Debris vw-1

by Jo Anderton

  Just a little while longer.

  "Thank the old man for me, won't you?" I sucked oil from the tips of my fingers.

  "I'll tell him you said that with your fingers in your mouth." Kichlan grinned. "Trust me, that will be thanks enough."

  As breakbell sounded above us, the rest of the team filtered in. Uzdal and Mizra were wrapped in extra scarves and knitted hats, their pale features nearly lost amidst the clothes. Sofia was so heavily layered she walked like a child dressed for the snow. A few strands of her dull hair escaped a large knitted hat, to stick against her cheek and nose. Natasha followed, brown hair tucked into a tight dark cap pulled down as far as her eyebrows.

  "Lovely day outside," Uzdal muttered. Even in the sublevel warmth he kept his layers on.

  "If we're really lucky it might snow on us again," Mizra added. "Wouldn't that be nice?"

  Kichlan collected metallic jars and filled his brown leather bag. "Then the sooner we fill quota, the better."

  "Other's oath," Uzdal muttered.

  We left the Darkwater sublevel and entered an outside world growing rapidly dim and cold. I tucked my hands into the pockets of my jacket, tugged my leather-lined cap down to cover my ears. The wind that had whipped the clouds along started whipping us as soon as we stepped into the street. It was funnelled by the buildings and careened down Darkwater with a scared-dog howl. Above us, clouds settled in like hounds for the night, dark fur raised and shaggy.

  It was hard to believe I had ridden the Tear in clear sunlight that morning.

  "The snow will start any moment," Mizra said as we turned the first corner in what I was beginning to learn was our usual Mornday route. "And then, if Lad finds another sewerage vent, the day will be complete." He clasped his hands behind his back in a fair imitation of Kichlan. "Because if collecting doesn't make us as miserable, as cold, and as dirty as possible, then we're simply not doing it right."

  I grinned at him and glanced at Kichlan. He was entertaining Lad that morning who, as usual, led us from the front. Together they were pointing at lampposts, rooftops, effluent vents. But at each one Lad just shook his head. Not a good sign, as far as the quota was concerned.

  "What is it with this place and brothers?" I asked, keeping my voice low.

  Mizra shrugged. "Don't know about those two, but twins always end up as collectors."

  "Really?"

  "Truly."

  "Other's oath," Uzdal muttered again.

  What had started Uzdal's sudden fascination with the phrase? I thought for a moment. "I haven't met many twins like yourselves." Had I met any at all? No binders that I could think of, not at any circle level.

  Both made identical faces of disgust. "Sad truth about the world, Tanyana," Mizra said. "Twins aren't particularly, how shall I put it? Desired."

  I did my best to appear perplexed, and assumed that it worked when Uzdal gave his head an exasperated shake.

  "Most twins end up like us." Uzdal pointed to himself and his brother. "Debris collectors. Fallen. So, most mothers, if they find out they're expecting twins, well, they do something about it."

  "They abort the children," Sofia, walking behind us, interrupted. "That's what these two are trying to say, although they obviously don't want to. Of course, if you'd just thought about it for a moment you might have worked that out for yourself."

  I ignored the criticism, and stared horrified at Mizra and Uzdal. I had heard that some healers could see a baby as it grows by the flow of pions between mother and child. What did a baby destined to collect debris – an Unbound baby – what did they look like to pion sight? Would the flow be interrupted, the womb dull compared to the rest of her pion-bright body?

  "That's horrible," I whispered.

  "We know," Mizra said.

  "That's real life." Sofia pushed past us, to walk with Kichlan instead.

  "Why do they kill them?" I asked the twins. "Why are twins, most twins, why are they like us?"

  Uzdal glanced ahead, where Lad walked between Sofia and his brother, laughing. "Why is Lad one of us? Because he is broken, Tanyana."

  "And we are broken, all of us, in some way," Mizra continued. "We're like that crack in the wall that fell on you. Debris likes broken things. It likes us."

  Likes? He reminded me of Lad, talking about debris as though it could think, as though it could feel. But I knew what he meant.

  Me, with my scars, with the bone Grandeur had knocked into my brain. Lad, with his crooked smile and childish laugh. But the twins?

  "Being twins doesn't make you broken. A shattered skull-" I swallowed "-that makes you broken. So I don't understand. And Kichlan isn't broken, Sofia isn't broken."

  "Nice of you to say so," Mizra said.

  "Yes, terribly nice," Uzdal said. "But we know what we are. And not everyone who is broken has the scars to prove it."

  "Although we-"

  "-are not among them."

  I blinked at them. "You're not one of the ones who don't… what?"

  The boys chuckled. "When we're somewhere warmer."

  "Less windswept."

  "We'll show you what we mean."

  Lamps spluttered into life as we walked, and as I tried to work out what under the Keeper they were talking about. Broken was a good word for it. Broken was the bones in my head, the skin on my left side. And Lad, yes, I could see how he could be broken. There was something in him that didn't work the way it should have. But what? I knew what had broken me. What had broken Lad?

  Could any of us be fixed?

  "Guess it's dark enough to turn the lights on." Kichlan had started to hang back as the twins, evidently tired of confusing me, moved forward to engage Lad.

  Thunder rolled above our heads, low and near. Lightning flickered against the dark sky.

  "We still collect in the rain, do we?" I glanced up at Kichlan, trying for an innocent and hopeful expression.

  He nodded. "Today we do. We just scraped above quota last sixnight, and that was with an emergency. But those are rare, we can't rely on another one and I will not risk something that close again."

  Lightning flashed, suddenly bright, suddenly plunging the street into darkness. In the heavy silence that followed Kichlan and I looked to each other and turned to the lamp we had just passed. In a moment it flared, so bright I expected the glass to break with the strain, then it cut off suddenly into the cloud-weary darkness.

  "That's not lightning," I whispered. As if on cue, my wrist sprang into brilliant light. "Again?"

  As soon as our suits lit up, then Lad, Mizra, Uzdal and Sofia hurried to Kichlan's side. Even Natasha, dragging further behind than I had noticed, ran to join us.

  "Where is it?" Uzdal asked. Kichlan drew his sleeve up, exposed his wrist and tilted it at the bare wall of a nearby building. It shone steady, sharp and bright, while down the street the lamps blinked on and off.

  "It must be near," Natasha murmured. She stood beside me, watching the lights.

  But Sofia shook her head. "No, I don't think so." She pointed at Kichlan's projected map. It was larger than the one Devich had helped me to produce, the ciphers clearer. I found Kichlan's me sign easily. It was solid, bright and purposeful. I remembered my own, lost in the jumble of images, and twitched the sleeve of my jacket to cover my suit. But as my fingers brushed the band, I felt the symbols move in short bursts of pressure and warmth. With a gasp, I flicked the sleeve up again and I saw it. The symbol, my symbol, throbbed beneath my fingers as if I had called it.

  "There." Kichlan pointed to his map, and soon the rest of us saw the debris cipher. It flickered in a far corner. Not bright, not steady, not close.

  "Why is it so far away?" Mizra asked.

  Something large and wet splashed on the top of my head. Then another on my arm. Even as I realised they were raindrops, I felt the symbols move again. They rolled beneath my touch, tugged and pressed, tilted and guided. I followed them, smoothed my fingers to the left and turned my wrist. When they stilled, and I peered beneath my fo
re and middle finger, the debris cipher was there, ready like my own. Beating. Living.

  I considered the path my fingers had followed. The crests, the dips and the corners. I looked at the symbols sprayed on the building wall.

  Didn't make any sense to me.

  "Why are they calling us?" Mizra continued. "We're too far away! There has to be another team closer than us."

  "That's why." Sofia gestured to the flickering lamps.

  Kichlan, who had been studying his map, turned to her. "Factory?"

  "Has to be." She looked grim.

  Kichlan said, "Then we need to hurry. Time to run."

  "Run?" Mizra's voice rose, in both tone and volume. "What, no horse?"

  "There's no time, Mizra. Shut your mouth and run."

  Kichlan grabbed Lad and pushed him forward. The big man easily outpaced us as we struggled to follow Kichlan. My legs and lungs quickly ached. Rain fell in ever larger, ever more frequent drops. The wet pavement was slippery, and in the darkness of the skies and the uncertain light of struggling lamps, I came close to losing my footing and crashing face first to the stones.

  Kichlan grabbed my arm and helped keep me steady.

  "It's raining!" Mizra yelled, as he ran ahead of us, breath loud and hoarse in the artificial night. "That's even better than snow."

  "What's happening?" I gasped to Kichlan as we skidded around a corner. He stopped long enough to flash his map against a nearby wall. My fingers itched to touch my suit, to follow the symbols like he was doing.

  "It's probably a factory." We waited as Sofia screamed at Lad, who had continued to run ahead, and the large man returned. "Hub of pions, large amounts of debris can collect unnoticed. If it's left long enough this is what happens." We both glanced at the dancing lights. "Someone hasn't been doing their collecting properly."

  I gasped in breaths, sagged against a wall and clutched at my chest. "What has that got to do with us?"

  "Problem like this could shut down the city. Imagine no light on the streets when night comes. No light at home. How do other factories work if the lights go out?"

  "Quite well, I imagine." I swallowed against a very unladylike urge to spit on the paving stones. "Don't need light to see pions. But I get the idea." And on a day like this, in the storm and the darkness bearing down on Movoc-under-Keeper. I couldn't think of a worse time.

  "They call in more than one team for work like this. For factories, construction sites."

  I knew too well what he meant.

  "Sorry!" Lad, only barely out of breath, ran to Kichlan's side. "Sorry, bro!"

  Kichlan shook his head. "Pay attention from now on. This way!" He pointed, and set off again. With a groan, I pushed off the wall and followed.

  This time, I gave in and I kept my fingers to the symbols at my wrist. They hummed with the pace of my running, jostling with the stones that threatened to slip me, with the hidden dips and sudden, uneven steps.

  That's when I realised that wasn't all they were doing. My fingers were guiding me. A moment before a loose stone came close to tripping me, a cipher pushed up against my touch. I knew a corner was coming before Kichlan took it because my fingers were guided that way first.

  When Kichlan stopped again to check his map I realised I wouldn't have had to. My fingers, my suit, already knew the way.

  I peered through heavy rain to the symbols he had splashed across a wall, that mesh of unintelligible figures I had been told had no meaning. Beside Kichlan, on his map, was a long, wiggling line. I walked fingers up from my own position, and sure enough, there it was. I scanned the ground. Beside Kichlan, mere inches from his shoe, a gutter had burst. The symbol buzzed like an insect as I saw it. Nearly invisible in the darkness a torrent of water gushed down the edge of the street, weaving its way like an imitation of the figure on the wall. On my wrist.

  Realisation was a breathless kick to the gut. The symbols were the map. All of them. They were the streets, the buildings, the dips and bumps in the road. And all we did was follow two of them. What could we do if we understood everything on the map, if we could read the city on the back of our wrists?

  But Kichlan and the collectors didn't know about this map. Devich and the technicians didn't either. So who had put it there, who was keeping us all in the dark about the power of the suit on our wrists?

  And why?

  "This way." Kichlan called against the beat of the downpour and the rush of hidden water. "We're close now!"

  "Bro!" Lad, ahead again, straining to be moving like a dog against a leash. He pointed to an alleyway curtained by rain and spray. "Found it, bro! Found it!"

  Kichlan flicked his wrist, and the map disappeared. "I'll trust you before any map, Lad."

  Grinning so widely his teeth were clear in the muted light, Lad started off down the alleyway. We followed, and my fingers vibrated, suddenly warm. Below them a symbol was growing strong, vibrant. Another dot under a hill, but not me. I was still there, still clearly marked and separate. The hill was crossed by two vertical lines either side of the dot.

  It took me a moment to realise what I was seeing, what the suit and my guided fingers were following. This new figure moved along a thin path, a clear patch between the mess of other signs that made up my wrist band. And I was following.

  I glanced between Lad's back, half obscured, and the cipher tugging on my arm.

  He had his own symbol.

  Kichlan didn't exist on my wristband. Neither did Sofia, Natasha and the twins. Only Lad. What was special about Lad? Why did he have a symbol all of his own?

  Then the alleyway ended, and my hand slipped from my wrist unnoticed.

  A fat, squat building sat like an ill toad on the other side of a wide street. The lights were dark here, no longer even flickering, and figures ran, frantic and hard to see, in front of the monstrous work of architectural torture.

  Debris leaked from its every pore.

  "Hurry!" Kichlan drove us forward.

  The debris was watery this time, like the rain had diluted it. No sails arched darkly, no growths bulged from the side of the building. It ran instead, oozing from windows, from doors, from the gaps between brickwork and cracks in cement. There was something sickening about its liquidity, its runny porridge texture. It looked fetid, like it should stink.

  "Other," Mizra hissed.

  Kichlan rushed forward. The rest of us crossed the street hesitantly. Even Lad eyed the debris with a squeamish expression.

  "Who's in charge?" Kichlan called. Fingers pointed, curious faces met ours in the unnatural dark. But even in the cloud cover, even with the rain, I could see their exhaustion, their horror.

  Judging by the rough numbers I could see, there were at least two other debris teams here. Possibly more. How long had they been fighting, to look so tired? And yet the muck kept coming, kept rolling out of windows, through the cracks of doors. Was anyone trapped inside, a factory worker who could not know what was happening? Could it hurt, to be covered in debris like this? To breathe it in, unknown? Would it undo the pion systems within a body, unravel blood from muscle, muscle from bone?

  We had to stop it. I didn't want to find out.

  "Eighth Keepersrill, Section ten," Kichlan was telling a man with greying hair and defeated, sagging shoulders as we reluctantly caught up.

  The man nodded. "Don't know how much of a difference you'll make, but it's good to have help." The sound of his voice, the shake and the fatigue, made my bones ache.

  "Have the veche sent more jars?" Kichlan asked, his face set in a convincing show of determination.

  "On their way."

  "Good." Kichlan slipped the bag from his shoulder and tossed it to Uzdal. "We'll do what we can with ours to begin with."

  "Can't imagine you'll be much use." The collector gave a weary shrug. "But feel free. "

  "They're a pleasant lot," Mizra murmured as we moved away.

  "They've been here a long time," Kichlan told him. "Can you blame them?"

  "And we'v
e had a nice little jog in the rain, have we?"

  "Not now, Miz," Kichlan said, voice firm. "Now, we need to do what we can to help these teams. They're exhausted, and could do with some relieving." His eyes flickered to mine. "I think we should follow Tanyana's advice."

  "You do?" I asked, before I could stop myself.

  "Well, you managed to control the outbreak last time." He nodded. "Yes, we're going to do this your way."

  Sofia rubbed her upper arm and shoulder, pointedly, but Kichlan pushed on regardless.

  "Everyone spread out. Let's see if we can scoop this up and start pushing it back. I'm willing to lay kopacks down that there's a main body mass inside the factory, somewhere this is all coming from. And I think if we collect that, we'll have this place clean in no time. Tanyana, come with me. The rest of you, see what you can do."

  I followed Kichlan as he ran to the front of the building. A large, slatted wooden door was rolled up and debris surged from the entrance in thick waves. Most of the collectors were concentrated before it. Their suits shone like dull silver as they caught the debris in great shovels, then passed it back, where it was dispersed and sealed away in jars. But the debris kept rolling, and the collectors kept shovelling, and I realised they could end up in those spots, collecting, forever.

  "This is not working," I murmured to Kichlan.

  "My point exactly." He glanced around at the sorry lines, the slushing dark muck, and the ever-growing pile of full jars. "We need to get closer. Right to the front."

  I kept close as Kichlan pushed his way through. "So, this happens a lot, doesn't it?"

  "What does?" he asked.

  "Emergencies." I waved my hand. "Buildings and factories under attack. Like this."

  "Actually, no." Kichlan gave me a sorry expression over his shoulder. "You've had an unlucky run."

  "So two in a row like this is a bit strange?"