Debris (10 page)

  Five curious faces peered at me from the couches and chairs. I clenched my hidden hands in my pockets.

  "Found her." Kichlan tugged off his gloves and threw them on a desk that sagged beneath the paper piled on top of it. Paper: another relic from an age before the revolution.

  I started to notice the warmth in the room too, and reluctantly withdrew my hands and slipped the cap from my head. "Hello," I said, as I fussed with my hair. The problem with wearing a hat and styling cream at the same time.

  "Cutting it close, aren't you?" said a pale young man lounged across one of the couches.

  I said, "Streets with no names, doors with no numbers, I have trouble with them. Call it a fault of mine."

  He lifted his head to smirk at me. His eyes were sharply blue, his skin heavily freckled.

  "We're hard to find, Mizra." Kichlan unbuttoned his coat. "We all have trouble the first time." He hung his coat on the wall and waved his hand loosely at the free hooks.

  I undid my coat. They were all watching as I hung up my jacket. I tugged at my shirt collar, feeling intensely self-conscious.

  A sharp-eyed woman standing behind one of the chairs stared at my wrists. "How long?" Brown hair framed her face and bobbed as she nodded toward my suit, wrapped and dimmed by dark cloth.

  My throat went dry. "Sixnight and one. I think. And maybe another day or so." It all jumbled together, the falling and the healing.

  "Other." When she brushed a strand from her face her suit flashed brightly silver in the morning glare. "Doesn't it hurt, the cloth?"

  I raised my wrist. "No. Not any more, at least."

  Her face crinkled into a disgusted expression. "Other."

  "Is that unusual?" My eyebrows lifted, tugged stitches, and I eased them down.

  She snorted a soft laugh. "Unusual? You could say that."

  The pale young man, Mizra, chuckled. "We thought you might be fun."

  They thought?

  "Natasha, Mizra, enough." Kichlan frowned at both of them. "Tanyana, welcome to your debris collection team." His voice drawled the words out a little, making them bitter, tinged with sarcasm. Hardly reassuring.

  I swallowed hard in the silence. "Thank you."

  "You have met Mizra."

  The young man waved his hand in the air, suit glinting on a soft wrist.

  "His brother Uzdal."

  A nearly identical man sat in an adjacent armchair and regarded me gravely. Twins, they had to be. It was rare to see twins in Movoc-under-Keeper; it was rare to see them in the whole of Varsnia. Few lived beyond infancy.

  "You now know Natasha." Brown hair, sharp green eyes. Right.

  Would I remember any of this?

  "This is Sofia. If you need anything, she's the best place to start."

  A small, solid woman glanced up from the wad of paper she was reading. She chewed the end of a graphite pencil. Thin hair, a featureless brown, was pinned in a knot at the base of her head. She wore a shapeless dress in layers of grey.

  "And this, finally, is Lad."

  I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it for myself. But when Kichlan turned to Lad his voice softened, and he smiled. I'd been starting to wonder if he was capable of it.

  Lad was even larger than Kichlan. Poorly cut blond hair stuck out around his head, and his cheeks had a glow to them, strangely childish beneath a fine layer of stubble. He had been sitting on the edge of an armchair and leapt to his feet at the sound of his name. He grinned at me, so widely it seemed to split his face, and shuffled forward.

  "He told me about you." Lad grabbed my hands, squeezed them in his own, and shook vigorously. I hissed as he tugged at sensitive skin around my suit, and the wounds beneath my left glove. "Knew you were coming."

  "Be careful, Lad." Kichlan touched the larger man's shoulder. "Be nice to the new lady."

  "I am." He squeezed harder and leaned in close to me. His breath smelled sweet, like sugar drops. "He's glad you're here. Waiting a long time."

  I tried to pry my hands from Lad's grip. "Thank you."

  Beaming like a newly risen sun, Lad gave me one final, extra-enthusiastic shake, and released me. I staggered a few steps and grabbed at the wall for balance.

  Kichlan frowned at Lad, but even so his face held none of the disregard he had shown me. "What did we talk about?"

  Lad fidgeted with the hem of his shirt and shuffled foot to foot. "Be nice," he said, voice muffled, head low. "When the new lady comes, got to be nice."

  It was hard to imagine a man of his size, his strength, talking like such a child. I rubbed at the throb he had set off in my hand. How could I relate to a new circle like this? No, not a circle. Not any more. They were a collecting team. I had to get used to that. Resentment from Natasha, flippancy from Mizra and nothing from his twin, disdain from Kichlan and the small one, now spiced in the middle with Lad's excessive enthusiasm. A bizarre lot.

  "And how do we be nice to her?" Kichlan continued to lecture the large man.

  Lad lowered his head closer to his chest and mumbled. "Don't touch. Keep back."

  "That's right. Are we going to be careful, now?"

  Lad nodded. In places, his hair was long and frizzy, and it jiggled wildly. "Yes."

  "All right. But I'll be watching you. So you be careful."

  When Kichlan returned his regard to me, his face closed up again. It was like a door, a glance of a bright room and suddenly I wasn't allowed to see any further, any deeper. "My brother is enthusiastic. He likes to meet new people."

  At least one of them did. "Your brother."

  "That's right." Sofia dropped her wad of paper on the table with a bang. "Lad is our special boy, aren't you?" She stood, and patted Lad's hand. He grinned down at her. "Not another collector like him, nowhere in this world."

  "He's the best there is." Mizra, still prone, tipped his head over the arm of the couch and peered upside down at me.

  "None better." Uzdal's voice was so quiet I barely heard it.

  Did they expect me to add to this peculiar chorus of compliments? I kept my silence.

  "You're lucky to be on this team." Sofia stepped between Lad and me, hands on hips, and flickered her gaze from my feet to my head. I started to suspect I wasn't entirely welcome. "And I don't care where you've come from, what you did before the accident that brought you here. A good pion-binder is not necessarily a good collector."

  "Right." Accident? Did they know? Other, how could they know?

  "Hmph." Her lip twitched. "Take those dark bands off, and let's have a look at you."

  I ran a finger beneath the cloth hiding the suit on my right wrist from view.

  "You won't need to cover them here," Kichlan said, softly, and I had the strangest feeling he understood my need to keep the suit hidden. Why all the changes in my life hurt less if I didn't have to look at the Other-damned shackles of silver and light.

  I peeled each of the black strips away and undid my shirt collar so my neck was visible. My neck, and the bandages that crawled up from my left side. They felt heavy on me, even heavier than the suit, and I realised they were what I didn't want to expose to the world. Just like the suit, I didn't want my scars to be real either.

  Mizra sat up to watch me, with his brother leaning behind him to get a view too. Why were there so many brothers in this team?

  "Stomach too," Sofia said, arms crossed.

  I blinked at her. "You want to look at my stomach?"

  Mizra chuckled. "Better get used to it. No privacy around here."

  My cheeks flushed as I untucked my shirt, lifted it, and tied the ends to expose the rim of silver around my waist and the white edges of padded bandages. The suit cast its own light into the room. It spun lazily, and I realised, as I clasped my hands near my waist, that each piece moved in time with the others.

  Mizra whistled, the sound sharp against the room's smooth walls. "Sixnight, you say?"

  "And one," Natasha whispered. "Maybe more."

  Hadn't they noticed the bandages? Didn't they have questions? "Are you repeating yourselves for any particular reason?" The heat in my cheeks had turned to anger. Easier to deal with than embarrassment.

  Kichlan came to my aid again. "A sixnight–"

  "–and one, maybe more," Natasha added.

  Kichlan didn't miss a beat "–is a very short time to adapt so well to a new suit. Particularly at your age."

  I ignored that comment. "Is it?" I remembered what Devich had said to me, about being strong. Maybe this was what he meant. "What do you mean, adapt?"

  "Just look at them." Mizra dropped off the couch and approached me. He was tall, I realised, and very thin. He walked, slow and laconic, like someone strolling through water. "They're glowing steadily, and the spinning is synchronised. It usually takes moons to get to that stage, filled with hard work and a lot of practice."

  Had the bands ever been out of sync? I'd not noticed.

  Sofia began to undress. "Right, let's get you into your uniform. We have a lot to do today and don't need you to slow us down."

  My eyes widened. "What, exactly, does this involve?"

  She gave me a withering look, even as I realised she was wearing something else beneath her shapeless dress. The top was like a corset, boned around her chest, but not tight enough to inhibit her breathing. Dark material, lined with more stiff bones beneath the fabric, stretched over her shoulders and down her arms, ending a few inches short of her wrists. Of course, the strange outfit left a gap at her stomach, enough for the band of silver metal and an inch or so of skin. She wore pants in the same dark fabric, finishing above her ankles. The boning continued through the whole thing and softened with the contours of her body, with her own bending, the movement of her joints and muscles.

  I had never seen anything so form-fitting, so revealing, even though it covered her completely, and couldn't decide if it was ridiculous or hugely inappropriate.

  A horrible thought dawned on me. "What is that?" I choked over the words.

  Sofia gave me a cruel smile. "Your new uniform. Like it?"

  "Other's balls."

  Mizra chuckled as Lad pressed his hands to his lips, snorting giggles behind his palms.

  "Now, now." Kichlan fetched a packet wrapped in clear poly from the desk and passed it to me. "You'll get used to it."

  "The uniform is strong, it is warm, and it does not impede the use of your suit," Sofia said as she planted herself in front of me. "Swallow your pride, and just put it on."

  She was a rather ineffectual shield, but Natasha didn't offer to help and no one seemed inclined to ask her. So the smallest woman present was the only thing between the men and me as I pulled off my clothes, and tried to squeeze into the strange black top and pants. They smelled strongly of their poly wrap. The material was a lot like the dark strips Devich had given me, too stretchy to be normal, thin to the touch, but strong when pulled.

  I untied my shirt first, counting my blessings that I'd chosen a long one, and replaced my loose, comfortable woollen pants with the decidedly uncomfortable new pair.

  My new team were not modest about their staring. I told myself not to care, not to feel self-conscious, and focus more on easing the material around my ankles and over stitches.

  They kept quiet until I had pulled off my shirt and was trying to work out if I could keep my camisole on underneath the tight black uniform.

  "You're hurt," Lad murmured.

  I glanced up to see his expression shocked, eyes tearrimmed. And I swallowed hard.

  "Yes." I gave up the fight for a moment and straightened, so they could all see the bruises, the bandages, the scarring and the stitches. How strange that my new team had noticed the suit first, but maybe that was the kind of scarring they understood. And standing beneath the scrutiny of people I would have to work with, I realised the suit and the stitches were one and the same to me. Cause and effect. All a part of my fall. However much I wanted to keep them hidden, to deny their existence, it couldn't be sustained.

  "So," Uzdal said, tone flat. "You're the architect."

  Had I really expected to maintain my anonymity? Grandeur was a big statue, her fall must have been spectacular. In a terrible way.

  "I told you she would be," Kichlan said, and I wondered at his wooden expression. "Powerful binder makes a big mistake, we get a new collector. Doesn't take much to work that one out."

  Makes a big mistake? I bristled. "I didn't make any–"

  "Why didn't they heal you?" Kichlan somehow twisted the question into an accusation. "Why give you stitches? They will leave scars. I thought healers would do anything for their fellow pion-binders, even ones who throw themselves from great heights and drag buildings down with them."

  "The healers did the best they could for me." Why did this make him so angry? Had the veche dragged him from this dank sublevel to clean up all the debris I had left behind? Oh, the terrible injustice of it all.

  "Is that what they told you?"

  What could I say to that? I had no idea what he meant, and was at a point where I really didn't care. Instead, I sent Sofia a silent glance as I wrapped fingers around the hem of my camisole. She nodded, barely perceptible, and mouthed, "Leave it on," her voice little more than a breath.

  The black top squeezed on, tight boning pressing against my chest, my shoulders and arms. I waited for pain, but if anything, the firm but yielding pressure seemed to calm my stitches. Dressed, I flexed my hands, extended my arms and turned the inside of my elbows up. The material curved with me, not prodding, not constricting. It felt like a second skin, a tough one, strong when I rapped it with my knuckles. And a little too warm.