Debris vw-1

by Jo Anderton

  "Well, from what I have been able to ascertain, although I've never actually been taught, this one, here-" he tapped on the box symbol again, although this time it looked like it contained a bolt of lightning and some dots "-this is the one you need to pay attention to. This is the debris you need to find."

  It was the darkest of the symbols, the most solid, and hovering around the top of the roughly rectangular band beamed onto the wall. It swam on the crest of so many ciphers all with strokes and dots and jagged lines and was difficult to differentiate. "The debris that set off the call?"

  "I think so."

  "How am I supposed to know how to get there?" I spotted my uniform top half hidden beneath a cerulean throw that had been kicked from the end of the bed.

  "You need to find your symbol first." More searching, face so close to the wall I was surprised the light didn't hurt his eyes. "Ah, here we go. This is the suit owner. I think."

  I abandoned the attempt to fish my top out from the throw with my toes alone. Devich pointed at a squiggly image, the brightest of the symbols, but tucked all the way down in the bottom left corner of the rectangle. It looked like a dot under a small hill.

  Devich sucked his teeth. "You have a long way to go."

  Just what I wanted to hear.

  "The debris symbol is far away from your symbol, and it's dark. The closer you get, the brighter it will become, and the closer you will move to it."

  "What about the rest, that mess of symbols?"

  Devich shrugged. "Don't know. But as long as you head toward the debris symbol, you should get there."

  "Assuming you're right about them."

  "Yes."

  I had to finish dressing then, map or no map. As soon as I lowered my arm the light disappeared, and for a moment I panicked in darkness. But it wasn't fully black. My suit still glowed, giving me just enough to see by as I fumbled for the lamp valve. I tugged on my uniform top.

  "Now what do I do?" I didn't bother with proper clothes. A knit with a warm neck, the thickest pants I could find, boots that wouldn't close around my suit properly, and gloves. I had to leave gaps, a space between the clothes at my waist, a way to expose the bands on my neck, wrists and ankles.

  Devich had pulled on underdrawers and his shirt. He shivered. "You should hurry," he said, and wrapped his arms across his chest.

  "Why don't you come with me?"

  But Devich shook his head. "I would be in the way. A single useless pion-binder, unable to see, unable to help. You don't want me there. This is your chance to help people, to show them what debris collectors can do. I don't want to get in the way of that."

  What could debris collectors do? And how, exactly, was I supposed to hurry across Movoc-under-Keeper without a full rublie? I headed for the door anyway. Devich followed, and helped me drag on my jacket.

  "Be careful. Hurry, and be careful."

  Be careful? How dangerous could it be? I thought he didn't know anything about debris collecting, anyway.

  With the map clear in my mind and nothing else to go by, I decided to head right. If I was in the bottom left of all those bright symbols, somewhere, then I should probably head right.

  At first, I tried running. But my lungs burned with the cold air, and my stiffened muscles and stitch-sore skin protested painfully. I resorted to a brisk walk, which simply did not feel fast enough.

  The snowstorm had passed through and the night was clear. Frigid, and clear. The Keeper Mountain loomed large against the quiet night, its snowcap and sides like dull silver in the moonlight. My calves burned, my boots soaked through, the bottom of my pants grew wet, heavy and dripping. I kept walking. Each time I aimed my uncovered wrist at a wall, the map shone forth and I changed direction slightly, heartened that I seemed to have the right idea, but frustrated by how slowly my sign made its way through the others, the ones I did not understand.

  A bell rang, I had no idea which one. The snow seemed to soak up its deep artificial chimes so they didn't even echo. I nearly ran into a small Fist of enforcers, patrolling the streets closer to the river. They were dressed all in black, and a small blue light bobbed close to the ground in front of their feet. Lamplight and moonlight wasn't enough to march by, apparently. I darted into an alleyway and waited for them to pass, not even sure why. I had a legitimate reason to be running around at moonbell, or silentbell, whatever the time was. But still, it felt safer to wait, and continue once they had gone. The streets all looked the same: the snow concealed landmarks, brickwork, anything that would have helped me identify where I was. At one point I passed what had to be a lamplight factory. Working through the night, of course, when their pion-binding skills were needed the most. Loose beams of light danced around the building like smoke: pions that had escaped the systems that should have sent them out across the city, I guessed, and were happily creating their light right here, right now. I slowed at the sight. It was beautiful, in the middle of so much darkness and snow.

  Eventually, one of the factory workers stepped outside. He waved his hands and spoke to the errant particles in a weary voice. "Come now, what is this? What do you all think you're doing? Stop playing and get back in line. You have a duty, remember?" Slowly, the light dimmed. I could imagine those pions once dancing across walls and rooftop and out into the street, now subdued and following as their binder headed back inside.

  A duty, like I did. I hurried on, feeling just as weary as he sounded, and just as constrained by duty as his pions. But I seemed to be making some progress, as the debris symbol was growing brighter, sharp as a star carried on my wrist. And it was in this brightness that I saw tracks in the snow. Wheels, and unbelievably, hooves.

  I could think of no one but debris collectors who would rely on a horse-drawn coach. I ran again, pushing my body beyond its soreness, beyond the cold, and followed the horse tracks around an unlit corner.

  And into chaos.

  Debris clung to the side of a building like a great, wiggling fungal mass. It was nothing like the little pieces of dark flesh I had seen so far. This debris looked alive. Alive, and threatening. But worse than that, worse than the squid-sentience in its bulging, thrashing appendages, was its shadow. And that, surely, was all it could be. Something dark, flat, wrapped over the wall of the building like a sheet of taut fabric. It stretched further too, away from the debris mass, lancing across streets to the roofs of adjacent buildings. Black sails. Grey sheets of paper. Great, gaping holes with sharp, straight edges and nothing but darkness, impossible, impenetrable darkness worse than the night on the other side.

  I shivered, remembered the debris Devich had shown me when we first met. The same thing yet many, many times larger. Behind poly it had been strange. Here, arching over me, it was terrifying.

  And there was so much of it.

  Lights flickered along the street and in the windows of the surrounding buildings. Lamps desperately trying to cling to life, flaring brightly as their pions overcompensated, then sputtering back into darkness. The debris was doing that, it had to be. Interfering with the systems that carried the pions here, and then weakening their bindings when they arrived. And that wasn't all. Steam gushed from vents in the ground: heat that should have warmed homes all going to waste. I gave the hot, hissing air a wide berth and imagined that spurting into my apartment, scalding anything and anyone it touched. Water had burst from a pipe running the height of the building the debris clung to. How much longer did we have until the rest of the pipes gave way, or the bonds holding the very buildings themselves crumbled?

  A semicircle of spectators curved around the building and its parasite, closer than I would have risked to the falling water, the steam and the lights. They watched as Kichlan and his collectors fought in vain to cut the debris down.

  I pushed my way through.

  Kichlan – arms and suit immersed in a lower section of debris – turned to face me, and his expression grew as dark as the night.

  "Where have you been?" he hissed. The veins in his neck,
the twitch of his shoulders and jaw told me how much he wanted to roar those words at me. But not with so many people watching.

  I didn't bother answering. We could have that argument another time. Instead, I focused on the debris. I could see what Kichlan and the others were trying to do. Jars lay scattered on the ground at each collector's feet, some full to their seal with debris, most open and ready. Piece by squirming piece the collectors were slicing the debris with knives of sharpened suit, cupping it in hastily made spoons, and tipping as much as they could into the open jars.

  It was slow work, imprecise, and I could see instantly that it simply would not work.

  "What about the sails?" I asked Kichlan.

  He was focused hard on a piece of debris, too large to fit through the lip of a jar. He used one hand to cup it and another, suit metal flattened and rounded, to keep it still. But shadows, smaller planes of darkness, were flickering through the gaps between his hands, arching into the air and back to the mass on the building wall. So, for each slice the collectors cut off, they managed less than half into the jars, and the debris was just as big, if not growing larger, than it had been a moment before. This was not a battle they were about to win.

  Not a battle we were about to win.

  "What in Other's hell are you talking about?" Kichlan snapped.

  "The flat ones." I fumbled for a word to describe what I was seeing. "The shadow."

  "Plane form." Sofia approached, one hand carrying Kichlan's brown leather bag, the other wrapped tight and silver around a squiggling clump. "The normal debris is grain form."

  Yet another vital-sounding piece of information Kichlan had not to bothered to tell me. I was gathering quite a list of those.

  "Plane form, then. Why aren't you collecting them too?"

  Kichlan funnelled most of his debris into the jar and forced the lid closed. I was surprised by how much the container could hold.

  "We're going to run out of jars," Sofia said, and placed the bag at Kichlan's feet. It clanged with thick metal.

  "The veche will send another team to help." Kichlan jerked his head to the debris cluster. "They have to. We can't handle something this big ourselves."

  "What if they don't?" Sofia asked. In the light from our suits her face was worried, grave. "What will we do?"

  "What are you doing?" a spectator called from the crowd behind us. "Can't you see what this is doing to my apartment? Can't you work any faster?"

  Kichlan gritted his teeth and said nothing.

  "What about the plane form?" No one had answered me.

  Sofia sighed, loudly. "Just follow our example and help us, Tanyana. We need to work quickly, and will explain things later." She walked around the debris, and selected another protrusion to start slicing.

  "But if we don't contain those planes we'll be here forever," I hissed at Kichlan, very aware of the anxious eyes and ears behind me. "Just look at them. They're growing. For every solid bit you all cut off, those planes just stretch out a little further. Ignoring them won't help."

  "You can see the plane form?" Mizra came to deposit his full jars in the bag.

  I nodded.

  "Haven't got any more surprises hidden there, have you?" Mizra grinned. How could he be so relaxed?

  "Could we please focus on the debris?" Kichlan asked with a long-suffering groan.

  "Exactly!" Another voice from the crowd followed by rumbling, general agreement.

  The suit on Kichlan's right wrist expanded, narrowed into tweezers and stretched until he could grip one of the debris's dark protuberances. His left hand curled into a long, fine blade and sliced it free from the mass.

  "I am." I grabbed Kichlan's elbow. "We need to focus on all the debris. The planes too."

  "Then how would you like to handle this?" Kichlan rounded on me. His grip on the piece of debris slipped. It spilled into the air and floated, wiggling like a maggot, back to its friends. "There're only four of us who can differentiate plane from grain. Me, Sofia, Lad and you. What do you want us to do, try and catch them all ourselves?"

  I ignored his scorn. "Can we catch them?"

  "If you can hold a beam of light in your hand, then yes, you can catch them."

  For a long moment I studied the planes. They stretched across the air, from grain mass to rooftop, lamp, or the ground. They lanced out of any debris the team was trying to collect like rays of sun through cloud, only black, or a very dark grey. But they did not set out on their own, arcing over the city like the sails of some ghostly ship. In fact, all of the debris, even the grains I had watched Kichlan and Sofia collect, had tried to return to the body.

  "We need to spread our suits out-" I started thinking out loud "-if we can wrap around the whole thing, I think we could contain it enough to cut it from the wall."

  "We don't want to contain it." Kichlan breathed heavily, like was all he could do to keep himself from shouting. "We need to get rid of it."

  The team had started to converge. Sofia watched me avidly, like I was a fire about to run out of control. Lad, no longer tired and violent, smiled broadly. Natasha, Uzdal and Mizra appeared cautious.

  "But we can't get rid of it if we can't contain it." I poked my toe at the bag of jars. They rattled loudly in the night. I found it curious that debris made no sound. Its planes should have rocked the street with thunder, its shuffling grains like snake scales.

  "She's right," Mizra said in my defence, against the gathering shadow on Kichlan's face. "Isn't that what the jars do? Contain the debris, so it can be taken away?"

  "Who has the strength to hold all that?" Kichlan shouted as he pointed at the debris. His suit sliced out into a long, thin spike. The spectators behind us gasped, and shuffled back a pace. "You think you do, is that it? You might be able to pick up bits and pieces we find in old lamps but this is something far beyond you!" Spit flew from his mouth. My suit lit it brightly as it fell. Both my wrists were shining fiercely and I was certain, if I rolled down my collar, untied my jacket, or undid my boots, the rest would be too.

  "Not on my own, perhaps. But I am not alone, am I?" I turned to the others. Apart from Lad, who had began nodding violently and grinning like a madman, they stood like statues. "I thought we were a team. Why can't we do this together?"

  "We were doing this together," Kichlan said between clenched teeth.

  "Not properly."

  Not the way a critical circle would.

  I rolled my collar down and pushed up my sleeves. Bending, I undid the few laces I could tie on my wet leather boots, and hiked up my woollen pants. I shrugged my jacket from my shoulders and let it fall onto the wet street. My ankles, wrists and neck beamed cold blue light into snow and ice and stone, brighter than any of the others, brighter than Kichlan where he stood, gaping at me. It shone from my waist too, when my clothing moved enough to allow it to peek through.

  I could forget the gaze of crowd behind me, and the small sense of decency and decorum I had left, to be working as a circle again.

  "Are we ready?" I asked the collectors – my collectors – and tried to ignore how silly I must have appeared, with my clothes rolled up and my jacket in the sludge.

  "We can't do this without you," Sofia told Kichlan, saying what I had not been able to.

  "She doesn't understand any of this," he muttered. "She has no idea what she's doing."

  "But we will need you anyway." Sofia placed a hand on his shoulder, and he seemed to shake himself beneath it.

  "What would you have us do?" he asked me, voice thick and rasping.

  "Make the circle." The words slipped from me before I could check them and my collectors took up the call. They spread out in a crescent around the corner of the building. "Alternate. Sofia, Mizra, Lad, Uzdal, Kichlan, then Natasha." I squeezed myself between Uzdal and Lad, and longed for the days of Grandeur, for standing high above the earth and watching as the sky filled with energy. "Right." I rubbed my hands, I loosened my wrists. "Plane first."

  I raised my arms and extend
ed my suit, using its silver to reach for sails of plane debris. It responded easily, eagerly, knowing what I wanted, doing what was needed. Why was that a surprise? It was, after all, a part of me. I flattened it, curved it, linked left and right hand together and arched toward the debris like my hands – my suit – were a domed metal ceiling.

  Kichlan, Sofia and Lad followed my example. Their suits spread out, spread up. Edges knocked mine like seams without stitches. Together, we slipped between plane and building, between debris and lamp, street, rooftop. The planes flickered, at first. Unsure. Then they fought back.

  One large grey arc buzzed out of existence, then flared back into life a deeper, solid black. It battered against my suit with a sharp, clutching corner, fighting for the building, for the purchase I denied it. I felt each blow. Vibrations echoed through the suit, down into my arm and further, deeper into my skin, bones, head and mind. I steadied myself against it, pushing away memories of crimson pions and what it had felt like to be dragged to the edge of Grandeur's palm. I would not let debris undo me the way the pions had. I would not fall from this statue, eight hundred feet in the air.

  Sofia yelped, and her suit withdrew like a frightened cat.

  "No!" I shouted over the rattling in my ears. "Keep your suit up."

  Expression pained, Sofia extended her suit again.

  "That's it! Now-" I glanced over at Mizra, Uzdal and Natasha waiting in anticipation. "We'll contain the planes, you slice the mass from the wall! Hurry!"

  The planes flickered faster, as though in desperation, as though they knew what we were about to do. Sofia began to shake, but held her line.

  Mizra and Uzdal darted beneath our silver dome. They reached the building wall, aligned their hands with the brick and shot sharp blades up through the clinging debris. The spectators gasped again. Quiet words reached me.

  "Other!"

  "How can they do that?"

  "How horrible."

  Natasha hesitated, suit extended to short knives.

  "It's starting to give!" Mizra called. Natasha, with a jerking shake of her head, darted in to help.