me.

  Half-hidden to the side of one such knot, I found a woman, moaning and shaking. Two oil lamps rested beside her on the cracked floor. In their unsteady light I knew instantly that she should not have been here. She was dressed in armour of black leather woven with thick blue thread, and she was Hon Ji.

  I crouched beside her. Her straight black hair had been cut short; her olive skin was sun-roughened and scarred. The ferocious Hon Ji dragon twisted across the chest of a narrow surcoat. The material was torn and muddied. She wore two empty scabbards, one at her hip and a smaller attached to her thigh.

  It was rare to see Hon Ji in Varsnia, even when tensions weren’t high enough to send Strikers gliding through the city. What was this woman? She was too small, too frail looking to be Mob – a heavily reinforced foot soldier, body strengthened by pions. But neither Strikers nor Shielders carried weapons. And why else would she be covered in countless tiny scars, like cuts from many blades, over her cheeks, neck and forearms?

  What was she doing here? A member of the Hon Ji military hiding in a storage tank below a long-forgotten factory in Movoc-under-Keeper.

  “Hello?” I said, unsure what else to do.

  Her eyes opened. Large, dark pupils fixed on me. The whites were so bloodshot they looked dirty, muddy with terror, and pain-wracked. And then she spasmed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She rattled words at me that I could not understand, while her body shook, thrashing against the floor and the wall at her back. I tried to grab her as her limbs smacked blood onto the ground, but she screamed and kicked at me as her limbs flailed.

  I scrambled back. What was going on?

  Then I saw it. It wound itself through the mesh of her armour like a snake. Not just one, but many, more than I could count. They writhed with her. In her.

  Debris. Pale tendrils of the stuff, no solid grains or flattened planes but a horrible liquid, serpent-like amalgamation of the two.

  I pressed my hands to my mouth to hold back rising vomit when I realised what was happening to the system of pions that bound her body together. Pions are in everything, after all, even us. The debris in her body would be interfering with them, just like it interfered with the systems that carried heat and light across the city. Bonds unfurling, connections breaking, systems failing. That was why she spasmed so violently, beating her own blood into the white ceramic floor, her back arching at an impossible angle. The debris was destabilising the pion bonds that held her body together and she was losing control. Within the body of every living creature was a pion system so complex even the most powerful of healers barely understood it. For all the bone shards they could pry from a living brain, there were the cuts that had to be sewn back together, and the deeper wounds that stripped us of our pion sight that we could not explain. We were all so much energy, so many connections, all tightly knotted.

  Bond by bond, pion by pion, the debris was undoing that.

  The suit tugged at me. It begged for release with a pressure in my bones and a tightening of my skin that I could not resist. The Hon Ji soldier woman closed her eyes as I allowed the suit to encase me again, but she did not stop screaming. A bottomless noise, all that horror I had seen in her dark eyes, forced into sound.

  Then the Keeper was there, yelling into my face.

  “–help her! I can’t help her and it hurts, damn you!” More dark tears down his transparent cheeks. The grains of debris that surged through his veins rushed like rivers, they stood out ferocious and throbbing against his paleness.

  I pushed him away. “What’s happening to her? Why is it doing that?”

  “It’s killing her! Stop it, Tanyana. Calm it. Don’t let her die.”

  The woman was insubstantial here, but the debris infesting her was clear. A great pallid knot of grains twisted together, joined by something like a moist membrane that quivered as it writhed. It was horrific, disgusting, the filthy insides of some diseased animal given movement and strength. But this one did not attack me, as the other debris creatures had. All it did was squirm within her, winding over and around itself, undoing her, gorging on the broken bindings and growing as it did so.

  “How did she get here?” I whispered. I knew I had to calm down; I had no hope of soothing the debris like this. But my bile rose and my suit tightened as horror shivered over my skin.

  “They brought her here,” the Keeper spat the words through the dark curtain of his tears. “They did this. Like you, like the others.”

  The woman screamed again, her voice dim in this world. The Keeper added his own cry and clutched at his head.

  For a brief, horrible moment I wondered what this was doing to him. The Keeper was debris, and debris was killing this woman. Could he feel it? Did he know what her pion bindings tasted like? And yet, he could not stop it. By turning the debris into this monstrous thing, the puppet men had taken the Keeper’s control away.

  Ancient guardian he might be. But with so much debris taken from him, tortured and animated into things like this, just what was he
now?

  How sane could the Keeper remain?

  The Hon Ji woman’s screaming subsided. The Keeper fell to his knees, still clutching his head. Through the silence I heard footsteps clearly, more than one person but made in perfect unison, walking slowly, echoing oddly against the walls and the tanks and the loops around me. Then voices, carefully loud enough, it seemed to me, just so I could hear them.

  “Only an abandoned factory,” one said. “This is not what we are looking for.”

  “Not deep enough,” a second puppet man continued. “And not old enough, for a connection through the veil.”

  “Not a waste of time though.” Their voices were all the same. It was impossible to tell them apart, or even how many there were.

  “Not at all.”

  The Keeper lifted his head. His face was in darkness, his eyes spilling as though cut. “She is a Half, Tanyana. Please. She is a Half.”

  A Half? Which way were those footsteps going? Was Lad still waiting in the factory like I had told him? Waiting, and alone? But they didn’t know what he was, did they? If they did, he would have been taken by now. The puppet men had already proven how easily they could step into our lives.

  Torn between the puppet men and the muted thrashing of a Hon Ji Half, I wavered. The woman rattled her words again.

  “She is begging you, Tanyana.”

  That returned my attention to the Keeper. “You can understand her?”

  “Of course.” He turned his weeping eyes to what remained of his Half. “Please, stop the hurt. Please, didn’t mean to. Please.”

  “Stop.” My whole body wracked. I could hear Lad saying those words in his clipped half-language. And it hurt me to know this poor, writhing creature was the same.

  I crouched, shuffled as slowly and non-threatening as I could manage. “Can you tell her I’m not going to hurt her?”

  The Keeper said something. She gasped back noises that could have been words. He hesitated.

  “What did she say?”

  He folded forward, so he was on his hands and knees, and approached us. “I’m not sure. She thinks you are some kind of… Something like the Other.”