Debris (49 page)

  "Right." Where do you look to talk to the invisible? "Well, then." I drew a breath and focused on a spot beside Lad's ear. "If you're going to stay here and talk you might as well help. Dire warnings aren't going to make us run. So stop it."

  "Speak for yourself," Mizra muttered as wind blew and Lad listened.

  I realised, with a low sickness in my gut, that I could hear the collector's skin being torn away.

  Lad said, "Says you should have run, but if it's too late, he will try."

  "Right," I murmured. What exactly was I supposed to be asking?

  "How do we collect it?" Kichlan asked for me.

  "Says you can't," Lad said. "Says it's not normal, won't go into the jars like normal."

  "Other's balls," Uzdal growled.

  I said, "Why is it different? Why have we been able to–"

  A terrible scream sliced through my words. Lad added a scream of his own, wrapped his hands around his head and sank to his knees. Kichlan dropped to his side. Mizra and Uzdal stood to the spot like the steel beam rammed into the earth.

  "It's seen us!" Sofia yelled. She grabbed at Kichlan's elbow. But Lad was sinking lower, and I knew Kichlan wouldn't move unless he did. We had to hold it off.

  "Come on!" I yelled at Mizra and his brother. "A shield!"

  The debris shifted. It didn't float like grains or lance through the sky like planes. It compressed, became thin, transparent, and disappeared. The body against the beam sagged into a shapeless mess of blood and skin.

  "It's gone," Mizra whispered. But he knew, I knew, we all could feel it like taint in the air. The debris was here, somewhere.

  "Shield them!" I screamed at him. "Quickly!" I spread my suit out over Kichlan, Lad and Sofia like a ceiling of silver. Uzdal joined me a moment later. Mizra stared at the body, lips moving silently.

  "Mizra!" Uzdal yelled at his brother.

  Then the debris attacked. It slammed itself against the shield and Uzdal fell, a gurgled cry on his lips. I gritted my teeth as shock travelled through the suit and into my bones, but held steady.

  "Uz!" Mizra snapped from his distraction and wrapped his own suit over Uzdal's as the debris attacked again.

  "Not Lad." I ground my teeth, spat blood and saliva at a flitter of shadow. "You can't have him."

  
...you soon. Careful...

  As suddenly as I heard him the Keeper was gone.

  "Hold it up!" I told Uzdal and Mizra. "Can you?"

  Pale faces nodded. They could, yes, but not for long.

  I withdrew my suit from the shield and began stalking, ringing a wide circle around them. "Where are you? Come on, you dirty Other-skinned bastard! I'm here, try it."

  Darkness on my left. I spun, suit up and still oval, and the debris glanced against me. A sword on a shield.

  I chuckled. "This is old. I've been here before!"

  Something crashed into my lower back. I waited for skin to peel, for bones to crush like all the bodies I had seen. But my suit was too fast. It shot out from neck and waist, and wrapped my torso in silver that knocked the debris aside. Still, I was thrown into the air. Even as I realised I was alive, and whole, I shot stilts into the ground and held myself up.

  
You are the biggest threat. It hasn't realised that yet. It is still
going for the Half.

  I replied, "You could tell me something I can't see for myself and that would be more useful."

  
It is coming for you.

  Heat around my thigh. I withdrew one arm, lowered the other and swiped at the apparently thin air with a sharp suit. Something screamed, then crashed against my supporting arm. I folded with a cry, fell to the earth. Stone cut into my cheeks.

  
Roll.

  I coughed out dust, saw tiny splotches of red wet the grass.

  
Left.

  I rolled.

  
Wait. Right. Again. Faster.

  Not fast enough. Slices in my arms, over my neck and down to my back.

  
Suit! Quickly!

  I didn't know what that meant. My suit did. It wrapped me again in silver, fingertips to toes to jaw. Where it touched my open skin metal seeped into my wounds, into muscle and nerve. I screamed my throat raw, kicked against the ground, but could not shake the invasion of my body.

  
Head!

  I saw the flicker this time, rolled of my own volition. But something heavy and solid smacked into my temple. A different darkness spotted against the ruddy, dull sky, lit by pinpricks of stars.

  The suit moved. It crawled over my jaw, up over the back of my head like creeping hands. Dazed, I couldn't stop it. I was hit again, this time something sharp. It cut my ear, tore hair and grazed scalp. Then my suit was there. It soaked into my ear, into the spaces between my skin and skull. I clamped my lips closed, it sealed them. I squeezed my eyes shut and it was a heavy blindfold. Over my nose, it grew, into my nostrils.

  I couldn't breathe. Something was hitting me, clashing with my suit in a sound like a battle of silverware and crockery. But I couldn't breathe. Nothing else mattered, I fought my body, struggled with my addled mind for control.

  Just to breathe.

  I only wanted to breathe!

  
Be still.

  Sounds in my ears, clamouring and rushing, a cacophony. A smell like burning flesh. Great exhaustion pressed down until I couldn't move anything any more, even if I'd wanted to. My chest burned fit to burst, I was seeing colours on the back of my eyes.

  
It has gone for the Half. You can breathe now.

  Breathe? With silver shoved up my nose?

  
Listen to me, Tanyana, and breathe. I have waited this long
to meet you. If you die now, you will make me mad.

  I laughed despite myself and in that involuntary explosion of air discovered I could suck it in as well. Suit or none.

  I breathed so deeply it rushed to my head like wine. I wanted to laugh long, loud and hard.

  
Lie still, catch your breath. Don't let it think you're alive.

  The air smelled stale, like body odour and humidity.

  
And when you're ready, open your eyes.

  No point arguing. I could breathe, why not see. Why not talk.

  I opened my eyes to a very different world. Gone was Grandeur's graveyard. Gone were the bodies, the chaos. It was a dark world of empty planes and doors. Nothing but doors.

  Well, nothing but doors and a man.

  He was bent over me, concerned face close to mine.

  Pale as limestone, skin translucent, eyes dark and seeming to float in his face. There was nothing inside him one would normally associate with a man, no bones or pumping blood. Just thin veins of darkness like patterns in marble.

  He had no hair, I realised, and was naked. Naked and anatomically accurate.

  "Are you the Keeper?" I whispered, half expecting my mouth to fill with silver. It did not.

  He smiled. The inside of his mouth was black. "I have more than one name. But yes, that is one of them."

  I tried to sit up, but he placed a hand on my chest and kept me down.

  "Do not move until you are ready to fight it."

  That made sense, I supposed. I looked around. Doors for a sky, for the ground, doors instead of buildings and mountain. "What is this place?"

  "Again, it has had many names. The Dark World, perhaps, you might have heard. The place that is not."

  I peered at his head. The veins were moving, pumping their own blackness as ours would pump scarlet blood. "The hands that are not." What was that? I frowned, looking closer.

  "Yes. This, all you see, this is–"

  "–debris." I was sure of it. Grains in his body, planes surging them along.

  His smile broadened, his eyes shone like beetle wings. "Yes. Oh, Tanyana, I was so glad to welcome you."

  Welcome? "That was you, in the beginning? When I fell from Grandeur?"

  He nodded.

  Was I supposed to understand any of this? "So this world is made of debris? Like you?"

  "It is debris. Like me. We are one and the same. Your world is made of layers, and particles, of different pieces running in hectic chaos. I am only one. All this–" he swept his arms wide "–is me. It is also debris. I am the door, the guardian, the sign."

  "Right." No sense at all. "What are the doors?"

  His face settled into seriousness, into sadness in transparency and black. "Joins between our worlds."

  "Lots of them."

  "Yes, too many. It is all I can do to guard them and keep them closed."

  "Closed." I frowned, brain still sluggish. I blamed the blows, the silver and the whole bizarre situation. "If they opened, that wouldn't be good, would it?"

  He shook his head. "Should they open, the Dark World and the Light World, my world and your world, they will blend. The Dark World will destroy you. The Light World will destroy me. Everything is changing. Soon, I am not sure I will be able to hold the doors closed."

  "Fear for everything," I murmured, and thought of Lad who had done his role as a Half so well, and warned us. Lad.

  Lad!

  I jerked upright. The Keeper didn't hold me down. "The debris! Is it... is Lad...?"

  "Can you see? We are connected, all worlds. If you know how, you can see both."

  Like pions, just with an added helping of scary and a little too weird. A frown, a moment of concentration, and shapes emerged from the doors. My collecting team cast thin and insubstantial in wood and shadow. Mizra and Uzdal had fallen, their shield cast down, suits weak. They lay on either side of the empty site, limp and unconscious.

  "Not dead," Keeper told me. How did he know?

  Sofia was wrapped around Lad who still rocked, hands to head, crying. She shielded him completely, exposing her back, and watched as Kichlan stood against the debris-thing. She knew, I could see it in her face, that if Kichlan fell – then she would die before she surrendered Lad. Sofia knew it, accepted it, and thought it rather likely.

  "You said it is going for Lad. Why?"

  "It knows the most powerful of you, those who threaten it." He shook his pale head. "Do not let it kill the Half. There are so few like him left in this world, and they are so precious. I need them. You need them. To help me keep these doors closed."

  I could see all this, but no more of the real world. Kichlan stood – one arm hanging by his side, the other raised with a jagged blade of suit guarding his face – his image mottled with wood grain, in a world of darkness and doors.

  The debris-thing was something else entirely. The Keeper's terrible twin. A pale body with dark grains running through it, but twisted. Scarred. Dark ridges ran from fingers to shoulder, torso to leg. Its head sagged to the side. Its legs shuffled. Its skin rippled, new ridges forming, old ones dying, scarring over and over again.

  It looked to me, for all I did not want to see it, like it had fallen. And landed on glass.

  "What is it?" I whispered.

  "Debris. Like me."

  "Make it stop." I stood, no longer feeling the dizziness in my head or the cuts to my body. I felt whole, strong. I flexed a silver-coated hand. Very strong. "If you are it and it is you, make it stop."

  "I can't." The Keeper stood beside me. He was tall, but thin as a willow branch and as delicate. "They are changing us. Changing me. I am losing control."

  "They?"

  The Keeper lifted a fine hand and pointed with pale fingers. "Can you see them? They hide in your world, scurry like rats behind walls. But they are always there, behind you. Following."

  Where the remnants of a wall from Grandeur's old site would have hidden them in the real world, in the Keeper's home of doors and shadows the puppet men were starkly clear. Three of them stood in a line, watching Kichlan and the debris-thing.

  "They see too much," Keeper whispered. "They touch both worlds. I fear them. Their touch burns, and each part of me they scar unlocks another door."

  As one, their pale faces and mouldy eyes turned toward me.

  Kichlan roared. I spun to see him slash at the debristhing and miss widely. It flickered around him, dancing like a cruel partner. A warped hand flashed out, struck his shoulder, and sent him spinning.

  "Bro!" Lad leapt to his feet, throwing Sofia off like she was a doll. "No!"

  "Not the Half!" Keeper shouted, but I was already moving. I ran over to the doors. They were hard, like concrete. Kichlan landed on his injured side. The debristhing scuttled forward. Lad extended his suit into clubs and lunged.

  But I got there first. I held Lad back with a hand, catching his club in its downward swing, lifting him from his feet and pushing him at Sofia.

  "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.