Debris vw-1

by Jo Anderton

  I couldn't share in my circle's joy. "Many more were killed than that." My voice was raw, it sounded like sand scraped down my throat, uncomfortable to my ears. "Technicians, binders. People in the street. So many people in the street." Was that the suit, scraping words with its legs?

  "They were?" Volski's sunlight faltered. "Tanyana, are you all right?"

  Devich had been taken from me, but taken to be healed. I had saved him.

  I had to believe that.

  Zecholas hovered by Volski's shoulder. "My lady?" he asked. His gaze swept from my ash-flecked hair, to the torn clothes, the weight I couldn't put on one leg, the hollowness in my eyes I knew had to be there. A hollowness I could feel tunnelling deeper.

  "Not any more," I told him. Then, to Volski, "Let me go, I need to get home." I needed to tell Valya I was well, tell her it was over. Needed to spend a very, very long time lying down.

  Across the street, behind the rest of my huddled circle and their probably terribly embarrassed new centre, a spot of darkness drifted by. Not ash, this one. Something solid, flesh-like, wiggling. My suit spun that little bit faster, and tension travelled in spasms from my wrists to shoulder.

  It was over. Wasn't it?

  "Oh." Volski stepped back. Something in me pulled tight like the suit, something that told me pushing him away like this was foolish. But I had tried to tell Volski the truth, and he hadn't listened. Volski, who had known me so long and so well. Volski, who I had always believed I could trust. If he wouldn't listen, if he refused to believe me, then what chance did I have to get the others to hear me? To help me.

  "I'm glad you're well." Such sadness in that face, the same look he had given me on the bench in front of the gallery. It felt so long ago. "We all are."

  Were we? Llada's face was so red she shone from the building they were repairing across the street. Was that Savvin's back? I hoped it was, I hoped he couldn't bear to show his face. But Volski was here, and Zecholas, and even Tsana, holding back, still pressing her lips like she was trying not to be sick. That meant something, I supposed.

  "Thank you," I managed. Another glob of debris floated by, closer this time. I clenched my hands to try and control the spasms. "Be careful. There was a lot of debris." More than I could hope to explain. "The effects could linger."

  Volski nodded, grave. "You be careful too," he told me, and didn't move as I started walking again, just watched me with that same, sombre expression.

  A few steps, and I halted. Tsana was here. Tsana, the only person who had believed me. "Tsana, do you remember what I asked you?"

  She hurried forward, removed her hands long enough to reach for mine, realised I wouldn't take them, and pressed them back on her face. "Yes," she said behind fingers, muffled.

  "While you are all here, in this area of the city, do you think you could?"

  "Oh, yes, of course." Her cheeks were growing flushed against her fingertips. Didn't she want the others to know who she met at parties?

  "Can you remember an address? Can you be there, tomorrow, laxbell? It isn't far from here."

  "Ah-" She glanced over at Llada's red face.

  I shifted the weight away from my aching leg again.

  "Of course."

  "Great." I gave her the sublevel address. "Tomorrow."

  And I left the circle, wondering if they would find bodies in that rubble, or if the enforcers had already swept through, diggers in tow, removing every last one. If the healers had saved any of them.

  The bruises on my upper thigh flared into painful life as I crawled into the space between a rickety fence and the back wall of a tall building. Mud clung to my knees, it hung heavy from the front of my jacket. I pinched a blob of debris, the last of a cluster we had found clinging to the unstable and rotting fence.

  The lights of the whole street, only two blocks away from the sublevel, flickered in poorly kept time. The rest of the team were working on them. It wasn't even thirdbell, and we had already filled almost twenty jars.

  Groaning, I edged my way out of the gap and straightened. If this kept up we would have no problem meeting quota. And I knew that should have been a good thing, but there was so much of it, I could only imagine the debris was residue, parts of the planes that had escaped. So each glob, either floating in the air or stuck to buildings or oozing from sewerage vents, reminded me of Devich, half-dead and in a healer's care. Or the voice that had pleaded with me. Or dragonfly wings. So I wished things were normal, I wished we had to rely on Lad just to come close to what the veche demanded of us. Because none of this was right.

  "At least this is easier." Mizra, hand laden with full jars, stretched his back out, wincing.

  I couldn't stop the "Hmmm" under my breath.

  "Not risky enough for you, is it?" Mizra must have heard me, and snapped, "No fun if you can't put your life and the life of others in-"

  "Mizra!" Kichlan shouted from his lamp at the end of the street. "Enough."

  The twins, muttering together, moved on to a lamp as far from me as possible. With a sigh, I nodded to Kichlan, and he just looked away.

  I couldn't shake the feeling we'd all moved back a few sixnights and one.

  When we could carry no more we returned to the sublevel. I missed the scent of porridge cooked on Kichlan's fireplace. I missed Lad's unerring and probably dangerous focus on the flames. I missed everything that had, for a moment at least, made this cold room a new home.

  As Kichlan arranged the jars on the shelves, Lad and Uzdal sank into couches. I glanced at the sun creeping in through the half-size windows. Lax was bells away. Nothing to be concerned about.

  "Tanyana has a point," Kichlan said, suddenly. He turned from the shelves, a jar still in his hand. "This isn't normal."

  I gaped at him. "Er-"

  "No, Kichlan." Mizra leapt to the fray, eager anger in his face. "No! Walking out of that Other-hole wrapped in her suit, that isn't normal! Saving that cursed arrogant technician, of all the people who died, that isn't normal! What we found out there was debris on lamps. That happens all the time."

  "A whole street of them?" I murmured.

  Kichlan sighed. "You're not helping."

  "A whole city of them for all I care!" Mizra spat the words. "Anything is better than yesterday."

  I pictured the dead technician. I could still hear screams as buildings fell from the sky. "Yes," I said. "It is."

  "Then stop complaining about it. Stop wanting it to happen again!"

  I spluttered, made inarticulate by fury, by a bitter sense of how Other-damned unfair this was.

  "Mizra!" Kichlan snapped. "Tanyana doesn't want-"

  Sofia, looking pale, drawn, had been leaning on the wall. She pushed herself upright. "Think of everything that has happened, since she stepped foot in here. Three emergencies, Kichlan. We don't get that many in thirteen moons and a day. Something is going on." She pinned me with a vicious, animal-protecting-her-young eye. "And it's got to do with her."

  "Yes, Tanyana," Natasha said with her all-knowing, uncaring smile. "You do rather seem stuck in the middle of it."

  Shivers traced fingers along my spine. The anger of pions, the rage of debris, all rushed around me like waves.

  "She can do things with that suit no one should be able to do," Sofia continued. "She steps into the middle of the Other's own hell and suddenly the whole thing stops? We don't know her, Kichlan, not really. For all we know she's making this happen-"

  "I'm not!" Wrapped in their anger, surrounded by memories I did not understand, I struggled for something to make sense. "I didn't do any of this. The pions, Grandeur, the planes. I don't know why they are so angry."

  Uzdal, face dark from where he lay on the couch, glared at me. "What are you talking about?"

  I took a deep breath. After everything we had been through, my collecting team would surely believe me. "Grandeur was the name of the statue I was building when I fell."

  Reluctant nods. Lad's head was hanging so low I couldn't see his face.
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  "That wasn't an accident. I tried to tell the binders in my circle, the pupp- the veche men, no one believed me. But someone pushed me off. Someone who dug too deep into reality and summoned angry, violent pions. I'd never seen any like that before." I swallowed, saliva sticking in my throat. "Like the debris was yesterday."

  The room hung heavy with silence, broken only by Natasha's unsympathetic snigger.

  "So, what?" Sofia pressed on. "What does that mean? Pions are out to get you? Debris is too? Don't be ridiculous."

  "Doesn't sound very likely, does it?" Natasha smirked.

  "I know," I said. "But it's true. You saw what happened yesterday-"

  "You're saying that was your fault?" Uzdal pushed himself off the couch. "All those deaths, they were all your fault?"

  Other. Was I saying that?

  "Just like the statue?" Uzdal asked. "All the damage that caused, all the debris teams brought in to collect the mess? That was your fault too?"

  "No," my voice cracked as I spoke. "Someone else was-"

  "They were targeting you!" Mizra shouted. "You just said it. They pushed you off, no one else! If they were targeting you then it was your fault."

  "I-"

  Then a pit-a-pat like a bird against glass cut me off, and there was Tsana, fist against the door to the sublevel, expression uncertain.

  I swore beneath my breath, "Other."

  Tsana's large eyes fell on the shocked faces of my team one at a time. "Tanyana." She stepped into the room, one hand held out.

  I crossed the floor quickly. Why was she early, of all things? "Tsana." I took her hand. "Thank you for coming."

  "Of course." She smiled prettily, and let none of the distance between us show. "Of course."

  I would have to introduce her. Another thing I had hoped to avoid.

  "Everyone," I said. "This is Tsana. She's here to fix the ceiling, she's an architect." Like I used to be stalled on my lips. "Tsana, this is my debris collecting team."

  Sofia coughed. She stood, head high and neck uncomfortably straight. "Not that she needs our help. Sometimes it seems she can just do it all herself."

  Tsana extended her smile. "She was a very skilled binder too."

  She probably meant that as a compliment.

  Sofia lifted an eyebrow. "I wouldn't know about that." She fixed me with a sharp expression devoid of any trust. "Lots we don't know about her." She left the sublevel with ice in her wake.

  Mizra and Uzdal didn't speak. They followed Sofia closely, heads down.

  "Don't be long." Kichlan helped Lad out of the chair, and pressed a coat into the man's hands. "Make sure the door locks behind you." I noticed he didn't offer me the large iron key in his pocket. "Try to make the ceiling as smooth as possible. Don't give the technicians a reason to notice it again."

  Tsana, affronted, sniffed loudly. "I only do the best work."

  Kichlan raised his eyebrows at her. "Come on, Lad."

  Lad continued to stare at Tsana like she was an exotic bird.

  "Is he quite all right?" Tsana murmured to me from the side of her mouth.

  "He's Lad," I answered the only way I could. "It's just the way he is."

  "Come on." Kichlan tugged Lad's hand. "Let's leave them to their work."

  "What's the lady going to do, bro?" Lad asked as he followed Kichlan.

  "Fix the ceiling, Lad."

  "All by herself?"

  "Yes."

  "Oh." Footsteps receded up the stairs.

  "Hello." Natasha, who had waited smiling under sunlight from the windows, approached Tsana. She held out a hand, and the two women shook.

  "Hello," Tsana replied.

  If their situations were not so vastly different, I realised, the two women would have been a lot alike.

  "I'll leave you to it." Natasha flickered her smile on and off like a broken lamp as she glanced between us. "Better make sure there's not a scar left, or you won't hear the end of it."

  I groaned and rolled my eyes to say I knew she was right.

  Chuckling, Natasha left Tsana and me alone in the sublevel.

  "So, that's your new circle." Tsana wasn't impressed. I could see it in her stiff shoulders, hear it in her clipped words.

  "Team," I corrected her. "We don't use circles. Debris collecting is done in teams." Except, of course, for the circle we had made when we all worked together.

  "Ah." She frowned. "So how do you-?" She made a gripping gesture in the air.

  I held up a hand and pulled back my sleeve. Rather than balking at the slowly spinning, shining suit, however, Tsana leaned in and peered at it. That surprised me.

  She said, "I still don't understand."

  "Stand back." I spread my suit out over my hand, at first in a glove of silver, and then beyond my fingers and into the traditional pincer shape. It didn't want to go that far. The suit fit so well over my hand, so snugly. Like a dog with a new trick, a child with a new word. It had learned to coat me from toes to neck and it seemed now it didn't want to do anything else.

  "Amazing." Tsana frowned for a moment. "I can't see it at all. With pions, I mean."

  Couldn't she? I withdrew the suit, watching it glint silver in the sunlight. That was strange. Something without pions. Or, I reconsidered, maybe they were too deep, too dense for her to see them. Like the ones that had thrown me from Grandeur.

  "Shall we?" I pushed those thoughts aside and gestured to the ceiling.

  "Of course." She found the crack and stood beneath it.

  I figured I should thank her. While we were exchanging white lies. "I appreciate you coming to do this."

  "You asked."

  Given the circumstances she could hardly have said no.

  It didn't take her much, but I'd known that would be the case. I could have done it with a glance, and certainly with more grace, in the days of my old life. Tsana's frown returned, she flexed her hands at her sides and muttered to herself, then the hole began to fill. The cement was fluffy, like foam. I resisted the urge to criticise, to tell her to keep her pions under tighter control. There was too much air. A moment and she realised this, corrected it, and the cement grew darker, harder and solid. Soon, nothing was left, not a scar to prove the crack had ever existed.

  Jealousy surged somewhere in my stomach. I had not been patched as elegantly as she did the ceiling.

  Tsana shook her hands out, adjusted the colour slightly, frowned deeper and adjusted it again. "There." She turned to me. "Done."

  I forced a smile, still tackling acidic envy. "Thank you."

  "Are you sure that's it?"

  Such a small thing to repay such a large debt. "Yes, that's perfect."

  "Good. Great."

  It must have been a massive weight from her conscience. At least, I hoped it was massive.

  We stood in the sublevel beneath the healed ceiling, staring at each other with nothing to say.

  "Well, that's it." I clapped my hands together.

  "Yes."

  "Shall we-?"

  "Of course."

  I was careful to lock the door as we left. Last thing I needed was another reason for Kichlan to dislike me.

  A landau was hovering in the street, resplendent in polished mahogany and silver. How many kopacks was Tsana paying to have it wait? Or maybe it was her own, the driver's family employed by hers through the generations.

  Tsana hesitated at the coach door. "Can I offer you a ride up to the Tear?"

  "Ah." I swallowed. "No. I was forced to move. I live near here now."

  "Oh." The door swung open with a creak loud in the darkening street. "I am still happy to take you home."

  I shook my head. "The walk is not far. I enjoy it." Why did my tongue feel like a strip of torn cloth in my mouth? Thick and unresponsive.

  "I see."

  I watched Tsana climb in. She was being assisted by pions, I realised with a start, probably looping around her waist in ribbons of colourful light and gathering beneath her feet. It added a graceful, floating qua
lity to her movements. "It was lovely to see you again, Tsana."

  She gripped the silver handle, nodded. "It was." She started to pull the door closed, and hesitated. "Goodbye, Tanyana."

  The coach glided away the moment the door snapped shut. I stood in the street and watched it disappear in a flicker like moonlight on dark water.

  I reached inside my jacket, past my blouse, and into one of the folds of my uniform tight against my chest. I pulled out Devich's scrap of paper, thick between my fingers, scanned the address and turned into the evening. To follow it.

  Devich lived further away from the city centre than I would have believed. I could have told myself it was to keep close to his work, to the building that no longer was. But it might have had more to do with a childhood unaccustomed to luxury or city living.

  Still, it wasn't the top floor of an old house, above a food-obsessed crazy woman. It had that in its favour.

  Devich's home was surrounded by thin triple-story buildings squashed in together along a street that ran close to the Tear. It looked the same as all the others, wind-stripped paint on weather-pocked stone patched with off-colour cement. His, I noticed, had a small garden between the gate and the two sagging steps to the front door. Flowers I couldn't identify, petals anaemic, stems yellowing, wavered against a chill lifting from the Tear. Three small worms of debris wiggled their way through his garden.

  Everything was washed out, starkly colourless in the light from street lamps. I pushed open a well-maintained gate, skirted plants, and pressed a pion lock beside the door. It wouldn't unlock for me, but it would send streams of colour and light to let him know someone was at the door.

  Devich answered. He was pale. His hand, wrapped around the door frame, shook. His nails were bloodless.

  "I can go, if you like," I said as he stared at me in shock. "If you need to heal."

  He pulled the door all the way open, stepped out onto the first step and wrapped me in an embrace. One arm held my shoulders; the other, I noticed, was bound to his side. "Tanyana."

  Awkwardly, Devich drew me inside.

  His home was lit warmly, by pions generating light behind rose-coloured glass. I rather liked the effect, and realised it reminded me of flame. Proper, real, not-a-pion in-sight flame. An interesting choice for a debris technician.