by Jo Anderton
I did remember. That first time I had tried to tie us all together in a circle, when we had stood against an enormous mass of debris grains and planes, and worked as a team to subdue it. It had lashed out when we tried to control it, knocking Sofia to the ground. She had looked so pale, almost dazed, for many sixnights after. But I had not known why.
“Why didn’t you say something?” I asked her, mind reeling, trying to understand.
She flashed me an angry look. “Because it didn’t have anything to do with you.”
“Oh, like the way this has got nothing to do with you?”
Edik chuckled. “Please, keep this up. I started charging you the moment you stepped in here.”
Mizra touched my arm, lightly. I realised I was breathing hard, fast, and that the bands on my wrists – where I could see them – were spinning in time with my hammering heart. “Sofia was not alone. She had us to help her. Just like you do.”
I held Sofia’s indignant gaze. “So you removed it, did you?”
She nodded, but beneath her hard expression I thought I saw pain, hurt, and something I could barely understand. Relief and grief, acceptance and guilt, all at once. “It was broken.”
“Broken?” That word made me sick.
“Sometimes that’s the best option. For mother and child both.” Edik levered himself off his stool and approached me. “There are pions present in every living creature, and a developing child is no different. A relationship between the pions in a child’s body and those within its mother’s body is vital for the creation of a fully functioning individual. However, if the woman is a debris collector, this connection can be hindered. Her child’s pions are unwilling, or unable, to interact with her own. We don’t fully understand it, but whatever it is that debris collectors lack – that which prevents them from communicating with pions – interferes with the way the pions in their body interact with others. In some cases, such as Sofia here, mother and child appear completely severed. Blood still travels between them, true, but it’s like a wall is raised along the edge of her womb and pions simply cannot pass through it. Children who develop without contact with their mother’s pions are rarely born whole.”
Whole, broken. Who was the filthy man to determine what either of those words meant?
“Such children do not grow up in the usual way. Though their bodies mature their minds are left behind. They might struggle to grasp language, to interact with other people, or function in society. Sometimes they can be violent and difficult to control. While they have suffered no obvious, physical trauma, they will never be able to see pions or communicate with them in any way.”
I stared at him in horror, then glanced at Sofia, Mizra and Uzdal. Did they understand what this man was saying? He was describing Halves.
“In such cases, termination is often the most humane choice.”
They were killing Halves.
“So you understand why it is so important to know what’s happening in your body, in advance. You need time to make a decision.” He patted the edge of the bed. “Just sit here and I will have a look at you.” He smiled. His teeth were stained. “It won’t hurt.”
Feeling numb, I sat on the edge of the healer’s bed.
“Could you remove your jacket? Your shirt?”
I lifted an eyebrow at him. “Why? You should be able to see pions through my clothes quite clearly.”
“Ah, not born a collector then, were you?” He was looking at my scars, probably putting cause and effect together in that cunning little brain of his. “Look, I’m a healer, yes, but one without a circle. Let’s make it easier for me, shall we? There are pions in your clothes, and they can make it difficult to differentiate the pions in your body.”
I scowled at him. Not only was this man disgusting, he was untalented. He was also all I could probably afford. “Fine.” I shrugged off my jacket, unbuttoned the shirt and let it fall. Then I peeled away my uniform top, until I was dressed only in a light shift.
His eyes widened at the twisted lines of jagged scar tissue down my left arm. “Nasty.” He sucked air in through his teeth. “And the shift.”
I baulked at that. He did not need to see the metal crossed over my skin; the new, deep scars, and the older nicks and scrapes the suit had been steadily filling in. My hair hid the notch in my ear and the new grazes across my forehead. The shift, while thin and hardly dignified, at least hid my abdomen.
“It stays,” I said, and placed my palms flat over my stomach to emphasise the point. Sofia, Uzdal and Mizra were worried enough about me as it was. And I couldn’t have them carrying tales of new scars back to Kichlan.
“Now really–”
“I said, it stays.” I held his gaze firmly. I wasn’t sure if he recognised the nine point circle centre still deep within me, that power and authority I had once worn so well, or if the spinning of my suit as it increased in speed convinced him. Or maybe he just wasn’t being paid well enough to take on battles with his clients.
“As you wish. Roll down the top of your pants then, at least.”
I unbuttoned my loose woollen pants and eased them – and the uniform underneath – down a few inches. The shift was long enough to keep me covered. As Edik dragged his stool across the floor Sofia leaned down and whispered in my ear. “Why are you making this harder for yourself?”
I made a disgusted noise. “If he is skilled enough to tell me whether I am with child, and if that child will be a debris collector, then he has the strength to see pions through a thin layer of clothing. I think he just likes watching women undress.”
Uzdal turned away, covering laughter with a fit of coughing as Sofia – bright red – leaned back.
“Now, let’s look at you.” Edik perched on his stool and stared intently at my stomach.
It was disconcerting, to say the least, made even worse by his constant murmuring conversation with lights I couldn’t see and the perilous way his stool complaining so loudly beneath his weight. I knew what he was doing, knew he was watching and coaxing pions, but I struggled to stop myself fidgeting. While I waited I placed my hands on my knees, spread the palms wide and watched the suit on my wrists, ready to catch any unruly activity.
“This isn’t right,” he said, after a long inspection that seemed to stretch – heavy with the sense of lost kopacks – for bells.
It was hardly encouraging. “What isn’t?” And I wasn’t about to remove the final layer of my clothing, no matter what he said.
“Isn’t she–?” Sofia stammered. “Is there a child?”
Edik shook his head. “I think so, but I can’t say for sure. It’s difficult to see.” He scanned my torso, down my arms, almost fell from his stool to look at my legs. “This simply isn’t right.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, keeping my voice as reasonable as I could manage. My suit spun faster with frustration, whipping up a need to wrap a silver-coated hand around his podgy neck and force answers from him. “What can’t you see?”
“You.” Edik leaned back on his stool and stared at me down the short length of his nose. “Well, parts of you.”
“How is that possible?” Mizra asked. He touched my shoulder. The suit convulsed in its bands in response, but I held it down. “I mean, she’s right here, she’s real.”
“It isn’t possible.” I was amazed at the calm in my own voice. “It’s ridiculous. So explain it to me.”
“I might not look like much to you now, collector, but I have been a healer for many years.” Edik sighed, stood, lumbered over to his collection of seeds in their split paper bag and started chewing them again. “I know what I should be seeing. But instead, there are gaps. I can see your heart working, your lungs drawing in air, but anything below that is fragmented. Like, ah, I don’t even know how to say it, like something came in and cut the pions away.”
All I could feel, for a terrible moment, was the spinning of suit and the tugging in my bones as I wondered, yet again, just how much of me was left.
“But that’s impossible. If your pions really were gone somehow, then you simply would not be here. Yet, there you are. And it’s not just your abdomen. Your head, I can hardly see any of your brain! There should be countless pions there, frantically working to keep you living and thinking. But I can’t see them. Forearms, some of your legs.” He ran a hand over his face. “It’s impossible, but true.”
Gaps within me, breaks in the pions that made me?
“You mean, like, holes inside her?” Uzdal asked, voice strangled.
Another shake of Edik’s head. “I don’t think so. If there were holes, if the pions really were missing, then you’d see the damage. She wouldn’t have a head, for one. Rather, I think there is something else – something that isn’t made of pions – in the way.”
Something not made of pions? But everything, surely, was made of pions. They were the foundations of our world, the raw materials.
Everything, that is, except for debris. And the Keeper.
Slowly, I lifted my hand, stared at the spinning, begging, tugging suit.
Was it even possible? There was only one way to be sure.
“Watch my hand, please,” I said. My voice sounded distant, even in my own head. “Watch the pions. Tell me what happens.”
I released the suit gradually. Already aggravated, it pulled for freedom, wanting to coat more than just my upraised hand. I held it in tight check, the memory of its last attack still fresh and sore.
As it slithered its slick way over my palm, the back of my hand, finger by finger to the very tips, Edik gasped.
“What do you see?” I asked, but I was already certain of the answer.
“That’s it,” he whispered. “It smothers the pions. I can’t see through it, I can’t see past it.” He fixed his gaze on me. “You don’t think much of me, miss. I know that. But I was once greater than this filthy place attests, and I am telling you the truth. Your pions are not too deep for me to see, it is not my lack of skill that hides them. That, that stuff. It wipes them away.”
I reined the suit back in.
So what did it all mean?
I wished Kichlan was here.
“The suit is in your way?” Sofia frowned. “But you could see me clearly. You could,” she hesitated, “operate. It doesn’t make sense.”
“It does,” I answered for him. “My suit is not like yours, Sofia. You know that, we all know that.” My suit was tied to more than my bones, my muscles and my will. It filled me. It made me. And now, it was trying to control me.
Oh, what a weapon it could be.
“I have a question.” Mizra lifted a hand. What kind of class did he think this was? “I thought everything,” his raised hand waved around the room, “was built from pions. Us, the room. The suit. So why can’t the healer see it?”
I was beginning to understand something, as impossible as it seemed. “Why do we wear these suits?” I asked, a rhetorical question, but Mizra took it up.
“To collect debris,” he answered.
“Why do we need them?”
“Because they are the only things that can touch debris,” again, he answered promptly. Too much the attentive student. “Nothing else, not our fingers, not our tools… Oh.”
“Oh, indeed.” The strange mixture of liquid and solid, of light and symbols that swum in the bands and deep beneath my skin, I had always wondered how it worked, what its pions were doing to create something so strange, so unlike anything I had ever seen. Anything pion-made.
“Isn’t that impossible?”
“What?” Sofia glanced between us. “What’s impossible?”
“The suit,” I said. “It’s not made of pions, that’s why Edik can’t see into it, why he can’t see past it. The suit doesn’t only collect debris. It is debris.”
Edik laughed. It sounded a little strained. “Now that is impossible! Everything is made up of pions, to begin with. And debris is just rubbish. It certainly can’t be used to create anything, particularly nothing as complicated as your collecting suits.”
I shared a weighty, silent look with Mizra, Uzdal and Sofia. One thing we knew about debris was it certainly was not the inanimate waste product everyone else believed. So was it really that implausible? After all, the ancient Unbound had written books with debris. The puppet men had created monsters with it. Who could say they didn’t also create weapons with it?
Other, I needed to talk to Kichlan.
“What about the child?” Uzdal murmured.
I felt a guilty pang. I had forgotten about that.
“Well.” With another awkward laugh Edik drew a kerchief from his pocket and wiped his face “As I said, with that, whatever it is, in the way like that, I can’t be sure. But I think, yes, very probably, you are pregnant. The pions I could see have clustered toward your abdominal region, and the division of energy leads me to believe your body is currently sustaining another life. But I cannot tell you what kind of child grows within you. A binder, or a collector.”
Strange, but it didn’t take a moment to digest such news. Maybe it was because I had already come to believe it. Or maybe it was because, compared with what I had just realised I was carrying around, bearing a child sounded so normal.
“Right then.” I slipped from the edge of the bed and began dressing. “Just don’t expect to be paid the full amount.”
“But–”
I turned, held a finger up and silenced him. “You don’t seriously expect me to pay for something you didn’t do.”
Edik wiped away more sweat. “One hundred kopacks.”
I snorted. “Fifty.”
“That’s robbery!”
“One hundred is extortion.”
“Seventy-five!”
“Sixty, or nothing.”
Sweat ran in rivulets down the side of his neck to stain his already dirty collar.
“Fine.”
We touched rublies, and Edik led us out of his filthy home. “I am sorry I couldn’t help you. Believe me, I am.”
I nodded, unsure whether I believed him, unsure whether I cared.
Back on the streets all I could think about was Kichlan. He would be home with Eugeny and Lad. Surely he wouldn’t mind an unscheduled visit? As long as I didn’t turn up injured, freezing and newly evicted it would be better than my last surprise appearance at his door.
“Tanyana?” Mizra stopped me as I began to stride ahead.
Surprised, I met his concerned expression. “Yes, what?”
“What are you going to do?”
“I was thinking I would ask Kichlan. I mean, he has a history with suits.” I blinked. Maybe they didn’t know that. How much of his past had Kichlan told the rest of our old collecting team? “Well, he’s been doing this for a long time. I think I should run this theory past him.”
“The baby, Tanyana!” Sofia snapped, grabbed my arm and shook it. “Not the suit! What are you going to do about your baby?”
Something sharpened within me as I stared at her, as I met her frustration and disgust. I breathed deeply. The suit stilled.
“I don’t know,” I said, and meant it. I really didn’t know.
“Edik didn’t say it would be a collector,” Mizra said. “And he certainly didn’t know if it was like– Like Lad.”
“I heard him.”
“So I think aborting it could be a mistake, don’t you?” Uzdal finished the thought.
“But the choice is yours.” Sofia still held me. “Whether or not the child is a collector you will have to deal with the consequence of its birth. You will be responsible for its life. Do you want that? Can you handle it?”
I stared at them, one at a time. “You realise, don’t you, what Lad is.”
Silence.
“He is a Half. Broken by our standards, maybe, but vital – absolutely vital – to the future of this world.” I pried Sofia’s fingers from my sleeve. “And you two,” I glanced at Mizra and Uzdal, “think I should kill this child if it is like Lad. If it is a Half.”
They shook their heads with a slightly unsettling synchronicity. “We didn’t say that,” Mizra said.
I turned to Sofia. “And you think I should kill it regardless?”
“No!” Sofia said. “I am telling you that your choice will impact not only your life, but the life of your child. And you should think about what kind of life that would be. What kind of life Lad has had.”
“Halves are–”
“This is the modern world, Tanyana.” Uzdal stepped forward, his expression like cold stone. “You might have contact with the Keeper, but most people don’t even believe he exists.”
“But–”
“Let him finish!” Mizra snapped.
“It’s all very well to stand here discussing higher purposes and the good of the world, but this is a person we are talking about. A life!” Uzdal took a deep breath and lowered his voice. We were starting to attract attention. “In this world Halves live in danger, in fear. You know what Kichlan has gone through to keep Lad safe! Is that what you want? Another scared creature who cannot understand why they are forced to hide? And do you want to be just like Kichlan? Always worried that the veche will come and take your child away?”
I remembered what Kichlan had said. That people like Lad, people we now knew to be Halves, would be taken by the puppet men and never seen again.
“We don’t know this child is a Half,” I whispered. “We don’t even know if it is a collector.”
“Exactly.” Sofia crossed her arms. For some reason, that made me feel better. Like we were back on solid ground, relating in a way I could understand. “That’s why you have to weigh up the risks and make a decision.” She glanced away. “Like I did.”
Together, Mizra and Uzdal looked to the ground, and suddenly the weight of what Sofia was saying hit me. She must have felt like this. Confused and hurting, but hopefully not alone. She’d had Mizra and Uzdal’s support, and maybe that of the father, whoever he was.
I baulked a little at that thought. I couldn’t even imagine Sofia – sturdy, hard working Sofia – enjoying an irresponsible romance. She didn’t seem to care about anything other than debris collecting. Well, that, and Kich–
Kichlan? When I first met her, I’d watched Sofia follow him around like a loyal puppy. I hated myself for thinking that now, but it was true. And even now, the way she questioned me about him, the way she looked at me, she’d even waited for Lad with him on an evening or two.