by Jo Anderton
"That's it, keep it going-" I called. The next smack against my suit knocked me to one knee. "What happened?" Another crash. Sofia faltered, her suit retracted, and Natasha leapt away from the wall with a curse.
I wasn't about to fall. My suit shot out from my ankles and tunnelled thick spikes into the road. The next push didn't budge me, I was buried too deep.
"Tell me what's happening!" I demanded.
"Doesn't want to, Tan!" Lad yelled, his voice high pitched and panicked.
"What doesn't?" I jerked my head around, searching for only the Other knew what. Some kind of interference, someone wielding fierce and fiery power.
"It's the debris," Kichlan answered.
Sofia faltered again. A wide plane flashed out from the debris mass and threw her to the ground. Her limp body jerked as her suit whipped back into her wrists. Kichlan withdrew and ran to her. Uzdal abandoned the attempt to cut debris from the wall and was tugging on his brother's hand, begging him to do the same. And still the stuff was growing, planes lacing the sky, grains bulging and wiggling. It pushed against my suit, but my ankles held firm and I realised that my legs would break before my metallic supports ever gave way.
Still Lad held his position beside me. Our suits were smooth and light-reflecting patches of sanity, of quiet and stillness, among the chaos and the sudden violence only we could see. Tears ran in thick rivers down his cheeks, but he did not falter.
"Doesn't like it," he whispered, over and over. "Doesn't like it."
"That's ridiculous!" I cried. A third spike, five inches thick and sturdy as earth, shot from the back of my waistband to crash through paving stones. I couldn't control it. "This is debris. It is a by-product, a waste. It doesn't care what we do to it, Lad. It doesn't care about anything. It doesn't think, it doesn't feel. It's waste, just waste."
I pushed my suit to spread further. If Kichlan and Sofia couldn't stand in the face of some particularly putrid garbage, then I would do it for them.
I wrapped my suit around Lad's, all the way over the bulging mass until I touched solid brick. Something burned in my arms, a deep and fiery ache, a scraping and a tugging at my bones. I didn't dare look down at them.
"Give up, Tanyana," Kichlan said, wearily, from Sofia's side. "You can't do it all yourself."
But I pushed on. Silver liquid poured out of the band around my neck. It coated my shoulders, my chest, the top of my arms before joining with the bands on my wrists. There, it boosted them, it sent its own strange metallic shape-shifting metal into the large, curved plates I had wrapped around the debris and helped me spread them further. But the burning replied in kind. It raced up my neck, caught in my throat, and it was all I could do to breathe around it.
"Careful," Mizra said, approaching me. "Don't push the limits."
My waist began to do the same thing. I couldn't stop it. I had called upon the suit and it was giving me everything, more than I wanted it to give.
"Kichlan!" Mizra shouted. "Get over here and help!"
Running feet and scuffles at my side.
"Tanyana, you have to stop it. You'll empty yourself. Tanyana, stop it!" Kichlan tried to grab my elbow. But a silver hand whipped out from my waist and smacked him away. I was wrapped in silver, a crawling armour coating me from my wrists to my waist.
"Doesn't like it," Lad kept murmuring beside me, rocking on his feet and crying. "Have to stop."
I nearly had the whole mass wrapped in silver. Just a snip from the wall now, a bend in my suit and a slice. I could do that.
"Lad!" Kichlan's voice cut through his younger brother's mumbling. "Stop her!"
In the corner of my eye I saw Lad flinch. He blinked, he stopped rocking, and he turned to me in horror. "Oh no!" he whispered, lips red and wet with his tears. "No."
He pulled himself from the sphere we had made, and wrapped a metal-coated hand around my forearm. Silver into silver. Suit to suit. He sank into me and distant, hissing voices surrounded me.
Don't like it, they whispered. Don't like it, they pleaded.
Shocked, I stared into Lad's concerned face. He was talking to me, red lips moving, but all I heard were the whispers.
Don't like it. Don't like it.
And then, like the clear chime of a bell.
Please stop.
"I'm sorry," I said. But not to Lad. Not to Kichlan hovering in the hazy background. Or Sofia, presumably still lying prone on the damp paving stones. "I'm sorry," I told the whispers, and they were silenced.
"Sorry won't help you," Kichlan was saying. "You need to withdraw. Where do you think the suit comes from? How much metal do you think they've crammed into your bones?"
Lad had gone silent, and tipped his ear toward the debris, expression puzzled.
"If you dig any deeper you'll empty yourself out," Kichlan continued. "Your body will break. Your bones first, then your muscles, then your skin. You'll collapse in and the suit will still hold you up, keep you like this while you die. Do you want to stand here forever?"
Like a statue? I'd had enough of statues. I breathed, grounded myself with the air pressing in my lungs, just as I would have done before calming recalcitrant pions. Another breath, and I brought myself under control.
I eased my armour away. It slipped from my chest and arms like oil. The supports I had sent crashing into the earth withdrew, leaving gaping tunnels beneath the road.
But I continued to hold onto the debris. It had stopped fighting. Nothing pushed against my plates of silver, no planes were clawing into my very bones. Everything was silent, everything was still.
I realised Lad had his bare hand on my arm, his suit also withdrawn. His thick fingers were so warm I could feel them through layers of uniform and clothes.
"That is better," he said, and broke into his usual smile. "Doesn't hurt anymore."
"It is better," I said. Gradually, I retracted the rest of my suit and it felt like gorging on a large, fatty meal. My skin seemed to stretch, to bloat, and my bones were suddenly heavy.
"Oh, Tanyana," Uzdal gasped. "You did it."
I had kept my eyes on Lad's face as I summoned my suit inside. His encouraging, simple joy. But at Uzdal's words I turned to the debris and my hard-won calm fell away.
Gone was the parasitic mess of plane and grain. A single clump wriggled in the air beside the building's corner. I stepped forward. Nothing squirmed, no black sails fluttered. It was debris. The simple kind we found behind aging brick walls and in the cracks of lampposts. Nothing more.
"Here." Mizra handed me a jar.
Numb, I extended the very tips of my suit, pinched the debris out of the air and slipped it into the jar.
Thank you, something whispered.
"Thank you," Lad said.
As soon as I sealed the lid, the lights in the windows and nearby streetlamps steadied. Steam died with a soft hushing, and the broken water pipe stopped gushing. Pions re-established their systems, took back control. Even as we stood there each affected system would be activating emergency protocols, sending signals to the veche's city planning department. In the morning the relevant six point critical circles would arrive, and they would fix the damage.
The crowd, who could not have understood what they just witnessed, gave us a smattering of applause. Face hot, jar in hand, I found I had no idea what to do. It seemed somehow surreal, and the urge to bow or lift the container where they could see it, bizarrely out of place.
The rest of the collectors were equally bemused. Kichlan helped a shaking Sofia to her feet; Uzdal and Mizra grinned and waved; Natasha kept her back turned and Lad joined in the clapping, laughing loudly.
The accolades didn't last long. Soon, the chill of a Movoc night overwhelmed the appreciation of the crowd. The clapping petered out, and the spectators dispersed.
As I met Kichlan's furious eyes, I wished I could dissolve into the night with them.
In the middle of the snow-padded, ice-whitened street, he said nothing. He collected the bag of jars from the stones, t
ook the one I was holding, added it to the clinking pile and tied the bag tightly.
"Natasha," he called her. "Could you bring the transport around, please?"
Puzzled, I watched Natasha head behind the building. We waited in the cold silence, Kichlan staring at the ground, until Natasha reappeared on the coachman's seat of a small, decrepit wagon pulled by a squat, shaggy horse.
A rusty axle squealed in the night. Painted in a peeling drab green, with cracks in what could once have been quite nice stained glass windows, I had no real way of knowing how old this former coach was. The wheels were wooden and bowed precariously, which gave it a bizarre, bobbing kind of movement. Where Natasha sat, all the cushions, the backing and any railings to give her some kind of safety were long gone. And the coach had no doors.
Kichlan caught the expression on my face. "Feel free to walk the way you came." He helped Sofia climb rickety stairs into the coach.
Mizra saved me from admitting I wasn't at all sure which way that was. "Don't be silly." He grabbed my hand and dragged me toward the coach. I was surprised to find Uzdal at my other shoulder, his hand at my lower back a gentle but no less insistent push to his brother's pull. "She's with us."
"She's one of us now," Uzdal chimed in.
I allowed the twins to bundle me into the coach. Sofia sat hunched in the middle of the opposite seat, left arm cradled around her middle, cheeks pale. Lad, Uzdal and Mizra squeezed in beside us. Kichlan told us there wasn't enough room for another body, and sat with Natasha at the dangerous driver's seat.
I had never ridden in a coach drawn by a horse before. The ride was bumpy, cold and slow. There were no cushions inside either, and the no-longer-sealed wooden seat was hard and threatened splinters when I tried to brace myself with my hands. Icy air washed in from the gaping holes that should have held doors. By the time we came to Darkwater, dawn was brushing faint pink against the Keeper, and ice clogged the steps and edges of the coach's empty door frames.
My collecting team disembarked in silence. Kichlan gave Natasha directions that could have led to Eugeny's house, and watched her, the horse and the coach rattle off into pale streets. The silence held as he unlocked the door, as he led us down the narrow stairs, and until he'd emptied the bag of full jars onto the shelves.
And then, the inevitable came.
Kichlan spun, he advanced on me like a hungry dog on a meal, and I fought to hold my ground. "You're dangerous!" He poked the air with a sharp finger. "You don't know what you're doing, you don't listen to instructions, you think you're still a veche architect and act like you're in charge and you nearly get people killed!"
"And you made a hole in the ceiling," Sofia added, her voice soft and words slightly slurred.
Briefly, I wondered how badly she had been hurt.
"Yes!" Kichlan was almost on top of me. I met his fury squarely. Veins purpled his neck, a blotchy red flush darkened his cheeks and forehead. "You've been nothing but trouble, like I knew you would be! We don't need collectors like you, collectors who think they're still too good for this role. You're a burden, and you're trouble."
"That would be two things," Mizra drawled.
I peeked over Kichlan's shoulder. Mizra lay on one of the run-down couches, his feet up, studying a stray thread he was pulling from his gloves.
"What?" Kichlan stopped trying to poke my eye out from a foot away and crunched the hand into a fist.
"You said she was nothing but trouble, and then that she was a burden too. That's two things. She can't be nothing but trouble and also-"
"Mizra, shut your useless, Other-made mouth!"
"Yes, Miz." Uzdal sat in the couch beside his brother, chin resting on the palm of his right hand. "Give Kichlan his due. I'm surprised he waited until now to start shouting."
"True, Uz, true," his brother answered. "We knew it was coming the moment he worked out who she was."
"You two." Sofia, face pale and hand shaking, made wobbly cutting motions in the air. "Stop it."
Kichlan seemed to be having trouble controlling his breathing. I watched a muscle twitching in his neck as he closed his eyes and squeezed his hands. "Where was I-?"
"Trouble," Mizra said.
"And a burden," Uzdal said.
"Brother?" Lad's voice was a small squeak in a room of loud voices. "Brother, please?"
If Kichlan heard Lad, he chose not to acknowledge him. "You-" he resumed his pointing-at-my-face violence "-should have listened to me. You're not too good to do what I tell you to, to come when you are called, to keep your mouth shut when I tell you to. To… to…" He seemed to have run out of words.
I looked straight into that red, panting face, and was calm.
Kichlan knew nothing about losing your temper. He did not understand putting the lives of others in peril. He did not know pressure, expectation, failure or horror. And he could not scare me.
"Have you finished?" I whispered.
The twitch started up again, fresh and violent. He opened his mouth; nothing came out.
"Then you will listen to me." I stepped so close his finger touched my forehead, just above my eyebrow. Right on a bandage. "Do not tell me what I think. Do not put attitudes in my head or words in my mouth."
"You-"
"No!" I cut across him, snapped at the air like I could bite it, like I could take a chunk of it into my mouth and tear at it with my teeth. "No! You have said enough. You will listen."
I was the head of a circle of nine, back in my life before Grandeur. I had kept the best under my control. The wealthy, the educated, the elite of the oldest families. This debris collector was a smudge on the bottom of my polished leather boot with the silver bear-head clasps.
"Whatever problem you think you have with me was yours before we met," I continued. "I fell far. I fell from wealth and status and you know that, and it eats you. Well, this is it. No more. Keep your attitude buried some where with your decency, somewhere the sun will never touch it. I don't want to hear about it again. The problem is yours, not mine. Not ours."
Sunlight glanced in through the narrow windows. A stray beam caught on the metal of an empty jar and sprayed across my face.
"I have not come here to wrest your petty leadership away. I do not want it, I do not want to be here."
"There, did you hear-?" Kichlan turned from me, imploring our small, silent audience. But I didn't let him. I reached up, grabbed his finger and jammed it against my bandage.
"What would you expect? That I would want to fall? That I would want this pain, this disfigurement? I have lost more than you understand. More than kopacks. More than status. More than the respect I worked so hard for so long to earn! What can you expect? That I should have wanted that all to happen just so I can be here, with you, chasing garbage for the rest of my life?"
He gaped at me, and had stopped trying to pull away.
"What else did you say? That I don't listen? That I don't do what you tell me to do? I have listened to what instructions you gave me, but do not criticize me for failing to follow the ones you didn't give!" I released his hand and waved my wrist in front of his eyes. "If you'd chosen to explain these things to me I might have known what to do when the call came, I might have known what a call was! As it is, you were lucky to have my help at all."
Not even Sofia leapt to Kichlan's defence.
Pale, still breathing quickly, as though he'd been running as I shouted at him, Kichlan lowered his hand.
"Now." I straightened, smoothed my sleeve and brushed my hair from my forehead. "Was there anything else?"
"You still need to fix the ceiling," Sofia ventured.
Stiff, I gave her a curt nod. "And I will. When I can afford to do so." The last words tasted dry, sandy.
"You need to learn to control your suit," Kichlan said, when he had stopped panting. He stood tall, hands by his side. All thunder was gone from his face, in its place a kind of understanding. Like a clear sky.
"And I will." I hoped he could see the same in my face.
"You know I will."
"Yes, I do. I should have realised earlier, I should have listened to L-"
Together, we looked at his brother, and the argument was instantly banished. Lad was pale, shaking. He had wrapped his arms around his chest and wept silently.
As one, the debris collectors went to his aid. Kichlan spoke softly into his brother's ear. Sofia, one arm still pressed against her waist, patted him with her free hand. Mizra and Uzdal hovered like fretting pigeons. I pried Lad's hands from the nook of his elbows and held them tightly.
"Stop shouting. Can't shout. He says not to shout," Lad murmured, rocking from heel to toe.
It took the rest of the morning to quiet Lad down. Finally, when the noon sun was as yellow as a layer of cloud would allow, Lad was calm enough to be guided home.
I kissed Lad on the cheek and Kichlan graced me with a smile as we parted at the Darkwater street sign.
As it turned out the ferry did run on Rest, but its trips were few, slow and far between. By the time it had taken me to the second Keepersrill and I had walked the long streets home, Devich was gone. He had left a note under the remaining strawberries from the night before, and I ate them hungrily as I read.
Don't work too hard, my lady.
Devich
8.
The next morning I developed a system. I rose at dawnbell and pulled on loose clothes over my collector's uniform. Then I walked to the Keeper's Tear River and rode the ferry to Section ten. Each trip cost only twenty kopacks, but it meant a long trek down the eighth Keepersrill to Darkwater.
I knew, somewhere at the back of my weary brain, that I couldn't keep doing this forever. Travelling each morning was hard enough, and I couldn't afford the apartment itself for much longer. But it was my home, and so exclusive I had acquired its lease solely through the veche contacts of a member of my nine point circle.
I would hold onto it as long as I could.
The smell of food coaxed me down to the Darkwater sublevel. When I came to the bottom I realised some of the furniture had been moved. The table that held the empty jars was shoved inelegantly into the middle of the room, up against the end of a couch. The shelves had been pushed over to a corner. All this exposed an ancient, blackened fireplace, around which the entire team was huddling.