by Jo Anderton
"Very strange, more like it. Usually you'd go more than thirteen moons and a day without a crisis half the size of these two." He grinned. "But then, you haven't been having the best luck, have you?"
Luck. Was that what it was? "You could say that."
We came to the front line of collectors. A middle-aged man, with thick hair plastered to his skull and neck, blinked at us through the rain.
"Here to help?" he asked. He scooped as he spoke, the motion automatic, and twisted at the waist to pass the debris he had collected to the line waiting behind him.
When Kichlan didn't answer, I said, "Yes." Kichlan was staring at the debris, his hands loose by his sides, suit retracted.
"Well, we could use the help. First call came at breakbell and I've been here since. They've been calling other teams all morning. Not that you'd know it was morning… hey!"
Kichlan had stepped past the front line. Debris surged over his feet like mud.
"What's he doing?" The collector paused in his shovelling. "We need to hold the line!"
"Tanyana," Kichlan said, ignoring the collector. "Shall we?"
I nodded, and waded through the debris to stand at his side. It was warm, where it brushed over me. The strangest feeling. Touching but not touching, like wind if it had weight and heat.
"Hey!" More collectors were shouting at us now. "What's going on?"
Behind us, the lines faltered.
"Can you mesh our suits together, the way you did with Lad?" Kichlan asked.
"Don't see why not." Except I had no idea how I'd done that, and less of an idea if I could do it again.
"Let's try, then."
Together, Kichlan and I raised our hands and spread our suits out like a shield. The edges of silver touched at first with a screeching, metal scraping against metal. But then they softened, grew pliable, and sank into each other.
A strange shiver rattled through Kichlan as the same thing passed through me. I remembered Lad's hand on my arm, the connection between us, the whispers I had heard. Kichlan felt entirely different. Where Lad had been open, too open perhaps, Kichlan was closed. His suit became mine, but there were no whispers, no hints of the voices in his head. Did I feel the same, or could he hear my doubts clear as if I was shouting them?
"Lower!"
I glanced down. Debris was oozing from a gap between our suits and the ground. We grew them until only a trickle remained.
"They can collect that." Kichlan clenched his teeth; his eyes were hard and focused. "Let's start moving."
Feeling oddly light compared to the weight Kichlan seemed to be carrying, I walked beside him and helped force the debris back into the factory. It pushed against us as we advanced, but had none of the energy of last time. It did not crash like lightning against us, but merely tried to ease itself past us, like cupping a gentle trickle of water.
"Come on," I thought to it, I whispered in my own head and hoped Kichlan truly couldn't hear. I was wet, already tired, and shaken. All I wanted was for the debris to move easily, to retreat to its source and wait for us to collect it.
Murmurs behind us.
We came to the rolled-up door and were forced to pinch our suits in to fit through. I waited for the explosion, for the debris to roll through the gaps we made, for it to surge to sudden life as it sensed weakness, and carry us along with it.
Nothing happened.
"What's going on?" I whispered to Kichlan.
"Kichlan!" a voice called, echoing.
With a quick glance between us, Kichlan and I lowered the shield so we could see over the top. The factory was almost empty. Debris lay in patches of the floor, puddles after a storm. But of the fountain that had spewed forth from the doors, windows and cracks, there was no sign.
"What did you do?" Uzdal was clambering in through a window. He clung to the steel bones of the building and peered down at us. "Where did it go?"
Kichlan was just as shocked. "I have no idea."
Uzdal surveyed the cement walls and steel structures around him and began gradually climbing down. "I just got up here, was about to try and squeeze the debris and-" he mimed an explosion motion with his free hand. His right arm was wrapped tightly around a thick, loadbearing shaft "-it was gone."
"We walked inside…" Kichlan raised his eyebrows at me.
I replied, "Don't ask me. I've got less idea than you do."
"Kichlan? Tanyana?" Sofia called from the other end of the factory. She was crouched behind another wooden door, only rolled a few feet up. "What happened?" With a wince, she crawled her way through.
"Trying to work that out." Uzdal finally made it to the factory floor. He patted rust and dirt from the front of his jacket. They turned to mud on his wet clothes and hands.
Gradually, the other team members appeared. Lad and Mizra came together, descending from the second floor on metal stairs that rang loudly in the empty, cavernous room. Natasha ambled in through the front door.
"The teams outside are looking spooked," she drawled. "They really want to know what you've done, and why it worked so well."
Kichlan, apparently sick of the same question, rounded on her. "For the last, the final, the absolutely I will not repeat myself ever again time, I do not know!"
Her face set into a sullen cloud, the same colour as the sky outside. "First time you told me, you know."
I approached one of the larger debris puddles. It bubbled as I crouched beside it. How long before it started growing again?
"You might as well tell them to come and collect this mess up," Kichlan said.
"Your messenger now, am I?" Natasha grumbled, but still turned to leave the building.
Gingerly, I extended a thin dirk of my sharpened suit toward a particularly large bubble.
"Still need to find where all the debris came from," Kichlan said.
I popped the bubble.
Are you pleased?
I snatched my suit back so quickly it slammed into my wrist and pushed me to the floor.
"Watch yourself." Mizra chuckled.
But I didn't respond. Instead, I turned my head until I could see Lad. He was smiling, a happy, contented smile that widened when he caught my eye.
"Likes you," he said. "Listens to you."
I gaped at him.
"That's lovely, Lad." Kichlan dismissed his brother's rambling. "Now where do you think we should go?"
His younger brother pointed to the floor. "Down."
I returned to the bubbles. Underground made sense, yes. It was all bubbling up from underneath.
"Right, down we go. Anyone see some stairs on their way here?"
I sat up. Again, I carefully extended my suit, this time as the usual tweezers. My hand shook as I pried a slightly more solid selection of debris from the puddle. I brought it close to my face, frowned at it.
It remained quiet.
A breath I hadn't realised I was holding eased from me in a sigh. The debris rippled.
"Come on, Tanyana!" Kichlan called. He was helping Lad squeeze under the door Sofia had come through by holding it further from the ground. "Sofia's found our way down."
I stood, holding the debris, and hurried to his side. I slipped beneath the door – with far greater ease than Lad – and helped Kichlan do the same. The debris sagged from my suit. It felt warm, wet, and wiggled weakly.
"Where to?" I asked Sofia, once Kichlan was through.
But I didn't hear her reply.
Are you coming to see me?
I nearly dropped the debris. Sofia had already started leading the way and no one seemed to notice me standing there, white by the bloodless feeling in my cheeks, staring at a small, wiggly piece of debris.
No one, apart from Lad.
Still smiling, he nodded. "We should go," he said. "He is waiting."
"He?" I whispered.
I am.
Lad turned, and I caught up to him. "You can hear him, can't you?"
Lad followed the team into a narrow, dark hallway. Without the pion systems in pla
ce to keep the lights working, the way downstairs was perilous. I clung to a railing with my free hand and sought each step with a fumbling foot.
"Can you smell that?" Uzdal's voice echoed up from the darkness below.
"Smells like a sewer," Mizra answered. "I knew we'd end up in a sewer today, somehow."
I ran into Lad's back as the stairs ended and the ground levelled out. He steadied me with a large hand in the dark.
"This is no good," Kichlan whispered. "I can't see a thing."
I agreed with him, silently, and the light from my suit strengthened, deepened into a stark, silvery blue. The symbols rolled, pressed together, and became a thickened mess of colour and shape.
"Tanyana?" Kichlan turned, shocked. "What-?" He looked down at his own suit, glowing only the usual soft light. "How are you doing that?"
I shook my head. "I don't know," I whispered. Somehow, it felt right to whisper at the bottom of these dark stairs. "I really don't know."
"We should use it while we have it," Sofia said, ever practical.
"Yes. Tanyana, could you?" Still frowning, Kichlan stepped aside so I could lead the way.
Lad kept close to me as we walked. I couldn't help but glance at the symbols, hard to read in the light and in their bloated closeness. Sure enough, there was Lad, his hill with a dot close to mine. And there was debris, right in front of me, the lightning strike sharply detailed amidst ill-defined lines. But as I lowered my wrist I saw it. A cipher I hadn't noticed before, not while the rest of the figures were spaced out. Made of the map itself, yet brighter, sharper, very much a symbol in its own right. Another debris sign. One that encompassed all of us, one made up of us. It was everywhere, it was everything.
I looked up into the darkness, to the grey shapes of a curved roof and snake-twisted pipes.
"What is that?" I whispered to myself.
I am here.
And sure enough, my suit-light fell on a crack in the floor. A pipe ran beneath it and we could hear the sound of water rushing through iron. But from the gap, the dark corners between pipe and cement, debris grew like a fungus. Bulbous, patchy, and swaying as though in a breeze.
"That's it." Kichlan crouched beside the crevice. "Oh, very well done."
I said nothing. Something was tickling my stomach, something like the first buds of laughter. If I opened my mouth nothing but giggling, inane chuckling, would burst out. Beside me, Lad let out a little laugh, and was ignored.
"Uzdal, the jars." Kichlan held out his hand, and Uzdal slung the bag's strap into his palm. "Let's work, shall we."
I have been waiting. I am glad you came.
As the others set to scooping, prying and pinching the debris from its hold beneath the building, I lifted my hand and stared at the scrap I held between my fingers.
"Why are you talking to me?" I breathed over it, and it jiggled.
They are here, did you see them? Watching you like they watch me. Together we can fight them. Together, we are strong.
Then something touched my shoulder. A hand, light, warm. It brushed my neck with soft fingers and a warm breath.
I am sorry for you, Tanyana. Truly, I am. But I cannot be sorry you are here.
I spun. The room behind me was empty, save for storage crates and shards from broken ceramic loops.
"Tanyana?" Kichlan looked up from his work. "What's the matter?"
"He scared her and now he's gone," Lad answered for me, his words nonsense. "He didn't mean to."
"You didn't scare her, Lad," Kichlan said, full of patience.
I stared between them. The phantom memory of the hand on my skin was warm, and everything jumbled together in that heat. Eugeny's warning, Kichlan's explanation. Lad, with his inexplicable connection to debris and the voices within his head. The voices he had always heard and sometimes, the voices he obeyed.
And I had no idea which one of them was right, if anyone understood anything properly, if I had any idea what was going on.
"Tanyana?" Kichlan stood. Concerned, he approached me, a half-filled jar held in front of him. "It's been a strange morning, hasn't it? Are you all right?"
I nodded. A lie, if ever there was one.
He held out the jar. "Drop that grain in here and take a moment to rest. We've almost got this finished."
I held the debris over the open jar. It felt like a chasm, the lip a gaping mouth.
"Go on." Kichlan smiled.
Goodbye. For the moment.
I dropped the debris and watched Kichlan seal the lid. "Where do the jars go when they are full?" I asked him. I had to concentrate to retract my suit, and my hand shook.
"To the technicians. From there, I don't know."
"Oh." The technicians. Devich.
"Come and give us light. We're nearly done."
Leaning over the rest of the team I watched them collect. Sure enough, the fissure was close to empty. What had caused the debris to rise, to swallow the factory whole?
Lights started to reignite in the factory above us. Voices echoed down from the stairwell.
"It's come up from the old city, hasn't it?" I whispered. The Movoc-under-Keeper built long before Novski's revolution, and the small patches of it that still remained. Like the wall that had fallen on me on my first day as a collector. I squinted hard into the tiny gap between pipe and cement, but try as I might I couldn't see deeper. No ruins, no hand-laid stonework, and not the wellspring I believed had to be there, the untapped oceans of debris.
"No," Sofia answered. "Debris like this is created by the new world, by massive levels of pion manipulation." She hesitated. "But I know what you mean. It likes old places, doesn't it?"
Lights flickered on in the basement, drowning out my suit. In the crevice, no shadow of debris remained. Not even a grain.
When we climbed out of the basement to a world lit again by steady, strong lamplight, I saw them. At the edge of the crowd of surprised but grateful debris collectors, half hidden by the rain and the shadow of a building, stood two of the puppet men. Their faces pale, expressionless, bodies wooden and unmoving, they watched me.
11.
By the time I returned home, it was late Mornday evening and the skies had not brightened once. Rain fell constantly, I was soaked through and so chilled I couldn't keep my finger steady on the lock. It took three tries to convince the pions I was me. And I had just managed to unlock the door and shrug off my jacket when footsteps sounded behind me.
"Vladha?"
I spun. Two large men filled the small, paved courtyard. Both were swathed in coats constructed of dark material, heavily patched, and wore tight knitted hats pulled down to prominent eyebrows.
"Are you Vladha?" the left one asked again. His voice was low as the thunder, his eyes two glinting spots in the shadows of his face.
"Miss Vladha," I answered, already stepping back into my hallway, already reaching to close the heavy wooden door between us.
But large, meaty hands held it open, and wide arms kept it there.
"Landlord sent us," the man on the left said.
"He's not happy," said his fellow.
"Doesn't like tenants who cannot pay."
"Doesn't like losing kopacks."
"Doesn't like it at all."
I stumbled into the hallway, coat dropped to the floor. Suddenly they were inside, filling the small space, invading my home.
"You can't," I whispered.
They gave an identical snicker of contempt. "Oh, we can," the left one chuckled. "We do, in fact, more often than you'd think."
"Places like this." The other was walking down the hall, eyeing the walls, the pictures, the lamps. The little statue of princess Ludmilla that Mother had given me when I graduated, the best she could hope to afford. His eyes were like fingers the way they touched, the way they caressed and pried. "Always in demand. You're not the only one. Buy out of your range, live beyond your kopacks. But there's always someone willing to take what you drop. Always the next arrogant idiot with an overfull rublie in
line."
"You wait right here."
The wall I stood against moved. Hands reached from the marble and wallpaper. They gripped my arms, clutched at my waist and thighs. The man chuckled as I strained but had no way to hold back the pions, no way to calm my own wall into submission.
"What have we got, then?" He followed his fellow into my bedroom and left me pinned to the hallway, straining like a fly in a web.
My rublie felt heavy in the pocket of my pants, but I knew with a horrible certainty that they wouldn't go for it. There was nothing left in it, not enough, at least, to cover the debts I had so wilfully ignored. The rent, the water, the pion heat. How many kopacks did I owe and what would these men do to get them?
Unwelcome hands rattled through my bedroom. Voices laughed. Something smashed. I tried to ignore them, as though I could will them out of my home, out of my memory, by staring at the closed wooden door.
"Hey!" A gruff voice spoke and a large hand gripped the side of my head, shaking until I snapped my gaze to his face. "None of that!"
They didn't know that I was a collector and I couldn't have undone the bindings they worked in my wall, no matter how hard I concentrated.
"You should leave," I rasped out of a sore throat. "Don't you know what I can do? I'm an architect, employed by the veche itself. If you don't go, now, I will undo your bonds and turn your pions right back on you! Trap you here, call enforcers, and then who knows what information would get out? I don't think my landlord wants anyone to know the kind of associates he employs, do you?"
The large man smirked between tight knitted cap and unwashed beard. "Yeah, we were told about you. Pity you can't pay your bills, Miss Employed-by-the-veche." He leaned forward. A breath like rancid meat and old onion washed over my face. It set my eyes watering. "We were told to keep you busy, if you went and tried anything. Keep you occupied." He wrapped a hand across my jaw and tipped my face. The back of my head pressed into the wall, my neck strained until I thought the scars would tear. "We could give you prettier cuts than these." He flicked a pink ridge on my cheek. I sucked air through my teeth. "So you keep quiet." He released me, cuffed the top of my head with a casual backhand, like I was a dog that had displeased him, and rejoined his fellow.