Debris vw-1

by Jo Anderton

  Uric's twelve pointed circle burned too brightly in my mind, and I stood beside him, fighting pions of my own. I had known from the beginning, hadn't I, that this was more than Yicor's luck. Kichlan had thrown himself from his Grandeur, I had been pushed.

  What, exactly, was I going to do about that? I felt backed into a corner. Devich and the powerful people he knew weren't accessible to me any more. Pavel and the thugs who had thrown me from my apartment felt like warnings, as though someone was telling me in brutal terms to cast aside all thoughts of Grandeur, of pions, of justice and a veche tribunal. To let that life fall forgotten into the past, and get used to being a debris collector.

  And most of all, to stop asking questions.

  But what frightened me most was how comfortable this corner could be. Lad's friendship, Kichlan's loyalty, Eugeny's care, I wanted these things. I liked them. It would be too easy to embrace this new life, to stop fighting for the truth, to leave the past alone. It even sounded like the most sensible thing to do.

  After all, nothing was holding me to my old life anymore. My circle was gone, my apartment was taken, and I had just sold the last piece, the last memory.

  Maybe it was time to let go?

  13.

  Lad leaned into the river spray, one hand wrapped around the railing, the other tangled in mine. I was keenly aware that I had nowhere near enough weight to keep him on the ferry if he fell, and would be sucked into the Tear's icy current behind him.

  "Feet on the floor, Lad, not the railing." I tugged at the large man, a lot like trying to shift a steady wall of brick and mortar with my little finger.

  "The water is nice, Tan." He leaned over further.

  "Not if you fall in it, it won't be."

  With a sheepish glance, Lad slipped his feet from the first rung and back to the deck, landing loudly. The few ferries that ran on Rest were filled, but not in a crowded way. There were tired young men making their way down from the city. Middle-aged chaperones supervised younger women who fluttered their eyelashes and were rewarded with leering, sleep-deprived smiles. An elderly couple huddled on seats by the doorway, watching the Keeper Mountain grow slowly smaller, blinking against sunlight on the river. A gaggle of children were doing a fair imitation of Lad's unsafe climbing. I felt sorry for the two governesses trying to pry them all down.

  Kichlan stood beside me, also watching the Keeper Mountain. "They weren't like him, you know," he said, soft against the rush of the wind, not loud enough for Lad to hear. "Neither. Both were good binders, respectable people working hard for Varsnia and their children. It's not in the blood. My parents weren't collectors."

  "Pion skill has got nothing to do with blood, although the old families won't want to hear that." My mother was proof of that.

  "Don't you wonder, then, what it is?" Kichlan's hands gripped the railing, knuckles white, skin blue in the chill. "What made us?"

  "I know what made me." I touched the side of my face. "And you made yourself." Kichlan had not been forthcoming with any more details of his fall, but I refused to be dissuaded and continued to pry. "Fling yourself eight hundred feet into the air, did you?"

  He said, "Doesn't take eight hundred feet to break a person, and not all of us have to be quite so dramatic." Kichlan looked over my head. "Him then." In the corner of my eye I noticed one of Lad's feet had crept back to the bottom railing. I poked him in the side, and he lowered it with a chuckle. "What made him?"

  Over the last sixnight and one, Kichlan, Lad and I had explored the backstreets and alleys between the seventh Effluent and the eighth Keepersrill. Narrow, dark capillaries between wide veins, shaped without reason, blocking often in dead ends or gates. It was this constant companionship, I told myself, that had stopped me searching for Devich. How could I head into the city, or try and find the building where he had suited me, with Kichlan and Lad like dogs, constantly at my heels. And Olday evening, as the brothers had said their farewells at the bottom of Valya's rickety stairs, Kichlan had asked me to come with them the next morning, to visit his parents' graves. If I hadn't been so surprised, I might have thought up a way to decline.

  Devich had to be worried. He must have visited my apartment by now. I owed him the truth; he deserved to have his fears rested. Instead, I was heading for the cemetery.

  Graves were not my speciality. Between Movoc's prerevolutionary walls and the newer townlets that were springing up around the Weeping Lake, the cemetery was a sprawling necropolis, an architect's nightmare dedicated to the dead. I never visited.

  We disembarked at an aging limestone quay, just on the other side of the old Tear gates. Once large defences, securing the break in Movoc's wall necessitated by the Tear River, the gates were rendered useless by the revolution and were now entirely ornamental. The iron had been restored to a better condition than it had probably ever been. The bars were shaped like little rivers, starting with a viciously sharp-summited Keeper, and ending with a skull. Lad stared at the skulls as we passed beneath the shadow of the wall, and even I couldn't help but shiver. Their eyes had been replaced with original kopacks, ancient coins of brass, and they glinted cruelly in the glare from the water.

  From the quay we filed along a narrow road, just as ancient, cut into a rocky landscape of desolate knolls. Little more than thistles grew. Shadows seemed to lie there without anything to cast them, hugging the cold earth. We weren't the only ones travelling to the necropolis to visit the loved dead that rest. The old couple followed, at an increasing distance, slow over the treacherous, uneven ground.

  "Is this something you do often?" I asked Kichlan, feeling breathless but desperate for something to fill the shadowed quiet.

  Lad followed a few yards behind us. He hummed a slow, sad tune.

  "I want Lad to remember them," Kichlan answered. "So I suppose, yes, we do this more often than most people."

  Certainly more often than me. I wasn't even sure I could remember the plaque behind which my mother's ashes slept. I had not known my father when he was alive, and certainly didn't know where he rested now.

  Kichlan led the way along thin paths of cracking stone. I felt surrounded. Gravestones with small roofs made hushed, disordered suburbs. Memorial statues and tombs hulked beside older, unmarked barrows. Rosemary grew in thick-scented clumps between stones. And images of the Other loomed from every corner. Featureless faces etched into gravestones; flat, humanoid shadows built of dark rock stretching from the side of a tomb wall. And older, more frightening things. A skull, half buried, its face crushed. The chaos of a skeleton statue, bones put together the wrong way. The Other was death, and disorder, and fear. Surely he belonged here, then, far from the protective shadow of the mountain named after his opposite: the Keeper.

  The stonework was coarse, the paving poor. I tried to tell myself that was why I preferred to stare at the skyline, or a square of green cloth that had been used to repair Kichlan's jacket, near the shoulder.

  He halted in a newer patch of graves. Each had a headstone, engraved with names, no worn-away faces or shadows. The roofs were well tended, no tiles cracked. Shin-high fences marked them all apart. Lad tugged rosemary from where it grew in a gap in the path. He settled onto his heels before two graves with no fence to divide them, and placed the rosemary gently on the earth. He picked at weeds that had began poking around the iron fence. He brushed dirt and dried leaves from the roof.

  "They loved him, despite what he did. Despite what I chose to do." Kichlan remained by my side, hands deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched.

  "I'm sure they did." Was this why I was here? To be told how much Lad's mother loved him? "Why have you brought me here, Kichlan?"

  Lad, satisfied with the cleanliness of the graves, had started pulling small leaves from the stalks of rosemary. The scent surged up around him like a rising tide, and he muttered to himself, a constant flow of words I couldn't hear.

  "After I- when Lad forced my hand, I didn't give up. I tried healers first." Kichlan was as quiet as Lad,
nearly as difficult to hear. "They kept telling me the same thing. That no one knows what is wrong with him, no one knows why pions choose to abandon some people. They said it like that. As though he'd been tested, and rejected." The venom in his soft words was a chilling and terrible thing.

  I touched the top of my head. "I wish I could tell you I can't imagine how horrible that feels."

  Kichlan shuffled closer, so our arms touched through layers of woollen and leather coats. "Too much of that and someone in the veche must have heard. They sent technicians to check on Lad every second day. Even some of those Other-cursed veche men. I stopped asking after that."

  I shuddered, and Kichlan leaned against me.

  "Eugeny had some ideas of his own. You know what he's like."

  Golden root wax plant, whatever it was. "I do."

  "Nearly impossible to get Lad to drink his concoctions, I have to say. For all the good it did." He let out a sigh so long it sounded like it had started somewhere close to his feet. "And now, all I can do is watch him, protect him. Make sure he remembers the parents that loved him, and try to make him happy."

  "Did you read the veche records?"

  He snorted. "Those little glass pion-written things? I did, when I could. They were not terribly helpful."

  I could imagine that. "What about researchers? You must have attended a university to become a technician. The texts there, the lecturers, they could have helped you."

  Yes, what about them? I knew some strong binders who'd dedicated their lives to the study and the teaching of those little spots of bright light. If I asked them, they might know what made a person lose their pion sight, and they might know how to fix it. What's more, they might know how to summon a horde of furious, crimson pions from deep inside reality. They might even know who could do it.

  Why hadn't I thought of this earlier? Jernea, if he was still alive, would not turn me away. I was sure of it.

  "Ah." Kichlan looked down at me, mouth set, but unable to quench a sudden hope I saw in his eyes. "Technicians train each other, I'm afraid. If you display the correct skills and make the right inquiries the veche comes calling, and offers you a position. So I did not attend any university that could help us."

  I remembered the letter from Proud Sunlight that I had cradled so close to me. It is with regret we hear of your misfortune. But if Jernea was still there, he would listen to me. He would help.

  "I did," I whispered. "And I will try."

  "Done now, bro." Lad was standing, watching us, and neither of us had noticed. "Is that enough?"

  For a collector like him. And a collector like me.

  "Yes, Lad," Kichlan answered with a smile. "We can go home now."

  Together, we rode the ferry on its journey upriver. Together, we took Lad home and gave him over to Eugeny's food and care. Together, we returned to my new home. I felt close to Kichlan, close to Lad. A part of the team, even something like family.

  Then Mornday, when I descended to the sublevel and stepped beneath the filtered morning light and the cracked ceiling, Devich was there.

  He glanced at me, and his expression didn't change. He had been rotating half a dozen or so small glass slides in the air in front of his face. He stilled them with a whisper, then plucked one and held it close to his eye. I wondered what was written in it.

  "Vladha?" he asked.

  I realised I was gaping at him. I shut my jaw with a click, and forced my feet across the floor. Kichlan, Lad, Mizra and Uzdal were already sitting in the couches, none of them pleased. A second technician was counting jars.

  Guilt knocked the air from me, guilt at Devich's expressionless face. "Yes," I answered with a gasping breath. "Tanyana Vladha."

  "And are you still housed at the second Keepersrill? Paleice, I believe it is."

  Kichlan glanced up at this, surprised. I gathered this was not an ordinary question.

  I drew a breath. It was like treading on pale ice itself. "No."

  Devich's eyebrows rose. There was something sharp in the motion, something hurt.

  "No, I was forced to leave there. Forced. No way to contact anyone I knew and tell them where I had gone, no time to take anything with me." But time to watch Lad lay rosemary at his mother's grave. "Believe me, I did not move out of choice."

  The hurt became alarm. His fingers tightened around the slide and it cracked. He didn't seem to notice. "Forced?" he said. "Are you all right then, Vladha?"

  "Yes. Only due to the other members of my team." I inclined my head to Kichlan.

  Devich did not even glance at him. "And where are you living now?" He repaired the cracked slide with a whisper, and poised his finger above it.

  "I rent a room not far from here. In someone else's house."

  "Ah." Irritated, he glanced my way. "Address?"

  I told him, but I hoped he had understood I could not entertain him any longer, not with Valya cooking below. If he wanted a bed to share with me, it would have to be his own.

  "Thank you. Please, take a seat, we will begin when the rest of the team have arrived."

  I squeezed in beside Kichlan. "Inspection?"

  He made a low, grunting noise. "Yes, but I don't know why. We haven't been up to our usual standard but we've definitely been above quota the past few sixnights." He frowned. "Yes, I'm sure of it. So I don't know why they're here."

  I glanced up at Devich. His face was down, apparently focused on the slide, but his eyes had followed me. His expression was cold, and confused, and even a little jealous. But I did not move from Kichlan's side. Devich had no reason to look like that.

  Sofia and Natasha arrived as breakbell sounded, dim and distant through glass and cement. They were both surprised by Devich and his fellow technician, but answered their questions easily. Finally, when we had all gathered, both technicians stood together before the table covered in jars.

  "Firstly," started the technician I didn't know. "The damage to the ceiling."

  I groaned, inwardly. Sofia shot me a venomous expression.

  "This has not been reported to the veche, which is irregular to say the least."

  "However," Devich interrupted. "You will be given time to have it repaired. Inspectors will be sent in two sixnights and one, ensure it is filled in by then."

  His fellow technician appeared surprised by this, but made a note of it and didn't argue. I couldn't remember if I'd told Devich about the damage I'd caused to the ceiling, but I must have. A rush of gratitude flushed my cheeks.

  "Now, we will proceed." The technicians employed Kichlan and Mizra to help them set up a large screen they had drawn from a long canvas bag. It was built of hollow tubes and green material. They arranged it across one corner of the room, and dragged two chairs to sit behind it.

  "One at a time," Uzdal whispered in my ear. My confusion must have been evident. "They take us behind there one at a time and have a good poke around."

  I flashed him an alarmed expression, and he chuckled. "The suit, Tanyana. They poke around at the suit. Make sure everything's working."

  "Oh." My face flamed, which set him laughing again.

  "And believe me," Uzdal continued once he had calmed down enough to speak. "You want everything to be all right."

  "Why?"

  "Because if it's not then you need to go back on the table, with the lights and the machines and they do a tune-up. They tighten, they push deeper." He shuddered. "It's not pleasant."

  "Did it happen to you?"

  He nodded. "The suit never took to Mizra and me very well. Had to endure a few of those to get it right. One time's bad enough, don't you think?"

  I remembered the voices, the pressure, and the knowledge of pain numbed by drugs. "Oh yes."

  Devich took Sofia first. Far from nervous, she seemed relieved to be getting it over and done with.

  "You shouldn't worry, though," Uzdal commented as the technicians led Sofia away. "You're like her. Suit always worked, didn't it? Never had any problems. Can't imagine you'd have them now." />
  The suit worked too well at times. Maybe working too well would also warrant a tune-up. I hoped not.

  Sofia stayed behind the curtain for half a bell. When she emerged, she was relaxed, her suit glowing particularly bright. Devich took Natasha next, and he and his fellow kept her for a bell at least. When she returned to us she was happier than Sofia had been. Even volunteered to find us something to eat.

  Uzdal and Mizra were called together, and I sat fidgeting beside Kichlan, wondering if Devich was forcing me to wait on purpose. If this was some kind of vindictive punishment.

  "It's fine." Kichlan patted my knee. I jumped under his hand, and he gave me a sympathetic smile. "You've had no problems, so you'll be fine. I know the first time is hard, a bit frightening. Brings back the nasty memories." He tapped his forehead. "But it's not that bad. Trust me."

  I nodded, unable to find my voice. None of them understood the torment, the turmoil, that had nothing to do with my suit.

  "Vladha?" Devich stepped out from behind the screen. I jerked again, and stood up so quickly I knocked my knee against the corner of the low table near the couch.

  Wincing, bending slightly to rub what had to be a developing bruise, I answered, "Yes?"

  "My colleague can examine the twins, and we will run out of bells if we don't make this faster." He glanced at a silver watch drawn from the lapel of his jacket. Unlike the one Jernea had given me – and which had not survived my first day as a collector – Devich's watch was powered by pions. Tiny replicas of silver bells rose from its otherwise smooth surface and danced, chiming out the time as they did so. Expensive. "Would you come here?"

  "With Mizra and Uzdal?" Why did I feel embarrassed? The twins had already watched me undress once, what more could they possibly see? Surely Devich wasn't about to strip me to my skin and have his poke around?

  "There's nothing to worry about." Devich tried for patience, but I thought he looked annoyed. "Believe me."

  I glanced at Kichlan, desperately seeking some kind of escape. He just nodded, and made get going motions with his hands. I stepped around the couches and approached the screen. Devich's lips were tight. He wasn't impressed.