Suited

by Jo Anderton

  It, it couldn’t be. I could feel myself blushing. Did she know the way Kichlan felt about me, the way I felt about him? Did she hate me for it? Had he kissed her too, beneath unsteady lamplight? And had it led to… to this?

  I didn’t believe it, not really. But I needed to know. “Your child. Who… Who was–” I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

  She met my eyes and her gaze was flinty, her expression closed. But she knew the question I couldn’t bring myself to ask. “Oh, don’t worry,” she said, her voice soft. “The father was no one you know. There is more to my life than debris collecting.”

  I tried not to feel quite so relieved.

  She looked away. “He never saw me that way,” she whispered so softly I didn’t think she expected me to hear. “And now, he never will.”

  But where did all this leave me? I still didn’t know what to do. “I can’t make that decision. Not yet.”

  “Don’t take too long,” Sofia said. “Or it will be made for you.”

  I nodded. “I’m going to talk to Kichlan.”

  She looked away again, her bottom lip caught between her teeth. “Do whatever you need to do. Just make sure you think about it.”

  “I will.” I turned, and hurried away from them, already thinking about the suit, and debris, and whether Kichlan could shed some light on the whole thing.

  The trip to Edik’s surgery had taken up only the morning’s bells. I made my way through the back streets toward the eighth Keepersrill. Until I turned the corner, and almost collided with Tsana.

  For a long moment I stared at the woman who had ruined my architectural career and taken my place as the head of a nine point circle. She stared right back at me, squinting as the light from the band peering out at my neck shone brightly in her face.

  “Tsana,” I said her name through clenched teeth. “What are you doing here?”

  She was not alone. Behind her, my once-circle wove pion patterns over the supporting wall of a collapsing factory. On Rest. Why was my critical circle working on a Rest day? Not even debris collectors worked on Rest.

  My surprise must have shown. Tsana straightened, her expression firmed into superiority, and she waved little dismissive gestures at me. “All circles are busy at the moment, just like us. Movoc-under-Keeper needs us. We don’t have time to take a day off.”

  Behind her, the repair wasn’t going well. Of course, it can’t have helped that the circle’s so-called centre was not guiding the gathered pions at all, but rather stopping for a conversation. But it was more than that.

  I approached them. The nine binders were clustered closely together, ringing the wall in an inelegant semi-circle. Not how I would have arranged the circle, certainly – pion threads could get tangled that way, and extricating them was nothing but a waste of time and energy. They were attempting to reconstruct sandstone blocks from the broken shards cluttering the ground. But every brick they made slipped quickly into mud, and from the pleading, rambled words and frantic expressions, it seemed they were having trouble simply attracting enough pions to work with in the first place. I crouched, close to the bottom of the ragged break in the wall, and scooped up a handful of mud. As I watched, it dried to sand, thinned until it was almost transparent, and then seemed to dissolve into air.

  I’d seen that before. I glanced around. No frantic Lad, gibbering the Keeper’s words. No flashing alarm from my wrists, ankles, neck and waist. What was going on?

  “Tanyana?” Volski caught sight of me and lowered his pion-guiding hands. “What are you doing here?”

  “Isn’t that my question?” I asked him. “I don’t recall ever working on a Rest day.” I glanced around the street. “Particularly in a place like this.” However much I now belonged in these Movoc-under-Keeper backwaters, my nine point circle certainly didn’t. Muck from leaking drains coated their expensive boots. Sand from the dissolving factory clung to the fine fibres of their tailored, woollen pants. Even the bear-heads decorating the shoulders of their jackets, denoting status and veche-employment, seemed tarnished in this place.

  “Ah, well.” He sniffed too loudly. “Things change.”

  “What are you doing?” Tsana cried shrilly behind me. “Stop distracting him. Volski, keep working!”

  Expression pinched, Volski turned back to the wall.

  Setting a tight, false smile in place I retreated, and leaned close to Tsana’s ear. “I know what you did to me.” A thrill pulsed up from my belly with the words. I found freedom in the truth and power in the scars she had given me. “I wonder what your precious circle would think, if they knew too.”

  A silence so deep I could hear every last grain of sand shifting from the disintegrating stones, settled between us.

  “What do you think I did?” Tsana stammered, finally.

  “Don’t try it.” I wrapped fingers around her wrist and dug them in. “Don’t even try to deny it.”

  “How–”

  “And don’t ask any more questions.” Something more than freedom was rousing through me, something I was coming to know too well. Oh, how my suit enjoyed its power. It revelled in strength, in aggression. It egged me on closer to the fire. What would it feel like, to give in? To be a weapon, just for a moment. To be truly powerful? “You’re going to stop interrupting and let me talk to my people.”

  My people. Unfairly ripped from me. But they would always be my circle of nine.

  “And if you don’t, I will tell them the glass you created for me to land on was not an accident.”

  “They won’t believe you.” But she shook beneath my grasp.

  My false smile became real. “Oh, I think they will. You are not strong enough to be a centre of nine, you are not skilled enough. I think it will explain a lot of things.”

  Tsana breathed heavily, close to my ear. I held her tightly, and waited.

  “Fine.” She pulled, and I let her go. “Fine.”

  “Knew you’d understand.”

  I approached the wall again. The more I looked at it, the more I was certain a door was open here. The stones the architects were creating disintegrated into powder faster than they could build them, and that dust itself was fading away.

  But if I was right and a door was open here, where was the Keeper to help me close it? And was I willing to risk another confrontation with the suit to attempt to do it without him?

  “You might as well stop trying to rebuild this,” I said. “It’s not going to work.”

  Volski – who had been watching Tsana and me – lowered his hands and left the semi-circle before I even stopped talking. “Why? What’s happening here?”

  I smiled at his earnest face, at that mix of curiosity and trust I knew so well. Volski had been a member of my circles since I had first earned a circle of three. We worked well together. But as I glanced between him and the mess of a wall at his back I realised I didn’t know him as well as I, perhaps, should. I had not stood by his mother’s grave, as I had with Kichlan and Lad. I had not let him into the most private parts of my life, as I had Sofia, Mizra and Uzdal. He had never opened up to me the way Aleksey – a man I had only just met – did so spontaneously.

  What different lives they were, what a different person I had become. The architect, the debris collector. I tightened my fist against my restless suit. And what next? What now, with this silver filling me?

  I pushed that all aside. “Remember the marketplace?”

  Volski lifted an eyebrow. “I’m not that much older than you, Tanyana. Don’t treat me like I’m going senile.”

  I chuckled. “Fine then.” I broke into the half-circle and lifted a hand to the collapsing wall. “I think this is the same.”

  “So what is it? Debris?” Tsana – unable to hang defeated and sulking in the background – stood between Volski and me and waved imperiously at the terrible job her circle was doing. “Can you get rid of it?”

  What anger I had felt toward her, what fury at her petty jealousy and desperate scramble for power, was fal
ling away. Falsely tall, back rigid and nose tipped high, she looked ridiculous. She was just as powerless as I was, I realised. As much a puppet of her family, of the veche, maybe even the puppet men. So I did not hate her. I pitied her.

  “It’s not debris.” My suit spun. “Not quite.” I released it slowly, kept it on a very tight leash. “And it is not that simple.”

  As the suit spread across my body and face, Tsana backed away. I heard her gasp – the sound distant and muted on the other side.

  In the Keeper’s dark world, this lowly backstreet was crowded. Doors pressed at my feet, low above my head, and squeezed me from either side. It made me shiver, so much ruin so tightly packed. And no sign of the Keeper. That was disturbing enough on its own. Where was he, while this door leaked emptiness and undoing into the world he guarded?

  Sure enough, the door in front of me was opening. The smallest of cracks, even thinner than the one the Keeper had used to prove to me just how vital he was. A draught of caustic air blew in from whatever was on the other side, enough to send the suit on my hand rippling like water.

  “What is it?” Volski asked, his voice surprisingly clear. What was it that made some people stand out in this place, when the doors and the darkness covered everything else? Lad was like that, but he was a Half. And Kichlan, sometimes. I couldn’t begin to imagine what Volski could have in common with the two of them.

  I didn’t know where to start explaining doors to a pion-binder. So I simply said, “It’s difficult, and dangerous. You should probably move back.” Wasn’t sure about that either, but it couldn’t have hurt.

  Could I do anything here, without the Keeper’s help? The last time I tried to open a door my hand had passed through the handle. But I had touched it in the end, hadn’t I? With my bare skin. In a moment of panic in the market square I had added my weight to the Keeper’s and together we had closed the door. I carried its scars in tiny splinters of metal across my palm. Perhaps I could do that again.

  So I tried.

  The first time, my hand passed through the wood like it didn’t exist.

  I rubbed at my face. I felt insubtantial and tired and not at all sure this would actually work.

  “What is it, my lady?” Volski had not retreated like I had asked him.

  I was not a lady, had not been for a long time. As the centre of a nine point circle, when I was employed by the veche for vast sums of kopacks and a healthy dollop of respect on the side, then I deserved – at times demanded – the honorific. When I had lost those things, then I had lost that right.

  But this time, I did not correct him.

  “I can’t close it,” I whispered, even though I knew this was pointless because he could not understand or help me.

  “What can’t you close, my lady?”

  I glanced over my shoulder in shock. Almost hidden in the mottle of wood grain and darkness, Kitai had broken away from the half-circle and approached us. A small woman, wispy-thin and pale, she was a much stronger binder than her appearance suggested.

  Something lump-like formed in my throat. I was glad she could not see my face.

  As I watched her, Kitai solidified in this realm, as though my very attention was all it took to give her form.

  “The hole.” Door seemed like such a foolish thing to say. I gestured to the wall to cover up my hesitation. “It’s something that debris, well, it’s like a side effect.” Ah, how eloquent and authoritative.

  “Is there anything we can do to help?”

  Tsana laughed, a hoggish, graceless sound. “Have you all lost your minds? She’s not a centre any more! She’s a debris collector. And just what do you think you can do to help her? You like the thought of picking up garbage, do you?”

  The movement was subtle. My once-circle, the tattered remains of the nine skilled pion-binders I had handpicked and trained into a forceful team, closed ranks. They tightened their semi-circle around me, leaving Tsana fuming, isolated at their backs, and did the thing she hated the most. They ignored her.

  Well, most of them did. Savvin held back, as did two new members whose names I did not know. But it was enough. It was more than enough.

  “What are you doing?” While Tsana did not quite exist in the Keeper’s world, her screeching certainly did. “Stop! She’s not– Stop!”

  “Can we help you?” Volski’s arms were crossed tightly at his chest, the only indication that he even knew Tsana was there. “Is there anything we can do?”

  Use pions to collect debris? That was impossible. I turned back to the door, and sucked in a sharp breath. The crack was wider.

  “I am your centre! Listen to me!”

  But could I use pions to close a door?

  The door was debris. My suit was debris. If I couldn’t touch it, what hope did my circle – my ex-circle – have?

  “My lady?” Zecholas this time. “Tell me what’s happening. We must be able to help.” What a sharp mind that boy had. No knot of pions was too tight for him, no binding too complicated.

  With a fiercer need than I had ever known, I wished that I could find something for them to do. That I could command them, wrap myself in their beaded threads of light and power, and work miracles again. Even if all I could see of those miracles was the waste they created.

  Which made me think.

  The door was debris torn from the Keeper’s control. And we all knew how that debris was created in the first place, didn’t we? I glanced back at my once-circle. Who had sent them here, on Rest, to try and patch a hole in a wall in the middle of a backwater effluent? A hole they had no hope of patching, a problem they could very well be making worse with each pion they bound, each thread they strung, each complicated knot they wove. Because those manipulations generated debris, and a nine point circle created the most waste, particularly when a single binder was all it should have taken to patch a simple crack in a wall.

  I stared hard at Tsana. She was speaking to Savvin, hunched over, face hidden, though I couldn’t have read something as detailed as her lips. The veche. Did they know what they were doing, sending her out here? Did they know a nine point circle would only make the situation worse?

  But why would anyone – even the puppet men – want that? What could they gain by saturating this world in emptiness?

  “Maybe you can help.” The words slipped from me in a daze. “But not in the way you’d expect.”

  I turned back to Volski and Zecholas, put Tsana and her shadowy backers out of my mind.

  Volski grinned so broadly it seemed to shine through the darkness. “Tell us what we need to do, my lady.”

  We were all enjoying this too much.

  “It’s a matter of imbalance,” I said, and faced the door again. “Too many pions, too much debris.”

  “The debris created is proportional to the level of pion manipulation,” Zecholas provided.

  I nodded. “As the do– ah, hole, is directly caused by all that debris, using pions to attempt to correct it only makes the problem worse.”

  “I see.” Zecholas whistled lowly. “So we are useless here.”

  I allowed myself to smile. It should not have felt this good, to be surrounded by them, to be their focus, their centre. And maybe I had more important things to worry about than trying to recapture my lost glory. But it felt so good, it felt so right. I had thought I was beyond this, that I had accepted my life as a collector and the new people it brought. But this was my circle, and not so easily let go.

  “You’re a pion-binder, aren’t you, Zecholas?”

  He even gave me a soft chuckle. “Yes, my lady.”

  “So why don’t you tell me what you have to do.”

  “The pion system creates the waste–” Kitai began.

  “–the waste is the problem–” Volski continued.

  “–so close the pion system down.” Zecholas finished.

  And I bathed in them.

  “So you want us to destroy the wall to fix the wall?” Volski wasn’t arguing, as such. I knew
the tone. He would do whatever I asked of him, he was just curious about my reasons.

  “Once I have fixed the hole, you can rebuild that wall in a moment.” I stared hard at the dull chrome stretching across my palm. “But until I am able to do that you are useless here, like Zecholas said. Worse than useless.” I rearranged my suit as I spoke, directed as much of it to my hand as I could, thinning the rest. It resisted, it liked to wrap itself around me nice and evenly, but as the centre of this circle, wallowing in memories of authority and skill, my suit was no match for me. Not now.

  My hand thickened. The fingers meshed together, it began to look more like a basic scoop shape than the complicated body-hugging form. That didn’t matter. All I needed was something strong enough to touch the door, to push it, and to close it.

  “Good enough for me.”

  I couldn’t see the pions slow as my once-circle started to work. I couldn’t see bonds unravel, free pions dart away into the throng that was Movoc-under-Keeper, but I knew it had to be happening. A wall was a simple construction. The mesh of sandstone bricks, the ties of mortar, and the broader framework of stress and weight distribution that held the lot together. It would not take much, three distinct stages. Convince the pions that maintained the bonds to stop working so hard, undo the threads that tied them together, and set them free. The whole structure would return to the sand and cheap gravel that had created it.

  I couldn’t see the process happening, but I knew as soon as it did. Because Tsana recommenced screeching, and because the debris changed.

  I hadn’t been entirely convinced this would work. The difference undoing the system would have on an opening door was entirely theoretical. So when the door gave a strange rattle – not like something was trying to push through, more like the whole structure was settling – I was too cautious to do anything about it. Until it shrank. One inch, another. Nothing more. But still. It shrank.