Suited

by Jo Anderton

  “That is what happens when you communicate with them, when you draw attention to them. She died that way because of you!” Except I knew that wasn’t true. I knew she had died that way because of me, but my anger and my suit would brook no argument. “And Lad is not your tool to be used and disposed of. Do you understand?”

  The Keeper hiccupped, pressed his hands over his eyes. I could see the throb of his debris pulse as it surged beneath his skin.

  “Tanyana! He–” Aleksey this time, strangled and indignant. I turned to see Kichlan knock him aside, leap to his feet, rush at the Keeper – at what must have looked like the empty air I was shouting at.

  I blunted my suit, split it, wrapped it around his chest and held him secure. “Kichlan, stop!” His wild eyes snapped to me. Of all the things in that strange, dark space, those eyes were the clearest. “We are coming to an agreement.”

  Fedor struggled with Mizra and Uzdal, panicked and disbelieving. “But he is the Keeper,” he croaked out the words. “You can’t just argue with him. You can’t–”

  I held Kichlan’s gaze. He could not see my eyes through my silver mask, but still, I needed him to understand. Then he sagged against my suit like a doll empty of its stuffing, and I hated myself for holding him like this, for keeping him from the brother who needed him.

  I turned back to the Keeper. “No more, do you hear?” I kept my tone tight, my voice low. No more shouting, no more screaming. We had to compromise, for Lad. “If you want to talk to me, then talk to me. But Lad is not yours. No more expeditions on his own, no more risks he cannot comprehend. Are we agreed?”

  The Keeper lowered his hands, his inhuman face unreadable.

  “If you don’t agree then you can close these doors by yourself.”

  He wiped his dark tears away. “Are you are willing to risk the world for him?”

  “Of course I am.”

  His mouth set in a furious line, but he gave in. “So be it.”

  Gingerly, watching him closely, I unwound my grip on Kichlan’s chest. “The Keeper has promised,” I said. “No more.”

  “And we can trust those promises, can we?” Kichlan touched his hands delicately to his forehead, then the back of his skull. Even painted with doors, I saw him wince.

  I shrugged.

  “You can,” the Keeper snapped at me. “Tell him you can.”

  I said nothing.

  Sofia hurried to Kichlan’s side, exclaimed over his head, arms, back. Aleksey was rubbing his own jaw, and apologising in slightly slurred words.

  But Lad, through all this, hadn’t moved. He still sat beneath the lamp – beneath the great debris door – and held the dead woman’s head in his lap.

  Slowly, I approached him. Debris wormed its way from the clean cut through her neck, questing with stunted, sightless heads out into the world.

  Lad’s lap was heavy with blood. It hadn’t thickened the way I would have expected, if anything, it ran thinner than usual. Diluted and pale, layered like oil. Was her body still disintegrating? The pion bindings undoing even after her death?

  “Lad?” I crouched. I tried not to look at the mess that had been her eyes. Something eased above us, something that sounded wet. I glanced up. The Half’s body was attached to the lamp with by tendrils of metal grown from its copper frame. And while the debris obviously disrupted the pion flow enough to interfere with the light, it was so contained within her, so focused on her bindings and hers alone, that these new and unnatural straps held. Her body sagged against them. It stretched. How long before she came apart like the flesh I had inadvertently pulled from her stomach? And what would the debris do then, without a body to inhabit and destroy?

  The puppet men had dragged her body here, hung her up, and then set off an emergency call so we would find her. But I couldn’t imagine why.

  The Keeper crouched on the other side of Lad. Shoulders stiff, mouth firm. “Do you see what it’s doing?”

  The wiggling mass of debris had grown. And the pasty snake-heads that rose from her body, that wavered, scenting the air, they were the very things rattling the door.

  “You should have calmed it and reclaimed it in the first place. When I told you to.”

  I released a sigh. “I don’t even know if that is possible.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “This is nothing like–” I stopped. What was I doing, arguing, while Lad was in such danger?

  So instead, I leaned close to him. “Lad?”

  He sniffed. “Tan.” And the face he tipped to look at me tugged my heart. Riddled with guilt and fear and utter confusion, he shook and began to rock. “I’m sorry, Tan. I hurt Geny. I– tell Kich I am sorry.”

  “He knows.”

  Movement behind me. I held up a silver hand. “I think you should stay back.” Kichlan, I thought, without needing to look. So I was surprised, when Aleksey said, “What can we do to help?”

  I glanced over my shoulder. Kichlan, Sofia and Aleksey stood much closer than I had realised, with Fedor just behind them. Mizra, Uzdal and Natasha had closed the gap, but they were still hazy in the door world. Dimly, I could hear someone else being sick, and clenched my teeth against a powerful urge to do the same.

  “Can you see the debris?” I asked them.

  “Of course.” Kichlan’s voice was raw and sore sounding.

  “What is it?” Aleksey asked. “I mean, it’s debris, but...”

  “I know.” How, exactly, did one explain such horror? So instead, I talked about pion bindings and disintegration and tried to pretend I wasn’t talking about a person, or a Half. “So don’t get too close to it,” I finished. “We need to be careful.”

  “What about you?” Aleksey whispered.

  “What about Lad?” I thought I heard Kichlan say, but it was so soft I couldn’t be sure.

  “Tan?” Lad looked up again. “I’m sorry, Tan.”

  A throbbing tendril of debris, scrawled with thick ridges like scars, flicked itself free of the dead woman’s mouth and wrapped around his arm.

  Above me, the door banged hard. Wood cracked.

  “We have no more time left!” The Keeper cried.

  Lad gasped. His suit sliced out from his wrist in a circular blade and cut the questing tendril away. The rest of them, the writhing mass in body and head, stilled. Then, as one, they swivelled to face the slumped, weeping Half.

  And attacked.

  In one great pale mass the debris reared and ploughed toward Lad. Behind me, Kichlan cried out. Beside me, the Keeper screamed. And with Lad’s terrified wide eyes searing my mind I did the one thing I could do. I stood, and I got in the way.

  My suit spread out behind me, it fanned like wings that caught the charging debris, then cupped and threw it back. While it battered me I grabbed the Hon Ji woman’s head from Lad’s lap. She fell to blood and mess between my fingers. Crying, Lad scooted out of the way. I barely felt the gore. Only debris, pressed between my fingers, squeezing and squirming desperately. I spun and threw the strands into the worming mass. My suit-wings shifted, wound their way to my chest and arched above me in a gleaming shield.

  “You need to calm it!” The Keeper, beside me, scrambled at my shoulder.

  “Right.” But I didn’t believe it was possible.

  You know how, Lad had once said to me. He was no help now. Kichlan and Aleksey ran behind me, grabbed him and dragged him away. He wept loudly, and his sobs seemed to echo from the very doors.

  “Right,” I said again. In the past, I had used the contact between my suit and the debris to calm it to the point where it could return to the Keeper. I’d held it in thin pincers or silver-wrapped hands, and summoned whatever I could to combat the chaos and the pain the puppet men had imbued it with. From the image of Lad’s smile, to the smell of Eugeny’s house. To Kichlan. Just Kichlan.

  I’d never really understood how and why it worked, only that when I was touching it with my suited hands, the debris could understand me. The Keeper needed me to do that again.<
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  So I closed my eyes. Through the suit I felt each blow, over my skin, though my muscles, and down into my bones. Even as the debris hit me, I reached out to it. I held my hands out, palms up, opened my wing-like shields. It rained thick and heavy against my face, my body, my palms. I tried to make each touch a caress, to respond to each blow with a soothing word.

  “You don’t need to do this,” I breathed. I summoned each inch of love, of protection, that Lad so terrified and lost had brought out in me. I gave it all to the debris. “I know they have hurt you, I know they have frightened you. But you don’t need to do this. Let it go.”

  But the bombardment did not stop, and from somewhere I thought I could hear laughter. Distant, mechanical, unnatural.

  I breathed deeply. The air was heavy, it tasted sour. I pushed all that aside, focused on sowing my small seeds of peace. “Listen to me–”

  Something twisted my arm. Sharp, burning, like needles plunging into me. And all my thoughts of Lad were shattered. In their place: a cold table, harsh light, and pain, deep piercing pain. They were tearing me, forcing hunger into my being, scouring out an emptiness, a loss I would do anything to fill. And I wanted to scream, because that table, that suiting, was so terrible and so familiar. I had lived it once, I could not live it again. But when I opened my eyes the table was gone and the lights and the needles, but darkness and doors crowded me and for a horrible moment I wasn’t sure what was going on.

  Then I noticed the debris snakes peeling my suit away from my right arm. They wove themselves in and out of the metal like threads in cloth and from there they pulled, twisted, tugged. And the suit went with them. It split like a deep wound – more tearing, more scarring – and a large section of my arm peeled free. As my skin was revealed, dark and door-textured in this strange world, I finally screamed.

  Pain sheared into my arm, and deep into my belly. My wings dissolved, the suit rippled, and sent out hundreds of tiny saws that tore and sliced the debris free.

  Shaken, I clutched my arm. What had the debris done? Dissolved the pion bonds in my suit? But it hadn’t destroyed it, hadn’t liquefied silver as it did to flesh. If anything, it looked like the debris had melded with the suit, joined it, and tried to take it from me.

  “Tanyana!” The Keeper was by my side. He touched my arm with his own, pale hands, while the debris rolled over itself, regrouping. “Are you all right?”

  I shook my head. “It’s not working.”

  “Are you trying–”

  “Yes!” I was having almost as much trouble calming myself. “Yes, I tried. It doesn’t hear me, or it doesn’t care. I gave it everything I had. It just– it just–” Gave some of itself back. Where I had sent out Lad’s love it had forced on me its fear, its pain, its torture. All too recognisable, all too terrifying. “How is that possible?”

  “Tanyana!” Kichlan ran to my other side. “What was that?”

  “The debris attacked me.” And it was strong. Stronger, perhaps, than my suit.

  “What will you do?” The Keeper asked.

  I glanced between them. “I don’t think we can calm it and return it. You saw what it did when I tried.”

  Kichlan blanched. “So what do we do?”

  “The door,” the Keeper whispered again, broken and desolate.

  The debris looked like it was trying to create a form, to become a creature like the last one that had so decimated Movoc-under-Keeper. A creature which, this time, I knew I would not be able to contain. But it was struggling. It was not one great, single-minded mass of grains, and it was not one sheer plane. So many different bodies, heads, and forms, all folding and fighting over each other. And all so broken, patterned by hard-ridged scars. It surged, it dissolved, elements of it reared toward me only to be drawn back into the rest.

  Around it, the door its unnatural presence created was rocking on its hinges. Wild, nearly broken, no small contained gap for the Keeper to trick me into looking through. No sewer wall beneath the city to bear its destruction. That door would burst open and the market square would be consumed by emptiness, possibly this entire Effluent, maybe all of Movoc-under-Keeper.

  Would the open door consume everything in this world?

  Even the debris?

  “The door,” I whispered, and pushed both Kichlan and the Keeper back.

  It was probably a foolish idea. Foolhardy. Dangerous. But it was all I had.

  I launched myself through the debris. As it burst around me, as it wrapped its malicious, squirming self about me, I stretched past it. To the door.

  I grasped for the handle. My hand slipped right through it.

  “Open it!” I cried as wiggling furious fingers slipped into my suit. Into my arms, my legs, torso, face. “Open the door!”

  My suit fought back. It churned and rippled, flicking debris from it, smacking it back, pulling it free. Paralysed as the debris and the suit battled, I watched the Keeper from the corner of my eyes. Horrified, he stared at me. His hand twitched once, toward the door.

  “What?” he gurgled.

  “Open it.” My voice was failing. “It’s the only way.”

  Still, he hesitated.

  “Keeper!” Lad shouted. He pulled away from Aleksey, stumbled toward me, arm outstretched. “Do what Tan says. Make it stop hurting her!”

  I don’t know if it was the sight of another of his precious Half flinging himself into the path of danger, or if my garbled words finally drove some kind of sense into the Keeper’s pale head. But he flickered, reappeared beside the door, and grasped the handle.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said, and opened the door.

  On the other side was... nothing. Darkness not at all like the night, not at all like the Keeper’s world. It was distance, emptiness, nothing. And it made me ache to witness, because it was so wrong, so terrifyingly wrong.

  I didn’t know what I was doing. But the suit did. As the door opened and that wind, that clutching, dragging, ice and fire nothingness rushed out, the suit gathered itself and rolled one last time. In a great wave, from my toes to my head, it threw the debris from us like shedding a second skin. The writhing mass tried to right itself, but I was ready for it. Even as the debris regrouped I cupped it, wrapped my suit around its unstable form and pushed it right through the open door.

  My suit could take no more.

  It failed in the wake of the emptiness. As it started to reduce to a ripple of sandy water, it whiplashed desperately back into the bands. The Keeper leaned on the opening door, pushing with all his insubstantial weight against the terrible howling wind, and I strained to help him. But my suit was gone, withdrawn, and my skin touched the rough, splintered wood.

  Still we pushed, the Keeper and I, until the door closed, and the wind stopped, and I could fall back, and allow the suit to slip from my eyes.

  “Oh, very good.” Voices without tone, emotionless, impossible. I had not seen the puppet men. And yet I was not surprised to know they were near.

  “Very nicely done.”

  5.

  “Says that was very dangerous. Says that was a bad idea. Says it hurts, Tanyana, hurts and will never heal.”

  Lad rambled on. I kept my eyes closed, savoured the darkness – the hot inside-my-own-head darkness that had nothing to do with doors – and breathed in the open air.

  The city, and the world, had not been sucked into nothingness. So it couldn’t have been that bad an idea.

  “Says the door will not go away now. The hole will stay forever.”

  I opened my eyes. The lamp no longer flickered, but when I turned an aching head I realised that was because it no longer existed. The lamp and the Hon Ji Half’s body were gone. All that remained were enormous cracks in the cobblestones, spiderwebbing their way from the centre of the marketplace. Even as I watched they inched further, crawled up the sides of a closed-up stall, and dissolved it. Poly turned to liquid, then steam, then nothing at all. The vegetables inside it unwound to thin, floating fibres befo
re vanishing with a breath of icy Movoc wind.

  “How much longer will that go on?” I asked, my throat seared.

  Someone had carried me from the centre of the market. Without them, would I too have been caught in that creeping emptiness and brushed away like so much dust?

  “It’s slowing,” Kichlan said, close and above me. It took a moment to realise I was lying in his lap, his arms cradling my neck and knees. That explained who had moved me.

  I shifted slightly, trying not to feel uncomfortable at being held so close to him. The movement flared up pain, too much like memories of stitches and healing scars. My suit hurt. In the bands, all around them, and deeper, a throb that seemed to travel to my spine. My right hand, I realised, felt the worst.

  A grunt and I lifted it. My palm was a mess of countless tiny cuts, all crimson and slowly solidifying silver. Splinters from an unreal door? I shuddered, lowered it, and glanced up at Kichlan instead.

  He didn’t look to be in much better condition. Blood patterned his temple. His jaw and one eye were already darkening with bruises, and his lower lip was cut.

  “Oh,” I said, before I could stop myself. “I’m sorry.”

  “Actually, that was mostly me.” Aleksey’s jaw was also bruised, his lip swollen and welling up blood. He dabbed at it with his sleeve.

  “Oh.” It really seemed about all I could manage to say. “I’m sorry.”

  He tried to smile, flinched, settled into something neutral. “No one warned me collecting would be so violent.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, yet again. “I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t let you get close to Lad – any of you – the debris would have killed you. And then there was a door, and it was open. I didn’t want to hurt you, I would never want to–” I sounded pathetic. What kind of an excuse was that? “I’m sorry.”

  “I know, Tan,” Kichlan said. “I really do understand. And thank you for helping my brother.” And, so swiftly I could have imagined it, he ducked his head and kissed me.

  For a moment, all I felt was his tingling lips on mine. His blood was warm, and did not taste like mine did – not heavy with the metal drilled into his bones. I lifted one of my scarred hands, in something that felt like wonder, and ran fingers down the marvellous angle of his jaw.