by Jo Anderton
Yicor had met us at Eugeny’s house and led us to the half-buried, domed room beneath the city. He’d been surprised to see Lad, clinging to Kichlan’s hand and rocking on the balls of his feet with excitement, but had not questioned his presence. The once great, circular room was almost empty; only the few younger Unbound men had gathered, with Fedor and Lev at their head. Lev shared Fedor’s expression of affronted horror.
Of course, that was mainly due to Volski and Zecholas waiting in the underground street, where they were quite happily cooing over the ancient architecture.
Only Yicor did not appear personally insulted by the presence of pion-binders in this secret, buried world. But then, he didn’t seem to approve either. The old man simply watched – expressionless, silent – and listened.
“And I agreed with him,” Kichlan added.
“Not me!” Lad beamed. “I knew Tan was right from the beginning.”
Fedor glanced at Lad and his anger slipped away. “You,” he whispered. “The Half.”
Tingles of worry crawled through me, and I felt Kichlan tense beside me. Fedor knew.
“Half?” Lev gasped, and excited murmurs rippled through the room. “Are you truly? Do you speak to the Keeper?”
“Am.” Lad beamed, proudly. “Do! He talks to me and then I tell Tan. It’s very important.”
Lev turned to Fedor. “They brought us a Half.”
“That is beside the point.” Deftly, Fedor returned the weight of scrutiny to my shoulders. “Those two men waiting outside are pion-binders,” he hissed, scowling at me. “They do not belong here. This is not their battle. It is ours.”
“Yes,” I said. “We’ve heard that argument a few times too.” This was going nowhere. “Listen, I know this is your plan and I know how much you’ve sacrificed for it.”
Fedor grunted.
“But that doesn’t change the fact that without Zecholas and Volski’s help, you will fail.”
“You know nothing about this.”
I turned to Yicor. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance you can talk sense into this man, is there?”
“This is Fedor’s undertaking,” Yicor answered. “Not mine.”
“And not Eugeny’s,” Lev grated.
“That’s enough, we are doing this. Now.” Fedor pushed past me, and began squeezing his way through the tight gap that was all that remained of the entrance. “And we are doing it without your help.” There was no way anyone could exit that room and still maintain a dignified air of injured pride. But Fedor certainly tried.
One by one, with identical filthy glares and insulting words muttered under their breath, the assembled Unbound men followed. Not before smiling at Lad, however. Or nodding to him, or waving. Of course, he couldn’t help but smile back.
“That went well.” Kichlan released a loud sigh. “You really have a skill when it comes to things like this.”
“It was never going to go well.” Alone in the chamber with Kichlan, Lad and me, Yicor began to smile. “No matter how you handled it, these boys have worked too long and too hard on this to let a newcomer take over. Especially one with two wealthy binders in tow.” The smile widened. The cheekiness, the hidden depths of knowledge I had seen when we first met, returned. “Of course, they can’t stop you following them. Section twelve, tenth Keepersrill. It’s the large building on Widesign. You can’t miss it.” And Yicor left with a great breath to suck in a steadily growing gut, and a final daring glance my way.
Follow them?
“Did you really need him to tell you the obvious?” Kichlan glowered at the old man’s retreating back.
“He makes a good point,” I answered.
“What, to follow them? I could have told you that.”
“He told us the address.”
“And why do we need that to follow them?”
“Should be quiet,” Lad said, and firmly placed my hand in his brother’s, silencing us both. “And hurry, or they will be gone.” He left us to squeeze his broad frame through the rubble. Not an easy feat.
Kichlan touched his lips lightly to my straggly fringe. I could feel the curl of his smile. “You need a haircut,” he said, before leading me to the door and helping me through.
I emerged flustered and hot into the dim underground street.
“They’re leaving,” Volski pointed out. He was sitting on rubble in the shadows, away from the opening to the domed building.
“Then let’s follow them.” I helped Kichlan through. He was, after all, almost as large as his brother. Steadying him took longer than it should – my hands at his sides, his on my shoulders – and when I turned, Volski’s gaze seemed to have sharpened.
“This is remarkable.” Zecholas, however, remained utterly unconcerned by the less than enthusiastic reception to his presence. He was peering into collapsed windows, stroking time-eroded statues, and clambering into unsafe-looking nooks. “I wish you could see them, my lady. The pion bindings are beautiful. Simple and direct, uncomplicated but strong. As close to perfect as I’ve ever known. I don’t think these were built using pions at all.”
“No, they wouldn’t have been.”
He collected one of the chunks of gold-flecked crystal from a nearby pile, and tossed it down to me. “And these – my lady, I don’t even know how to classify them. The pions inside them are like nothing I’ve ever seen. So concentrated it actually hurts to look at, and too bloody bright to see what’s going on anyway. And yet, they’re not doing anything. It’s just stone, as far as I can tell. The statues are like that too, only not as bad.”
He swung himself down from a ledge and grinned at me, fiery with passion for his pions. “This place is inspiring. These buildings use none of the complicated, multi-level, heavily-alloyed bindings that are in vogue at the moment. Maybe not as aesthetically pleasing.” He rubbed rough stone. “But see how long they have stood.”
“Maybe you should pioneer a new design?” My fingers twitched, unconsciously, with the very thought. To make something as beautiful and simple, as natural rock. That was a greater challenge than it sounded.
Zecholas laughed. “Well I might.”
“Your friends–” Volski broke in, ever practical “–are getting further away.”
I silenced the foolish dreams of another lifetime. “Then we’d better hurry.”
We set off back along the hidden street. Kichlan and Lad in front – Lad humming softly, Kichlan trying to pretend he wasn’t watching me over his shoulder – Volski and Zecholas on either side of me.
“I take it our offer to help wasn’t greeted with the kind of enthusiasm you had hoped for,” Volski murmured.
“You heard?” Hardly a surprise in this stone place. The echoes of our own footsteps looped over us, and I could even catch the edge of Fedor’s voice. He was, I gathered, still complaining.
“We heard enough.” He hesitated. “So why are we following them?”
My smile hardened. “To help them. Hopefully before they realise how much they’re going to need it.” I quickened the pace.
“You’ve really thought this through, haven’t you?”
Up ahead, Kichlan descended into a coughing fit.
“I wish people would stop asking me that,” I muttered.
We hurried down the submerged path, occasionally dragging Zecholas away from more exciting examples of primitive architecture and every single pile of crystalline stones, and up the ladder. Climbing up was a lot harder than down. I clutched at a stitch in my side until I noticed Kichlan watching me, concerned.
It seemed Lev had remained in his shop. He stood behind his desk and eyed us across the merchandise, lit only by a single oil lamp in his hand. “This is not their battle,” he said.
I’d had enough of arguing, and pushed out into the quiet deep of a cold Wetday night in silence. Lamplight flickered around us, an unsteady and increasingly common dance. I wondered, as I breathed steam, just what the doors were doing. Just how many were creaking open, moment by moment, while
we fumbled, petty and useless?
“Have we lost them?” Without the history of Movoc past, chiselled into stone to distract him, Zecholas was suddenly focused.
I traced fingers along the band on my left wrist, fidgeting while Kichlan coaxed Lad out into the night. They had no symbol, the band of motley would-be saviours we were following. Lad, however, bumped strong and distinct, clinking against my fingernails. How strange, I thought, for debris to clink.
“I know how to get there,” Kichlan answered for me.
“You do?” I whispered, leaning close as he led us through back alleyways that I could barely see in the light of struggling lamps.
“We’ve been there before, Tan. That’s where the coach we followed unloaded its jars.” He slipped an arm around my waist. “And anyway, I worked there.”
“When you were–”
“Yes. Long ago. Before I fell.”
A pause in which I could not properly feel us walking, where all I knew was the brush of his breath and the heat of his hand. Then I whispered, “How did you fall?” And though he hesitated, a barely perceptible movement, he did not pull away.
“After Lad… After he hurt that girl, and the veche wanted to lock him away, thinking him unsafe without constant supervision, I was taking the final measurements for a new suit. I told you the kind of suits the veche had me work on, didn’t I? Experimental, different. This suit was more than five bands and deep implants. It was armoured, similar to yours, shaped to fit the body of the young debris collector it had been assigned to. But I knew I had to be with Lad, all the time. So I knew, I had to see debris as he did. I had to fall.”
“What did you do?” I thought of the silver hand I had seen on his dresser, amputated, wrist a ruin of torn and burned wiring.
“I overloaded the suit. Instead of readying the network to bond with the nervous system of the collector I wired it to itself, linking all its implants into one great circuit.”
I slipped my arm around him.
“Then I diverted the room’s heating pion flow into the suit and sat against it. So my head was resting against the heap of metal – hands and breastplate was all they had sent by then – when it overloaded. And exploded.”
“Your head?”
“I knew what it took to make a collector.” He tapped the top of my head, the invisible scars more terrible than those that crossed my skin. “When I woke again, in another floor of the same building, I was no longer a technician. But I could keep my brother safe.”
I felt heavy with the knowledge as we continued. The image of Kichlan – a whole Kichlan, talented and unscarred by bitterness yet to come – resting his head against the suit, calm in the face of what he was about to become, would not leave me. I knew why he had chosen this life, and yet the details made it harder. Part of me wished I had not asked him. Part of me wished I could have been as calm and purposeful as he was, when I fell.
When I was pushed.
Yicor was right, it was not far. When the alley we followed opened up onto a familiar street the first thing I noticed was Fedor and his group trying to melt into the shadows along the side of the laboratory. After a moment, Fedor broke away and approached the front door. Even from the other side of the street I could see the slick of sweat on his face and the shake in his step. But it wasn’t nerves. He had extended the suit on his right hand into a great blade, a sword almost as long as his entire arm. His left was attempting to mirror it, but burgeoning instead into something shapeless and bulging.
Fedor’s suit was not like mine. It was designed to pinch, to cut, to scoop. He was not a weapon. So I drew in a hissing breath at the pain on his face, at the tension I knew would be needling itself through the bone in his arms to his spine, his head, his legs, as he drew on every last inch of the suit embedded within his marrow.
“Bro?” Lad whimpered at the sight and beside me, Kichlan shuddered.
“I know, Lad,” he whispered. “What is he trying to do?”
I shook my head. “I think he means to break the lock.”
“Tell me you’re joking.” Volski squeezed himself close beside me. “I don’t know what those blade-things on his hands can do, but do you have any idea what the pions on that door look like?”
“Yes,” Kichlan and I answered at once.
If Volski was surprised by that answer he didn’t show it. “Then you know trying to break into them isn’t a good idea.”
“That’s why you’re here.” I flashed both Volski and Zecholas a grin that felt a little unhinged, even to me. “Let’s go.”
“Stop!” I hissed to Fedor as we broke from the cover of our alleyway and ran across the street. “You don’t know what you’re doing. There are locks and enforcers and even more in that building.”
He shook his head at me. “Of course I know that, Tanyana. Do you really take us for such fools?”
I paused. “Then what are you doing?”
He lifted his fully formed blade, turned his arm so light reflected down its sharp length. “Watching. I’m better at that then you seem to think. I watched you fight that twisted debris, I’ve seen how strong the suit makes you. I might not be able to see the Keeper.” Jealousy again “But I too can be strong.”
“You don’t understand,” Kichlan snapped. “Tan’s suit is different–”
“But not that different.” Fedor gave up on his second blade, and let the suit on his left hand settle back into its band. “If I work at it hard enough, if I concentrate, focus, I too can form a blade that will cut through anything in my way.” He glanced at the lock. “Even this.”
Could he? True, our suits were not the same, but we had the same foundation. We were both built from debris. “I– I suppose you could.” Disrupt the pion systems, disable the lock. “But I’m not sure–”
“And that is why you vacillate, unable to do anything. That is why you collect when you should fight. Because you are unsure.”
I stepped back from him, stunned. Where had that come from?
“I, however, believe in what I am doing.” He glanced at Lad. “You should tell him that. The Keeper. Tell him he still has servants who respect him, and are willing to risk anything to aid him.” Fedor plunged his blade into the pion lock’s blank, crystalline screen.
For a moment, the lock spluttered and fizzed sparks round Fedor’s suit. Hardly what I had expected. “Didn’t I tell you,” he said with a smirk, “that I had all the strength we–”
The entire laboratory lit up, splattering light across the cloud-laden night sky, and Volski and Zecholas both threw themselves to the ground. “Get down!” Volski cried. “All of you!”
Kichlan dragged Lad to the stones and shielded him with his body. My suit spread into a wide screen of its own accord. And as the laboratory shone too-bright, too-sharp, I closed my eyes and turned my face away. Until Fedor started screaming.
I dragged my suit back in so I could see what was happening. It protested, tugged and pinched and performed all its usual tantrum-like tricks, but grudgingly obeyed. Fedor was strung up in invisible threads, at least six feet in the air, suit torn from the lock, wrists together above his head and legs akimbo. He shook as the air sizzled, and the pion bindings that defended the laboratory attempted to incapacitate him. But something wasn’t quite right. A pathetic wailing sound – more like a crying child than an alarm – rose and fell. And the building flickered, the lights that surged apparently sourceless from the very walls, stuttering like a massive faulty lamp.
I grabbed Volski and Zecholas and dragged them to their feet. “Something’s wrong with the defence system. Look at it, is that really what you expected from such a complex systems of bonds?” Still, it took some coaxing to convince them to approach the building.
Fedor’s Unbound team had lost their protective cover of shadows but still held back, gaping up at him in horror. Only Yicor approached us.
“By the Keeper,” he whispered. “What is happening to him?”
“Not here,” Lad muttered
. “He is not here to help.”
“The building’s defences are like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Zecholas squinted as he stared deep into the laboratory, far deeper than concrete and steel. “There are people behind that door. Heavily armoured, reinforced.”
“Enforcers?” I asked.
“Actually, closer to Mob. Strengthened, lengthened and carrying big knives. But they can’t get out.” His eyes refocused on my face. “And we should be thankful. The lock is malfunctioning. I think it’s trying to shock Fedor, knock him out, keep him there for those boys with their awful anatomy to catch. Instead, it has fused the doors and the walls into one big mess of knots and steel.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how long it will take for them to get out, or how long the lock will keep doing that.” He gestured at Fedor, who spasmed above us and cried out weakly.
“Can’t you help him?” One of the Unbound – Yan, I thought his name was – pleaded, his voice constricted.
“Either way, we will have company soon.” Volski was scanning the roofs, tracing the lines of pion bindings that I could not see. His sturdy jaw was set, his eyes serious but always so calm. “An alert has been sent. Down the light threads, one through the heating, probably through sewer pipes too. I’d safely assume they are using every binding available to them. Even if I could intercept each one they are too strong, too complicated, for me to unravel without a circle at my back.”
“Even you?” I asked, gently. Volski had far more skill than he would ever admit to.
Volski did not smile. “I’d guess we’ll have more of those Mob to deal with – or whatever they are – in less than a quarter bell.”
We had to get away from the laboratory, fast. It was time to cut Fedor free. I drew a deep breath. “We need to free him.”
“I can’t undo that.” Zecholas gestured to the door. “The two of us together couldn’t do it. I’m not even sure your circle could have, my lady.” His shoulders sagged. “If this is why you brought us here then I fear you were mistaken.”
But I shook my head. “Actually, I’d hoped to avoid this all together.” I straightened, clenched fists and promised the suit a chance to spread its wings. “But we have to deal with what we’re given.” I turned to Kichlan. “Will you help me?”