Debris vw-1

by Jo Anderton

  "It's beautiful, on you." Was it me he stared at so hungrily, or the shining metallic creature he had created?

  "I have to clean these." I swept a hand over the scars on my shoulder. He spared them barely a glance. "I won't be long."

  And his silent adoration vanished with a grin. "Don't be. I told you it's a treat." He hurried to the kitchen like an excited schoolboy.

  I washed my scars with fresh water, but couldn't quite remove all of the golden paste. The new bandages were rough. My collector's uniform was so uninviting I almost felt physically ill at the prospect of dragging it on. But I couldn't ignore Kichlan's warning, however much I wanted to forget about both brothers. As I pulled it over my head I noticed that the thick, boned, strangely stretching material that held no bodily smells, no dirt, and no stains, somehow smelled like Eugeny's fireplace and a goosedown bed.

  I didn't bother fussing with my hair. Devich had said to hurry.

  He didn't seem to notice the uniform as I entered the kitchen, wearing satin bedclothes over the top and hoping their design of dark water and red carp would keep it hidden. He stood, chest wide and thrust forward, arms open over a feast laid out on the clean kitchen bench.

  And it was a feast. Good enough reason, I supposed, to feel insufferably proud of himself.

  "My lady." He mock-bowed, arms sweeping forward, brushing against a decanter of wine and grabbing it before it could fall.

  "How did you do this?" I gaped at the food, and my stomach rumbled loud appreciation.

  Devich laughed. "Don't question how the food is come by, care only for how it tastes."

  "Devich's own words of wisdom?" I arched an eyebrow.

  "Hardly. Something my father used to say, when his rublie was particularly empty. Now-" he rubbed his hands together "-can I help you to your table?"

  I mused over this small slip as Devich held out a chair and sat me at my small pale lacquered table. Not from a family of debris technicians then? Not the kind of family who had always worked for the veche, always created arcane and complicated suits, and had rublies full enough to prove it. There was more, perhaps, to Devich's easily cultured civility.

  "What can I offer you first?"

  I found it difficult to keep my attention from his shoulders, as they strained a shirt that simply couldn't be wide enough to fit them, or his narrow, belt-tightened waist. Scrounging through the drawers he found cutlery enough to serve his feast, and rolled his sleeves up to do so. His forearms were muscled, well defined, their hair fair.

  I swallowed against a lump in my throat. "Give me a bit of everything." My stomach gurgled at the idea of a measly bit.

  Devich had brought fish. Fish. Raw salmon in slivers with lime and pepper dressing. Two large tuna steaks, grilled, and topped with thickened sour cream. Trout in a gelatinous sauce with root vegetables so fresh they were still topped with leaves. A salad of crab and green beans. Even prawns, darkened to red by a chilli crust.

  More food than the two of us could eat together, even though we focused on the eating in near silence.

  Finally, he heaped sugar-sprinkled strawberries on a plate, and we picked at them.

  Devich leaned in his chair as he dusted pale sugar onto his knees, smugly. I supposed he wanted compliments for the food he didn't prepare, or perhaps, for the kopacks that bought it.

  "Delicious," was all I could get out.

  "Wasn't it?" He stood, graceful and smooth, swept plates from the table and piled them on the bench. For the cleaner. I stared at them. There were boxes in a heap on the floor beside the bench. Had he carried them all himself, or simply directed a young chef's apprentice to do it for him? Had he walked, or hailed a landau for the trip?

  "Now, my lady, if you're still interested in tea." He held out a hand, and helped me to my feet. My stomach felt strange, not what I would call pleasantly full, just heavy. The result of such rich meat and thick sauces, I supposed.

  "Yes. Tea would be lovely." As long as I didn't have to watch him drink it.

  "You look tired." Devich traced his finger beneath my left eye. I glanced away. "Sit in your chair, and I will bring you tea. Can't have you too exhausted, can we?"

  Despite myself, I grew hot as I left the kitchen and sank into the chair in my study. The lamp was low, its flicker unsteady. Like flames in a fireplace.

  Devich brought me tea, and to my unmeasurable relief, hadn't made himself one. He sat on the floor, leaned against my legs, and wrapped an arm around my knees as I sipped. He was very, very warm.

  "There's something I want you to do for me," he murmured, voice as soft as the lamplight.

  "One meal and you'll think I'll do anything, is that it?" I sipped again.

  He didn't laugh. "This is a favour. One friend to another."

  "Is that what you are? I thought you were my overenthusiastic tailor."

  "And this is me being serious, Tanyana."

  "Then this is me listening, Devich." What right did he have to sit at my feet and be serious?

  "Good, then this is what I want you to do. I want you to stop hiding yourself, my lady. I want you to stop believing any of what has happened makes you different."

  The porcelain rim of the cup rested against my teeth. Steam moistened my upper lip. "Stop hiding?" I squeezed the handle so strongly my hand began to shake. "How dare you-"

  "No, I'm not going to take any of that from you." Devich unwrapped himself and sat back. His green eyes seemed darker, the lines of his face stern. But far from making him unappealing, I found him arresting. More than with his smiles and easy laugh.

  I set the cup at my feet. "You don't know what you're talking about."

  "Yes, I do." He held up a hand. I surprised myself by shutting my mouth against a building tirade. "I've told you this before. You're not the first debris collector to pass through my door."

  "Only the strongest," I murmured, and didn't say what that really meant. That I'd had more to lose, and fallen further.

  "I fitted a suit once," Devich said. "To a woman not much younger than you. She was beautiful, and had been talented. An artist, I believe. Something to do with sculpture."

  Had she fallen through glass so half her face was unrecognisable?

  "She mastered the suit well, although with none of your natural flair, and was allocated to a team in the outer western rim of the city. Far from the Tear."

  "You followed her around too, did you?" I asked.

  "It was a good suit. I'm interested in the performance of all my suits."

  "Helped that she was young and beautiful."

  Devich flashed me a frown, and looked for a moment like he might argue, but ultimately did not rise to the bait. Pity. An argument would have been more interesting than any moralising tale. He said, "I watched it happen in fragments, in the flashes of her life I saw each time I stopped to check and tune. I watched her fall apart."

  I collected my tea and began sipping again. If Devich was trying to frighten me he had no idea how far I had already fallen.

  "She lost her home," he continued. "Her colleagues, her friends. Then, well, I can't quite say what she lost next. Nothing you can touch, nothing you can buy. I suppose you could call it spirit."

  "She lost her spirit?" I couldn't hide the cynicism I my voice.

  "Whatever made her, her. Her identity, maybe, her reason to be."

  Was he really that blind? Did he really think I was still holding onto those things like a cat clinging to a tree? Surreptitiously, I sank into my antique leather chair. I tried to ignore the food I had just eaten, the bath I had just taken, the apartment address so far from my collecting team I could conceivably take a tent and supplies each time I travelled between them.

  No, not holding onto any vestiges of an old life. Not at all.

  "I saw it happen," Devich said. "Her clothes weathered and her hair grew tattered and her skin dirty and grey. She stopped cleaning, she stopped washing. Finally, she stopped eating. I'm glad I didn't find her. By the time I returned to check on he
r she had been dead for nearly a moon." He sat back against his heels. "It was a fine suit, some of my best work. A waste."

  "Is that why you bought me evenbell supper tonight? Think I'm going to starve myself to death, do you?"

  Devich jerked his head up. "You don't do serious very well, do you?" he snapped.

  With a sigh, I wrapped my hands around my tea and let its warmth seep into my palms. "I understand what you're saying, Devich. I do. But I don't know what you want me to do about it. This-" I gestured at my face, at my wrists, and nearly unbalanced tea into my lap "-I am different because of this. I'm not even a pion-binder any more, let alone a circle centre. So when I say I'm no one's lady any more, I mean it. That title no longer applies to me. I am less than I was, in many ways. Only you don't see them."

  But when I looked up to meet his fervent eyes, his flushed, defiant face, my certainty wavered. He really didn't care about the scars, did he? Or the bands of silver. Or the loss of status, and lack of kopacks. He saw me, only me. Not the difference between me as I once was, and me as I was now. Just me.

  I swallowed hard. Only me.

  "What do you want me to do?" I whispered, uncertain.

  With a triumphant smile he leaned forward, he eased the cup from hands reluctant to give it up and clutched them instead. "Come with me, back into the world. Put on your old dresses-"

  I arched an eyebrow.

  "-your best suit then," he chuckled. "Come with me and show this world who knew you, who respected you, that you are still the same. That nothing has changed."

  I tugged a hand from his and pressed it to the scars on my face.

  "You have nothing to be ashamed of," he whispered. "So promise me you will."

  Slowly, I slipped from the chair and sank to the floor by his side. I held his face in my hands, kneeled, pressed my chest to his and felt him breathe.

  "I will," I whispered onto his lips. "I will." Then I took his mouth with my own, and his knees gave out and we fell sideways, locked together, fighting the chair legs and the pale-fringed edge of a rug.

  The floor was cold and hard, and Devich soon stood and pulled me to my feet. We made our way from wall to wall. He pressed me against them, ran his lips over my cheeks, my neck, and made no comment when he came to the thick collector's uniform. I realised he probably knew what it was, and had always known I must have been wearing it.

  I no longer cared. My bedclothes fell in the hallway. I yanked his shirt apart, impatient with buttons, and left it hanging from the handle of my bedroom door. His pants were a thick, woollen weave that must have been hot, must have been itchy. I noticed this dimly as I undid more buttons and let him step out of them. They fell smoothly.

  "What about this?" Devich hooked his fingers around the collar of my uniform.

  I stepped back from him, breathing so quickly and strongly my chest strained against the boning. Devich, wearing only underdrawers but not awkward in the least, watched the rise and fall of my breasts with satisfaction.

  "Collector's uniforms are so very interesting. At least, they are on you."

  For a moment, I hesitated. Hysteria bubbled up within me as I realised Kichlan hadn't explained the sex etiquette regarding the uniform. Was I supposed to lie with Devich with the damned thing on too?

  "Not so interesting as what's underneath." Devich grinned at my hesitation.

  Kichlan could be damned to all the Other's hells, as far as I was concerned. I stripped the uniform off. It left lines on my waist and chest, thin pink indents from the boning.

  Devich didn't say anything more. He simply wrapped his arms around my shoulders and nearly squeezed the breath from me as he kissed me.

  I didn't see him remove his underdrawers, but in a moment he was spreading me on the bed, hot mouth kissing my lips, my forehead, my cheeks and neck. And he was hot and hard against me, rubbing the inside of my thigh, smearing something warm and moist onto my skin. Gasping, I arched, thrust up my hips. But he held back.

  One hand stroked my forehead, fingers light and gentle. The other cupped my right breast, squeezed it slowly, tipped my nipple upward so he could dip his mouth down and taste me like cream.

  I groaned and clutched his buttocks. I squeezed them and tried to push him into me.

  A flash of delighted green and a soft laugh. "But, what about…" His hand left my breast to wave softly over my belly.

  "I have the necessary precautions." I didn't want to think about such pragmatic, sensible things. "Don't worry."

  "Gladly."

  Then Devich slid into me and I arched again. He bent his head, tongue flicking over my erect nipples with each thrust, until I grabbed his head and forced him to suck. To squeeze. To nibble.

  I lost all sense of time with Devich upon me. Beside me. Behind me. His touches were warm, his tongue hot, his body muscled but lithe and dexterous. He held me like I was more than a coat rack to hang his precious suit on, like I was indeed a lover. A friend.

  Finally, when I was sore and content, when my bandages were lifted and loose with sweat, he spent himself within me and lay quiescent at my side.

  For a moment I stared down at his face, young in the lamplight, without his serious or mischievous mask on. Too young and handsome for someone like me. He was an image of life before Grandeur, of its pleasures and its beauty. He did not fit with the fallen and scarred.

  I placed a soft kiss on his lips. He stirred enough to return it, but I eased him down and told him to sleep.

  They were in a small jar at the back of one of the drawers in my dresser. I had bought them years ago, and hoped the pions were still active.

  The pills were small and bright red. As I held one up I remembered the way they used to look, filled with buzzing lights, a hive of activity.

  I swallowed the pill with a dry throat, and returned to Devich's side. As I lay flat, hand on my naked belly, I hoped the pions from that pill were already doing their work. I hoped they were destroying the possibility of any child that might have come from Devich and me.

  7.

  Light snapped on and flooded my dark bedroom, jerking me from a dream that might have involved Kichlan being chased by a giant cat. That, or talking brickwork.

  With a cry I lifted my hand to block my eyes, but that only made the radiance brighter. I struggled to sit up, tangled in my own sheets and tipped fighting to the floor.

  "Other!" Devich swore from the bed. "Point it at the wall!" He yelled. "The wall!"

  "Point what?" I screamed back. Why were we shouting at each other?

  "Suit, Tanyana. The suit!"

  Kicking against tight blankets I wriggled until I could press my back against the side of the bed. Then I waved my wrists around, no idea how to point the suit at anything without crashing into it and causing yet more unaffordable damage. But I must have done something right, as the band on my right wrist gave a low clicking sound and as quickly as it had sprung to life the light dimmed. I opened my eyes a crack to see the suit's shifting symbol patterns beaming from my right hand and reflected large on the bare wall opposite the bed.

  "Oh, Other!" Devich swore again. "You've been called."

  "I've been what?" I freed my feet, pushed myself into a sitting position still wearing the sheets like a cocoon. "What are you talking about?"

  But Kichlan's warning muttered in my mind before Devich could answer, "It's an emergency. Something's gone wrong."

  "With debris?" Feet on the floor, free arm pressing sheets against my chest, I hauled myself up. Where was my uniform? Why hadn't I put it back on? Wasn't this what Kichlan had said could happen?

  "What else?" Devich slipped from the mattress with delicacy and enviable decorum. Nude, he crossed to the signs. They ebbed and glowed the same way they did on the suit, only writ large, and revolved in great slow arcs as I gradually turned my wrist.

  "How do you know something's gone wrong? How can you be so sure it's debris?" And why hadn't I been told this was going to happen? Symbols on a wall, bright lights in my slee
p, and I had no idea what any of it was trying to tell me.

  "Because I designed your suit." Devich ran a hand on the wall beside the reflected ciphers. "I tested it for three solid moons, I know a call when I see one."

  "Then what does it mean?" The floor was cold; wooden floorboards seeped chills up through my calves. I flexed my toes, shifted weight from the ball of one foot to the heel of another. The symbols moved with me.

  "Keep it still!" Devich snapped. He ran a finger over the top of a box-like symbol before it shifted away into nothing. "Your team leader must have explained this to you."

  "No." Kichlan had started, hadn't he? Wear your uniform, Tanyana. Because you'll be called, Tanyana. By the suit. The suit. Always the suit. Perhaps I hadn't been all that interested in listening. Yet, as Devich frowned, I found myself explaining, "But really, it's been hectic, accidents, snow storms." Why was I defending Kichlan of all people? "At least I have you here to teach me."

  He shook his head. "I don't know how to read it. The men you met in the hospital, remember them? They send the call, they could tell you what this all means. Technicians like me, we just make sure your suit can hear it."

  "Oh." My heart did a half-beat. Those men, oh yes, I remembered those men. "Can you try?"

  I kept my wrist up as I scrambled on the floor with my left hand for the bottom half of my uniform. I had managed to pull it up to my thighs before Devich answered "The call is a map. Of a kind."

  He didn't fill me with confidence.

  "Not of the city, though. It's a map to debris."

  Was it? I glanced down to the signs beating out their light on my wrist. Did it only respond to a call? Or was this how Lad found his debris so well? Somehow, the idea of Lad reading a complex set of symbols imbedded in his own suit didn't make a lot of sense. Particularly if Kichlan and the others couldn't do it.

  "How does it work?" Topless, pants scrunched around my thighs, I shuffled close to the wall. Devich glanced at me and flashed a sudden and very filthy grin, before helping me pull them up the rest of the way. I tried to focus on the map and ignore the occasional slip of his fingers.