Suited

by Jo Anderton

  We passed a group of children, hurried along by governesses in rich dresses. I wondered what they could be doing this far from the Keeper’s Tear River. An excursion to learn how poor, less-skilled binders live? Kichlan and I were forced closer to each other in order to walk around them. He slipped an arm through mine in the process, and even when the children were long gone, he did not let me go.

  Kichlan headed for Eugeny’s house. Arms locked as they were, it seemed I was going with him. I wasn’t about to untangle us.

  Only when Eugeny’s squat building came into view, did Kichlan slow down. “Another few days?” he whispered. “Let me think up an excuse to give Lad first. I do not want him involved in this.”

  “I agree.”

  Fedor had given us a scouting mission. Something nice and easy to start us off. Simple. He didn’t know where and when yet, but would tell us soon, so we should be ready.

  I hoped our role remained that way: simple.

  “Let’s hope Fedor does not expect us to follow his commands blindly.” Kichlan placed a hand on the door’s handle, and hesitated. “I’m willing to go along with this, but not if it puts my brother in danger.” A pause. “And not if it puts you in danger either.”

  My heart did a strange little flip. “I know.”

  But even as Kichlan turned the handle the door flew open. He staggered and almost fell against Eugeny’s chest. The old man looked wild, the edges of his face lit by the oil lamps behind him, eyes shining and fearful. Great purple bruises darkened his eyes, his chin, and his cheek was deeply grazed and oozing blood.

  “What–?” Kichlan grasped the doorframe to keep his balance.

  “Lad is gone,” Eugeny said. “He’s gone.”

  4.

  “I don’t know what happened.” Eugeny sat at his kitchen table, in front of a popping fire, cradling a badly bruised arm. “After you left, he seemed happy, his usual self. He helped me with the chores, mucked out the stable – you know he loves that horse.” Eugeny sucked air through his teeth as Kichlan tested his wrist.

  I stood against the wall, close to the warmth of the fire, so I couldn’t see most of the old man’s injuries. The black marks around his eyes and cheeks were difficult to look at. Kichlan pursed his lips as he inspected Eugeny’s arm, his skin ashen. I couldn’t decide if that was due to Lad’s absence, or Eugeny’s face.

  “That hurts, boy.”

  “I don’t think it’s broken,” Kichlan said, his voice so low it was nearly consumed by the fire.

  For a moment, I wondered how he knew. Then I considered a life spent with his strong, volatile brother, and realised he probably had far too much experience.

  “Well that’s something.” A moment of pained tension and heavy breathing. “Started just after we ate. He began talking to himself, pacing. Asking for you both. I couldn’t calm him, it got worse and worse. Then he wanted to leave, and I tried to stop him.”

  Kichlan sat forward, pressed a cloth damped by fire-warmed water against the cut on Eugeny’s cheek. I looked away.

  “Well, you can see what he did.”

  A log burst loudly in the fireplace. I watched an ember leap for freedom and wink out silently on the stone floor.

  “I should have been here.” Kichlan sat back, rubbed his eyes. “I should never have left him.”

  “Boy.” Eugeny touched Kichlan’s hand lightly, loosened his tightly clenched fingers and held them. “You can leave this old man be, get out there and find your brother.”

  “I can’t leave you alone again. Not like this.”

  “I can look after myself.”

  Kichlan hesitated, until I said, “We will use my suit, the symbols. It will take us right to him. We won’t be gone long.”

  Then the call came.

  It blared bright from my wrists, streaming sharply into Kichlan’s face and the back of Eugeny’s head. Kichlan’s came an instant later, and together we turned to direct the shining maps onto the kitchen walls.

  “A debris emergency?” The old man turned, and peered at us through swelling skin.

  Kichlan and I shared a long, heavy look. We knew where these calls came from. Every so-called emergency the veche and their puppet men had called us out on had turned out to be a test.

  “Another one?” Kichlan grated out the words.

  “They called both of us,” I answered. “Both teams. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”

  He scowled. “We need to find Lad.” A flick of his wrist and his map disappeared. “The veche can go hang themselves and their debris. I am going to search for my brother instead.”

  I slowly shook my head. “Can’t you see?” Tension ran tight through my bones, along the lines of my suit, made sharp by the bright light of the debris emergency. It was all so clear to me. I could feel it in the metal deep within.

  “See what?”

  I flicked off my map as well. Instead, I placed two light fingers on the band around my wrist. I could follow the surging and the dipping of the symbols there, better than any projected map. The debris cipher buzzed violently against my fingertips. Lad’s symbol was strange – pulsing, and doubled-up, almost as though there were two of him – and he was right beside the debris.

  “The Keeper,” I whispered. The words felt like poison on my tongue. “Do you think Lad left on his own? Do you honestly still believe he was talking to himself?”

  Kichlan’s face closed up, solidified into a dark expression of anger and frustration. “That bastard.”

  “We need to go. We need to hurry. Whatever is causing this,” I waved the blinding suit band in front of Kichlan’s face, “the Keeper will be there. With Lad.”

  “Other’s hells!” Kichlan balled his hand into a fist and smacked the stone wall. “Damn him!”

  “Kichlan!” Eugeny pushed himself to his feet. “Destroying your hand, and my wall, will get you nowhere. I can look after myself. You need to go and find your brother.”

  “I should have been here!” He drew his arm back for another swing. I caught him, and he stilled instantly.

  “Not you,” I hissed. My own anger fought with the suit’s tension and between them, something twinged against the metallic scars low across my belly. “Me, Kichlan. The Keeper is doing this to get to me, just like the veche is doing this to get to me. So can’t you see? We have to go, now, because somewhere the Keeper and the puppet men are wrecking debris havoc and Lad is with them. Lad! So we have to go, Kichlan, and keep them away from him.”

  Colour drained from Kichlan’s face and I knew he understood. If we didn’t hurry the puppet men, waiting for me, waiting to test me, would find only Lad to distract them. “No,” he breathed the words. “I can’t let them take him.”

  “Exactly.” I turned to Eugeny. His battered face was set and determined.

  “Hurry,” was all he said.

  Still clutching Kichlan’s forearm, I dragged him from his home. He sagged like a dead weight behind me, like all the fury and frustration had leaked from him with the colour in his cheeks. I released him only to touch my suit, to follow its instructions. Kichlan did not speak, it seemed like it was taking all of his strength to stay upright.

  “Tanyana!”

  I spun. Natasha, Mizra and Aleksey ran towards us, their wrists beaming flickering maps on the walls. Mizra stared in horror at Kichlan, but still took his arm from me when I asked.

  “Lad is missing,” I said, and that was explanation enough. Mizra and Natasha shared shocked glances before peering uncertainly at Kichlan.

  Aleksey frowned. “The big guy, right?” he said, after a moment. “Well, I’m sure he can look after himself.”

  I fought an urge to slap him as Kichlan jerked his head up, and focused. “You’re what?”

  “Enough,” I snapped at both of them. “We need to hurry.” I turned on Mizra. “Can you help Kichlan? They’ve been called too.”

  Mizra scowled. “Both teams? That’s odd, isn’t it?”

  “I know. Believe me, I know.�
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  Aleksey glanced between us, confused. But I wasn’t about to take the time to explain.

  “Don’t bother,” I said, as Natasha beamed her map against the wall. Without Kichlan hanging on to me I could follow the map on my wrist with far greater efficiency.

  We ran. I tried not to imagine what was awaiting us, what debris creature the puppet men had summoned to test me with, and what that thing was doing to Lad. Why had the Keeper dragged him from the safety of Eugeny’s house?

  “What are you doing?” Aleksey ran with surprising ease for a man of his size. He did not even sound out of breath as he matched my pace and peered pointedly at my wrist.

  “It’s a map,” I answered, shortly, and took a sudden corner. He stayed by my side.

  “I know, at least, it is on the wall. I know the symbol for me, and I know the one for debris.” In the sharp suit glow and the on-and-off light of passing lamps his self-effacing smile took on something sinister, something ingratiating and false. “Natasha explained it to me and I’m glad she did. Can you imagine something like this happening when I’ve only just started?”

  I said nothing, though I could imagine it quite well. After all, it had happened to me.

  It didn’t deter him. “So I understand it’s a map, but you’re reading it with your fingers.”

  I slowed slightly to allow Mizra, Natasha and Kichlan to catch up. With a short sigh I explained, in no real detail, that the symbols on his wrist were the map, and that he could follow them by touch alone. I did not explain that Lad had a symbol of his own. Or that the Keeper was there, with the debris, and that debris was more than a clump wriggling in symbol form in some glowing corner. That it was all around us.

  But still, as we ran, Aleksey tested the map on his own suit with his fingers. His eyes widened as he felt bumps in the road before we came to them, and he anticipated corners, gates, and fences in our way.

  “Remarkable,” he gasped as he leapt over a pothole he could not have seen otherwise. Despite everything I found myself smiling with him, and wondering fruitlessly again what we could achieve if we knew how to read all of these symbols, this long-lost language of the Unbound.

  “Kichlan!” Sofia, Uzdal and Fedor appeared at the intersection of a street. Sofia rushed to take Kichlan, while Fedor met my eyes and nodded a guarded greeting.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Sofia cried out again, tone high-pitched, panicked and far too loud for my liking. She wrapped her arms around Kichlan’s chest and stared up into his blank face. “It’s Sofia. I’m here now. Everything is okay. Please talk to me.”

  I let the others explain and, fingers pressed to my suit, continued forward. The debris symbol – that box-like shape, split by lightning with dots on either side – buzzed and shook like a terrified creature. I had never felt anything like it.

  Beside me, Aleksey swore. “Is this normal?”

  I glanced up at him. The scar across his nose was stark in the suit-light. I must have looked much the same. “Nothing about this is normal.”

  But when I turned the final corner, when the pull of the map died and was replaced by my suit tugging, aching, demanding to be let free, there was no terrible mass of debris grains growing with each dark and lancing plane. No waves of it rolled over my feet. No creature stalked between realities ready to rip us all apart.

  The street opened out to a wide square. I could make out quiet market stalls folded up for the night, their wares visible but secure inside boxes of thick, clear poly. Any signs written in pions that may have given details and prices were probably dimmed, but we had no way of knowing. So too the bright renders – images of bears, usually – that loped through the market for the entertainment of children. Vegetables to be sold raw or roasted were stored at one end of the market, beside frozen meat and long tanks full of dark-scaled Weeping carp. Cheap, factory produced clothing, only available in grey, beige or a sickly kind of green, was piled at another end. Cooking ware, cutlery, small items of furniture and ghastly poly reproductions of the Keeper Mountain were scattered liberally throughout the square.

  In the middle of this, beneath a tall, fitfully flickering lamp with ornate, flame-shaped glass, crouched a single person. He wept, long and low, and as a breeze ruffled blonde curls bronzed by the flickering light I realised it was Lad.

  Then I saw why he was crying.

  “That’s him, isn’t it?” Aleksey murmured beside me. “Lad?”

  “Lad!” Kichlan tore himself from Sofia’s gentle hands, shoved Aleksey aside, and ran toward his brother.

  My suit pulsed into life. It coated my legs with a quicksilver slick and propelled me forward. Two swift, long strides and I caught him. The suit gloved my arms and my fingers bit hard into Kichlan’s shoulders. I forced him down, held him against the cobblestones as he struggled and swore at me.

  Lying against his back, I whispered a constant stream of words into his ear. “Quiet, Kichlan. Wait. Just wait. Calm down. Are you calm?”

  “What are you doing to him?” Sofia shrieked.

  I looked up. Lad turned, face stricken in the lightning flashes of the pion-powered lamp.

  “Get off him!” Sofia ran to my side. “Tanyana, let him– oh– Other–” Her words choked off into silence.

  A body hung from the lamp above Lad. Headless, sagging and disembowelled. But worse – somehow worse – was the way it drooped. Limbs that looked too long, torso twisted out of shape. The Hon Ji Half. And within her, still working its terrible disease, the debris squirmed.

  Sofia spun. Her feet slipped and she fell to the stones. Dimly, I heard her retch. Kichlan bucked and fought. My suit demanded freedom, needed to protect me, and some terrible frightened part of me wanted to give in. Because in that world behind the suit’s mask the dead woman – the woman I had killed – would just be less real.

  Lad cradled the Hon Ji’s head in his lap and hunched over it as he wept. And while it was terrible, and while I ached for the pain and confusion it was causing him, all I could think of was those debris tendrils, those murderous serpent heads. I had to get him away from them.

  Aleksey knelt beside me. “What’s going on?”

  I looked up at him. Mizra, Uzdal and Natasha held back at the corner in a frightened little knot. I glanced over at Fedor. He helped Sofia sit up and wiped her mouth, but his face was pale and sweat-slick in the unsteady light. Aleksey, however, remained composed. He stared at Lad and the body with intensity, but it was not fear or horror. It was business-like and steady.

  “I don’t know,” I grunted as Kichlan bucked. “Can you hold him?”

  Aleksey took one look at the large man beneath me, and nodded. “Reckon I can.”

  We moved swiftly. As I slid myself to the stone, Aleksey took my place. Knee to the hollow of Kichlan’s back, elbow at his neck, and Kichlan could barely move.

  “You did that well,” I said, a question in my tone.

  “Ah, yes.” He grunted, as Kichlan pushed against him. “I’ve had practice.”

  Now was hardly the time for a longer explanation.

  My suit began to spread and I did not try to stop it. Its strength seeped through my legs and arms. It pressed against my chest and I breathed with it. Something tickled in my gut, not pain – something heady and far too enjoyable.

  Aleksey watched me in wonder. “Lad, did he kill her?”

  “No.” My shoulders were covered, my neck.

  “How do you know?”

  The suit covered my face. I blinked. The Hon Ji Half was a chaos of debris, so much more of it and so much worse than the last time. Lad was more solid in this world than he had seemed before, and he cupped a writhing snake-nest in his lap. Above him loomed a great door. Taller than the struggling lamp, as wide as the market square, it rocked wildly on its hinges, ready to break open at any moment.

  “Finally!” The Keeper appeared by my side.

  I didn’t think. Even as the rest of the market was resolving itself – Kichlan and Aleksey, Fedor and Sofia –
I spun and smacked him in his white, dark-veined face.

  The Keeper’s world shook as he stumbled back. The darkness and the doors rippled like cloth in a breeze. He dropped to a knee, pressed his hand to his cheek and stared up at me with shock. “T… Tanyana?”

  “That’s enough!” I shouted at him, and my own words echoed around the inside of my suit like tremors. “You leave him alone, do you hear me? Never do this to him again!”

  The Keeper’s expression strengthened and he stood. “Lad is my Half. They all are.”

  Fury tripped another set of tremors through me. Very slowly, like I was drawing a pair of great blades, I extended my suit out long and threatening from both hands. The Keeper held his ground.

  “No,” I hissed the word through clenched teeth. “Lad is not your tool. You will not put him in danger, you will not take him from the safety of his home and his family. Not again.”

  “Tanyana?” Fedor, somewhere distant and dim, sounded incredulous. “Is… Is the Keeper here?”

  Kichlan roared and broke free. He scuffled with Aleksey. From the corner of my eye I watched their door-and-dark patterned bodies fight, watched Kichlan go down to Aleksey’s tightly controlled fists.

  “You don’t understand.” The Keeper shook his head and ran fingers over his white scalp. “Halves are the only way I can communicate; the only way I can touch any world at all. That is why they were sent here.”

  I lifted my blades. I felt powerful and strong and more like a weapon than I could dare to think. “Not any more. Not Lad. You will not put him in any more danger.”

  “What are you doing?” Fedor asked, terrified and outraged all at once. He tried to approach us, but Mizra and Uzdal held him back.

  “But that is their purpose!” the Keeper cried.

  “Like her?” I pointed to the dead Half and my blade twisted over itself, curling into something intricate and cruel. “Was that her purpose too?”

  “What? No.” Keeper stumbled back as though I had hit him again.

  “That is what happens to your Halves!”

  “No I–”