7.

 
 
 
 

Light snapped on and flooded my dark bedroom, jerking me from a dream that might have involved Kichlan being chased by a giant cat. That, or talking brickwork.

  With a cry I lifted my hand to block my eyes, but that only made the radiance brighter. I struggled to sit up, tangled in my own sheets and tipped fighting to the floor.

  "Other!" Devich swore from the bed. "Point it at the wall!" He yelled. "The wall!"

  "Point what?" I screamed back. Why were we shouting at each other?

  "Suit, Tanyana. The suit!"

  Kicking against tight blankets I wriggled until I could press my back against the side of the bed. Then I waved my wrists around, no idea how to point the suit at anything without crashing into it and causing yet more unaffordable damage. But I must have done something right, as the band on my right wrist gave a low clicking sound and as quickly as it had sprung to life the light dimmed. I opened my eyes a crack to see the suit's shifting symbol patterns beaming from my right hand and reflected large on the bare wall opposite the bed.

  "Oh, Other!" Devich swore again. "You've been called."

  "I've been what?" I freed my feet, pushed myself into a sitting position still wearing the sheets like a cocoon. "What are you talking about?"

  But Kichlan's warning muttered in my mind before Devich could answer, "It's an emergency. Something's gone wrong."

  "With debris?" Feet on the floor, free arm pressing sheets against my chest, I hauled myself up. Where was my uniform? Why hadn't I put it back on? Wasn't this what Kichlan had said could happen?

  "What else?" Devich slipped from the mattress with delicacy and enviable decorum. Nude, he crossed to the signs. They ebbed and glowed the same way they did on the suit, only writ large, and revolved in great slow arcs as I gradually turned my wrist.

  "How do you know something's gone wrong? How can you be so sure it's debris?" And why hadn't I been told this was going to happen? Symbols on a wall, bright lights in my sleep, and I had no idea what any of it was trying to tell me.

  "Because I designed your suit." Devich ran a hand on the wall beside the reflected ciphers. "I tested it for three solid moons, I know a call when I see one."

  "Then what does it mean?" The floor was cold; wooden floorboards seeped chills up through my calves. I flexed my toes, shifted weight from the ball of one foot to the heel of another. The symbols moved with me.

  "Keep it still!" Devich snapped. He ran a finger over the top of a box-like symbol before it shifted away into nothing. "Your team leader must have explained this to you."

  "No." Kichlan had started, hadn't he? Wear your uniform, Tanyana. Because you'll be called, Tanyana. By the suit. The suit. Always the suit. Perhaps I hadn't been all that interested in listening. Yet, as Devich frowned, I found myself explaining, "But really, it's been hectic, accidents, snow storms." Why was I defending Kichlan of all people? "At least I have you here to teach me."

  He shook his head. "I don't know how to read it. The men you met in the hospital, remember them? They send the call, they could tell you what this all means. Technicians like me, we just make sure your suit can hear it."

  "Oh." My heart did a half-beat. Those men, oh yes, I remembered those men. "Can you try?"

  I kept my wrist up as I scrambled on the floor with my left hand for the bottom half of my uniform. I had managed to pull it up to my thighs before Devich answered "The call is a map. Of a kind."

  He didn't fill me with confidence.

  "Not of the city, though. It's a map to debris."

  Was it? I glanced down to the signs beating out their light on my wrist. Did it only respond to a call? Or was this how Lad found his debris so well? Somehow, the idea of Lad reading a complex set of symbols imbedded in his own suit didn't make a lot of sense. Particularly if Kichlan and the others couldn't do it.

  "How does it work?" Topless, pants scrunched around my thighs, I shuffled close to the wall. Devich glanced at me and flashed a sudden and very filthy grin, before helping me pull them up the rest of the way. I tried to focus on the map and ignore the occasional slip of his fingers.

  "Well, from what I have been able to ascertain, although I've never actually been taught, this one, here–" he tapped on the box symbol again, although this time it looked like it contained a bolt of lightning and some dots "–this is the one you need to pay attention to. This is the debris you need to find."

  It was the darkest of the symbols, the most solid, and hovering around the top of the roughly rectangular band beamed onto the wall. It swam on the crest of so many ciphers all with strokes and dots and jagged lines and was difficult to differentiate. "The debris that set off the call?"

  "I think so."

  "How am I supposed to know how to get there?" I spotted my uniform top half hidden beneath a cerulean throw that had been kicked from the end of the bed.

  "You need to find your symbol first." More searching, face so close to the wall I was surprised the light didn't hurt his eyes. "Ah, here we go. This is the suit owner. I think."

  I abandoned the attempt to fish my top out from the throw with my toes alone. Devich pointed at a squiggly image, the brightest of the symbols, but tucked all the way down in the bottom left corner of the rectangle. It looked like a dot under a small hill.

  Devich sucked his teeth. "You have a long way to go."

  Just what I wanted to hear.

  "The debris symbol is far away from your symbol, and it's dark. The closer you get, the brighter it will become, and the closer you will move to it."

  "What about the rest, that mess of symbols?"

  Devich shrugged. "Don't know. But as long as you head toward the debris symbol, you should get there."

  "Assuming you're right about them."

  "Yes."

  I had to finish dressing then, map or no map. As soon as I lowered my arm the light disappeared, and for a moment I panicked in darkness. But it wasn't fully black. My suit still glowed, giving me just enough to see by as I fumbled for the lamp valve. I tugged on my uniform top.

  "Now what do I do?" I didn't bother with proper clothes. A knit with a warm neck, the thickest pants I could find, boots that wouldn't close around my suit properly, and gloves. I had to leave gaps, a space between the clothes at my waist, a way to expose the bands on my neck, wrists and ankles.

  Devich had pulled on underdrawers and his shirt. He shivered. "You should hurry," he said, and wrapped his arms across his chest.

  "Why don't you come with me?"

  But Devich shook his head. "I would be in the way. A single useless pion-binder, unable to see, unable to help. You don't want me there. This is your chance to help people, to show them what debris collectors can do. I don't want to get in the way of that."

  What could debris collectors do? And how, exactly, was I supposed to hurry across Movoc-under-Keeper without a full rublie? I headed for the door anyway. Devich followed, and helped me drag on my jacket.

  "Be careful. Hurry, and be careful."

  Be careful? How dangerous could it be? I thought he didn't know anything about debris collecting, anyway.

  With the map clear in my mind and nothing else to go by, I decided to head right. If I was in the bottom left of all those bright symbols, somewhere, then I should probably head right.

  At first, I tried running. But my lungs burned with the cold air, and my stiffened muscles and stitch-sore skin protested painfully. I resorted to a brisk walk, which simply did not feel fast enough.

  The snowstorm had passed through and the night was clear. Frigid, and clear. The Keeper Mountain loomed large against the quiet night, its snowcap and sides like dull silver in the moonlight. My calves burned, my boots soaked through, the bottom of my pants grew wet, heavy and dripping. I kept walking. Each time I aimed my uncovered wrist at a wall, the map shone forth and I changed direction slightly, heartened that I seemed to have the right idea, but frustrated by how slowly my sign made its way through the others, the ones I did not understand.

  A bell rang, I had no idea which one. The snow seemed to soak up its deep artificial chimes so they didn't even echo. I nearly ran into a small Fist of enforcers, patrolling the streets closer to the river. They were dressed all in black, and a small blue light bobbed close to the ground in front of their feet. Lamplight and moonlight wasn't enough to march by, apparently. I darted into an alleyway and waited for them to pass, not even sure why. I had a legitimate reason to be running around at moonbell, or silentbell, whatever the time was. But still, it felt safer to wait, and continue once they had gone. The streets all looked the same: the snow concealed landmarks, brickwork, anything that would have helped me identify where I was. At one point I passed what had to be a lamplight factory. Working through the night, of course, when their pion-binding skills were needed the most. Loose beams of light danced around the building like smoke: pions that had escaped the systems that should have sent them out across the city, I guessed, and were happily creating their light right here, right now. I slowed at the sight. It was beautiful, in the middle of so much darkness and snow.

  Eventually, one of the factory workers stepped outside. He waved his hands and spoke to the errant particles in a weary voice. "Come now, what is this? What do you all think you're doing? Stop playing and get back in line. You have a duty, remember?" Slowly, the light dimmed. I could imagine those pions once dancing across walls and rooftop and out into the street, now subdued and following as their binder headed back inside.

  A duty, like I did. I hurried on, feeling just as weary as he sounded, and just as constrained by duty as his pions. But I seemed to be making some progress, as the debris symbol was growing brighter, sharp as a star carried on my wrist. And it was in this brightness that I saw tracks in the snow. Wheels, and unbelievably, hooves.

  I could think of no one but debris collectors who would rely on a horse-drawn coach. I ran again, pushing my body beyond its soreness, beyond the cold, and followed the horse tracks around an unlit corner.

  And into chaos.

  Debris clung to the side of a building like a great, wiggling fungal mass. It was nothing like the little pieces of dark flesh I had seen so far. This debris looked alive. Alive, and threatening. But worse than that, worse than the squid-sentience in its bulging, thrashing appendages, was its shadow. And that, surely, was all it could be. Something dark, flat, wrapped over the wall of the building like a sheet of taut fabric. It stretched further too, away from the debris mass, lancing across streets to the roofs of adjacent buildings. Black sails. Grey sheets of paper. Great, gaping holes with sharp, straight edges and nothing but darkness, impossible, impenetrable darkness worse than the night on the other side.

  I shivered, remembered the debris Devich had shown me when we first met. The same thing yet many, many times larger. Behind poly it had been strange. Here, arching over me, it was terrifying.

  And there was so much of it.

  Lights flickered along the street and in the windows of the surrounding buildings. Lamps desperately trying to cling to life, flaring brightly as their pions overcompensated, then sputtering back into darkness. The debris was doing that, it had to be. Interfering with the systems that carried the pions here, and then weakening their bindings when they arrived. And that wasn't all. Steam gushed from vents in the ground: heat that should have warmed homes all going to waste. I gave the hot, hissing air a wide berth and imagined that spurting into my apartment, scalding anything and anyone it touched. Water had burst from a pipe running the height of the building the debris clung to. How much longer did we have until the rest of the pipes gave way, or the bonds holding the very buildings themselves crumbled?

  A semicircle of spectators curved around the building and its parasite, closer than I would have risked to the falling water, the steam and the lights. They watched as Kichlan and his collectors fought in vain to cut the debris down.

  I pushed my way through.

  Kichlan – arms and suit immersed in a lower section of debris – turned to face me, and his expression grew as dark as the night.

  "Where have you been?" he hissed. The veins in his neck, the twitch of his shoulders and jaw told me how much he wanted to roar those words at me. But not with so many people watching.

  I didn't bother answering. We could have that argument another time. Instead, I focused on the debris. I could see what Kichlan and the others were trying to do. Jars lay scattered on the ground at each collector's feet, some full to their seal with debris, most open and ready. Piece by squirming piece the collectors were slicing the debris with knives of sharpened suit, cupping it in hastily made spoons, and tipping as much as they could into the open jars.

  It was slow work, imprecise, and I could see instantly that it simply would not work.

  "What about the sails?" I asked Kichlan.

  He was focused hard on a piece of debris, too large to fit through the lip of a jar. He used one hand to cup it and another, suit metal flattened and rounded, to keep it still. But shadows, smaller planes of darkness, were flickering through the gaps between his hands, arching into the air and back to the mass on the building wall. So, for each slice the collectors cut off, they managed less than half into the jars, and the debris was just as big, if not growing larger, than it had been a moment before. This was not a battle they were about to win.

  Not a battle we were about to win.

  "What in Other's hell are you talking about?" Kichlan snapped.

  "The flat ones." I fumbled for a word to describe what I was seeing. "The shadow."

  "Plane form." Sofia approached, one hand carrying Kichlan's brown leather bag, the other wrapped tight and silver around a squiggling clump. "The normal debris is grain form."

  Yet another vital-sounding piece of information Kichlan had not to bothered to tell me. I was gathering quite a list of those.

  "Plane form, then. Why aren't you collecting them too?"

  Kichlan funnelled most of his debris into the jar and forced the lid closed. I was surprised by how much the container could hold.

  "We're going to run out of jars," Sofia said, and placed the bag at Kichlan's feet. It clanged with thick metal.

  "The veche will send another team to help." Kichlan jerked his head to the debris cluster. "They have to. We can't handle something this big ourselves."

  "What if they don't?" Sofia asked. In the light from our suits her face was worried, grave. "What will we do?"

  "What are you doing?" a spectator called from the crowd behind us. "Can't you see what this is doing to my apartment? Can't you work any faster?"

  Kichlan gritted his teeth and said nothing.

  "What about the plane form?" No one had answered me.

  Sofia sighed, loudly. "Just follow our example and help us, Tanyana. We need to work quickly, and will explain things later." She walked around the debris, and selected another protrusion to start slicing.

  "But if we don't contain those planes we'll be here forever," I hissed at Kichlan, very aware of the anxious eyes and ears behind me. "Just look at them. They're growing. For every solid bit you all cut off, those planes just stretch out a little further. Ignoring them won't help."

  "You can see the plane form?" Mizra came to deposit his full jars in the bag.

  I nodded.

  "Haven't got any more surprises hidden there, have you?" Mizra grinned. How could he be so relaxed?

  "Could we please focus on the debris?" Kichlan asked with a long-suffering groan.

  "Exactly!" Another voice from the crowd followed by rumbling, general agreement.

  The suit on Kichlan's right wrist expanded, narrowed into tweezers and stretched until he could grip one of the debris's dark protuberances. His left hand curled into a long, fine blade and sliced it free from the mass.

  "I am." I grabbed Kichlan's elbow. "We need to focus on all the debris. The planes too."

  "Then how would you like to handle this?" Kichlan rounded on me. His grip on the piece of debris slipped. It spilled into the air and floated, wiggling like a maggot, back to its friends. "There're only four of us who can differentiate plane from grain. Me, Sofia, Lad and you. What do you want us to do, try and catch them all ourselves?"

  I ignored his scorn. "Can we catch them?"

  "If you can hold a beam of light in your hand, then yes, you can catch them."

  For a long moment I studied the planes. They stretched across the air, from grain mass to rooftop, lamp, or the ground. They lanced out of any debris the team was trying to collect like rays of sun through cloud, only black, or a very dark grey. But they did not set out on their own, arcing over the city like the sails of some ghostly ship. In fact, all of the debris, even the grains I had watched Kichlan and Sofia collect, had tried to return to the body.

  "We need to spread our suits out–" I started thinking out loud "–if we can wrap around the whole thing, I think we could contain it enough to cut it from the wall."

  "We don't want to contain it." Kichlan breathed heavily, like was all he could do to keep himself from shouting. "We need to get rid of it."

  The team had started to converge. Sofia watched me avidly, like I was a fire about to run out of control. Lad, no longer tired and violent, smiled broadly. Natasha, Uzdal and Mizra appeared cautious.

  "But we can't get rid of it if we can't contain it." I poked my toe at the bag of jars. They rattled loudly in the night. I found it curious that debris made no sound. Its planes should have rocked the street with thunder, its shuffling grains like snake scales.

  "She's right," Mizra said in my defence, against the gathering shadow on Kichlan's face. "Isn't that what the jars do? Contain the debris, so it can be taken away?"

  "Who has the strength to hold all that?" Kichlan shouted as he pointed at the debris. His suit sliced out into a long, thin spike. The spectators behind us gasped, and shuffled back a pace. "You think you do, is that it? You might be able to pick up bits and pieces we find in old lamps but this is something far beyond you!" Spit flew from his mouth. My suit lit it brightly as it fell. Both my wrists were shining fiercely and I was certain, if I rolled down my collar, untied my jacket, or undid my boots, the rest would be too.

  "Not on my own, perhaps. But I am not alone, am I?" I turned to the others. Apart from Lad, who had began nodding violently and grinning like a madman, they stood like statues. "I thought we were a team. Why can't we do this together?"

  "We were doing this together," Kichlan said between clenched teeth.

  "Not properly."

  Not the way a critical circle would.

  I rolled my collar down and pushed up my sleeves. Bending, I undid the few laces I could tie on my wet leather boots, and hiked up my woollen pants. I shrugged my jacket from my shoulders and let it fall onto the wet street. My ankles, wrists and neck beamed cold blue light into snow and ice and stone, brighter than any of the others, brighter than Kichlan where he stood, gaping at me. It shone from my waist too, when my clothing moved enough to allow it to peek through.

  I could forget the gaze of crowd behind me, and the small sense of decency and decorum I had left, to be working as a circle again.

  "Are we ready?" I asked the collectors – my collectors – and tried to ignore how silly I must have appeared, with my clothes rolled up and my jacket in the sludge.

  "We can't do this without you," Sofia told Kichlan, saying what I had not been able to.

  "She doesn't understand any of this," he muttered. "She has no idea what she's doing."

  "But we will need you anyway." Sofia placed a hand on his shoulder, and he seemed to shake himself beneath it.

  "What would you have us do?" he asked me, voice thick and rasping.

  "Make the circle." The words slipped from me before I could check them and my collectors took up the call. They spread out in a crescent around the corner of the building. "Alternate. Sofia, Mizra, Lad, Uzdal, Kichlan, then Natasha." I squeezed myself between Uzdal and Lad, and longed for the days of Grandeur, for standing high above the earth and watching as the sky filled with energy. "Right." I rubbed my hands, I loosened my wrists. "Plane first."

  I raised my arms and extended my suit, using its silver to reach for sails of plane debris. It responded easily, eagerly, knowing what I wanted, doing what was needed. Why was that a surprise? It was, after all, a part of me. I flattened it, curved it, linked left and right hand together and arched toward the debris like my hands – my suit – were a domed metal ceiling.

  Kichlan, Sofia and Lad followed my example. Their suits spread out, spread up. Edges knocked mine like seams without stitches. Together, we slipped between plane and building, between debris and lamp, street, rooftop. The planes flickered, at first. Unsure. Then they fought back.

  One large grey arc buzzed out of existence, then flared back into life a deeper, solid black. It battered against my suit with a sharp, clutching corner, fighting for the building, for the purchase I denied it. I felt each blow. Vibrations echoed through the suit, down into my arm and further, deeper into my skin, bones, head and mind. I steadied myself against it, pushing away memories of crimson pions and what it had felt like to be dragged to the edge of Grandeur's palm. I would not let debris undo me the way the pions had. I would not fall from this statue, eight hundred feet in the air.

  Sofia yelped, and her suit withdrew like a frightened cat.

  "No!" I shouted over the rattling in my ears. "Keep your suit up."

  Expression pained, Sofia extended her suit again.

  "That's it! Now–" I glanced over at Mizra, Uzdal and Natasha waiting in anticipation. "We'll contain the planes, you slice the mass from the wall! Hurry!"

  The planes flickered faster, as though in desperation, as though they knew what we were about to do. Sofia began to shake, but held her line.

  Mizra and Uzdal darted beneath our silver dome. They reached the building wall, aligned their hands with the brick and shot sharp blades up through the clinging debris. The spectators gasped again. Quiet words reached me.

  "Other!"

  "How can they do that?"

  "How horrible."

  Natasha hesitated, suit extended to short knives.

  "It's starting to give!" Mizra called. Natasha, with a jerking shake of her head, darted in to help.

  "That's it, keep it going–" I called. The next smack against my suit knocked me to one knee. "What happened?" Another crash. Sofia faltered, her suit retracted, and Natasha leapt away from the wall with a curse.

  I wasn't about to fall. My suit shot out from my ankles and tunnelled thick spikes into the road. The next push didn't budge me, I was buried too deep.

  "Tell me what's happening!" I demanded.

  "Doesn't want to, Tan!" Lad yelled, his voice high pitched and panicked.

  "What doesn't?" I jerked my head around, searching for only the Other knew what. Some kind of interference, someone wielding fierce and fiery power.

  "It's the debris," Kichlan answered.

  Sofia faltered again. A wide plane flashed out from the debris mass and threw her to the ground. Her limp body jerked as her suit whipped back into her wrists. Kichlan withdrew and ran to her. Uzdal abandoned the attempt to cut debris from the wall and was tugging on his brother's hand, begging him to do the same. And still the stuff was growing, planes lacing the sky, grains bulging and wiggling. It pushed against my suit, but my ankles held firm and I realised that my legs would break before my metallic supports ever gave way.

  Still Lad held his position beside me. Our suits were smooth and light-reflecting patches of sanity, of quiet and stillness, among the chaos and the sudden violence only we could see. Tears ran in thick rivers down his cheeks, but he did not falter.

  "Doesn't like it," he whispered, over and over. "Doesn't like it."

  "That's ridiculous!" I cried. A third spike, five inches thick and sturdy as earth, shot from the back of my waistband to crash through paving stones. I couldn't control it. "This is debris. It is a by-product, a waste. It doesn't care what we do to it, Lad. It doesn't care about anything. It doesn't think, it doesn't feel. It's waste, just waste."

  I pushed my suit to spread further. If Kichlan and Sofia couldn't stand in the face of some particularly putrid garbage, then I would do it for them.

  I wrapped my suit around Lad's, all the way over the bulging mass until I touched solid brick. Something burned in my arms, a deep and fiery ache, a scraping and a tugging at my bones. I didn't dare look down at them.

  "Give up, Tanyana," Kichlan said, wearily, from Sofia's side. "You can't do it all yourself."

  But I pushed on. Silver liquid poured out of the band around my neck. It coated my shoulders, my chest, the top of my arms before joining with the bands on my wrists. There, it boosted them, it sent its own strange metallic shape-shifting metal into the large, curved plates I had wrapped around the debris and helped me spread them further. But the burning replied in kind. It raced up my neck, caught in my throat, and it was all I could do to breathe around it.

  "Careful," Mizra said, approaching me. "Don't push the limits."

  My waist began to do the same thing. I couldn't stop it. I had called upon the suit and it was giving me everything, more than I wanted it to give.

  "Kichlan!" Mizra shouted. "Get over here and help!"

  Running feet and scuffles at my side.

  "Tanyana, you have to stop it. You'll empty yourself. Tanyana, stop it!" Kichlan tried to grab my elbow. But a silver hand whipped out from my waist and smacked him away. I was wrapped in silver, a crawling armour coating me from my wrists to my waist.

  "Doesn't like it," Lad kept murmuring beside me, rocking on his feet and crying. "Have to stop."

  I nearly had the whole mass wrapped in silver. Just a snip from the wall now, a bend in my suit and a slice. I could do that.

  "Lad!" Kichlan's voice cut through his younger brother's mumbling. "Stop her!"

  In the corner of my eye I saw Lad flinch. He blinked, he stopped rocking, and he turned to me in horror. "Oh no!" he whispered, lips red and wet with his tears. "No."

  He pulled himself from the sphere we had made, and wrapped a metal-coated hand around my forearm. Silver into silver. Suit to suit. He sank into me and distant, hissing voices surrounded me.

  Don't like it, they whispered. Don't like it, they pleaded.

  Shocked, I stared into Lad's concerned face. He was talking to me, red lips moving, but all I heard were the whispers.

  Don't like it. Don't like it.

  And then, like the clear chime of a bell.

  Please stop.

  "I'm sorry," I said. But not to Lad. Not to Kichlan hovering in the hazy background. Or Sofia, presumably still lying prone on the damp paving stones. "I'm sorry," I told the whispers, and they were silenced.

  "Sorry won't help you," Kichlan was saying. "You need to withdraw. Where do you think the suit comes from? How much metal do you think they've crammed into your bones?"

  Lad had gone silent, and tipped his ear toward the debris, expression puzzled.

  "If you dig any deeper you'll empty yourself out," Kichlan continued. "Your body will break. Your bones first, then your muscles, then your skin. You'll collapse in and the suit will still hold you up, keep you like this while you die. Do you want to stand here forever?"

  Like a statue? I'd had enough of statues. I breathed, grounded myself with the air pressing in my lungs, just as I would have done before calming recalcitrant pions. Another breath, and I brought myself under control.

  I eased my armour away. It slipped from my chest and arms like oil. The supports I had sent crashing into the earth withdrew, leaving gaping tunnels beneath the road.

  But I continued to hold onto the debris. It had stopped fighting. Nothing pushed against my plates of silver, no planes were clawing into my very bones. Everything was silent, everything was still.

  I realised Lad had his bare hand on my arm, his suit also withdrawn. His thick fingers were so warm I could feel them through layers of uniform and clothes.

  "That is better," he said, and broke into his usual smile. "Doesn't hurt anymore."

  "It is better," I said. Gradually, I retracted the rest of my suit and it felt like gorging on a large, fatty meal. My skin seemed to stretch, to bloat, and my bones were suddenly heavy.

  "Oh, Tanyana," Uzdal gasped. "You did it."

  I had kept my eyes on Lad's face as I summoned my suit inside. His encouraging, simple joy. But at Uzdal's words I turned to the debris and my hard-won calm fell away.

  Gone was the parasitic mess of plane and grain. A single clump wriggled in the air beside the building's corner. I stepped forward. Nothing squirmed, no black sails fluttered. It was debris. The simple kind we found behind aging brick walls and in the cracks of lampposts. Nothing more.

  "Here." Mizra handed me a jar.

  Numb, I extended the very tips of my suit, pinched the debris out of the air and slipped it into the jar.

  Thank you, something whispered.

  "Thank you," Lad said.

  As soon as I sealed the lid, the lights in the windows and nearby streetlamps steadied. Steam died with a soft hushing, and the broken water pipe stopped gushing. Pions re-established their systems, took back control. Even as we stood there each affected system would be activating emergency protocols, sending signals to the veche's city planning department. In the morning the relevant six point critical circles would arrive, and they would fix the damage.

  The crowd, who could not have understood what they just witnessed, gave us a smattering of applause. Face hot, jar in hand, I found I had no idea what to do. It seemed somehow surreal, and the urge to bow or lift the container where they could see it, bizarrely out of place.

  The rest of the collectors were equally bemused. Kichlan helped a shaking Sofia to her feet; Uzdal and Mizra grinned and waved; Natasha kept her back turned and Lad joined in the clapping, laughing loudly.

  The accolades didn't last long. Soon, the chill of a Movoc night overwhelmed the appreciation of the crowd. The clapping petered out, and the spectators dispersed.

  As I met Kichlan's furious eyes, I wished I could dissolve into the night with them.

  In the middle of the snow-padded, ice-whitened street, he said nothing. He collected the bag of jars from the stones, took the one I was holding, added it to the clinking pile and tied the bag tightly.

  "Natasha," he called her. "Could you bring the transport around, please?"

  Puzzled, I watched Natasha head behind the building. We waited in the cold silence, Kichlan staring at the ground, until Natasha reappeared on the coachman's seat of a small, decrepit wagon pulled by a squat, shaggy horse.

  A rusty axle squealed in the night. Painted in a peeling drab green, with cracks in what could once have been quite nice stained glass windows, I had no real way of knowing how old this former coach was. The wheels were wooden and bowed precariously, which gave it a bizarre, bobbing kind of movement. Where Natasha sat, all the cushions, the backing and any railings to give her some kind of safety were long gone. And the coach had no doors.

  Kichlan caught the expression on my face. "Feel free to walk the way you came." He helped Sofia climb rickety stairs into the coach.

  Mizra saved me from admitting I wasn't at all sure which way that was. "Don't be silly." He grabbed my hand and dragged me toward the coach. I was surprised to find Uzdal at my other shoulder, his hand at my lower back a gentle but no less insistent push to his brother's pull. "She's with us."

  "She's one of us now," Uzdal chimed in.

  I allowed the twins to bundle me into the coach. Sofia sat hunched in the middle of the opposite seat, left arm cradled around her middle, cheeks pale. Lad, Uzdal and Mizra squeezed in beside us. Kichlan told us there wasn't enough room for another body, and sat with Natasha at the dangerous driver's seat.

  I had never ridden in a coach drawn by a horse before. The ride was bumpy, cold and slow. There were no cushions inside either, and the no-longer-sealed wooden seat was hard and threatened splinters when I tried to brace myself with my hands. Icy air washed in from the gaping holes that should have held doors. By the time we came to Darkwater, dawn was brushing faint pink against the Keeper, and ice clogged the steps and edges of the coach's empty door frames.

  My collecting team disembarked in silence. Kichlan gave Natasha directions that could have led to Eugeny's house, and watched her, the horse and the coach rattle off into pale streets. The silence held as he unlocked the door, as he led us down the narrow stairs, and until he'd emptied the bag of full jars onto the shelves.

  And then, the inevitable came.

  Kichlan spun, he advanced on me like a hungry dog on a meal, and I fought to hold my ground. "You're dangerous!" He poked the air with a sharp finger. "You don't know what you're doing, you don't listen to instructions, you think you're still a veche architect and act like you're in charge and you nearly get people killed!"

  "And you made a hole in the ceiling," Sofia added, her voice soft and words slightly slurred.

  Briefly, I wondered how badly she had been hurt.

  "Yes!" Kichlan was almost on top of me. I met his fury squarely. Veins purpled his neck, a blotchy red flush darkened his cheeks and forehead. "You've been nothing but trouble, like I knew you would be! We don't need collectors like you, collectors who think they're still too good for this role. You're a burden, and you're trouble."

  "That would be two things," Mizra drawled.

  I peeked over Kichlan's shoulder. Mizra lay on one of the run-down couches, his feet up, studying a stray thread he was pulling from his gloves.

  "What?" Kichlan stopped trying to poke my eye out from a foot away and crunched the hand into a fist.

  "You said she was nothing but trouble, and then that she was a burden too. That's two things. She can't be nothing but trouble and also–"

  "Mizra, shut your useless, Other-made mouth!"

  "Yes, Miz." Uzdal sat in the couch beside his brother, chin resting on the palm of his right hand. "Give Kichlan his due. I'm surprised he waited until now to start shouting."

  "True, Uz, true," his brother answered. "We knew it was coming the moment he worked out who she was."

  "You two." Sofia, face pale and hand shaking, made wobbly cutting motions in the air. "Stop it."

  Kichlan seemed to be having trouble controlling his breathing. I watched a muscle twitching in his neck as he closed his eyes and squeezed his hands. "Where was I–?"

  "Trouble," Mizra said.

  "And a burden," Uzdal said.

  "Brother?" Lad's voice was a small squeak in a room of loud voices. "Brother, please?"

  If Kichlan heard Lad, he chose not to acknowledge him. "You–" he resumed his pointing-at-my-face violence "–should have listened to me. You're not too good to do what I tell you to, to come when you are called, to keep your mouth shut when I tell you to. To... to..." He seemed to have run out of words.

  I looked straight into that red, panting face, and was calm.

  Kichlan knew nothing about losing your temper. He did not understand putting the lives of others in peril. He did not know pressure, expectation, failure or horror. And he could not scare me.

  "Have you finished?" I whispered.

  The twitch started up again, fresh and violent. He opened his mouth; nothing came out.

  "Then you will listen to me." I stepped so close his finger touched my forehead, just above my eyebrow. Right on a bandage. "Do not tell me what I think. Do not put attitudes in my head or words in my mouth."

  "You–"

  "No!" I cut across him, snapped at the air like I could bite it, like I could take a chunk of it into my mouth and tear at it with my teeth. "No! You have said enough. You will listen."

  I was the head of a circle of nine, back in my life before Grandeur. I had kept the best under my control. The wealthy, the educated, the elite of the oldest families. This debris collector was a smudge on the bottom of my polished leather boot with the silver bear-head clasps.

  "Whatever problem you think you have with me was yours before we met," I continued. "I fell far. I fell from wealth and status and you know that, and it eats you. Well, this is it. No more. Keep your attitude buried some where with your decency, somewhere the sun will never touch it. I don't want to hear about it again. The problem is yours, not mine. Not ours."

  Sunlight glanced in through the narrow windows. A stray beam caught on the metal of an empty jar and sprayed across my face.

  "I have not come here to wrest your petty leadership away. I do not want it, I do not want to be here."

  "There, did you hear–?" Kichlan turned from me, imploring our small, silent audience. But I didn't let him. I reached up, grabbed his finger and jammed it against my bandage.

  "What would you expect? That I would want to fall? That I would want this pain, this disfigurement? I have lost more than you understand. More than kopacks. More than status. More than the respect I worked so hard for so long to earn! What can you expect? That I should have wanted that all to happen just so I can be here, with you, chasing garbage for the rest of my life?"

  He gaped at me, and had stopped trying to pull away.

  "What else did you say? That I don't listen? That I don't do what you tell me to do? I have listened to what instructions you gave me, but do not criticize me for failing to follow the ones you didn't give!" I released his hand and waved my wrist in front of his eyes. "If you'd chosen to explain these things to me I might have known what to do when the call came, I might have known what a call was! As it is, you were lucky to have my help at all."

  Not even Sofia leapt to Kichlan's defence.

  Pale, still breathing quickly, as though he'd been running as I shouted at him, Kichlan lowered his hand.

  "Now." I straightened, smoothed my sleeve and brushed my hair from my forehead. "Was there anything else?"

  "You still need to fix the ceiling," Sofia ventured.

  Stiff, I gave her a curt nod. "And I will. When I can afford to do so." The last words tasted dry, sandy.

  "You need to learn to control your suit," Kichlan said, when he had stopped panting. He stood tall, hands by his side. All thunder was gone from his face, in its place a kind of understanding. Like a clear sky.

  "And I will." I hoped he could see the same in my face. "You know I will."

  "Yes, I do. I should have realised earlier, I should have listened to L–"

  Together, we looked at his brother, and the argument was instantly banished. Lad was pale, shaking. He had wrapped his arms around his chest and wept silently.

  As one, the debris collectors went to his aid. Kichlan spoke softly into his brother's ear. Sofia, one arm still pressed against her waist, patted him with her free hand. Mizra and Uzdal hovered like fretting pigeons. I pried Lad's hands from the nook of his elbows and held them tightly.

  "Stop shouting. Can't shout. He says not to shout," Lad murmured, rocking from heel to toe.

  It took the rest of the morning to quiet Lad down. Finally, when the noon sun was as yellow as a layer of cloud would allow, Lad was calm enough to be guided home.

  I kissed Lad on the cheek and Kichlan graced me with a smile as we parted at the Darkwater street sign.

  As it turned out the ferry did run on Rest, but its trips were few, slow and far between. By the time it had taken me to the second Keepersrill and I had walked the long streets home, Devich was gone. He had left a note under the remaining strawberries from the night before, and I ate them hungrily as I read.

 

  Don't work too hard, my lady.

  ~ Devich