by Jo Anderton
I couldn't feel pain, but I could feel a need. An urgency, sharper than the light on my wrists, ankles and neck. I could feel it somewhere in my bones, in the insect legs scratching away below my muscles, the silver kicking in my blood.
"I'm not going until I know you're not hurt." What an effort it took to say that.
"We are all doomed if you don't go, girl. If you can't help him." Valya held a patchwork quilt to her chin like a small, frightened child. "Hurry."
I left the house, plunged into streets that should have been dark and empty. Ruddiness lit cobblestones with a fireside light, dull and red, hanging on the bottom of clouds like a pooling stain. It lit terrified faces as the people of Movoc-under-Keeper spilled from buildings like blood escaping skin. I pushed through a growing crowd – ignored the screams of children, the barking commands of men, the imploring hands of women – and felt vivid against their dull fear. Felt purposeful. Necessary.
I didn't bother casting the map, not this time. Instead, I followed the symbols on my wrist, wound around streets and buildings and potholes without watching my feet, trusting in the suit, the guiding movement beneath my fingers.
Then Lad's cipher rose vivid and insistent, pushing against my forefinger. I skidded to a halt. Lad and Kichlan stood at a corner, on the other side of a sea of milling people. Kichlan had cast his wavering map on a building wall. Lad, bag full of metallic jars hanging from one shoulder, gestured to me.
I waded across the street. An old woman clutched at my elbow, her hand too much like Valya's. It made me shiver. "What's happening?" she screeched at me, two rotting teeth pale stumps in a dark and gaping mouth. I shook her off and pushed forward.
"Tan!" The suit and the firelight combined to give Lad's cheeks a youthful pink. It jarred with the tension within me, with the light on the heavy clouds. I had no idea where in Movoc we were, only how close the debris was, only that we needed to be there. Now.
"We need to hurry." I grabbed Lad's hand and drew him into the mass of people. "It's this way."
Kichlan flicked off his map and followed. "How do you know?" he shouted. Were his ears ringing too? Had Eugeny woken screaming in the night? Somehow, I couldn't imagine it.
"It's here." I lifted my wrist. "The map, it's all here."
A moment's hesitation I put down to running, to his being out of breath. "You can read the suit? On your wrist?" Even against the ringing I could hear his surprise.
"Yes." Surely he expected no explanations now.
"How? Who taught you?" Kichlan demanded.
"No one taught me." The suit had shown me. Those wiggling worms I had seen kick out from my skin. They had taught me.
Lad squeezed my hand as we ran. I squeezed back.
I said, "I worked it out myself."
"Ever considered sharing?"
"Now is not the time" hovered on my lips. But then the world was rocked again and flames leapt above the tops of buildings, throwing huge chunks of stone into the air as though they were no more than balls tossed in play.
"Shelter!" Kichlan roared, barely perceptible as chaos erupted around us.
Together we dragged Lad to the nearest building and pressed him into the wall. Bodies pushed us, forced my shoulder onto the cement so hard I was glad for the sturdy uniform. And in the screaming, the press of bodies, the roar and light of flame, Lad watched, captivated, as parts of Movoc-under-Keeper fell from the sky. A wall smacked down into the throng that filled the street. Somehow, over everything, I heard the crack of each bone, the squelch of flesh, and had to fight very hard not to be sick. A column, a great cylindrical pillar, slammed into the roof of a building, shattering tiles, crushing stone. It slid to the street in an over-slow avalanche of brick, cement and – my stomach lurched again – bodies. Dead like dolls, limbs loose. Scorched. Broken. Thrown.
I started to sink against the wall, one arm wrapped around my middle. But Kichlan yanked me upright. "Don't! If you get under all this, you'll never get up again!"
The bodies against us were fierce now. Running, screaming, wailing. Forcing like the current of a rapid, angry river.
I swallowed bile. "We have to get to the debris." The words came unbidden. What I really wanted to do was join the senseless, panicked screaming. It seemed a lot easier that way. "We need to stop it." Was that really me, so calm, so sensible?
Kichlan's mouth firmed, his face grew determined. "You're right."
That made me feel better. I wasn't the only one.
He said, "That means going toward the fire, though."
I touched the suit, nodded. "It does." The dead didn't show up as symbols. The crowd was nothing but a low, indistinct rippling. I swallowed hard. Didn't seem fair.
We ran into the street, both gripping Lad's hands, pulling him forward. His head tipped back and he stared with wonder at the red sky. The crowd thinned as we ran. Some of them tried to stop us.
"Not that way!" a young man screamed. Blood soaked the front of his pale nightshirt. A gash in his forehead painted half of his face red. "They're all dead, and it's getting bigger, and they can't stop it! Don't go that way!"
We pressed on. But his voice echoed in my head, and I feared what it was, though somewhere in my gut I already knew. Could debris really do all this? Debris that wriggled, bug-like, through the air on a course of its own?
"Kichlan!" Sofia called from an intersecting street and hurried toward us. Her face was pale beneath dirt, smudges and a fine layer of sand. The collar of her jacket at been torn, bloody handprints smearing the fabric.
"Are you all right?" Kichlan asked, fear in his voice. "Have you seen the others?"
Sofia shook her head.
"Sofia?" I glanced at her hand. It shook and reflected our suit lights with something wet. Something red. "You're hurt!" I reached for her, but she turned away. Her expression hardened.
"Something hit me. Stone, I think." She gestured to her shoulder. "It's not serious."
I bit back an argument.
"We need to get closer." She turned to Kichlan, all business. "The others can find us. We need to work out what's going on."
"Can you keep him close to you?" Kichlan asked Sofia, placed Lad's hand in hers. "Stay here with him. For now. Tanyana and I will see what's happening."
"Tanyana and you?" Sofia asked. And despite the chaos and the blood and the fear the look she gave me was one of betrayal, of hurt. It lasted only for a moment, disappearing so quickly I began to doubt that I had seen it at all.
"Don't worry, Tan," Lad said, as we gave him over to her care. "It will be all right. In the end."
I knew he believed every word.
Kichlan and I left Lad with Sofia, where they huddled under a wide awning that seemed to have maintained some of its structural integrity. Lamps shuddered beside us as we ran, flickering high, then dying, only to burst into painful brilliance.
"Another factory?" I shouted.
Kichlan tapped the solid metal stand of a lamp as he passed it, wrapping a hand briefly around the carved lines and the bear heads peering eyelessly out of dark steel. "I doubt it." His voice hesitated, his feet pushed on. "Things go wrong when factories don't keep themselves clean. Lights fail, heat dies. I've never heard of one disgorging fire before."
The ground rocked again and Kichlan ploughed into me, pressing me up against a wall as stones hailed onto the open street. I felt them hit his back, heard the dull thuds and his low gasps of breath. "Kichlan!" I hissed, struggled to peer around his shoulder, but he leaned more of his weight on me and I couldn't move.
"They're not big. The uniform is taking most of it." Something very large crashed a yard from where he shielded me, spraying the cobblestones with dry rain.
"Liar," I whispered. It was hot, wrapped in Kichlan's body. I had forgotten how tall he was, how large. It was easy to do, with Lad to compare him to.
"See you prove it." He chuckled, breathlessly.
As the stones petered out a voice shouted from across the street, "Hey!"
&n
bsp; Kichlan turned; I took the opportunity and slipped around him. "Kichlan! Tanyana!" Mizra from a high window. "Door." He pointed out from the shattered glass, arm strangely angled to avoid the edges. "Get up here. Hurry!"
We crossed the street, pushed in a door hanging loose from its hinges, pion lock buzzing sickly. Two flights of dark stairs and Uzdal was waiting. Firelight lit his hair and the side of his face, as though the room behind him was burning.
"You have to see this." He coughed, spat onto the floor. "Ash," he explained, by way of an apology.
The firelit room had once been a home, though now it was mostly rubble. A decrepit couch remained, and a low table.
"Don't know where the owners have gone." Mizra was staring out a gash in the wall on the opposite side of the room. "Got out as fast as they could, I'm guessing." He faced us, skin dirty, eyes darker than the cinders. "Don't blame them."
I approached him like it was a dream. Those weren't my feet stepping ash into someone else's carpet. Those weren't my eyes watering against grit, my face flushing with sweat as heat washed through the hole in the wall that had, I realised with an architect's detachment, been a supporting structure. The building could fall any moment. But it didn't matter, because it was a dream, all of it. None of it could be real.
"Other," Kichlan whispered the word. It summed everything up rather neatly.
"We can't stay here," I said. "It isn't safe."
The scene outside belonged in nightmares, not reality. A crater in the street, a hole where buildings had once been, so deep the bottom was all shadow and spitting flame. The building beside it – a squat, ugly thing – was torn apart like a limb, spurting water into the flames, hissing steam. Things dangled from the cracks in its walls and floors, soft things. They wavered in the steam, they cooked in the heat. Some moved, and those were the worst, some were still living, torn like the building, fiery like the sky. Bodies.
"What happened here?" Kichlan asked. No answer could satisfy that desperate question. "Why are we here?"
"Can't you see it?" I answered him, because neither Uzdal or Mizra could. Something darker leapt with the flames. Unreflective and dull. Planes of debris. Sails of it, roaring with the steam, surging with the light. It traced itself in a dim web around the building, it arched out of the hole like the wings of a giant, terrible dragonfly, and it leapt into the air, displacing stones, body parts.
Not displacing them. Throwing them.
"Oh, Other," Kichlan whispered beside me.
A glass window winked up at me from the crater. Planes of debris were playing with it. Cruelly. Like a cat. They flicked underneath it, lifted it, tossed it, cracked it. Silver wire held the glass together in a mangled pattern. Sharp shards dangled like cold flesh.
"Did you see that?" Kichlan asked, struggling with a mouth that must have felt as dumb, as cotton-filled as mine.
I said, "Yes."
Mizra and Uzdal glanced between us, faces pale beneath ash, their fear all too obvious.
"We have to get away," Kichlan said. "We have to get out of here now."
"Yes." I swallowed solid grains of ash in my throat. "This building isn't struct-"
I stopped. Peering from the gash made in the earth, glinting from many levels below the ground, the edge of a metallic table caught my eye. And an arm. A great, silver arm. I remembered a needle attached to the tip of that arm. I remembered Devich's voice from the darkness beyond the halos of hot lamps.
"This is familiar." I gripped loose bricks; I leaned forward. "I was suited in a place like this."
My words seemed to hang in the air as the debris stilled. The planes dropped the window they had been torturing and rose out of the crater like great dark fingers. They swept slowly over the rubble, touching, testing, then with a flash they lashed the side of the building. I cried out as debris, very hot, very black, slashed at the gap in the wall. Slashed at me. I stumbled back. The dragonfly twitched its enormous wings and the next plane that attacked was sharper, more precise. It slammed straight into my chest.
Breath rushed out of me as I was flung back. I crashed into the couch and came to a sprawling halt up against the far wall.
Running, shouting, and everything drowned out by fire in my chest and buzzing in my head. I blinked against a blurred haze, a fog hanging over my vision. Kichlan leaned very close. I watched his mouth, but couldn't hear anything he was saying.
Another voice took his place. You should run.
But I couldn't move. Dimly, I realised my arms were silver, my suit activating without guidance and coating me from wrists to elbows, ankles to knees, neck to waist. I closed my eyes, focused on my chest, and pushed against the pressure. Air rushed into my mouth as my suit retracted. I swallowed it greedily.
To be safe. You should run.
"What was that?" Mizra screamed.
I could hear again.
"Debris," I gasped out the word, and something flared in my side. Fire, sharp, hot. Something broken?
"I saw it." Kichlan was still close. His hand under my head, his face beside mine. But he was straining to look at the ceiling. "The building. It's attacking the building."
"It?" Mizra screeched. "What in all Other's hell?"
"Get… out." I fought for each word. "Unstable." The pain was easing, being replaced by a numbness spreading down from my side to my hips. Better, or worse?
Kichlan didn't waste breath. He scooped me up, grunting as he pushed himself to his feet. "Damn, Tan. You're too heavy for someone so small."
I didn't smile. I thought of the numbness, of insect feet and silver sleeves. I was too heavy. How much of what Kichlan was carrying was me, and how much was the suit?
He lurched for the stairs and nearly tumbled down them with Mizra and Uzdal pressing so close behind us.
Another plane crashed into the building as we burst onto the street. Rubble shook from the walls. Tiles slid to shatter on the paving stones.
"Put me down." I pushed against Kichlan's shoulder and he did not argue.
"Are you all right?" His look was searching.
I nodded. "Yes. Knocked the wind out of me."
"What did?" Uzdal at my shoulder, breathless.
"Planes of debris." I flicked a hand toward the building. "They're everywhere in that mess down there. They're-"
"Attacking the building," Uzdal finished my sentence. "It doesn't do that. Kichlan?" He begged like a child for reassurance. "It doesn't do that, it's never done that. Has it?"
"I've never seen anything like that. Holes and fire and bodies." Kichlan frowned at me. "This isn't normal."
And I realised why this felt so familiar, the shock and the violence and the breath pulled from my lungs. I could have been eight hundred feet high.
"We should get away then, shouldn't we?" Uzdal said, through a fog, from a distance. From the ground so far below. "Shouldn't we run?"
Run.
"We're here to do our duty." Kichlan lifted his wrist. "We've been called to collect it."
"Collect that?" Mizra shouted. "We can't collect that. It threw Tanyana across the room."
I looked down as they argued – at my feet, at a distant construction site so vivid in my memory – and knew we were about to be swept away. Knew there was nothing we could do.
"Bro!" Lad ran down the street, Sofia gasping in his wake, clutching her shoulder and dripping blood from her arm. "Angry, bro. So angry."
"I couldn't stop him," Sofia choked on the words. Uzdal rushed to her side, slipped his shoulder beneath her arm to hold her steady, and stared in horror at the bright blood coating her hand.
Kichlan nodded his understanding. "I'm sorry, Lad. I didn't mean to forget about you."
But was Lad really talking about himself? I thought of the debris dancing with destruction like a cruel cat. The whack like a fist against my chest. Lad wasn't angry, was he? But the debris was.
"Who would summon furious pions from too deep inside reality?" I whispered, but there was no critical circle below me to res
pond. And this was debris, not pions.
Why was it all so angry?
They talked, while the debris consumed. I thought of the bodies in the rubble of what could easily be Devich's building. His work, not his home. He wouldn't have been there in the middle of the night, surely. But someone was there, enough people to plaster blood across bricks and cracked cement. I couldn't stand here talking about Lad, when all I wanted was to know was if Devich was in that pile of rubble.
Pions, debris, the lot, they could take their anger and be Other-damned! I would not be swept away again.
"We have to," I said, firm over the flame and hum. "We're debris collectors. We have to go into that building, and we have to stop the violence." I lifted my arm. My suit, still coating me from wrist to elbow, shone so brightly I squinted against it. "We have been called."
And I had to find out if Devich was safe. I had to know, for certain.
"She's right." Kichlan squared his shoulders, stood tall. "Sofia, you and-"
"Not staying!" Lad cried.
"I'm not an invalid, Kichlan," Sofia said, her tone leaving no room for argument.
"Fine," Kichlan said with a resigned sigh. "What about Natasha, have we seen any sign of her?"
No one answered. Mizra glared at me, Uzdal at least seemed resigned to his fate. Kichlan and Sofia maintained varied degrees of forced determination. Lad looked like he was about to cry.
"We can't wait any longer." Kichlan took the bag of containers from Lad. "We have to do what we are here for. We have to stop this."
"Hurry." I set off without waiting, crossed the street and kept as far from the building as I could. Something licked my foot, and I glanced down to see a dark plane flicker from a scattering of shattered tiles – to glance off the suit that had wrapped me from my knee to my toes.
I shook it off, but Kichlan had seen. Kichlan was staring at me, frowning, thinking, wondering. I began to run. I couldn't start that wondering. Could the debris have heard me, or seen me leaning from the window? What had made it drop the glass? What had made it launch itself at me, and destroy the entire building around me? The same thing that had made the pions throw me from Grandeur's palm? What, exactly, could do that? Or who? A pion-binder who could not only see debris, but control it as well?