Suited

by Jo Anderton

  I turned away from the anger in his voice. Guilt battled with the suit’s automatic, aggressive response. Kichlan was only trying to protect the brother he loved so much. What did I think I was doing, dragging them both – all of them – into this fight?

  But it seemed both of us had underestimated Lad.

  He spun and shoved his brother back. Kichlan, eyes wide, tumbled a few steps away. “Don’t say that to Tan,” Lad said, quiet for once, his words nearly lost beneath the echoing babble of many voices in a crowded room. “And don’t use your voice like that. She did not ask me, I want to come. I am a Half, and I am strong, and I can decide for myself!” He drew a calming breath. “You should know that, bro. I can decide for myself.”

  Speechless, Kichlan and I gaped at him, then at each other, then back at him.

  “I–” Kichlan stammered. “I am sorry. I should have realised. I– you are my brother. Sometimes, I just want to look after you.”

  “Is okay. Forgive you, bro. Just, you should know. I can look after me too.” Lad crossed his arms and didn’t move. “And Tan too. Say sorry to Tan.”

  Kichlan looked down on me. Shock had broken whatever fury he had paced himself into. “Sorry, Tan.”

  Everything about him softened as slowly, he came to sit beside me. Lad turned around and placed himself in front of us like a screen. He was such a large man that he did so quite effectively.

  Kichlan touched my chin, my jaw. He brushed back my unruly fringe. “What have you done to yourself?”

  Part of me needed to pull away. Because of Devich’s child. Because Kichlan was right, and I was using his brother for my own ends. But more, because the notches were yet another scar, another ugly mark and he was close, so close, searching each one of them with prying eyes. I hated myself for thinking that, as though I should care what Kichlan thought of the state of my face. Wasn’t I used to scars by now?

  Instead, I swallowed my pride. “It’s the suit,” I whispered, unable to lie, even if I did not confess the entire truth. “The suit is healing me. Becoming me.” Was it really so easy to say? “Bit my bit, piece by piece, I am becoming their weapon.”

  He shook his head. “No, you will never be that.”

  “You don’t know the extent of it. You can only see my face.”

  “Oh, I think I’ve seen more than that.” He smiled. It only made me feel worse. “It doesn’t matter. Tan, you will always be you. Even if you turn into silver, you will not be their weapon. You are too strong for that.”

  I hoped so.

  He kissed me gently, over the gouges in my forehead. He wrapped his arms around me and I did the same to him. Together we lay down on that hard, cold stone padded with thin blankets, and somehow I managed to sleep.

  I woke to a world that wasn’t quite real, and the suit thrumming in my ears. Deeper than a heartbeat, stronger than the rush of blood, as solid as bones and taut as muscle. Gradually, I eased myself upright. The room sharpened into such focus that I could see every mark on the walls, smell every last wisp of oil-scent, taste the sweat and feel the heat of close-packed bodies.

  Kichlan had left me alone on the hard bed. He and Fedor stood together, faces close as they debated, eyes catching lamplight to flicker toward me.

  I caught snippets of words, more than I should have been able to hear.

  “–the defences are already weakened–”

  “–any front on attack would be suicide–”

  “–binders did it the first time–”

  I lay back down. It didn’t matter how we got there, only that we were ready when the puppet men came calling.

  “Bro will work it out,” Lad said. He was sitting close to my feet, a stooped figure nearly hidden in the shadows. “He said he would make sure Fedor did not ruin the whole thing.”

  “Good,” I said. And heard the scratching of wires inside me.

  Lad cast me a strange glance, worried eyes and terse mouth. “Don’t need to worry,” he said. “We won’t be all alone this time. The Keeper says he is coming with us. He will tell us if they are following us or watching us or coming for us. Says he will warn us in time.”

  As long as he did not get in my way. I closed my eyes again. The suit and I slept.

  “You’re a heavy sleeper.” Aleksey, close to my face. When I opened my eyes his scar was long and pale in the darkness, like a crescent moon. He was holding my shoulders, gently rocking me to consciousness.

  “She isn’t still asleep, is she?” Mizra peered around his shoulder. He lowered his voice. “Is something wrong?”

  I stood, rolled out a crick in my neck and shook feeling into my hands. Wrong? No. I had never felt stronger, more powerful. I felt as though I towered above everyone in the room, calm even in the face of their desperation and fear.

  “No.” My voice was smooth, too smooth. A chime of metal, a great and solid bell. “I was tired. That’s all.”

  “Been an interesting few days,” Natasha said from her spot beside Sofia and Uzdal. “I can’t really blame you.”

  “But we need to move,” Fedor said in tone that brooked no argument. “Tonight, or not at all.”

  I pushed past them into the subterranean street. Lad kept close to me, matching my pace but asking no questions, his face as determined as I had ever seen it.

  We climbed up into Lev’s shop and dispersed in small groups to roam Movoc-under-Keeper in apparently random patterns, which would eventually congregate at a laboratory high along the river on the outskirts of the old city. We were not to attract attention, the small groups ensuring that if some of us were found, captured, and questioned, at least the rest of us could complete the mission – Fedor’s plan, with Kichlan’s embellishments.

  The street lamps, I realised, were dead. The suit saw debris planes in their systems and felt cracks along the pion lines as far back as their factories. Not the Unbound, facilitating their desperate night raid; not the veche, hiding their troops in the darkness; but a city falling, the unravelling of every pion bind, the weakening of valves, the shifting of walls, steel, and flesh into sand.

  I did not need the oil-lamps each group carried to see by. I saw the night world with a bluish tinge, as though the light spinning on my wrists, ankles, waist and neck had lit the city for me, and me alone.

  “This way!” Kichlan hissed, crossed a blackened street and ducked down an alleyway. I followed, and wished I had bothered to find out where we were going. I could have outrun them all.

  Kichlan had made sure to take Lad, Volski, Zecholas and me in his small group. We ran in short bursts, as silent as feet on stone could be. So when the suit heard a single person – small, light-footed, agile – running close behind us, cutting cross our path, darting wall to wall, I stopped.

  “Tan?” Lad asked, peering at me from over his shoulder.

  Kichlan scowled at us both, lifted a finger and pressed it against his lips. “What are you–?”

  “Wait for me,” I whispered. The footsteps were fading, their owner getting away.

  “We don’t have time–”

  “Then keep going.” I didn’t bother to look at him. “I will find you.” And before any of them could respond, I was gone. Silver in my bones. I didn’t even need to let the suit loose. I was running. Back down the street, a sharp turn into an alleyway, two easy leaps: lamppost, wall, to roof. Then I was gliding, the suit light, like invisible wings cupping the icy night air, so soft was my tread across the shattered tiles of failing rooftops. It was good, oh so good. The suit goaded me, filled me with its strength. Dimly I was aware of life in the buildings beneath me: snoring, the clatter of furniture, the dark spitting of an argument terrible in the night. They were not aware of me.

  And neither was Natasha. She ran so smoothly she could have been a shadow herself. Away from her allocated group, away from apparent suicide by attack against the veche, away from the collecting team she had infiltrated so effectively that Lad and I had risked the Mob to keep her safe.

  So I told mysel
f that was why I dropped from the rooftops to land in her path, because we had risked so much for her. Even this foolhardy last stand against a vastly superior foe was happening, in a way, because Lad and I had decided to protect her. Running away from us was a betrayal.

  That was a better reason than the feel of icy wings, than the hunt, the chase, the fight.

  I landed so silently that she did not hear me, did not even see me, until it was too late. Natasha skidded to a halt, suddenly ungainly, suddenly clumsy, slipping on night-wet stones only feet away. Her usually green, sharp eyes widened like dark haloes in a ghost’s face. “How?” she whispered, and I saw true fear there. In the shaking hand that pushed strands of brown hair away from the sweat on her forehead and yet – I was certain – would draw a weapon from her jacket faster than she could blink.

  “Go ahead,” I said, in my smoothly metallic voice. “Try one of your little tricks. Let’s see what happens.” I was grinning. Utterly out of my control, like the bubbling warmth spreading from my bands, coating my legs, abdomen, and torso.

  But to my disappointment, Natasha dropped the hand. She stood, arms by her sides, held slightly way from her body with her palms facing me. “This isn’t like you, Tanyana,” she said. Hardly the begging apology I deserved.

  “You’re running,” I hissed. “Abandoning them.”

  “Of course.” She tipped her head slightly, actually looked confused. “What would you expect me to do?”

  “Stand with your team and fight!” I hissed.

  Natasha shook her head. “This is not my fight. This should not be anyone’s fight. You are letting that man, that Unbound fool, lead his people and your people to their deaths. You must know that is true.”

  “You understand nothing.” I stepped forward. We were close, so close I could hear the blood beating fast with fear in her veins.

  “No, Tanyana. Please.” Was that it? Was that the pleading I had wanted, the begging she owed me? “I need to return to my contacts. I have a duty; I have sworn an oath to the Emperor himself. I must tell them what the national veche is doing, I must warn them. There is more at stake than you could understand, more going on than your foolish suicidal plans!”

  Emperor? Natasha did not look like she belonged with the Hon Ji. She was too pale, too green-eyed, hair too light and curled. But then again, she could not have infiltrated us so effectively if she did not look like this.

  Hope sprung up in her eyes, and a subtle change of breath. “We have a common enemy!” she said. “You want to fight the national veche, Tanyana? Those corrupt old men who did this do you? Then help me escape. The Emperor’s army is your only chance, far better than a small group of the ragtag poor and broken. With everything you know – with your very strength in our ranks! – we will break their hold over this nation. No one will ever be subjected to the kind of torture you have known at their hands. Never again!”

  Armies? Emperors? It was a nice try, a bold idea. But the suit and I knew what it would take to remove the puppet men. Us.

  “Your armies will die.” I thought of debris monsters devouring the pion bindings that hold a body together. Had she told her precious Emperor about that? “I will not join them.”

  Natasha sagged a little, appeared defeated. I was not convinced of her apparent helplessness.

  “Why do you spy for them?” I asked, softly, ready to move. “You were not born Hon Ji, were you?”

  Her sharp eyes flickered up for a moment. Bitter, unsure. “My Hon Ji mother worked in the colonies,” she hissed. “My father was Varsnian Mob. I take after him.”

  Indeed she did. For she moved, suddenly, with such speed and grace that I wondered just how much of his pion-enhancements her father had passed to her with his looks, or if that was even possible. One moment she was dejected, slumped, and the next she had her blade in one hand and the two remaining metal and clay disks in the other.

  Natasha was fast, unnaturally so. But she was not suited, not the way I was.

  Silver lashed out from my coated hand. It caught her wrists before she could so much as activate her lightning weapon. It squeezed her bruised and broken skin, twisted bones and tendons until her hands opened in reflex. The knife clattered useless to the stones. I caught the twin disks.

  I drew her hands together, wrapped myself around them like I was the chain I had freed her from earlier.

  “Damn you,” she gasped, but I did not loosen my grip.

  “You will stand with us,” I said. “You will fight with us.”

  But as I began to drag her back to Kichlan and Lad, the suit refused to be put away. Uninterested in hibernating in its five tight bands it clamped hard over my skin and clothes and refused to respond to the usual movement of muscles, the normal firing of nerves.

  Gripping Natasha’s wrists hard, I wheezed a deep breath. “Not now. Not yet.” I coughed against scratching, digging, wiggling silver. “Not her.”

  The suit did not want to be placated. Battle, it whispered somewhere inside my head. Fight. Even Natasha – with her hidden weapons and the deadly grace she had, somehow, hidden from me for all these moons – had been too easy, over too quick. It was not enough, my muscles told me as they flexed, we needed more.

  “She is not the challenge, you know that.” I turned my face away from the line of Natasha’s shoulders, so ready to try and throw me off balance, the casual strength in her stance. And I pushed down the rising need to test her, to see how lithe that back, how strong those legs, and just what she thought she could do against me without her weapons. “And this is not the bargain.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Natasha asked, voice restricted by pain.

  Hesitation. The suit did not understand the difference: a good fight was a good fight.

  “A compromise then?” Was I really arguing with my own body – again – with my muscles and the deepest of my bones?

  The suit agreed to retract, but only so it could slide back over my very skin beneath clothes and boned uniform closer than it ever had. And I gasped, not because it was cold but because it was warm, living yet metal. And I could not tell where skin ended and suit began and it felt right, so horribly right, like we had been missing each other, like this was the way we were always meant to be. Those paltry bands on my wrists, ankles, waist and neck only held us back. We were supposed to be joined all over, ever more.

  I hated myself for feeling it. But I could not stop the pleasure.

  I convinced the suit to leave my head clear. Although, adding all the scars on my face and scalp, I was silver enough.

  “T– Tanyana?”

  I glanced over my shoulder. Natasha pulled back, horrified, from the suit-coated hand that extended to bind her wrists. Had she seen it move beneath my sleeve? Had she felt the ripple as it claimed my skin? She did not understand.

  “We must hurry.” I held the two disks in my free hand, and could feel their energy, their vibrating potential, through the touch of metal to suit. “Try to keep up.”

  Suited this way, I knew instantly where Lad was. I could feel him. Not just his symbol pushing insistent against my fingertips, I felt him through all of me. From skin to bone. Lines solid, symbol strong, flowing through me.

  So we ran toward him, the suit and I a splash of light in the darkness, with Natasha stumbling, falling, dragging behind us. Quickly, too quickly, we found him. It was an effort to slow down and stop. All I wanted was that sensation of speed, and the flush of wind.

  “Tan!” Lad launched himself at us as we rounded the corner, wrapped his arms around me and held tight. “Thought we lost you!”

  He rocked me, his touch sending shivers through us. The suit did not like him, the suit did not trust him. Until Kichlan appeared by our side and noticed Natasha; Natasha, weakened, bloodied, fallen against the stones. Still bound by the wrists, still linked to me like a dog on a chain.

  Kichlan crouched beside her. Gently, he lifted her head. Her eyes flickered open, and she winced beneath his concern. One side of her fa
ce was bruised, scratched by the stones. Her clothing was torn, wet; her arms straining at a terrible angle.

  It reminded me of the Mob, too keenly, sharpened with guilt and an underlying horror at what I had done. It was enough to force the suit to let her go. It retracted back to cover my hand and brought with it the taste of her fear, the dirt of her skin, the feel of her blood. I shivered.

  “Tan?” Kichlan helped Natasha sit back against a wall. She groaned as he laid her hands in her lap, ran fingers along the bones in her arms. “What happened?” Hesitation, disbelief, played across his face. “Did you do this to her?”

  “She was running,” I said, as though that explained everything, as though that excused me.

  “Running? So you, what, chased her?”

  Volski and Zecholas held back. I could feel them behind me, hear their breathing and shuffling feet.

  “I can’t just let her go,” I hissed. “She is one of us!”

  Then Lad, to my utter surprise, took my hand. “Tash has secrets,” he said. “Tash was the one the Mob was after, not Tan. Tan and I helped her.” He glanced at me, hesitating. “So– so she shouldn’t go. That’s why, isn’t it Tan?”

  Slowly, Natasha lifted her head. One eye was swollen shut, her lips bleeding, great scrapes and grazes darkened her forehead. “You, Lad?” She spat blood. “Even this suited bitch kept her mouth shut. But you would betray me?”

  “Tash–”

  “I thought you were my friend.”

  Lad hiccupped an uncertain sob.

  The suit believed this was all a waste of time, and it was easier to agree. So I turned – still holding onto Lad – and strode ahead, leaving Kichlan crouched by Natasha’s side. “We should hurry.” I rattled the disks against the metal of my hand. It was a struggle not to run.

  “My lady?” Volski murmured as he and Zecholas hurried to keep up. “Lady, are you all right?”

  I was. The suit and I, together. We were damned near perfect.

  I felt the laboratory before I saw it. Or, at least, I felt that which it housed. Debris was a symbol of itself, the strongest symbol of them all. Fiercely bright and connected to me in a far deeper way than Lad was, but connected also to the suit, the city, the sky, the earth. It thrummed through me, a bass accompaniment to the suit’s ecstasy, a second heartbeat, an all-consuming pulse.