Debris vw-1

by Jo Anderton

  "Hold him!" I shouted at her.

  She and Lad stared at me like I was the debris-thing, like I was a ghost or a creature worse than any imagination could make me. But I didn't care. It was Kichlan I had come to save. I would not let the scarred thing hurt him any more.

  The Keeper appeared behind Kichlan as the debris-thing hesitated. It flickered itself around, head twisting like a doll. I realised it had no face; at least, it had none left. There had been a nose, eyes, a mouth. Only ridges, shifting and solidifying, remained. The scars on my own cheeks seemed to tighten in response.

  Kichlan looked up, pale and strained. "Tanyana?" he whispered.

  The debris-thing lashed at me. I caught it as I had the planes, locking my suit to its arm like weapons crossed.

  "Tame it!" Keeper cried.

  "Miss Vladha."

  As one we stopped. Kichlan, Sofia, Lad, even the debris-thing, the Keeper and I, as the puppet men entered the abandoned construction site.

  "What are they doing?" Keeper hissed.

  "You?" Kichlan spat the word at them. "What is going on?"

  But the puppet men held their attention firmly on me. "We suggest you do not listen to the advice of weaklings not long for either world. We suggest you listen to us, Miss Vladha, and do exactly as we say."

  The Keeper placed himself between Lad and the puppet men. He wavered, like a wind was battering the branches of his limbs and the thin trunk of his body. But still, that stance, legs wide and shoulders broad, was defensive and strong. "You know I am here, don't you?" His dark eyes danced between the three identical faces. "You can see me. Hear me."

  How was that possible? Even Lad, a Half, only heard the Keeper.

  The puppet men turned simultaneous heads, lifted the corners of their mouths, and sneered together. "You should flee. Your time is limited. Run, if you want to make the most of it."

  Kichlan rolled to unsteady feet. "Leave him alone!" He didn't know Keeper was there. All he could see was the sight he dreaded most, the puppet men threatening his brother.

  But they paid Kichlan no heed. Sneers fell away as they looked back at me. "Destroy it, Miss Vladha. Quickly."

  "No," Keeper whispered.

  The debris-thing folded, and vanished from my hand.

  "Behind the Half." The Keeper vanished with it.

  I plunged my suit into the ground. It threw me up and over Lad and Sofia's heads. The debris-thing re-emerged and I crashed right into it.

  "It's going to keep doing that." The Keeper reappeared. "You have to calm it."

  "I don't know what you mean!" I shouted back.

  "That debris is more powerful than anything you have fought before." The puppet men started again. "It will kill your team."

  "It will ravage every pion system in the city."

  "Will you let that happen?"

  "Destroy it, Miss Vladha."

  "Destroy it."

  "No!" the Keeper cried. "All these doors, Tanyana, they are pieces of me. Like this one below you – broken, twisted, and scarred – is a piece of me. They have all been torn from my body. If you destroy it, you will create another door. Didn't you hear me? If you don't return it to me, I won't be able to keep the doors closed!"

  The debris-thing fought, lurched and tipped beneath me. Its faceless visage strained, not to the Keeper, not to attack me, but toward the puppet men. Whimpering, snuffling, a desperate and beaten dog.

  "You created this?" I asked them, gasping as I fought to hold on.

  "This is the final test."

  My hands slipped. The debris-thing skittered toward the puppet men. As one they opened their jackets, together they drew out something bright, sharp, and terrifying. I flinched, and the scuttling debris-thing did the same. Smaller, but still arms – like the ones that had fitted me with my suit. Needled, thick with wires, slightly curved and altogether cruel. The puppet men lifted the devices, pointed them, flipped buttons to start the cords moving and fluids churning. And the debris-thing screamed, flickered in and out of existence, before twisting back toward Lad. It pushed the Keeper aside and I leapt to my feet, but not before catching the triumphant grins on the puppet men's faces.

  The only emotion I had ever seen them express and it was horrifying. Lines rose all over their pale skin. Seams of darkness, jagged, covering foreheads, cheeks, and necks. Their mouths opened widely, too widely, their eyes darkened over and they weren't human. No expressionless faces and stilted movements, not any more, just ridges and vast grins and dark, bottomless eyes.

  In an instant, it was gone, and the puppet men were pale and wooden again.

  I jumped at the debris-thing, plunging my suit into its pale shoulders, pushing the creature down against the doors. The Keeper gasped, faded further, and staggered. They were one and the same. Joined. The Keeper and this manic thing beneath me. Knowing that, could I fight it, cut it into pieces and force it into jars?

  "How is this a door?" I panted.

  "We told you not to listen to it," the puppet men sneered.

  "The doors connect us, Tanyana. They connect the Dark World and the Light World. I am that connection. Debris is that connection. When they rip a part of me away, when they twist it to their own ends, they are tearing the doors from my control!" Keeper straightened, though he still shook. "If the doors open, the worlds merge. If I can't close them, we will lose them both. Both worlds."

  "It lies," the puppet men leered, mechanical and unemotional.

  "That is why my Halves exist. They alone will hear me should a door open, they alone can help me close it. That is why they are precious. And that is why you cannot do what these men are telling you to do!"

  "Superstitious nonsense."

  "You must choose. What do you believe?" Keeper asked.

  "There is but one choice, Miss Vladha," the puppet men said. "If you do not destroy the debris now, it will kill your team. One by one."

  "No," the Keeper whispered. "I cannot take much more. If you do not tame it, the doors will open, and this world will be lost."

  "That is ridiculous. Use the weapon we have created in you, and finish this test."

  My head reeled. Weapon? I looked down to my silver-wrapped wrists and thought about everything I had done and all that had been done to me. The suit had protected me so many times, caught me when I had been thrown, shielded me from the planes of debris that had killed so many and from threats so mundane as a rotten and falling wall. I remembered Comedian and Barbarian, and what I had done to them. Was that what I was, what the veche had made me? A weapon that could withstand any debris storm, that could break any pion-made bond, that could maim or kill without thought?

  "Is that what this is all about?" I asked. Suddenly, it all made sense. "This is why you have used me, all this time." What greater weapon could there be? What pionpowered weapon could fight against an army with suits like mine?

  I added, "I'm doing this for our future. My life, for a stronger Varsnia." Dina's funding complaints, rumours of weapons and war, and the obsessive attention of the old veche men.

  "You understand." As one, the three puppet men pretended a smile.

  This was why I had been thrown from Grandeur's palm.

  "I have one problem with it, though." I shook my head. "I am not a weapon." I was an architect. I had worked hard to make my life what it was. And suit or no suit, Grandeur or no Grandeur, tests or Keepers or doors or debris, it didn't matter. Even Devich. None of them could make me anything other than who I was.

  And I was no one's weapon.

  "Then you will die, like the others who have been suited, tested and failed before you."

  "Others?" Kichlan whispered, his voice cracking.

  "Do as we tell you and you will live. Fail, and you will die. You and your team."

  The debris-thing struggled, and the Keeper winced. "Please," he groaned. "Calm us. Rejoin us. It hurts, Tanyana. It hurts."

  "Destroy it, Miss Vladha. Destroy it before you are destroyed."

  The debris-thi
ng thrashed again, kicking my gut, whacking fists against my head and neck. I felt each blow through the silver. How long could I withstand that? How many more times would it have to vanish and reappear before I was too tired to follow? Would Lad be the first to go, when that happened? The first to be flayed alive, to be stripped of skin and life. Then who? Kichlan?

  I couldn't let it happen. Not Lad. Not Kichlan. Not another debris collector, not while I had the strength to stop it.

  I would have to destroy it. I withdrew a hand from the debris-thing's shoulder. It shivered beneath me and the Keeper cried out, weakly. I lifted the hand above my head, sharpened and curled my suit into a great, shining arc.

  "Hurry," said the puppet men.

  "No, please," the Keeper whispered.

  I was not a weapon. "But I don't know what else to do!" I looked into the Keeper's dark eyes, to the debris that surged through transparent veins and skin across his face, and realised how much the puppet men had looked like him. Just for that instant.

  "You do know," Lad said, his quiet voice nearly lost behind them all. "You did it before. Remember, Tan? When you told the debris to go backward, and it did. When you asked it to stop turning all the lights off, and it did. When you told it to stop hurting people, so you could save that man. Can't keep hurting it. That's what he means. Stop the hurting."

  How do you stop a scarred mirror-image from hurting? How do you give peace to untouchable sails, to bubbling grains? To waste?

  The same way you convince pions to build a building for you.

  I eased my cruel suit back, and relaxed my shoulders. I closed my eyes. As the debris-thing bucked under me, thrashed and flickered in and out of solidity, I slowed my breathing.

  "Shh," I whispered to it. "It doesn't hurt any more, you know that? Feel it, it doesn't hurt." And I sank deeper. I gave the debris-thing everything I had. No enthusiasm, no wild desire to weave lights and patterns into the world. I gave it peace. I gave it calm.

  "Miss Vladha? What are you doing?"

  I gave it standing in the cemetery with Kichlan, as Lad placed rosemary at his mother's grave.

  I gave it Mizra's wild stories.

  I gave it Lad's smile.

  And the bucking stopped, the tension eased, the screaming dwindled into a soft sobbing and the body dissolved away.

  "Ah," the Keeper whispered. "It hurts."

  I couldn't move. I felt empty, brittle. All my strength exhausted, all my knowledge jumbled. The Keeper was on his knees. The debris-thing, as it dissolved, rushed into him like a current of dust mites in the sun. Tears ran down his pale cheeks, great lashings of black liquid.

  "They hurt us, Tanyana." He implored me to understand, to correct it. To help him. "They tortured me, to create that thing. I can still feel it! I can still see it. Horrible light, cruel faces, all around me. All playing with me, hurting me, twisting me and changing me, all for this."

  The doors around me wavered. My suit was retreating. Perhaps I no longer had the strength to sustain it.

  "They made you, Tanyana. And they tried to break you. Don't let them. For me, for everyone. Don't let them."

  A cool breeze on my face.

  Through the slits of my eyes I saw Lad on the ground, Sofia collapsed beside him.

  I couldn't see Kichlan.

  Then I heard footsteps over the earth, and the voices of the puppet men above me, "This is unexpected."

  "Unexpected."

  The footsteps were so close. Shadows blocked the sun. The puppet men. I had to get up, I had to stop them doing whatever it was they wanted to do to me next. Because the Keeper was right. I would not let them break me and I would not let them turn me into a weapon. No matter what they injected beneath my skin and between my bones. I was me, not the suit. Me.

  "Disobedience is as bad as failure. The subject should die here."

  But my empty, brittle body would not respond. I couldn't move.

  "And yet, the survival of the subject can create a new test."

  "Further experiments are needed."

  "Agreed."

  The footsteps faded. I allowed my eyes to close, and fell into darkness.

  19.

  Devich stood on the hastily erected stage accepting thanks he in no way deserved. Not only because he was just a technician, and it was the collectors who had saved Movoc-under-Keeper, but because he was one of the scheming veche bastards who had put her in peril in the first place.

  Not that Kichlan and I had mentioned that to anyone.

  Still, it made me furious to see Devich up there. To listen to the veche representatives give speeches thanking all of us who were involved in such a rescue, from technicians to collectors. An old man, with a large bear-face hanging from a chain about his neck, droned on about the sacrifice we had made. I knew what he really meant. The veche had sacrificed us. I didn't know the number of collectors who had been killed by the Keeper's debristwin. But the injured surrounded us. Teams missing members. So many with bandages, splints, even though the veche had commissioned healers to help us.

  We were no exception. Mizra and Uzdal had suffered fractures where the Keeper's dark twin had thrown down their shield. Sofia had a broken rib, Kichlan an arm. Only Lad and Natasha had escaped unscathed. I wore my new scars in silver.

  "Just be glad Lad isn't up there," Kichlan whispered in my ear and touched a finger to the fists I hadn't realised I was making. "He doesn't need to draw any more attention to himself."

  He had a point. Lad stood beside his brother, humming and rocking and generally paying no attention to anything that was going on. I wondered if Keeper was here, somewhere. If this was some strange form of communication.

  Puppet men shared the stage with the veche and the technicians. They stood, so still against the wind even their jackets didn't seem to move. Vacant eyes stared out over the small crowd. Since we had been found at Grandeur's grave the puppet men had left us alone, but they certainly hadn't disappeared. They were always there. I caught sight of them on the edges of crowds, listening to healers give reports, following the more important members of the national veche who had come to survey the damage. Always there, always watching.

  The speeches droned on. Technicians applauded. The debris collectors around me watched the proceedings with apathy.

  Finally, thin ranks of pathetic trumpeters sounded an ending to the torment, and the puppets and veche representatives filed into waiting coaches. The technicians milled around, aimless without ceremony.

  Devich looked at me, and approached the end of the stage. "Tanyana?"

  Kichlan stepped between us, drawing Lad's concerned attention. "You need to get out of here," Kichlan said in a low, dog-growl voice I had never heard him use. "Now."

  "Bro?" Lad whimpered.

  I placed a hand on Kichlan's shoulder and drew him back. He flashed me a surprised look. "Look after your brother," I murmured. And as he turned to Lad, who had began wringing his large, fretful hands, I met Devich's eyes.

  He looked haunted. A man who had seen things he never wanted to see. "Tanyana?"

  Or done them, perhaps?

  At my back I could feel the presence of my team. Even injured and scarred they were a strength to me. This was that new life, I realised, the one the puppet men and their debris-creature had threatened to take away. But they had failed, and so would Devich.

  "What do you want?" I asked him, trying to keep my tone civil.

  "I-" He stretched his hands out to touch me, I kept out of his reach. He dropped his arms and his head, and I quelled a lurch in my heart, a pull of pity. "I'm sorry."

  "Is that all you have to say?"

  "I didn't have a choice! You must believe me. You know what they are like now, you know I didn't have a choice."

  "Pathetic." Kichlan hooked an arm through mine. "You're pathetic."

  Devich nodded. "I know."

  "And we will not waste our time on you." Kichlan smiled down at me, like sunshine against Devich's low clouds. "Shall we go?"

/>   That was the best thing I'd heard all day. I smiled back. "Yes, let's." Without another glance at Devich's lowered head, I allowed Kichlan and his brother to bundle me away from the stage. Sofia, Uzdal and Mizra said their farewells to us at the Tear. Natasha had wandered away without a word. Kichlan, Lad and I boarded one of the few ferries still running, and headed for the city centre.

  The wind that rose up from the Tear was fresh; it was clean. And Other, did Movoc-under-Keeper need it. No amount of scrubbing could clean away all the dirt that had spilled into the city. No amount of spring rain could wash all the blood.

  I gripped the railing, tipped my head into the wind, and breathed deeply.

  The silver notches in my ear and at the back of my head buzzed pleasantly in the cold. The silver-filled scars in my arms were too rugged up to join in.

  "Careful," Lad said, by my side. "Don't fall."

  I grinned at him and leaned back, hands firmly on the rail. "I won't."

  Movoc was taking a long time to heal. Gradually, its population returned. But they returned to devastated houses and infrastructure so ravaged it would take moons to rebuild. And there was worse. Those few too young, old, poor or sick to escape had suffered terrible fates when the pion world went mad. The stories that ran through the survivors were horrifying. A child, huddled and hiding in her bathroom, drowned when uncontrollable pions filled the room with water. An injured man pulled apart by the roaming threads of a tattered factory system. An old woman on Darkwater found burned alive by the pions of her own heater. I often wondered if that was her we had heard screaming. Mostly I tried not to think about it.

  We left the ferry on a quiet, almost empty dock. "Come on." Kichlan, good hand in the pocket of his coat, hunched against the wind.

  "Any rush?" I asked, but peeled myself away from the river anyway. I held Lad's hand and together we walked away from the Tear.

  Kichlan shifted his shoulder. His arm was hurting again, I suspected. The bone had been healed, the veche had seen to that, but it ached regardless. It would take time, the healer had said. We had waited more than a day at Grandeur's grave before anyone had found us. It was a long time for a wound to fester.