Debris vw-1

by Jo Anderton

  "Tanyana, please." He took a half step closer, before simply twitching his hand. A hopeless gesture. "Forgive me. I didn't want to. I'm so sorry I hurt you."

  "Hmph." I approached him, setting the buckles on his pale jacket sparkling.

  It was strange, I suddenly felt powerful. In my hurt, my ugliness, I was stronger than him in his tailored shirt and polished boots.

  I held out my hands. "What is this?"

  "Your suit, my- Tanyana."

  "Try again."

  He smiled, sad and slow. "I will explain. I'm here to help you." He flicked a glance back at the door. "Now that you're well enough, they let me come and see you."

  I lowered my hands, still scowling. My wrists had started to ache again, right up into the elbow joint.

  "Please." He said that an awful lot. "Sit down. Do you have tea? Can I make you some tea?"

  I gave in to him, and pointed him to the kitchen. As I settled into my reading chair I could hear him rattling around. The clang of cutlery, the hollow knock of cups, and finally the hiss of heated water. It was rather pleasant, to have Devich in my small kitchen.

  Too pleasant. I reminded myself to scowl as he entered the study, cups fitted with knitted warmers balanced in his hands. My stitches pulled.

  "Here." He handed me a cup, and I wrapped my hands around the warmth. The light from my wrists created sparkling patterns on the dark liquid, the crests of a false ocean.

  He sat on the footrest, knees close to my own. I didn't shift away.

  "Explain."

  He took a sip of his own first. This seemed to involve sniffing the tea, blowing away steam, and gradually touching the rim of the cup to his lips. "To be a debris collector, you need a suit. See, you can't go around picking the debris up, not with your bare hands. No one can do that. So we need to make suits. Special suits. And that's what you're now wearing."

  "But these don't look like any suit I've seen." I flicked my wrist, wincing slightly at the stiffness there.

  "True. Your suit is dormant now."

  "Dormant?" Suits weren't dormant. Suits were wool and buttons and dye.

  Another sip. "It'll be difficult while you're healing, particularly if you're going to insist on running around upsetting your stitches." His eyes slid to the red, angry skin of my left hand. I had to fight not to slip it from the cup and hide it between my knees. "When we can be sure everything has stabilised then I'll show you." The edges of his cheeky smile peeked above the rim of the cup. "It's not something I can really explain."

  I gulped my hot tea down, enjoying the warmth it left in my throat and stomach. "Why are you here then, if you refuse to explain anything?"

  "Told you." He placed his still-full cup on the floor and shuffled forward. His hands rested lightly on my knees and his raised eyebrows challenged me to pull away.

  I sat very still. The heat of his palms travelled through my pants to leave a tingling.

  "I'm here to help." He leaned in closer. "You're tired, Tanyana."

  I didn't pull away, but I did make a face. "You should try sleeping with these sometime."

  "It's the small things that are hard to get used to at first. Here." He kept one hand on my knee as he slid open the buttons on his jacket and pulled dark cloth from a pocket. "You might need to wait a few more days for your skin to heal, there's nothing I can do about that. But these are for you."

  There were five of them, tight circles of a dark cloth that stretched in my hands. "What are they?"

  "To cover you. So you can sleep." He took one from me and ran his fingers along it, demonstrating the elasticity. "These will hide the light." He placed the fabric back with its fellows. "Helps you sleep." And the cloth would hide the horrible metal bands from the rest of the world. He didn't say it, but I could read it in his face.

  I had never hidden before. Would I do so now?

  Devich collected his cup from the rug.

  I lifted an eyebrow at him as he sipped, carefully. "Is that all?"

  Crestfallen, he replaced the cup on the floor. "Well, I still need to help you with the pain. Show me your wrists."

  Wary, I did so, shoulders tense, ready to snatch them away.

  "How are your wounds?" He inspected the suit and lifted bandages along my arm.

  "Healing slowly."

  "Do they hurt?"

  I described the pain, the changes and the rises and the rare, rare dips. He listened, expression hidden.

  "I will show you some exercises. Keep the muscles working, and they will heal faster. Pay special attention to your neck. You need to keep the blood vessels and nerves there healthy."

  I lost track of the bells as Devich tortured me some more. He bent my wrists, he rolled my ankles and bowed me from the waist. He massaged the tender muscles around my shoulders. Hurt like the Other's own claws, left me feeling twitchy and sore and irritable. The monster even waited for his tea to cool to room temperature before drinking. What kind of Other-spawn would do that?

  Finally, he loosened more pions across my skin, to ease the damage he had done. "It hurts now, I know."

  "Oh, do you?" I wrapped myself in my arms as he took the cups away, determined to stay in the chair for at least another sixnight, and possibly never move again.

  "It won't hurt as much tomorrow. Trust me."

  "Why would I ever trust you?"

  Devich smiled, and drew his jacket from the corner of my desk where he had tossed it. His sleeve disturbed two old-fashioned graphite pencils I had bought for the novelty, never imagining I might actually need to use them. I watch him rearrange them. His hand was shaking.

  Was I really that horrible? To look at, to touch, to force himself to speak to?

  "Because I know a lot more about debris than you do, Tanyana." He kept his back to me as he shrugged on his coat. "You might be able to see it, but I've spent my life studying it. I worked with suits more primitive and painful than yours will ever be. I coached dozens of collectors, helped them through the beginning, when everything is nasty, painful and new. You're not the first collector I've visited to teach them how to sleep, whose knotted shoulders I have eased, who's resisted the exercises I designed for their own good. You're not the first, and you will not be the last." Smiling, open and easy, he flicked buttons into holes. "You're not the first, Tanyana, but by Other, you're the strongest."

  Curled into a chair, sulking, I snorted a laugh. "What could possibly make you think that?"

  "You can't know how quickly you tied to the network. Some collectors take weeks to heal as much as you have in the past, what is it now, sixnight? Yes, it's only been a sixnight. And your suit is generating, it started generating the moment it touched your skin. You are strong, Tanyana. Please, in the coming moons, with the coming changes, remember that. You are strong."

  I had no idea what to say, so I didn't reply.

  "And do your exercises." Grinning, Devich left me. I heard the door close, the sizzling click of the pion lock, and silence. Lovely silence.

  The skin around my suit stung when I pulled the dark covers on. My left hand screamed protests. But it was worth the discomfort to sit in darkness – actual darkness – and silence. Didn't have time to move from my chair before I fell asleep.

  4.

  "As you appear well enough to make a scene in the tribunal chambers-" a puppet man, standing in my doorway, passed me a small white card "-you are doubtless well enough to begin collecting. Leave now."

  I stared at the side of his neck, at his jaw, his eyes. Nothing. No seams, no wooden hinges. But I had seen them. I knew it. "How do you know that?" Two days since Devich had been here, two days since I had met Volski in the city. Had Devich told them? But I hadn't told Devich about the tribunal records. "What are you doing? Following me?" But how could these wooden puppet creatures have followed me without being terribly obvious?

  "We know that you are ready to begin collecting, Miss Vladha."

  I met his dirty-wall eyes and wondered what was going on behind them. "And what
will you do if I don't?"

  His expression didn't change.

  "I am not a debris collector," I hissed at him. "I don't belong with those people. I was pushed, do you hear me! This isn't right, it isn't fair!"

  The puppet expelled a long sigh, the most human thing I had seen any of them do. And in that movement I caught a glimpse, tiny and almost hidden by pale hairs, of a line etched down his neck to disappear beneath the collar of his shirt. Fine, thin, dark. But there. Definitely there. "You tried to reopen a tribunal, did you not?"

  "Other's hell, how do you know that?"

  "Let me assure you, Miss Vladha, that if you do not follow our instructions, if you do not meet up with your collecting team by breakbell this morning, you will be brought before a tribunal of your own. You will repay the veche for the damage you caused, and for the skills you have lost, one way or the other. If not through the collection of debris, then through a sentence of manual labour in the colonies. Abandon your duty, and the veche would have no choice but to strongly condemn such a blatant waste of your newly acquired talents. And as you might imagine, miss, there are few positions for a woman with no pion-binding skill at the edges of civilisation."

  Something inside me quailed. I tried not to show it. "You wouldn't really want that. Set up a tribunal and all I'll do is tell the truth. That's the last thing you want." But my voice shook, however much I wanted it to hold steady.

  "You refuse to understand, miss. The truth has already been told. Backed up with testimony by senior veche inspectors, no less. The matter is ended." No change of expression. No bluff to call, no threat to challenge.

  I looked down at the card in my hand.

  Sublevel, 384 Darkwater

  8th Keepersrill, Section 10

  "Eighth Keepersrill? Are you mad?" Dawnbell had just sounded. How did he think I could travel so far before the next bell?

  But when I looked up the puppet man had gone. Too silently, too quickly.

  I rubbed my face as I closed the door, and resisted the need to return to bed, pull blankets over my head and pretend none of this had ever happened. Instead, I wrapped my piecemeal suit in the black bands Devich had given me. They were easier to fit now, the skin around the silver mostly healed. I had discovered in my first, nervous proddings of this newly touchable skin that the suit went further into me than it appeared. When I tried to squeeze my finger under the edges I couldn't find a gap between skin and silver. It was a part of me now, deeply.

  I had discarded most of my boots – left them on the street for beggars with small feet – so the shoes I pulled on were not as high as I would have liked, not as tight to my calves or made of the kind of hard leather that could keep out cold slush and street-funnelled wind. I made up for it with heavy woollen pants and stockings underneath them. The shirt I picked was the same snowmush grey as my pants, with sleeves long enough to cover my wrists. Then I wrapped myself in my comfortable jacket, tucked my watch into a pocket and again, I stepped out into the city.

  The early morning was icy cold. A faint pink smudge lit the clear sky, edging the Keeper Mountain in rosegold. I did up both layers of buttons on my jacket, wrapping it tight around my chest. Still, the wind pried at it, insistent.

  I strode out into the near-empty street. Ice clung to the edges of lamps and crowded the rims of windows. The dawn gave Movoc back some of her colour. Dour buildings of pale stone glowed. Dull iron gates, window bars and lamps burnished to faint gold. The ice that coated the streets glistened like mother-of-pearl. And it made my heart ache, to remember the colour I knew hid below this borrowed, reflected light.

  I wasn't entirely sure where the eighth Keepersrill was. Further away from the city centre, for a start. From the street outside my apartment I could see the faint tips of the Keeper's Tear Bridge, the bear flags sagging beneath the weight of icy-heavy dew. I turned my back to it. If I followed the Tear down, away from the city centre, eventually I would come to the eighth rill. But this was the second, and I didn't know how many effluent inlets washed their filth into the Tear between here and the eighth. I had less than a bell till breakbell. Walking would take too long, and I wasn't willing to risk that. I needed to find transport, and that meant I would have to pay for it.

  I fingered the rublie in my pocket. The disk fitted comfortably in my palm and gave off a slight heat. Sadly, that was all it was good for now. I could no longer read the pions that would have told me how many kopacks I owned.

  Time seemed to rush ahead of me, leaving crunching noises in the ice. I dug a hat from my pocket – a leather cap that fit snugly on my head and was inlaid with tightly knitted wool – pulled it down over my ears and jammed my hands into my pockets. Then I headed for the Tear.

  Movoc-under-Keeper had started its life – back in the dark days before Novski developed his theory on critical circles – huddled around the Keeper's Tear River. The Tear had always been the life of this city. Its waters rushed, clean and clear, even in the middle of the coldest winter night. It provided Weeping carp to hungry primitives, and introduced them to the great bears that hunted the large, dark-scaled fish. Hundreds of years and a pion revolution later, Movoc-under-Keeper still huddled around the Tear. All levels of veche built their buildings as close to the bridge as possible, anyone with kopacks to spare bought apartments with views of the water. Other's teeth, even Grandeur would have faced the river, if she'd lived long enough to gain a face.

  When Novski's critical circle revolution changed the city, two large roads were built on either side of the river. Movoc's arteries. I headed for Easttear.

  The traffic began to pick up as I neared the river. Men mostly, rugged up with jackets and leather caps like mine, heads down and shoulders hunched, hurried against the sharp wind that rose from the water. Few women. Bracing the cold, wrapping oneself up in clothes that hid shape, hair and feminine beauty, was hardly very ladylike. There were those who had no choice: the cleaners, spinners, and governesses. This close to the centre of the city, however, most women could afford to behave like ladies. Even the women of my circle, when I had one, only grudgingly resigned themselves to jackets and caps on a construction site.

  The driver of the first landau that slid past glanced my way, but didn't stop, even as I waved as frantically as my stitches would allow. Either his coach was full, or he had just ignored me. I frowned, and tugged my cap down where it had started to ride up and expose the bandages over my left ear.

  The landau looked bizarre without pions. It glided several feet above the ice, silent and smooth, all polished ebony with sparkling silver fittings. Its driver sat at the front, exposed to the morning chill while his passengers rode in insulated comfort, hidden behind darkened glass. The driver held his hands out, fingers loose over invisible reins, mouth working as he coaxed and guided a complex tangle of invisible lights.

  I knew what I should be seeing. A landau was usually festooned with bright streamers, and carried on long legs of pion threads. They looped around the base, threading through the nooks and the hooks where wheels and springs would have been, back when horses used to draw them. There were usually six long spider-like legs of many bright and diverse colours. So what looked like gliding to me now was actually crawling. Crawling on light.

  The second coach ignored me too.

  I had known my life would be different now. But I hadn't imagined that something as simple as signalling a landau to take me down the Tear River would become this much harder, this quickly. My high-necked, tailored jackets had given me status. Their quality said I was a skilled binder, one who earned enough kopacks from her craft to have clothes like that made to measure. Their silver bear-heads shining from the shoulders told how many times I had been employed by the veche, and how many successful commissions I had filled. The insignia stitched into the neck, difficult to see unless one stood close, demonstrated which university I had graduated from, and with how much honour.

  Wearing those jackets, I did not have to stand in the slush of melting ice at the
edge of the street and wave at coaches as they glided past. Coaches came to me; they sought me out like loyal puppies hoping for scraps. Without them, I was just another person in this too-full city.

  A coach finally did pick me up. A much cheaper-looking affair than the silent and dark landaus I had watched gliding past. It had wheels, for one thing. Not all binders were strong enough to create large insect-legs of pure energy, and had to rely on pion systems working in a gearbox and driveshaft to help propel and steer the carriage. This one was painted in a pale lacquer, peeling in places, and one of its steel-mesh stairs was loose.

  "Where you headed?" The driver squinted down he slowed the coach beside me. He didn't stop it, so I was forced into a fast walk to answer him. As fast as I could manage, at least.

  "Eighth Keepersrill," I shouted over the rattle of wheels and icy stone.

  His eyes widened as he realised I was a woman. But then, I didn't look that much like a woman, dressed the way I was. Surprised most people the first time, which had always been the point. I didn't appreciate the assumptions that came with wearing skirts, long hair and glittery pieces of jewellery. As the fatherless daughter of a textile factory worker, I'd spent most of my life fighting against just those same kind of assumptions. But I was not a weak pionbinder, and I was perfectly capable of doing great things, powerful things, and living my own life my way.

  At least, I had been.

  "What Section?" He slowed the coach further.

  Swallowing my pride, I tried to sound grateful. "Tenth." And I smiled. I actually smiled at him.

  He nodded. "Get on."

  I didn't give him the opportunity to bring the Otherdamned coach to a stop. Ignoring the pain in my stitches, I grabbed one of the rails, pulled myself up and yanked a door open with the other hand.

  Three men were already crammed into the interior. One read from a small slide, one seemed half asleep. The third was industriously picking at the seat's worn cushions, undoing the cheap fabric with his fingers, and then repairing it with a whisper to whatever pions would listen to him. Better than boredom, I supposed. As I swung myself in they squeezed closer together, making a space for me. I wedged myself between the door and the man with the slide. He wore a bulky coat that made loud crinkling noises as I pressed against it.